To recap: Even as major state assembly elections were taking place, Modi decided to bring a package of laws to Parliament that would fundamentally reshape Indian democracy, by expanding the Lok Sabha, altering the balance of power between the North and the South and give the executive much more power over how constituencies are drawn and distributed. To get it through, the government duct-taped the changes to a law speeding up the implementation of the (already-passed) constitutional amendments promising to reserve 1/3rd of Lok Sabha seats for women.

For background on what exactly was in those laws (including all the jargon - malapportionment, Finance Commissions and simultaneous elections etc) as well as what was behind Modi’s move, read this:

The gambit failed. Despite some last-minute claims that they would alter the Bills to assuage Southern concerns (never mind that the proposed laws had not been shown to anyone ahead of the session) and misleading efforts to cast opponents as anti-women, the Opposition managed to defeat the package.

But that doesn’t mean the BJP’s plans were buried. The collapse of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, an attempt to break an Opposition party in Maharashtra, and the defeat of the DMK in Tamil Nadu have all raised BJP hopes that it may yet cobble together the numbers to pass the package in an upcoming session of Parliament.

But the questions around delimitation ought not to be just a matter of Parliamentary horse-trading (even if it is grotesquely appropriate, given the issues that the laws are addressing).

In a recent paper (which will also be developed into a chapter in a forthcoming book), Louise Tillin, Milan Vaishnav and Andy Robaina took a look at the package of proposed laws and also the broader set of questions the delimitation debate poses for India’s future:

“With the legislative pathway now uncertain, the core question is not simply what the government proposes, but what kind of federal bargain India will ultimately strike when delimitation and the balance of representation inevitably return to the political agenda.”

I spoke to Louise Tillin, professor of politics at the King’s India Institute (who I’ve interviewed several times before), and Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, (also a previous interviewee), about the the paper, the BJP’s tactics around it, whether there are good examples of grand federal bargains in India’s past and what their preferred delimitation solution would be.

The BJP’s political calculations

Rohan: Before we get to your paper, I wanted to get your reaction to the politics of the bills that were brought by the BJP earlier this year, and ended up as the first Constitutional Amendments that were voted down under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Why these bills? Why at that time, during the state elections? Do you feel like you have an idea?

Milan: To me, it’s still a bit of a mystery. It seems like there are a couple of motivations at play.

One is clearly the desire to put women’s reservation on the front burner, as a way of changing the political narrative – not just for the Assembly elections, which were underway at the time, but to lay down a marker. To say that what differentiates the BJP from the Opposition is this commitment that they have demonstrated – in terms of new welfarism but also in terms of this promise of a one-third quota for women. In a way, this was a very cynical move. Because the 2023 Constitutional Amendment Bill expressly linked women’s reservation to delimitation in a way that was totally unnecessary. If the government at the time wanted to, they could have simply passed the reservation law and implemented it for the 2024 elections. There’s really no innate connection between women’s reservation and delimitation per se. But obviously, there are reasons they didn’t want to do that, not least the fact that if you were to do that off of a base of 543 members of Parliament, you would be displacing a third of incumbents who were men, which would have been a tricky political call.

The second is a desire, perhaps, to preempt the findings of the ongoing census, which includes a caste enumeration, that is likely to be a source of a lot of political controversy. Could delimitation diffuse that bomb, without getting into the question of rejigging reservations?

There is a fundamental discrepancy, which I can’t quite wrap my head around. The plain text of the bill clearly says that the 2011 census will be used to determine the apportionment of seats across states. This was in direct contradiction to repeated statements from the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, really every government spokesperson, that they would not change each state’s share of seats. This was a verbal guarantee.

I don’t know how to make sense of that other than the fact that, if these bills would have gone through, then in the future, they only needed a simple majority vote to change the terms of delimitation. And so I think the reason we saw such great pushback from the Opposition is that nobody really believed that this verbal guarantee was credible, or that, frankly, if not this government, a future government wouldn’t change their mind.

Louise: The thing that bears on the timing here is the desire to get delimitation done ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha elections. This could have allowed time for other reforms that would be enabled by delimitation, by virtue of changing the political balance of power in the Lok Sabha, the principal one among them being ‘One Nation, One Election’, which is the introduction of simultaneous elections to the states and the Lok Sabha.

I don’t think this really gained much traction at the state level, but the other thing which was quite cynical about the way this was tabled was the attempt to suggest that the Opposition was playing politics by opposing delimitation in a way that hindered the enactment of women’s reservation. The Opposition seemed quite successful at drawing attention to the weakness of the guarantees around the representation of Southern states.

On the delimitation side, it was tabled with the kind of spectacle and surprise that we’ve come to know and expect from the Modi government, but it was also surprising that it was handled in a way that generated the kind of backlash that it did, and made it harder to pass.

I wish I knew more as to why that decision was made.

Why now?

Rohan: What was also surprising was the choice to do it, just around elections, including in Tamil Nadu – where blowback was to be expected. But if we pull back a bit, Milan, you mentioned it being a cynical move to connect delimitation to women’s reservation, but that decision was made back in 2023. In a way, they now seem to be undoing what they had originally planned. But what is the changed calculation? Why did they originally want women’s reservation to only happen *after* the next census? Why now try to make it happen without waiting for census results? Is it to do with other calculations being such that the 2020 census is now taking place so late? Or other developments they were hoping to have in place right now, but got pre-empted by global conditions?

Louise: The other important thing that’s changed since 2023 is, of course, that the BJP now are in coalition, having lost an outright majority of the Lok Sabha. So the mathematics of passing a Constitutional Amendment obviously had changed. I’m not sure if that was the strategy that was baked in, in 2023. Of course, they now have a Southern coalition partner, which slightly changes the dynamic also.

What do you think Milan, is this what they were intending to do in 2023?

Milan: I don’t know that their imagination in 2023 extended beyond 2024, which was essentially to claim the political credit for having been the first government that was able to actually make this constitutional change of women’s reservation. It had been debated ad nauseum for years and pledged by everybody, but implemented by nobody. By vaguely associating it with the next delimitation, they could just say – okay, we’re going to do this, implementation is forthcoming, TBD.

My sense is that there wasn’t much beyond that short term political thinking.

Louise: Yes, this was a mechanism by which it could be kicked into the long grass and avoid, as Milan said earlier, having to de-seat men in order to increase the number of women, if you had implemented women's reservation without increasing the overall number of parliamentary seats.

Milan: There is one other thing now on the agenda in a way that it has not been really at any time that I can think of, Louise. Delimitation has two components. The part that gets the most attention is reapportionment of seats across states, which in some sense is the ‘nuclear bomb’ here that everyone is focused on. But there is a second aspect – redrawing constituency boundaries within states. This last took place with the 2008 delimitation, and was broadly seen by scholars, independent experts, political parties as a reasonably fair, technocratic process.

But there is now the very real spectre of gerrymandering. If you look at what has taken place in both Jammu and Kashmir and Assam, there is a lot of reason for concern. For Jammu and Kashmir, it’s clear that there’s a misalignment between the population of Jammu and the Kashmir Valley and their political representation, in ways that are new and different. In Assam, you don’t have to look any further than what the BJP’s own chief minister has been saying, that there was a political logic to redrawing boundaries in such a way that marginalised minority votes. We see that from the compactness of boundaries, we see that from the way Muslim minority populations have either been ‘cracked’ or ‘packed’, depending on the particular logic of the place. And so the BJP may have wanted to push on this front, to change realities on the ground in a way that they wouldn’t want to pass up.

Rohan: I’ve not been reporting on the ground over the last few years, but before that I did have a sense that there was a longer plan, to tackle the 15 years of anti-incumbency in 2029, through simultaneous elections, women’s reservation and delimitation, all of which together acts almost as a reset, so you don’t have to grapple with what has been achieved in 15 years. But the 2024 result unsettled all of that. Moreover, there was an internal decision to postpone the census for other political aims. Part of me wonders if this was just the BJP realising that the timetable is getting too short now, and they can’t put off the decision any longer.

Louise: And the inclusion of a caste census, which wasn’t a given before the 2024 elections. If we remember the longer history of women’s reservations, the last attempt to introduce them was precisely stymied by parties that wanted caste reservations within women’s reservation, and that demand is very likely to return if it doesn’t take place before the census results are reported.

Is ‘malapportionment’ a political issue?

Rohan: If we put aside the redrawing of the boundaries within states, the key bit that gets talked about by analysts and scholars is the ‘malapportionment’, the idea that one-person-one-vote has been undermined, by not readjusting seats in 50 years. But is the government making this an issue? The South has been successful in pushing back at the need to preserve their relative power, but I don’t see the government making malapportionment – and the unfair treatment of the North – into a political weapon.

Louise: I do think I think that’s interesting. There is obviously a lot more outcry among Southern states about the consequences of delimitation than there is a real sense of a groundswell of discontent among Northern states about their underrepresentation .

It does feel as if this potential reallocation of seats between North and South is not really being driven by regional interests or mobilisation at the state level, but by national political strategic calculations about shifting the balance of power within the Lok Sabha.

The BJP could strategically have made a much stronger play in favour of a proportional form of delimitation, and use that as a way to burnish their commitment to democracy, right? For all we talk about the erosion of Indian democracy, the BJP are keen to continue presenting themselves as democratic and the legitimacy that comes from winning elections continues to be important. This could have been used as a way to burnish that commitment, to making India more democratic.

Of course, it’s difficult for them to push that narrative, because the more you do it, the more you get a Southern, federal backlash. But since they faced that anyway, they could have gone harder on the democratic element as part of the rationale for what they were doing, and especially as a rationale for the way that the legislation was phrased, indicating an underlying commitment to a proportional delimitation.

Rohan: Milan, I was looking back at your 2019 paper with Jamie Hintson, and noticed that back then the fiscal part of this – how delimitation is connected to how much money the South gets from tax revenues – was a lot less intertwined than it seems to be today. It shows up much earlier in your new paper with Louise and Andy. To me that’s interesting. How do you respond to the idea that the BJP hasn’t used the democratic argument much, and is dancing around the fiscal one?

Milan: Clearly, the long term bet of the BJP is that attrition in their core strongholds of West and Central India is inevitable and they have to continue pushing for new frontiers, whether that be Bengal, the Northeast, and the South, the latter is where they have had the least success. Second, they already have been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism about their centralising tendencies. So I think they’re careful about creating a story where malapportionment fuses those grievances into a coherent North Indian position of geographic domination. And then there is the point that Louise made earlier about coalition management.

On the fiscal question, you’re absolutely right. When Jamie and I wrote about this in 2019, the fiscal issues were certainly there. You could see the data on divergence rather than convergence in terms of per capita income was very much clear. But the political debate has evolved for two or three reasons.

One is that the debate took place as this most recent Finance Commission was deliberating, and I’ll come back to that because, even though the outcome wasn’t that monumentally different, the debate was interesting. This is when voices from Southern states were saying, we’re putting far more into the kitty than we’re getting out and this is no longer sustainable. Another is the introduction of GST, which centralised revenue generating authority and really narrowed the ability of states to innovate. And the third is the question of interstate migration, where the Southern and Western states, which are net recipients of migration, have benefited from cheap labour but have also been sent reeling by the short-term demands on infrastructure, transport, housing, welfare systems and so on.

One of the arguments we try to make in the forthcoming chapter, if not the paper, is that these are all now interconnected. What I found so interesting, just to go back to the Finance Commission story for a second, is that one of the puzzles for me about India’s political economy is why we have not seen more states working cooperatively or collaboratively to push back against the Centre.

What was so interesting in the debates leading up to the 16th Finance Commission report is that you finally saw a group of largely Southern chief ministers and finance ministers coming together to say, “Look, we don’t just want to lobby the Centre or the Finance Commission on what each one of our states is going to get from the horizontal devolution [how much each state gets individually]. We want to make a bigger point about the vertical devolution [how much all states get as a portion of total revenues, versus how much the Centre gets], that the overall share of funds that come from the divisible pool should be increased.”

That’s a relatively new thing. Louise has studied federalism much more closely than I have, but I’ve always been struck how, unlike a country like the United States, where if you have a Republican in the White House, you will often see Democratic governors, attorney generals come together to push back on issues like reproductive rights, gun regulation, on emissions standards. In India, you don’t see much of that. There’s lots of different reasons for that, but this was a real break from the past, which tells you something about the salience of this issue today compared to even five years ago.

Louise: That’s right. The Finance Commission’s relevance is also because the prelude to delimitation has been that the last two finance commissions, after years of using the 1971 census, have updated their figures [using the 2011 census]. That has galvanised Southern political opposition and tied it into an anticipation of the fight to come over delimitation. It was the terms of reference for the Finance Commissions that really set that political dynamic in motion.

On GST as a template for a federal bargain

Rohan: You have talked about how this is truly one of the big vexed questions that Indian democracy is eventually going to handle. There have been many innovative solutions, some of which are in the paper, and others proposed by many, such as Shruti Rajagopalan suggesting we turn the Rajya Sabha into a ‘Revenue Sabha’ to a complete reshaping of India’s Parliament through proportional representation in elections. But anchoring effects are strong. The GST reference tells us about something that was accomplished. But also that GST took 20 years and a long tortuous process to get done, one in which the initial steps mattered tremendously. GST is often spoken as this triumph of a federal bargain, but it’s not one that many are tremendously happy with today, and even to get there it involved this strange short-term compensation mechanism.

So if we have to look at these bills as anchoring the debate, which the BJP will find it hard to go back from – the 50% increase proposal for example – what can we draw from this?

Louise: I have another chapter that’s just about to come out on GST as a grand federal bargain. And I actually think that is the right way to think about GST. The political story of the route to GST is fascinating. And I haven’t thought about it in this sense until you asked the question, but I do wonder whether we might learn something from it, which is relevant to thinking about how the story of delimitation could be managed from here.

This also comes back to Milan’s point about the apparent unusualness of Chief Ministers working together. Actually, if we look at the long history of the negotiation of GST, that rested on an empowered committee of state finance ministers who worked very closely together over state-level VAT reforms and evolved a modus operandi and a form of state-level coordination around tax, and what an ideal GST rate might look like, that, at the time, gave Arun Jaitley, who was then finance minister, a very strong set of counterparts who were well coordinated and had a strong working relationship to negotiate with.

That equation was really crucial for the struggles that happened over the precise terms of the GST, and eventually the compensation mechanism. There were holdouts. Tamil Nadu was the main one, but all of the producer states feared losing in a GST regime [which would levy taxes at the point of consumption]. There were also many other states who saw the benefits of tax harmonisation. Even though there was nervousness about the ceding of sovereignty over the fiscal domain from the states, the potential benefits were sufficiently clear that that bargain could ultimately be struck.

What’s happened since then – the reneging on the terms of the compensation package and the subsequent squeeze on state finances, which is in part a consequence of GST, but it’s not only a consequence of GSD; the increase in cesses, which allow the Union government to retain a greater proportion of taxes before they are devolved to the states… There are a number of mechanisms that have come together, the GST being one of them, that are a visible change from the previous regime.

That’s a long prelude to thinking about whether we might learn something about how the states and the Union government negotiated a very complex fiscal bargain with the introduction of GST, that perhaps might offer learnings for how something as complex as delimitation might be approached. Namely, that this will have to be some form of a bargain whereby some states weather losses and are brought into the bargain because they can see that there is a greater good to be achieved.

And the greater good might be around some rebalancing of this question of malapportionment that takes India closer to ‘one person, one vote.’ I don’t think it should go all the way, because we have to think about the significance of what happens for federalism. That’s where the other part of this dialogue would need to focus is on: What else can be done at the same time as delimitation, to strengthen the institutions of federalism?

And if I can just highlight what for me is one of the most important things that we show in the paper: India, comparatively speaking, has one of the higher levels of malapportionment in the world, if we compare India to other federal democracies. It by no means has the highest, and it doesn’t have the most egregious form of malapportionment either. There isn’t a single state that is massively disadvantaged in this system. The disadvantage is spread across multiple states. But India has a relatively high level of malapportionment in the Lok Sabha.

It has the lowest level of malaportionment in the Rajya Sabha, in the upper house. It has a federal upper chamber, which is much more proportional to the population of states compared to every other federal democracy in the world. India has to think about the effects of what happens in the Lok Sabha with delimitation, on federalism and the equation with the Upper House in order to reach a bargain over delimitation.

Rohan: Everyone has said that a bargain is necessary, and as Louise points out, we have GST as an example. But here, there’s a ticking clock too. The status quo means that delimitation has to happen after 2026, once the census figures are out. Of course, in India, processes can always be played with. Censuses can be delayed in terms of when they’re published. Commissions can take more time to do things. But the difference here in a sense is that they have to do a GST-type bargain, but with a ticking clock?

Milan: Obviously, the path of least resistance would be to kick the can down the road. Amend the Constitution once more to say we’ll take this up in 2047, when India celebrates 100 years of independence, though my sense is that this seems unlikely. I think they will have to bite the bullet in some form.

But I do think that you’re right, Rohan in the sense that we are now in a political moment where there’s very little appetite to bring these conversations – which have been separate – and have them together. People have often said you need something like the States Reorganisation Commission, or something that’s of that magnitude, to consider these together. But I’m not sure that is going to happen.

One of the reasons, and this is something that comes out of the broader federalism book, is that it is unclear what the institutional forum for that is. One of the highlights of the GST, despite its many problems of implementation, has been the creation of the GST Council, which has been an innovative platform for bringing the Centre and the states together.

There have been criticisms of it too. In particular, that the states have not necessarily used it as effectively as they could to bargain collectively or to use it as a venue for sharing best practices. The second criticism has been that this process worked pretty well when you had Jaitley as a finance minister who attempted to find consensus, but the creeping recentralisation, the change of personnel, has given it a different tone and tenor.

We no longer really have an Interstate Council that’s meaningful. As far as I know, the National Development Council is moribund. At least during the era of the Planning Commission, you had a forum where the states were incentivised to come together with the Centre to discuss a wide range of topics, in part because the Planning Commission had the purse strings. If the vice-chairman of the Planning Commission called you, you showed up, because it really meant something. Its successor entity, the NITI Aayog, doesn’t have either a clear mandate or the carrots and sticks to make that convening worthwhile for a state chief minister or finance minister.

So there is political problem in the form a trust deficit between the Centre and the states, for well known reasons. But there’s also the broader question of where this debate over what cooperative federalism looks like, this bargain to be struck, where that is actually going to take place institutionally.

Striking federal bargains

Rohan: I see the GST reference made occasionally, and we can look back at the State’s Reorganisation Commission and so on. As a political journalist, I sometimes find fewer references to another example that I think is relevant – the farm laws. It’s not always thought about as an analogy to the federal question. But to my mind, the challenge facing the government was similar: One part of the government has been unfairly provided for, over the years, and now the government wants to redistribute that. For me watching the BJP’s political tactics around the farm laws – and the Land Laws in Modi’s first term – were instructive in looking at their theory of what might be happening here and what to do about it. I’m curious, as you look back at India’s history of grand federal bargains and also trying to deal with these lumpy redistribution questions, are there other models for us to look at beyond GST?

Louise: A big one that I have have looked at historically is the bargain that took place at the time of constitution making, which resulted in the centralisation of elements of economic planning and social security. In order to develop a system of social security for what we now know as the formal sector workforce, a central mechanism was needed in order to coordinate the rollout of that policy across states.

When you’re introducing a system of social security, it places costs on employers because it increases their labour costs. That’s very difficult in a decentralised federal setup, if it means that employers in one state bear costs that competitors in another state don’t bear.

In my work on the historical origins of India’s welfare architecture, that’s another bargain that I see being struck around from the 1930s into the Constitution period. Then, of course, the state’s reorganisation commission is another example. I haven’t really thought about the farm laws, but I can see the logic that you point to.

India has this quite an ambiguous form of federalism that is not heavily codified in the Constitution. It doesn’t have, as I said earlier, a very federal upper chamber, for instance, and there are other ways in which central authority is enabled, which are quite unusual in federal systems. In that setting, you have a constant process of negotiation across India’s post-colonial history about where authority should lie and how the boundaries between central and regional authority have been negotiated. These are slow moving, long-run things, and as Millan said, something like delimitation requires the longer term process of trust building. It requires institutional spaces. You have to build the trust and space for the kind of counterplay of interests between different states and across levels, which, at the moment, doesn’t exist.

So while we can talk about possible future pathways, the real thorny question is in practice, how might that happen? Short of ramping it through Parliament with some kind of fudgy compromise, which is probably the more likely outcome.

Milan: I think your question is the right one, in the sense that there has been a political modus operandi which has been established. Centralised decision making to essentially create a fait accompli, present it to the states and hope for the best. That is true of the 2015 ordinances on changes to the Land Acquisition law, of demonetisation, of Article 370 abrogation, through the farm laws, and so these laws are of a piece with all of that.

An interesting counterfactual to contemplate is, imagine that a Special Session was called, the government brought these three bills, but it actually codified in the Constitution Amendment Bill that they would expand the Lok Sabha and here hardwire in the fact that no state would lose representation. I think they might have just pulled it off. Even if there were some doubts about how this might be renegotiated or amended later, I think they might just have pulled it off.

For me, it was this real discrepancy between what they were saying and the plain text of the bill which was clearly not saying that. And by the time Amit Shah made a 11th hour promise saying he can be back in an hour with an amended bill, it was too late in the game to be taken seriously. But I think this was closer to success than we might have given it credit for.

Louise: That would be quite analogous to GST. It would have been like GST plus the compensation package that was announced at the last minute, where the states required that it was put in writing in particular ways before the Bill passed. But the key difference was the trust that Arun Jaitley had built with his counterparts in the states to get that passed. I read the Lok Sabha debates from when GST was passed and you read MP after MP saying we’re passing the bill while holding our noses. We know what this is doing to federalism. We’re ceding our fiscal sovereignty because we can see there will be some larger benefit for us. And I think Milan, you’re right. It’s perfectly imaginable that they could have pulled that off if they had put those verbal assurances into writing.

Rohan: There’s a story there not just of missing Jaitley, but also the office of the minister of Parliamentary Affairs and how that has changed from Modi 1 to now, but that’s for another time. I don’t know if you saw, Milan, but you’re not just right about how close it was – it might still happen. There are reports that the BJP, following the election result in West Bengal, in Tamil Nadu, with the DMK now out of INDIA, that they’re talking about it again and perhaps codifying the promise. For me, I see it hard for them to go back from the 50% promise – at least for the next delimitation. So, if that’s the template for what this would look like, 850 potential seats, and a proportional increase in seats for each state, how do you read that? Does it solve or begin to tackle all the tricky federal, fiscal, democratic questions being raised in this debate?

Louise: My instinctive response is just to think how cynical it would be if it were the DMK who helped it go through, given that the state government under them published the report of a Commission on Centre-state relations just before the elections, and this was meant to be a serious examination of federalism and the need for reforms. So it would be remarkable if it was to be the DMK that enabled the BJP to push the legislation through. I assume they would bargain hard for assurances, but we would need to see what those are. The DMK could also use this window as an opportunity to open up a bigger conversation about the need for strengthening federal institutions as part of that bargain. But I don’t think one can discount the cynicism of the short-term political context.

Milan: The other thing worth mentioning is that there is some fine print in the package that was presented, which didn’t get sufficient attention, but should worry people. If you look at the Constitution Bill, the focus was on increasing the maximum strength from 550 to 850. But the Bill also would have removed the constitutional requirement that Parliamentary and state assembly seats be reapportioned after every census. Furthermore, it would also grant Parliament the authority to determine which census should be used for future delimitation exercises.

There is also this other article in the Constitution, Article 329, which explicitly limits the judiciary’s ability to assess the validity of any law relating to the delimitation of constituencies or the allotment of seats. That’s something which has always applied, but I think takes on anew political resonance in today’s moment. Even if they were to reintroduce these bills, I do think that there would be reasons for the Opposition to be quite sceptical and nervous about how it plays out this time and then in future instances.

The preferred solution

Rohan: If you leave aside the broader question of trust at the moment, or you keep that as a smaller element because that’s too complex to crack, what would an approach that could resolve some of these concerns look like to you of the ones that you’ve laid out or others that you’ve seen elsewhere?

Louise: For me, it has to involve some reform to the Lok Sabha, which is short of proportional. We set out a couple of ways that you might achieve that, either through degressive proportionality, where you would have some rebalancing to enable a bit more representation to more populous states, but without less populous states losing out radically. But I think it really has to be accompanied by a reconsideration of the nature of the representation in the Rajya Sabha, so that you would move away from a purely proportional principle to something that recognises states qua states. So you strengthen the identity of the Rajya Sabha as a chamber where states’ interests are debated. Which doesn’t really happen currently, because the nature of the Rajya Sabha currently functions as a mirror to the Lok Sabha. If you were to move away from the principle of proportionality, you might start to nudge the dial on its function as a territorial chamber. For me, bringing the Rajya Sabha into the debate is really important, but probably very hard to achieve.

Milan: At the end of the paper we talk in general terms about what is our preferred path, which is an accommodation of three things.

One is moving the Lok Sabha towards some more proportional representation, ideally through a kind of degressive proportionality, where there is no linear correlation between seats and population, but that is more proportional than what we have today; some reform of the Rajya Sabha; and then some renegotiation of the fiscal compact that directly addresses the Southern states’ concern about redistribution.

I just wanted to highlight what Louise said about the Rajya Sabha, because it was to me the most interesting part about this paper, and the most unexpected. The Rajya Sabha hardly gets any airtime in these discussions, because its seats are not subject to delimitation under the Constitution. But it is very clear that the idea of the Rajya Sabha as a Council of States is no longer applicable.

One of the things we highlight in the paper is that there are multiple structural obstacles that prevent it from being a real forum to debate and discuss state interests. The first is that it follows a proportional formula, so it mirrors the Lok Sabha. There’s also the 2003 amendment which removed the domicile requirement and cut the link between the Rajya Sabha and the states they represent. You would have to find a way to address that, and the most extreme way would be to make these people directly elected, and not elected by state assemblies. Much like the change that took place in the US Senate, in which originally the 100 senators were indirectly elected but then they moved to direct election.

This also raises the evergreen question of the anti-defection law. One reason the Rajya Sabha cannot function as a forum for states is because the anti-defection law compels legislators to follow the party high command as opposed to what is truly in the interests of the states. So, one lesson of this whole exploration with Louise and Andy is how important thinking about both houses is to the eventual solution and not just focusing on the micro math of the Lok Sabha.

Rohan: That speaks to all the other ways that Indian democracy is built up, and whether we can fix just this, without fixing many of those other things, like referee institutions. I saw in your conversation with Shruti Rajagopalan about delimitation, some asking you – does it really matter? The North has always had more MPs, but it’s still poorer. So maybe a more fundamental question here, Milan is, as we are having this debate about the Lok Sabha, are we thinking through what is an MP? Are they representatives or intermediaries with the state?

Milan: Even if you were to concede they are broadly intermediaries and don’t see themselves or aren’t perceived by their voters as lawmakers, I think the issue of legislative responsiveness and constituency size, those issues are still important. When you have an average looks of a constituency that is around 2.7 million people – by far an outlier, if you were to look at any other kind of lower house in a major democracy – there is an advantage in expanding.

Obviously, there’s a trade-off on the other side, which is that if you expand too far, then you have a deliberative body that is unwieldy. But I think there’s clearly some scope to expand. At the end of the day, I do think it matters. And there’s, for me, a real question about what is the future of the anti-defection law. The irony of the anti- defection law is that on the one hand, it’s an example of just massive overreach in restricting the agency of individual legislators to act as a check on the executive, and it’s really severed the accountability link between the voter and the representative. At the same time, what we’ve seen, particularly, in the last to 10 years, is that it’s been wholly ineffective. In that if you wanted to create a system that avoided divorce trading and government crackups, it hasn’t worked. So it’s neither worked to end corruption nor has it worked to kind of keep the flock together because of the way that you’ve been simply resigned to reduce the numbers in the house or follow the Maharashtra model, which is just to redefine who the legitimate authority behind the party it is.

‘Legislative disregard’

Rohan: Let’s see which Parliamentarian is willing to say I’m in favour of the ‘pro-defection law’. Maybe we need a Karl Rove-ian turn of phrase, a ‘pro-choice’ law.

For Louise, when you look back at these big federal bargains, both in India and elsewhere, I have a similar ‘does it matter’ question, from a different angle. How often are these playing out as functions of major principled ideas about the shape of these democratic systems and how much is it just contingent on the immediate political calculations of these players? Obviously, it’s hard to put everything in one or two categories, but I’m curious as you look back at the things you’ve studied, whether you have a sense of how contingent some of these things are, or whether there is, the larger structural elements have a bigger role to play.

Louise: Both, I think. It’s very clear that federal and multi-level political systems, the world over, are hugely dynamic. India’s not alone in having seen a phase of radical recentralisation of power. We’ve seen that in federal, unitary, decentralised systems. f the 1990s and 2000s were the decades of decentralisation and devolution of power, we’ve seen a reversal of those transitions in many parts of the world. And that’s just an indication of the dynamism of these political systems, however hardwired institutions of federalism are.

These are profound questions. Think about the debates that have always taken place in the European Union, and have been sharpened again with a call for greater defence cooperation, given the threat from Russia and the US withdrawal from commitments to NATO. These are very live subjects in the European Union at a time also of rising Euroscepticism, which is pulling domestic politics in the opposite direction from some of those other drivers.

These are very consequential questions. I would say that as a scholar of federalism, but I think they’re inescapable questions, which are both structural and and also driven by shorter term changes in political coalitions within countries.

Milan: Just to add one final thing on that and then going back to the previous question, it is shocking to me, although I guess we shouldn’t be shocked about anything any longer, how cavalier this delimitation move was. This question of representation and the trade-off between federalism and democratic representation is one of the biggest constitutional political questions that exists in India And to call a special session with 48 hours notice and deliver a trio of bills that no one has ever seen before until they show up in Parliament really just demonstrates a kind of disregard for the legislative function that is kind of hard to fathom.

Going back to the other point about why it matters, I think we tend to think – and myself included – of delimitation as really something that’s about the legislature. But of course, it’s really also about the executive in the sense that this is also a fight over executive coalition formation. Who gets to be in government, who gets ministerial portfolios, whose states get budget allocations, and so on and so forth.

And so the effectiveness or not of any single MP is kind of a minor issue. Because I think what Southern states are really trying to do by pushing back is to try to protect their leverage in a coalition bargaining framework that determines who performs and who’s part of the executive.

Rohan: And I think quite neatly it proves its importance itself. In the sense that we saw a Constitutional Amendment voted down for the first time under the Modi government, which speaks to how important the make-up of Parliament is, even in a moment of executive overreach. I think we can stop there. Thank you both for this excellent conversation.

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The world was “wooing India,” said the Hindustan Times. This was the “golden era” of Indian foreign policy, said another international observer. Deutsche Bank called India the “shining star” of the global economy. You can “feel India’s superpower potential being realised” said Citibank.

Even at the time, there were plenty of questions about how much that economic performance was just a post-Covid mirage, and how long New Delhi could walk the ‘multipolarity’ tightrope. But as recently as March 2025, it was being said that “just about everyone it seems (apart from maybe China and a few South Asian neighbours) needs more of India.”

Now, as our four-year stint in Egypt is coming to an end and as we prepare a shift to Brussels this summer (get in touch if you will be there or have recommendations of whom to meet!) the wheel appears to have turned completely.

A few recent headlines, covering foreign policy and the economy:

• ‘India missed out on AI and now its run as market darling may be over’

• Indian economy faces perfect storm with oil above $100, rupee in freefall, inflation back

• Indian Central Bank intervenes as rupee drops to record low

• India’s weak currency reflects deeper problems than the Iran war

• Winter is coming for Indian inflation

• Iran War and India’s diplomatic failures

• India’s diplomats are hosting the world, but what is getting done?

Look first at the economy, where the government – having attempted to ignore the West Asian crisis while elections were ongoing has now pivoted to top-down demand destruction.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appealed to Indians to revive working from home, buy less gold and limit foreign travel to deal with a surge in global energy ​prices because of the continuing crisis in the Middle East.

Modi said the austerity measures, reminiscent of the Covid era, would reduce India’s fuel use and help save foreign exchange.

“Patriotism is not only about the willingness to sacrifice one’s life on the border. In these times, it is about living responsibly and fulfilling our duties to the nation in our daily lives,” Modi said.

Menaka Doshi and Preeti Soni write:

“Modi’s advice comes two months too late. Many Asian peers began conservation measures in March whereas in India, which imports well over 90% of its oil and gas requirements, state-owned fuel retailers have held local prices steady despite higher import costs since the start of the Iran war… Had Modi’s government allowed for a gradual pass-through of higher import costs, it would have helped curtail domestic demand and conserve fuel for essential purposes… [Now] With no election in sight for months and global energy leaders warning of a long oil market disruption, Indians should expect local fuel prices to climb... quickly.”

The West Asian crisis has caused severe pressure on the country’s balance of payments, the rupee and, as the headlines above indicate, the broader India story.

Ajit Ranade explains:

“There are moments when a currency tells a story more honestly than official statements do. The Indian rupee is doing exactly that. It has lost more than 12 percent against the US dollar in 12 months and has been sliding relentlessly even though India’s macroeconomic fundamentals are not in obvious crisis territory. Growth is still respectable. Inflation is not runaway. The current account deficit, at least in headline terms, is manageable. Forex reserves remain robust. This is not 1991.

But that is precisely why the rupee’s fall is worrying. If a currency weakens sharply despite decent growth and contained inflation, it is telling us that the problem lies elsewhere: in the balance of payments, capital flows, investor confidence, oil vulnerability and the structure of India’s external dependence.”

Here is Surjit Bhalla, long a pro-Modi voice on economic matters:

“No matter how one slices the data, it is time to dispense with the moniker of the fastest-growing major economy. India has also moved from being one of five “Fragile Five” economies in 2013 to possibly becoming one of just two (along with Turkey).”

The US-Israel war on Iran, and the subsequent blockade of Hormuz, may be the immediate trigger, but as numerous analysts have pointed out, there are structural issues at hand. Here is JP Morgan’s Sajjid Chinoy:

"Pressures have long pre-dated the West Asia conflict. For the first time in more than three decades, the Balance of Payments has been in deficit for two consecutive years and we are on course for a third consecutive deficit. There is a more chronic phenomenon underlying these pressures that we have to address...

In turn, a collapse in FDI is at the heart of the capital flow story, with net FDI — which used to average 1.5 per cent — completely drying up since 2024. What’s driving this? Between 2010 and 2025, India’s net FDI is strongly correlated with US 10-Year Treasuries — a proxy for global financial conditions. When yields are low India tends to get a gush of FDI; when yields harden — like the last two years — net FDI has completely dried up. Recall, FDI is typically governed by both (global) “push” and (country-specific) “pull-factors.” What India’s FDI trajectory suggests it has largely been governed by push factors since 2010. The last time it was driven by pull-factors was in 2005-10 when a strong corporate capex cycle catalysed strong FDI.”

In other words, when cash was plentiful and cheap, it flowed into places like India looking for yields. As conditions tighten, it has flowed back out – since there are no reasons keeping it there. Chinoy says that this wasn’t the case between 2005-10, because businesses were actually investing in India, which they haven’t been doing over the last decade despite the major clean-up of balance sheets and stabilising of macro fundamentals over the last decade.

This is a concern we have flagged for years now, including back during the sweet spot moment (and before when India’s pre-Covid growth had fallen to 4% and the government unveiled what turned out to be spectacularly badly timed corporate tax cuts), and continuously over the last half decade, as the Indian government kept urging and exhorting businesses to invest – never a good sign:

As I read Chinoy’s push/pull analysis, though, it got me thinking of a piece by Kate Sullivan de Estrada that we published on India in Transition a few weeks ago, entitled ‘India’s Foreign Policy Relocations in the Trump Tariff Era.’

“From roughly 2017 until recently, India’s growing international recognition was closely tied to the geopolitical salience of the Indo-Pacific. As External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar observed in June 2022, the region had moved to “the centre of the geo-strategic and geo-economic discourse,” placing India at the heart of an emerging strategic frame. The Indo-Pacific not only reflected the sharpening rivalry between the US and China, but key regional actors—including the US, Japan, Australia, and India through the Quad—framed the Indo-Pacific as a space defined by shared values of “freedom and openness.”

Against this backdrop, India stood as both a material and an ideological swing state. The Indo-Pacific became a high-yield recognition domain, delivering status, trust, and material benefits, even as India’s leadership interpreted elements of freedom and openness in distinctive ways. It conferred strategic indispensability, elevated India through association with major powers, and created opportunities for India to shape the norms and institutions of an emergent regional order…

But the recognition dividends of the Indo-Pacific frame depended heavily on the strategic priorities of external actors, particularly the US. Under the second Trump administration, advocates describe US policy attention as having gravitated toward the Western Hemisphere, even if more conventional commitments to American primacy persist. The background recognition context that underpinned India’s Indo-Pacific centrality began to shift.”

You should read the whole piece, including an analysis of how India moved its focus from the Indo-Pacific to trade deals, de Estrada noting that “India-as-trade-partner does not strike quite the same note of indispensability as did its role as a key balancer in the Indo-Pacific.”

The analogy here is that the attention on the Indo-Pacific was a push factor, which inflated India’s sense of importance, its ‘vishwaguru’ status and built the idea that its rise was inevitable – fully imbibed at home and translated into domestic messaging. But this was a flawed reading of what was going on.

And Trump, as we have discussed many a time on the newsletter, changed all of that.

Not just because of his affinity for Pakistani generals or his erratic trade wars but also because, at a more structural level, the Indo-Pacific theatre became a less immediate concern, and suddenly India’s stock dropped. The US-Israel war on Iran has added to that, and though the Western Indian Ocean should also be a key theatre for Indian interests, it simply isn’t a space into which New Delhi can project much leverage.

You get the sense from many a policymaker that they expect that the US, once it is done with its ‘Middle Eastern dalliances’, will eventually come to its senses and start focusing (pivoting?) to Indo-Pacific competition with China once again, and then India will return to its rightful place in the order of things. The ‘push’ will come back, while India works on trade deals to shore up the slower process of building a ‘pull’ factor.

Is that a given? There are already those who have argued that the Indo-Pacific and the ‘pivot’ are dead, or worse, ‘zombies’. And then there was the ‘G2’ in Beijing this month. Here’s India’s former foreign secretary Shyam Saran:

“The May 14-15 summit in Beijing between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump was a landmark geopolitical event, whose impact will reverberate across the Asian region and the world for years to come. This is an inflection point, and one is not using the term lightly. It is perhaps for this reason that there is a reluctance not only in the US and the West but also in our own region to grasp the full significance of just what happened in those two days of early spring in the Chinese capital.”

It will take time to understand the implications of the US-Israel war on Iran, but perhaps the biggest challenge for New Delhi is to take the right bet on how important the Indo-Pacific will be for its Western partners over the next few decades. Good thing US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is about to visit – from May 23 to May 26 – with, among other things, the question of the Quad hanging in the air.

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First is the bigger picture question of how the law to reserve one-third of India’s Parliamentary seats for women candidates will actually be implemented. In 2023, they ‘superglued’ the women’s law to an even more controversial question: Should India expand and redistribute the share of seats in Parliament to correct historical imbalances, a process commonly referred to as ‘delimitation’ (a subject we’ve tackled at length on this newsletter)?

However these two issues are resolved, these will fundamentally reshape India’s parliamentary framework, and therefore its democracy, for decades.

The second is the political scaffolding propped around those constitutional debates. Why did the BJP move now? Where does this historic loss in Parliament, the first legislation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has failed to pass since he came to power in 2014 (and indeed the first government-introduced bill to be defeated since 2002) place his party? And what are the likely political reverberations, including for the Opposition?

I’m planning to look at these two issues separately, starting with the second question today.

Previously, on the delimitation drama…

But first, a bit of background.

Despite massive changes to the underlying Indian population, the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, has had the same number and distribution of seats for half a century now. These were supposed to be readjusted every decade – a process called ‘delimitation’ – based on census results, but that process was frozen in the 1970s, for demographic and fiscal reasons.

As a consequence, there has been a huge disparity in the sizes of constituencies in the (higher fertility, poorer) North versus the (ageing, low-fertility, richer) South and, therefore, an undermining of the principle that each person’s vote is equally valuable. The freeze was due to end after 2026, but any potential delimitation based on updated population figures would massively tilt the balance of power in Parliament, giving, per some calculations, Uttar Pradesh alone as many seats as all the South Indian states combined. Leaders of southern states have described this as a ‘damocles sword’ hanging over the region, and argued that they shouldn’t be penalised politically for an official state policy of population control.

In 2023, the BJP – whose core support base is concentrated in (but not limited to) North India – attempted to solve this extremely delicate problem by appending it to an entirely different issue: the long-pending demand to reserve one-third of Lok Sabha seats for women. In a surprise special session of Parliament that year, the ruling party managed to pass the affirmative action legislation unanimously, but rather transparently included provisions that meant it could only be implemented after the next census, i.e. alongside a post-2026 delimitation.

The implied political tactic was that the BJP would eventually seek to blunt Southern opposition to delimitation by arguing that all who opposed it were ‘anti-women.’ But given the move would only come into effect ahead of the 2029 national elections at the earliest, it didn’t majorly play into the 2024 campaign, which the BJP went into promising more than 400 seats and emerged from having lost its simple majority, needing to rely on alliance partners to stay in power. (It has since regained its mojo through a series of comprehensive state-level victories).

‘Single largest change to Parliament in history’

Which brings us to April 16 and 17, 2026.

Not for the first time, the BJP chose shock and awe over the consultative-deliberative route to introducing major legislation that could have major huge consequences for Indian democracy (see also: the stripping of Article 370, the 10% upper-caste ‘EWS’ quota, the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the ordinances to alter land acquisition and agriculture regulation, i.e. the ‘farm laws’).

Without having called an all-party meeting and while politicians were smack dab in the middle of important campaigns for state elections taking place in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the BJP announced a special session of Parliament, keeping the agenda and texts of the legislation (a constitutional amendment, and two related bills) under wraps until less than two days before they were introduced.

When they were revealed, the bills confirmed the impression that anyone paying attention back in 2023 could easily foresee: The main thrust of all three proposed laws was the expansion and delimitation of Parliament:

“The proposed 131^st amendment expands the size of the Lok Sabha to 850 seats, ends the fifty-year freeze on inter-state seat distribution in the Lok Sabha, accelerates delimitation on the basis of 2011 census data, and ends the constitutional requirement to conduct delimitations after every census. The Bill represents the single largest change to the design of Parliament in the nation’s history, one that deserves far more parliamentary and public scrutiny than the government appears willing to afford it, with the draft circulated two days prior to Parliament taking it up.”

The proposed constitutional amendment also proposed to remove a clause requiring the women’s reservation to only be implemented following the results of a fresh census. Given that other elements in the bills permitted the use of the 2011 census data to carry out delimitation, instead of waiting for the results of the ongoing census, the effect would be to accelerate implementation of the 1/3rd quota. Note: Back in 2023, the Opposition had demanded the BJP remove the clause for the women’s law to only be implemented after the next census, but Modi’s party at the time refused.

In the Lok Sabha, the government attempted to defuse the expected pushback from the Opposition, especially South Indian states, by offering up a personal assurance, from Modi:

“If you want me to use the ‘guarantee’, then I give you my guarantee, if you want me to use the word ‘promise’ I can use the word ‘promise’, or if you have any word in Tamil that conveys this, I am willing to say it as well. No injustice will be done to any State – from east to west, and north to south.”

Home Minister Amit Shah even claimed that he would formalise Modi’s promise, by using a ‘50% formula.’ Per this maneuver, the South Indian critique of delimitation would be addressed by avowing that the new, 850-seat Lok Sabha would not fix the huge imbalance caused by the 50-year-old delimitation freeze. Instead, each state would mechanically get 1.5 times the number of seats it had before, thereby maintaining the same proportional share they have in the current Parliament.

(Why, you might ask, do this rather than simply introduce one-third reservation for women to the current Lok Sabha of 543 members? The answer came from Shah: The BJP didn’t want the political economy instability that would come from expecting male MPs/candidates to effectively vacate their seats/pathways to power. Currently, there are 469 men and 74 women in the Lok Sabha. 1/3rd reservation would cover approximately 180 seats1 , meaning in more than 100 more constituencies men would have to give up plans to contest, with all the attendant political fallout. The only way, then to accommodate a 33% quota would be to expand the Lok Sabha).

The problem with Modi’s promise, however, was two-fold.

First, given the state of politics between the BJP and the Opposition in India, the question of expecting other parties to simply ‘trust’ Modi’s word was always a losing proposition, as Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav spelled out in Parliament:

“Based on nearly 11 years of experience, even if the Bharatiya Janata Party were to give a written assurance that they would appoint a woman Prime Minister, we still would not trust them.”

(Particularly pertinent because, reportedly, the BJP did attempt to reach out to the Samajwadi Party in the final hours in the hopes of getting it on board).

The second reason is even more important, and explains why Shah never actually ‘formalised’ the assurance. As Pavan Korda writes,

“The actual text of the Delimitation Bill, 2026, makes this 50% formulation legally impossible… Article 81(2)(a) dictates the government must allot seats so that “the ratio between that number and the population of the state is, so far as practicable, the same for all states.” Population growth since 1971 has been massively asymmetrical. The North boomed, and the South stabilised. You cannot maintain an equal population-to-seat ratio while increasing every state’s seats by a flat percentage.”

‘Winning by losing’?

Eventually, the constitutional amendment bill failed to pass – an extremely rare occurrence in the Lok Sabha, where if it is clear that the government doesn’t have numbers, it usually pulls the legislation rather than see it defeated. The other two bills had to be withdrawn. This defeat seemed likely, since constitutional amendments require a 2/3rds majority, but not certain, as Sobhana Nair’s reporting on the Opposition’s thinking makes evident.

Rather than wanting to move past its landmark legislative failure or work more closely with other parties to find a solution, the BJP appears to have ultimately decided that it would rather have the Opposition’s votes on record, and trust that it can spin this as an ‘anti-women vote’ by its opponents (as much of the Indian media promptly did).

“The Opposition appears united. They do not want to let the Bills pass. In such a situation, we have no option but to become martyrs,” the Indian Express reported an anonymous ruling alliance leader saying. “As of now, there is no indication of the Bills being withdrawn. That would look bad. The defeat of the Bills can be weaponised politically against the Opposition.”

The very next day, the party already had advertisements in the newspapers, and Modi delivered a primetime speech – in his capacity as prime minister, no less – aimed at blaming the Opposition for standing in the way of women empowerment, with a particularly stark metaphor:

“This honest effort has been subjected to foeticide in Parliament by Congress and its allies, foeticide. Congress, TMC, Samajwadi Party, DMK—these parties are guilty of this foeticide. They are criminals against the Constitution of the country, they are criminals against the women power of the country.”

Modi’s argument that his party is only motivated by national interest, while the Opposition has politics on its mind is, predictably, disingenuous. Nearly every element of the process leading up to the defeat of the proposed legislation has been based on BJP political calculations: the ‘surprise’ special session to pass the law in 2023; the decision that year to link the women’s law to delimitation thereby putting off implementation until after the next census; the long, unexplained delay in conducting what should have been the 2021 census; and the timing of this special session as well as the text of the bills introduced.

This much is to be expected, and political calculations are a normal factor in timing legislative business. The question then is: What was the BJP’s thinking?

4D Shatranj

As has been the case for the last 12 years, we have little direct insight into what Modi and Shah were thinking. But some have attempted to piece together an explanation.

Roshan Kishore suggests that the BJP was planning ahead for 2029, knowing that it could not, at a national level, rely on the pre-election cash benefit gambit that has been a central element of practically every state election victory over the past half-decade:

“The state-level fiscal burden of this populist bargain is already threatening to overwhelm India’s debt management. There is no way the Centre can afford something of this kind at the all-India level in 2029…

What can the government do to carve out a narrative ahead of 2029 in such circumstances?

…

By preponing the rollout of women’s reservation to 2029, the government, especially the Prime Minister, is hoping to compensate for lack of material attribution with metaphysical attribution for women’s reservation. By clubbing this bill with delimitation (and possible gerrymandering) and leaving assurances of keeping the parliamentary share of southern share’s intact outside the text, the government is hoping to make the rollout of women’s reservation not a bipartisan but a partisan achievement…

This writer sees it more as a desperate attempt to front the social against the economic in politics.”

As for why now, the Hindu proposed an explanation in an editorial:

“When India’s decennial Census was delayed for more than five years without a definitive or rational explanation from the BJP-led Union government, the political logic was not hard to discern... By delaying the Census to 2026-27, the government ensured that the delimitation exercise could be initiated on its preferred timeline, using the 2026-27 Census rather than one conducted in 2031.

Now, perhaps realising that any delimitation exercise would itself take years to conclude after the 2026-27 Census, and therefore not be ready even for the 2029 Lok Sabha elections, the government appears to be in a tearing hurry to proceed with delimitation on the basis of the last completed Census, that of 2011.”

If either of these proposals are accurate – and they sound plausible, even if I would put less stock on the ‘metaphysical attribution’ element and more on simply charging forward towards delimitation – they also suggest that there are still major questions to be asked about the BJP’s national-level strategising post 2024.

Modi has faced legislative defeat before: With the land laws early in his first tenure, and the farm laws in his second term, major legislative priorities had to be set aside. In both those cases, however, it was street-level pushback rather than the Opposition’s efforts that did the job (although Rahul Gandhi’s ‘suit-boot sarkar’ jibes did get the prime minister to generally stop wearing suits). This time around the party appeared woefully unprepared, even though it should have come as no surprise that delimitation would be something that the Opposition would rally around.

Did Modi, Shah, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju and, uh, BJP President Nitin Nabin, really think they could get support for these bills over the required 2/3rds mark, knowing how sensitive the issue would be? Even as elections were about to take place in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu? And on the strategic side, how sloppy was the government’s calculation on delaying the census (admittedly, in part because of the other tricky political matter of counting caste), if it didn’t also take into account what that would mean for the maneuver to combine the women’s bill and delimitation?

The party may have resurrected itself in the aftermath of the 2024 electoral disappointment, and gone on to be wildly successful in several state-level contests. But is its leadership still relying on a playbook that dates back to its days of having a Lok Sabha majority? More broadly, does it have a national narrative?

Modi’s ‘vishwaguru’ of international relations angle is struggling, not least because of the Trump narrative violation and the aftertaste of disappointment following Operation Sindoor; the war on Iran and Strait of Hormuz closure has already proved to be a massive vulnerability for India’s economy; and the fruits of the government’s newfound love for trade deals will not be ready to harvest in time for 2029. The BJP of course, has its tried and tested ‘infilitrators’ line – but will that be deployable nationally, after 15 years in power?

Back when ‘400 paar’ seemed like a real possibility, I expected the BJP to push quickly for delimitation and simultaneous elections, with the aim essentially of making 2029 something of an electoral reset. Not a referendum on 15 years of Modi, given he would be 78 by then, but a question about who would lead India into its ‘viksit’ future, with a new Parliament building, supersized Lok Sabha composed of entirely reshaped constituencies, a newly compressed electoral calendar and perhaps a uniform civil code to govern everyone.

Building aside, do any of these now seem likely?

The answer may well be… delimitation. Remember, as things stand, the 50 year freeze ends in 2026, and is not automatically renewed. The government is constitutionally obligated to re-balance the current 543 Parliament seats based on population according to the results of the census (although it might have room to maneuver by choosing when it releases census data, and how a delimitation commission will operate).

In other words, the delimitation question is not resolved, by any means. On the next issue, I hope to cover some of the many interesting proposals put forward for how to tackle delimitation (which we discussed previously, at length, here) and also link out to lots of other useful analysis on both delimitation and the future of the women’s reservation law.

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Read also

• Siddharth Vardarajan: Nine Takeaways From Modi Govt’s Loss Over Constitution Amendment Bills for Delimitation

• Neerja Chowdhury: BJP govt’s Lok Sabha vote defeat leaves one question unanswered: Why the haste?

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta: A political setback for the government, a democratic opening for the opposition

• Suhas Palshikar: On women’s reservation, BJP had a lot more at stake than just ‘nari shakti’

• Sanjaya Baru: Andhra Pradesh deferred to Delhi Darbar — and therein lies a tale

The war may have taken place primarily in the Gulf and West Asia (not counting the submarine attack in South Asian waters) but its impact is being felt all over the world –particularly going east into Asia, where countries are heavily dependent on the energy resources and other inputs that flow through the strait of Hormuz. Yet these countries, including China, have had little say over how the conflict began or played out. Having relied for years on the US to maintain the security of this vital region, strategic planners from Islamabad to Tokyo now have to grapple with how to secure their own interests in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s reckless decision to go to war and inability to pry back control of Hormuz from Tehran.

In some ways, , political scientist and author of the deeply relevant China-MENA newsletter, anticipated this moment:

“[In 2024], we did this book on how do Asian countries think about issues of Gulf security or insecurity. We got Gulf experts from a series of countries – Pakistan, India, Singapore, Japan, Korea, China – and said ‘do a deep dive into what does the strategic community or policy community in your country think about the prospect of instability in the Gulf. Are you making contingencies? Are you planning for a possible deeper security role? Do you have the capacity to do that?’” Fulton, an associate Professor of Political Science at Zayed University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council, says.

“When we got the drafts from everybody, it was almost across the board the same story… Everybody said, in our own immediate region, we have much more consequential security threats that we have to divert all of our resources and diplomacy and attention to. And anyway, the Gulf is set because you’ve got the US security architecture that protects our interests,” he adds. “I suspect that at this exact moment in time, a lot of those country’s strategic communities are thinking back to this and will be saying ‘we actually have to have some conception of how turmoil in this region affects our interests, and what role we can play to counter it.’”

I spoke to Fulton about misguided ideas emanating from US thinkers that the Iran war is ‘really about China’, whether there are voices in the Gulf calling for Beijing to play a bigger role, what the post-war Gulf looks like and how Asian countries need to rethink their strategic approach to the region.

(n.b: We spoke before the US-Iran ceasefire announcement and the talks in Islamabad, but much of what was discussed still holds).

RV: This is a question I generally like to ask everyone: Are there things people are getting persistently wrong about the current conflict? Misconceptions that you find yourself wanting to address? 

Jonathan: I don’t know if I’d say wrong. There are a lot of gaps because of assumptions about the Gulf that can only be addressed with deep expertise or experience over time. There is a sense of a coherent set of attitudes amongst the GCC countries which is incorrect. Depending on proximity or vulnerability or how diversified your economy is, these six states have different attitudes about what this war means for them.

The other thing I found very ugly at the beginning was the almost gleeful framing, especially from the UK, portraying the place in a glib and shallow way. The expatriate populations that you see here – a lot are working class, middle class, small business owners. There is a very broad middle class that has nothing to do with media influencers. And in a lot of cases, what you’re seeing are family businesses that have been badly hurt by this. You can’t have an import-export company when goods aren’t flowing into the Gulf. When window traffic disappears, when people aren’t going out for a meal in your restaurant, you business suffers – and that takes a toll on working-class people, and families and small-business entrepreneurs in a very damaging way. That gets lost in this story of some grand geopolitical chess game between Trump and Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah, which, frankly, I don’t think anybody buys.

It’s really a lot of smaller tragedies that are building up and spilling out across the entire Indian Ocean region, now, because of really an inexplicable reason to attack Iran when it happened.

RV: On the geopolitical end of it, and this is something you’ve touched upon on your newsletter [and in this subsequent Atlantic Council piece], there has been an attempt at contorting things into suggesting it can neatly fit into a US-China great game.

Jonathan: Not to be glib, but it’s more like a dumb game. Because I see people in certain outlets in the US – and it’s not all, because I do work for the Atlantic Council, which is a reputable think tank, and the people who work there are very thoughtful – but I see also very politicised institutes that are trying to drive narratives, mostly because they’re trying to curry favour with the administration. You see this analysis –arguing that this isn’t about the principal countries who are involved in the hostilities, but that this is somehow about a great-power competition between China and the US.

And if that were true, then it would be the most ridiculous starting assumption based on a lot of faulty premises. I spend most of my working time looking at China in the Middle East. The shorthand people have been using for years is that China’s policy here is ‘oil for goods.’ China sells a lot of cheap products and buys lots of energy. I’ve lived here since 2006, and that’s when I first confronted this shorthand.

A lot of the people who are making this analysis haven’t really bothered to see what has changed in China’s approach to the region. I published a book last summer that did look at it, and found that the energy relationship is undergoing a very interesting transformation. Yes, China still buys a lot of hydrocarbons from the Gulf and some from North Africa. But what you’re seeing is China more and more becoming an energy supplier, They’re helping countries that are trying to get off the hydrocarbon habit.

So while China has been buying oil, they’re not buying it for the same purposes that they used. A lot of the crude oil that China’s now buying is being used for manufacturing, for industrial production. With the EV revolution in China, most transportation is getting off the oil habit.

What China has been doing when they have been buying this stuff, especially discount oil from Russia and Iran, they’ve been using it to build up their reserves, which they’ll use to address manufacturing, but they don’t need it anywhere near the same degree that US allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific needed. Japan, Australia, South Korea, India, Thailand, the Philippines – these countries really depend on Gulf energy and they’re the ones getting hurt the worst.

China has been able to weather this pretty well.

The other side of this great game narrative is China’s comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran. This is constantly mischaracterised as an alliance, which I always bristle at, as a political scientist. An alliance means you’re making a security commitment to your ally, and in their time of need, you’re going to be there. China has one alliance with North Korea that was signed in 1961. Most serious analysts say it doesn’t really exist as an alliance anymore.

But China has had a non-alliance policy since 1982. They’re not going to get caught up in other countries’ security entanglements. It’s something they’ve seen many other great powers do in the past. They don’t want to do it. So China has a partnership with Iran, which is functional. It is driven by asymmetry and, if you asked an Iranian, you’d hear predatory asymmetry – that China is taking advantage of Iran’s fundamental weakness – whereas China would say we’re helping a difficult partner that needs a lot of our support.

At the end of the day, what China does with Iran is really quite minimal compared to what they do on this side of the Gulf, with US partners. When China had to evacuate people from Iran, they were looking at 2,000 or 3,000 nationals. If they were to evacuate people from the UAE, they’d be looking at between 370,000 to 400,000 nationals.

You’re looking at a volume of trade between China and Iran in the high single digit billions. Whereas in the UAE or Saudi Arabia, it’s regularly between 105 to 110 billion every year. So on the geopolitical competition angle, China is getting hurt – like everybody’s getting hurt – on the Arab side of the Gulf, where they’re most vulnerable.

The kind of lazy analysis that says this is somehow about great power competition really mischaracterises the China-Gulf angle. It’s mostly written by uninformed people who haven’t formally studied China and are basically just looking for a job in a right-leaning think tank or in the administration.

RV: I really liked your short history of five-point plans from China. Again, a facile approach after they issued that was to say, look they’re getting into it now. But we’ve seen this over and over, in the last few years.

Jonathan: I have a lot of respect for the work that journalists do. But what happens is that journalists who aren’t watching China-Middle East ties regularly end up having a goldfish memory span, where what happened six months ago is gone, and what happened today is a story. What typically happens is there is some dramatic event – like Xi Jinping goes to Riyadh for a summit with the Arab League and the GCC. Shortly after, Joe Biden goes to Saudi and has a not-very successful meeting. And then everyone goes, ‘China is taking over the Middle East’!. And then they move on and forget about it. And then China does something else, and they say, ‘China just made peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, they’re taking over the Middle East!’ There is always this short-termism.

When a friend texted me about the five-point plan released by the Pakistani and Chinese foreign ministers, I could already see in my future a bunch of people asking me, ‘can you speak to how important this is and what it means about China taking over the Middle East’? So I wrote a piece saying, I’ve been watching China in the Middle East for 20 years, and you see a consistent pattern.

China has now rolled out seven or eight 3-, or 4-, or 5-point plans for whatever issue – Syria, Israel-Palestine, security in the Gulf, and now the war in Iran. What you see across all of these is a consistent set of principles, for diplomatic solutions that respect sovereignty, no outside intervention, development-centred solutions and the idea that China is always happy to mediate. The idea is to imply that China is the reliable, responsible partner, whereas the West in general, and the US in particular is usually on one side or the other, and so not an honest broker.

China looks like it’s promoting a set of norms, saying ‘we don’t want you interfering in our country, and we don’t want to interfere in other countries.’ And that’s very effective as a diplomatic tool when trying to engage with the so-called Global South. It says, ‘We’re not like the West, which intervened to cause so much damage. We respect your sovereignty, and our solutions are based on helping you and your neighbours diplomatically solve problems.’ That’s attractive.

So if you’re being generous, China has a consistent diplomatic approach. If you’re being less than charitable, you look at the history of these five-point plans, and realise none of them have ever amounted to any kind of result. There’s been no tangible outcome from any of them. And you think, what’s the point? The point doesn’t appear to be China trying to solve the issue of the war. It is China positioning itself to have a different outlook, and a different set of values or norms that they want to promote in this situation.

But, at the end of the day, in this part of the world, they have very little diplomatic capacity, political capacity, and certainly no military capacity to really step in and play a fundamental role in shaping outcomes. Which is fine. China has no ambition to be solving all the problems across the world. What they do want to be is perceived as a responsible great power talking to everybody. It helps to have that context to look at the loner arc of these proposals and realise that they are performative in a very significant way. You can’t be seen as a global power and not have a position on Middle East Conflict. But you also can’t commit to any kind of game-changing initiatives, and that’s where China is in this part of the world right now.

RV: You had a report out a little while ago, and one of the key points was that, when you “talk to actors in the region, they rarely think of Beijing as their first port of call” when considering who they might ask to be involved here. Has that changed from the Gulf side, regardless of whether China is doing anything about it? Have there voices saying they ought to be more involved?

Jonathan: I always refer to the Xi Jinping visit to Saudi in 2022 as ‘Peak China-Middle East hype’. A lot of governments and actors who have interests in this part of the world saw a series of events, starting with those series of summits in December 2022 and ended with the October 7, 2023 attacks. In between that, Xi went to Riyadh, and then Iran’s now-deceased President Raisi went to Beijing shortly after, and then you had the Saudi-Iran rapprochement announced in Beijing, and then Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas went to Beijing and had a pretty high profile meeting. And then Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang said, ‘we can solve the Israel-Palestine issue like we solved the Saudi-Iran issue,’ and he invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to Beijing in October 2023, which for obvious reasons, never happened. There was also the BRICS expansion, bringing in different countries from the Gulf, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisations brought in a brunch of Arab countries into the fold as well. There was all this stuff happening that made China look like a really significant diplomatic actor.

A lot of folks saw that China had been accruing all of this political capital through tis economic presence over decades. It was clearly a major economic actor. And what people drew from that was that China was ready to start spending some of that capital. That it saw a less popular US under the Biden administration, where relations with, especially Gulf Arab countries, wasn’t very positive, and he wasn’t able to get anything done with Iran despite his desired return to the nuclear deal. So it looked like maybe China was finally doing something here.

That’s when I was asked to write this report. And I thought, well, if you’re asking about how China’s perceived as a diplomatic actor in the Middle East, the best way to find out is talk to people in the Middle East. I did a bunch of interviews with people in Egypt, Israel, Saudi, UAE, and Iran, and just asked them all the same set of questions about how they perceived China as a diplomatic actor. By that point, we had had October 7th, we had had the Red Sea shipping crisis. We had had the October 2024 Israeli strikes against Iran, the decimation of Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders’ assassinations. And throughout all of this, what you didn’t see was any real reaction from China.

And I have to say, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect that in any of these cases China would do something. And I wasn’t disappointed, they didn’t. And most of these people from the region I spoke with also had the same feeling. They’re said, “We’ve seen this playbook. China doesn’t see us the same way America sees us. America sees us in strategic terms. China sees us in transactional terms. And that’s the exact same way we see them. We know China doesn’t offer security relationships. We know China isn’t going to bring a carrier group into the Gulf to protect shipping. China is’ – much as I said a few minutes ago – ‘preoccupied with its own periphery.This is a place for China to make money.’

So people in the region aren’t disappointed. They had level-set their expectations long ago to understanding China’s not going to do what others might want them to. And sometimes that led to resentment. In Iran, especially there’s a lot of resentment. Sometimes it led to bitterness because the Israelis felt that China would use them as a cudgel to beat America with and that they would they would use cosmetic support for Arab issues to distinguish themselves from America and criticise Israel. But nobody was really surprised or disappointed. Everybody said, ‘We’ve already seen what China has to offer in this part of the world.’

For this current context, there was a story just before hostilities broke that two Iranian cargo ships had loaded in a Chinese port known for shipping chemicals, many of which are used in weapons – rocket fuel, missile fuel. Since last year there was rumoured to be two shipments of sodium perchlorate to Iran that would be used in their missile program.

And it looked like they were doing this again. It just so happened that the cargo was loaded and the ships got to sea, and then the war started, and everybody thought, ‘well, what are they going to do? Are they going to turn around?’ Everybody’s tracking it on the shiptracker websites. I remember asking some Gulf Arab analysts who know China, ‘would this change the way you think about China? If that is what’s on this ship and that was used to fuel Iranian missiles, which are launched towards your country, would you have a different attitude towards China?’

They said ‘not really, it’s consistent with how we see it.’ It wasn’t said in a negative or a positive way. They were just saying it realistically. China is a commercially oriented country that doesn’t really have any top-level interest in this part of the world.

Now, there’s always a sense that those commercial interests mean that maybe it would be more active in leaning on Iran.

And that’s a whole different conversation. Because there are times when China could do that when Iran was very disruptive during the maximum pressure campaign of 2018-2019. When Iran was reluctant to sign the JCPOA in 2014-2015, China could use economic incentives to say, ‘Look, if you do this, we’ll offer you that.’

And that’s been pretty well documented, that China did use economic incentivisation in the run up to the JCPOA. That works when Iran needs money. It doesn’t work when Iran needs an Air Force. When Iran is physically, existentially at risk or threatened by Israel and the U.S., they know China’s not going to send any military support. And at that point, they’re like, ‘we don’t need a subway, we don’t need increased trade agreements. We need something that you’re not willing to give us.’

China’s so-called leverage in Iran is really quite minimal during these moments of crisis, because the only thing that could get Iran to change its behaviour are security commitments that they know they’re not going to get from Beijing. And Gulf Arab countries know that as well. They don’t really have this expectation that China’s economic footprints are going to have any kind of political or security results.

RV: Is that a structural situation – any leader in China would make this calculation – or is it somewhat contingent? Would different leadership in Beijing decide this is a great moment to expand power?

Jonathan: As I said a couple of minutes ago, China’s interest in this region are economic. They’re not strategic. China’s strategic interests are not only are closer to home, but they’re also without that US relationship. I mentioned asymmetry as the defining characteristic of the China-Iran relationship. Asymmetry is the defining characteristic of every Chinese relationship, except with the US, right? The US is the only country that has the capacity to really undermine what China needs to do, to maintain its trajectory, which already economically looks on pretty shaky foundations now.

The vulnerability that creates, shapes a lot of thinking. Regardless of who’s in charge in Beijing, they’re always going to have on eye on the US. If they’re talking to Iran, they’re looking at the US. If they’re talking to Saudi, they’re looking at the US. What that means is, throughout this war, the story on the back of it – as far as China is concerned – is this summit between Xi and Trump that was postponed. Trump has said it will go ahead in May, ‘after the war is finished’, as he phrased it.

China realises, if they were going to try to tip the scales or take advantage of this moment, the this would really harm their much more significant relationship with the US and cause untold problems. They’re looking at this crisis on multiple levels, but the most important level still remains: How does it affect our relationship with Washington?

RV: I wanted to talk to you about a set of pieces you wrote about the post-war Gulf. Obviously that’s shaky at the moment, and depends on what happens. But you wrote about how the Gulf would be looking at extra-regional powers to be more involved – potentially Europe. You also had a book on Asia and the Gulf, so I wanted to get a sense of your thinking of Asia’s involvement in the Gulf, beyond China – whether that is India, the Saudi-Pakistani defence pact – and how that plays into the post-war Gulf, reading the tea leaves.

Jonathan: The post-war tea leaves are very interesting because the Gulf is going to look different. There are a lot of folks who don’t think seriously about this region as often as you need to have that kind of perspective. There’s this sense that the US and Israel have imposed this conflict on the Gulf and put them on the frontline of something that they weren’t involved in triggering. And the Gulf countries are paying a terrible price.

Think of Donald Trump’s press secretary this week, when asked if the Gulf countries should pay for this war, she had a smug smile, saying ‘yes that would be in line with our thinking’, as if they aren’t already paying through their nose for this. It’s maddening.

There is political frustration with the way the US and Israel have done this. And popular frustration with the cost that people are being asked to bear. But, bigger picture, most who leave their emotions at the door and try to look at it from a dispassionate perspective, their view would be that the US security relationship has done exactly as advertised. These missile defence systems have prevented Iran from causing untold chaos and destruction. I know people will say you wouldn’t have needed it if not for American actions in the first place, but for a lot of folks here, the lesson that’s been taken is that the US security relationship will probably deepen if anything.

By that, I mean, what you see right now is that Israel has this alliance relationship with the US. And that means they’re first in line. They’re the ones at the table making the decisions. I imagine the Emiratis and perhaps the Saudis would say, we’ve earned a spot at that table too. We don’t want to be a major non-NATO partner. We want to be an ally. We want to have that kind of relationship so that we can be involved in the decision making.

But I do think there’s a lot of space for others. We’ve seen the Ukrainians step up and play some wonderful politics – and I don’t mean in a cynical way – they’ve used this moment in a very admirable, clever way to demonstrate that they can be a useful security partner at a time when it’s needed. I know talking with the Europeans that there’s an interest in Europe being perceived in the same way. People here don’t think of Europe in strategic terms. They tend to think of it as a place that is economically very important and diplomatically hard to maneuver. But the Europeans are trying to change that, at a time when a diversity of partnerships is very important for the Gulf.

That takes me to the Asian side.

South Korea has stepped up also quite admirably, rushing delivery of missile defence technology. A lot of folks don’t think of Korea when they think of the Gulf. But a Korean company got the contract to build the nuclear power plant in the UAE back in 2009. And part of that deal involved security commitments – special units helping with training. It came out later, that Korea had made real commitments, ‘if you’re attacked, we’ll send troops to defend you.’ That was politically sensitive in Korea because they’re still ‘at war’ with North Korea. But to their credit, Korea maintains that. They’ve made a lot of defence sales in the Gulf, mostly to the UAE. It doesn’t get recognised, but it’s considered political and strategically useful. Because their relationship with the US means the Gulf can work with Korea on this stuff. It’s not like working with China.

You mentioned Pakistan and India. For years, the India-Pakistan-Iran-GCC rectangle was clearly defined. India had a good relationship with Iran. Pakistan with the GCC. And that’s become much more complex. Prime Minister Modi has done a really great job of deepening India’s footprint on the Arab side of the Gulf, in a way that I frankly wouldn’t have anticipated when I moved here in 2006.

The Pakistan-GCC relationship seems to be back on track after a rough couple of years, but not to the diminishment of India’s growing ties. With Pakistan playing an important diplomatic role, we’re seeing a grouping of Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey and Egypt creating a kind of alternative axis politically in the region. It’s maybe early to call this, but that group seems to be one Middle Eastern axis, that I think will be quite formidable, and then you see the Emiratis cooperating with the US and Israelis in another distinct grouping.

I’m not sure if we’re seeing a bifurcation or blocs, but you are seeing more natural alignment patters that are probably going to shape a lot of how the Gulf looks, or maybe the broader Middle East looks after this.

In real, hard security terms, we haven’t seen a lot from Asian countries, which are deeply, structurally reliant on Gulf energy, and vulnerable to disruption of labour flows and remittances and investment. Energy seems to frame the way that a lot of people think about these relationships. But it’s much more than just this – it’s social, cultural, historical, religious.

One of my colleagues is an Indian who has been working at my university for about 25 years, and he was reaching retirement age. And I said, ‘what does that mean? Are you going back home?’

And he said, “No, my daughter’s back in the Emirates. She went to school in the UK, she got her medical degree, she’s coming here to work as a doctor, and she’ll sponsor me.’ You’ll see multiple generations of families who have been here uninterrupted for decades. Those relationships are really the fabric that connects these things. Energy, of course, is the sexy story. But these Asia-Gulf relations are really, really fundamental.

That said, you think, well, you have these close connections, you have creative investment, energy, labour ties, you have religious ties. What happens in the event of a security disruption? What happens if there’s a war?

You referred to a book I did with a friend here in Abu Dhabi, Li-Chen Sim. She’s a Singaporean political scientist, and we’ve collaborated on several projects over the years. We did this book on how do Asian countries think about issues of Gulf security or insecurity. We got Gulf experts from a series of countries – Pakistan, India, Singapore, Japan, Korea, China – and said ‘do a deep dive into what does the strategic community or policy community in your country think about the prospect of instability in the Gulf. Are you making contingencies? Are you planning for a possible deeper security role? Do you have the capacity to do that?’

We weren’t really surprised, but when we got the drafts from everybody, it was almost across the board the same story. If you’re in Singapore, you’re looking at relationships with your neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, which can be difficult and require much more of your diplomatic capital, and you’ve got to be thinking about that. If you’re in South Korea, you have to think about North Korea and China. If you’re in China, you have to think about Japan and South Korea and the US. If you’re Pakistan, it’s India, if you’re in India, it’s Pakistan. Everybody said, in our own immediate region, we have much more consequential security threats that we have to divert all of our resources and diplomacy and attention to. And anyway, the Gulf is set because you’ve got the US security architecture that protects our interests.

It seemed that what we saw across these countries was a very similar narrative with a reluctance to engage in security or strategic affairs in the Gulf, or the sense that it wasn’t really necessary. An Indian friend said, ‘what can you expect of a small country?’ I Said, ‘You’re one of the biggest countries in the world! How does India get to be a small country?’ But we do the same in Canada, because we always measure ourselves against the US economy or the US military and see ourselves as being defined by smallness.

Countries say ‘what could we do in this? We’re far away and we don’t have the same kind of material resources.You can’t really expect us to do much.’ Now, I wonder if the thinking has changed or if it’s starting to change. I was talking to a friend in Singapore maybe a month after October 7, 2023. He was saying, in Singapore, nobody really thinks about the Middle East in any kind of strategic or structural way anymore. During the counterterrorism days, everybody did, because they saw it as a potential domestic problem, that people who have been motivated by extremist ideologies in Yemen or wherever could come home and could trigger something that we don’t want. It’s important to have a focus on the region when that’s your guiding strategic doctrine. But in this era of great power competition, most people said, well, we can take our eye off that ball. It’s not necessary.

And I suspect that at this exact moment in time, a lot of those country’s strategic communities are thinking back to this, and will be saying ‘we actually have to have some conception of how turmoil in this region affects our interests, and what role we can play to counter it.’ I don’t think anybody’s got a very satisfying answer yet, but I think it’s going to happen to happen pretty quickly.

RV: What if the US doesn’t manage to reopen Hormuz, whatever that means, it’s likely that question will come up much sooner than a lot of these countries were hoping to address?

Jonathan: This is unfathomable to me that this could be an outcome. We have had an open channel of water that was such an important chokepoint for global trade that had been unimpeded for so long, and then this really unnecessary war starts, and it’s now closed to most countries. We have Secretary of State Rubio musing that we might just have to get comfortable with the idea of paying a toll – $2 million per ship is reputedly what the Iranians are asking for. And President Trump is saying, ‘well, we’re good. We make a lot of oil. We don’t need it.’

I don’t think he really understands the global nature of energy markets and what this means for other commodities and for American consumers. But you know, the idea that, ‘we broke it, you buy it. You guys need the oil, so you go secure it.’

I don’t think that’s a particularly satisfying solution for anybody. Particularly, in the UAE or Saudi or for any of these US partners in the Gulf.

We could be inching closer to a period where you could expect some kind of multinational maritime coalition, but I have no idea what that would look like. In the past you have found, for example, NATO countries participating, or countries that are similarly aligned. That works when you have decades of interoperability and joint training and a shared mission.

What would that look like if you’re asking a disparate group of countries, many of which have antagonistic relationships with each other, that don’t have joint training, that don’t have interoperability, to do this? I have no idea. It’s a very narrow waterway, and you wouldn’t want a lot of different navies bumping into each other. It’s a nightmare scenario, and it really speaks to just how, well, I was going to say what badly planned, but I don’t think it was planned at all.

I don’t think this was mapped out fully before the assassinations of the Ayatollah and all of his colleagues were killed on that first Saturday. It really speaks to the recklessness in this administration in Washington. If they were to leave us with that scenario, ‘you know, we broke it, you fix it’, I can’t imagine anything speeding the pace of the end of this unipolarity, which we’ve almost already been watching dissipate slowly. This would be just kind of like the ground falling out from under at night.

I don’t know if we’re actually there at this point, but certainly if the US were to withdraw quickly and say, “We’re not taking responsibility for this,” I think it would undermine their legitimacy with so many different countries that a lot of those relationships probably wouldn’t be able to be redeemed or maintained, and we’d see a very different world.

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“There’s the belief in the Gulf that, after the war, it’s impossible to come back to the status quo that prevailed before,” says Jean-Loup Samaan, senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the Institut Montaigne. “In the short-term, it seems clear that the six Gulf states are not going to revise their arrangements with the US… They are faced with a difficult reality: There is no external partner that can replace the Americans, and they don’t have sufficient indigenous capabilities to tell the Americans, ‘we don’t need you anymore. We’re going to handle our security.’”

Embedded within that scenario planning is the question of which actors – including South Asian ones – are going to be important players in calculations on either side of the Gulf over the next decade.

“One interesting and unanticipated development is this revived role of Pakistan [though] it has its limitations, says Samaan. “I would see the mediation of Pakistan in this conflict in a negative light actually. What it represents is a lack of critical actors when it comes to this conflict. Because China was reluctant to play a major role. We saw that they barely invested in mediation. They came up with a very general five-point plan. Russia cannot play that role. The Europeans cannot, because they are considered too weak or too close to the US. So, the only actors left were regional actors.”

As for New Delhi: “One of the reasons that the Gulf states have difficulties seeing India as a credible strategic player is that India maintains confusion regarding its priorities in the Middle East… there is no Indian narrative for its regional policy.”

Much of Samaan’s research speaks directly to the current moment. He is a former research advisor at the NATO Defense College and associate professor in strategic studies with the United Arab Emirates National Defense College. He is the author of New Military Strategies in the Gulf: The Mirage of Autonomy in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. He has a forthcoming volume on the history of Israel’s military strategy.

And, as recently as December 2025, Samaan wrote a piece for the Atlantic Council titled, ‘Is India losing clout in the Gulf?’ – presaging some of the debates now consuming India about what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s heavy investment in the Gulf has brought the country, alongside the surprising role being played by Pakistan, which New Delhi has long sought to isolate internationally (note External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent comment about India not being a “dalal nation” unlike its next-door neighbour).

I spoke to Samaan the day after news of the ceasefire broke to talk about his analysis of what comes after this war, no matter how the negotiations go, why the UAE-Saudi rift and Iran’s desire to isolate Abu Dhabi will play a big role in regional calculations, and why he thinks IMEC (and therefore India’s main strategic idea for the region) is in the “past tense”.

Check out other recent interviews on India Inside Out, and tell me who you would like to see us talk to:

RV: It feels like all of your research really brings us to this moment – the strategic planning of Gulf states and the ‘mirage of autonomy’, the involvement of Asian and especially South Asian powers, how Israel plays into it. I wanted to start off with the big picture. Any initial thoughts about the ceasefire?

Jean-Loup: There are a lot of unknowns. It’s unclear if it can hold with regards to Lebanon. What is clear to me is that this US administration is desperate to find an honourable exit. Apart from that, right now, the Iranian regime feels emboldened, confident that it has the upper hand. And that means probably very strong demands from them.

The ceasefire is a positive development, especially for civilian populations. But diplomatically, militarily, there’s a lot – if not everything – that is unanswerable right now.

RV: Are there misconceptions, things that everyone – especially the media – is getting wrong about this conflict, about this moment?

Jean-Loup: There are some problems with any media coverage of a conflict. The first one is that the news cycle is always hungry for the latest developments. If a conflict lasts more than two weeks these days, it’s called a ‘quagmire.’ That’s a major analytical mistake, because, apart from limited wars with one technical goal, there are no conflicts in history that last only a few days.

The second – and this is not just the media, I include everyone on this – we tend to listen to Trump instead of focusing what is actually happening on the battlefield. If you look at the last 2-3 weeks, everything in terms of the news cycle was chasing Trump’s statements. The crazier the statement, the more central it was to news coverage. As a result, it felt like there was nothing going on in terms of airstrikes, military activities. We almost forgot about the deployment of ground forces, about the speculation of occupation of islands.

There’s a phenomenon around the communication of Trump that makes everyone almost forget that those words are not the main thing. The main thing is actually the military action, which was in many ways unprecedented in terms of the intensity of the firepower that the Americans deployed against Iran.

RV: You are one of the few folks who is not only commenting on the Gulf, but you spent time there – teaching at the UAE National Defense College from 2016-2021 – you’ve studied it closely. Has coverage of the Gulf been too simplistic?

Jean-Loup: Yes. Especially in the first few weeks, there was all this interest in the Western media, that was connected to all the misconceptions that you usually hear, about Dubai in particular. A lot of the media coverage of Iranian missile and drone attacks on the Gulf almost read like a cautionary tale, a way for the Western commentators to say, ‘look, we always knew that Dubai was unsustainable, now we have the ultimate evidence.’

I didn’t feel there was a strong understanding, apart from those who were from or based in the region, of the social and psychological impact the war has had on Gulf citizens and residents. And that’s something that will last beyond the war.

RV: That takes us to the after. You’ve thought about this and written about it at length. You’ve pointed out that the ‘Gulf’ encompasses multiple players with independent approaches. In light of the ceasefire –which didn’t really seem to mention the interest of the Gulf – what does the after look like from various Gulf capitals?

Jean-Loup: In the short-term, it seems clear that the six Gulf states are not going to revise their arrangements with the US. I say in the short-term because the security situation is such that they have no credible options. Even though they didn’t want this war, even though they don’t really trust the US administrations, in general, and particularly this one, they are faced with a difficult reality: There is no external partner that can replace the Americans, and they don’t have sufficient indigenous capabilities to tell the Americans, ‘we don’t need you anymore. We’re going to handle our security.’ So, in the short-term, I think they will keep it this way. Some of them, in particular the UAE, will even deepen security arrangements with the US, thinking that that’s the most viable strategy.

Then – and this I have no proof of, this is purely speculation – some of these countries might be interested in reducing the public display of US presence. The countries with the biggest American military presence – like Kuwait, like Qatar, and not in the next six months but in the next two to five years – they might reduce the permanent presence will maintaining military cooperation like training and procurement.

I live in Singapore, so this is an example I have in mind. Singapore is a close partner of the US and has lots of military initiatives with the US, but there is now US military base in Singapore. Some Gulf states might be tempted to follow that model among others.

As you said, one thing for sure is, I don’t believe we’ll see closer coordination among the six member states of the GCC. After the initial expression of solitary among them, very quickly we saw explicitly different ways of conducting foreign policy. If you look at Oman, the UAE, these are very different foreign policies, and this will remain the case even after the ceasefire.

RV: After the Israeli airstrike on Qatar in 2025, there was a sense that the fear in the region was what happens in a period where the US withdraws and the region has, to some extent, Israeli hegemony. Has that been complicated now by how resilient Iran has been in this war, and how it has emerged, especially with its control over Hormuz? From a more scholarly point of view, now, what is the security architecture of the region?

Jean-Loup: To be blunt, there is no security architecture. It’s an intellectual construct. We don’t have any robust mechanism to manage the conflicts of the Gulf, and I can even extend that to the Middle East. The only credible actor at a regional level – the GCC – has never been able to solve internal disputes among its members. The case in point being the blockade of Qatar from 2017 to 2020. As a result, you don’t have a security architecture. Each of the states has its own foreign policy arrangements, with the US, with China, with India. There’s no coordination of these types of relations. And it’s the same at the regional level – with Iran, with Israel. It’s six different foreign policies.

You have the UAE, which is an exception on this, which has very open, very dense relations with Israel. But that’s it. Even Bahrain, which recognised Israel [in the Abraham Accords], has lesser, more discrete relations with Israel. The rest of the Gulf states have been very reluctant, to this day, to recognise Israel.

So, for many reasons and unfortunately, we can’t talk of a security architecture.

RV: I was going back to a piece from 2014 that you wrote, called ‘The Ties that Do Not Bind’, which talks about the limits of South Asia-Gulf rapprochement, primarily Pakistan and India’s involvement with the Gulf. Last year, you wrote about India ‘losing clout’ in the Gulf. I have been a bit surprised at how central of a role Pakistan is playing in this, and I’m curious how you see that.

Jean-Loup: I also share your surprise. 10 years ago, the impression in the Gulf was very different. In 2016, remember, Pakistan had decided not to join the Saudi coalition in Yemen, and as a result, relations were quite difficult between the Saudis, the Emiratis and Pakistan. Everything then was about India. Modi was just starting to be this ‘strong man’ that the Gulf leaders loved. So if you take that forward, it looks very surprising.

But there are three elements to note. The first is the pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last year, showing Pakistan was still able to maintain close ties with Riyadh. This is the specificity of the Pakistani political system. I suspect relations were difficult with the civilians, but not the Pakistani military. And the pact that was signed reflected that.

The second is the Trump effect. I don’t know if it is a well-designed strategy or a strategy by accident, but Trump fond a way to create tensions with India, because of its ties to Russia, but while doing that he also restored the international image of Pakistan. When the chief of the Pakistani Army [Field Marshall Asim Munir] visited Washington, DC he had a meeting with Trump. There aren’t a lot of army chiefs that have had that honour. That has created fresh momentum for Pakistan.

The last, which complicates things for India is that there is pressure for Gulf states to distance themselves from Pakistan. There’s the belief that India is not at the moment a major power at the level of China or the US – maybe it will be in the future – but it is not at the moment, and so the Gulf states do not have to navigate its sensitivities. I think the Saudi-Pakistani pact was the first time that India went public and said something about Riyadh needing to be mindful of its sensitivities. But prior to that, the Gulf states honestly didn’t care how India would perceive their interactions with Pakistan or even China.

To go back to your point: One interesting and unanticipated development is this revived role of Pakistan. It has its limitations. I don’t think Pakistan can suddenly become a major actor, because it is still vulnerable, it still heavily depends on financial support from countries such as Saudi Arabia.

RV: Is Pakistani involvement coming from a place of anxiety and necessity, that it will be dragged into this, given it already has a hot front with Afghanistan, and India on the other side? Remember, Pakistan and Iran were lobbing missiles at each other two years ago. Or is it coming out of a space of strength? Did the pact generate leverage that pushed Pakistan to be more involved?

Jean-Loup: Honestly, I don’t think the pact matters so much at the operational, military level. I don’t think the Saudis or Pakistanis would seriously consider a scenario where, even now with the conflict with Iran, you would have a situation where Pakistan sends troops to support Saudi Arabia. The pact had more meaning in signalling Saudi Arabia’s frustration with the US, the idea that Saudi Arabia has different options, and at the same time, that Pakistan is an actor that matters. I would almost disconnect the pact from mediation efforts.

I would see the mediation of Pakistan in this conflict in a negative light actually. What it represents is a lack of critical actors when it comes to this conflict. Because China was reluctant to play a major role. We saw that they barely invested in mediation. They came up with a very general five-point plan. Russia cannot play that role. The Europeans cannot, because they are considered too weak or too close to the US.

So, the only actors left were regional actors, which are in one way or another maintaining ties with different parts of this conflict: Turkey, Pakistan. But I don’t think this meant that Pakistan is getting stronger. It’s a situation where it’s difficult to find credible mediators, and we’ll have to see if the ceasefire holds. That’s also one of the reasons I’m sceptical about the current framework.

RV: You’ve written – in December 2025, before this war – about how, in your “discussions with Gulf officials and intellectuals, India is rarely mentioned in their strategic equation.” I wanted to ask about Modi going to Israel right before the attacks began, and what has happened sense. Is there a sense, from those you’re talking to, that India has picked a camp in the Gulf? And two, even more so now since the war, is there a sense that India is not relevant strategically, especially with Pakistan playing an important role?

Jean-Loup: The response would be very different from one Gulf state to another. Honestly, right now, the only Gulf state that considers India as a serious, credible strategy partner is the UAE. If you look at other countries – Saudi Arabia or Qatar – that they go beyond the idea that India is a trade partner that matters. Only the UAE, right now, has ambitions at the strategic level with India.

For the first part of the question, which was more about the perception of India in the region. One of the reasons that the Gulf states have difficulties seeing India as a credible strategic player is that India maintains confusion regarding its priorities in the Middle East. I can understand the bilateral relations of India with each of these countries – energy, trade, defence cooperation, it makes sense.

But there is no Indian narrative for its regional policy. And whether we like it or not, there is a China narrative for the Middle East – which is that, ‘we are not here to get into local disputes. We are here to make business, to sign trade deals, and that’s it. Mutual prosperity.’ It has its limitations, but it is, I think a compelling narrative, especially after three years of war in the region.

The US has a narrative. It might not be popular these days, but it has one. I don’t see that for India. The only narrative I can find is this idea of multi-alignment. But multi-alignment doesn’t say much in terms of how you see the priorities for your foreign policy in the region. As a result, that undermines the perception of India as a strategic player that matters in the region.

That’s one of the reasons why countries like Saudi Arabia, don’t dismiss India, but they will politely ignore India in their strategic assessment.

RV: To prod you on that, what do you make of IMEC – the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor? The idea that India can be pivotal with the Europeans, the Americans and the Israelis in bringing prosperity through logistical centrality. You don’t see that as the role of Indian strategy to the region?

Jean-Loup: It was. But I would use the past-tense. Because IMEC and I2U@ were initiatives mostly launched by the previous US administration, Biden’s presidency, with the idea that India was to become the new regional power that would help the US in building the security architecture that we were discussing.

Over the last year of the Trump presidency, there hasn’t been much on IMEC, apart from what the Europeans or the Indians or the Emiratis have said, there hasn’t been much. I honestly have the impression that this is no longer a topic in Washington. And with the latest conflict, even if we assume the war is over with Iran, I don’t think this will be the top priority.

A lot of this has nothing to do in a way with India, it has a lot to do with American politics and local politics. Keep in mind that IMEC was supposed to rely on both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Both of them have been distancing themselves from each other over the last 2-3 years. Even after this war, I doubt that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will have warmer relations just because of IMEC.

That also complicates the initiatives where India was supposed to be a major player.

RV: We noted, in fact, last year, when Trump visited the Gulf, he made no mention of IMEC. You mentioned the Saudi-UAE rift. You mentioned the UAE getting closer to the US. Pakistan in its messaging has not taken into account the UAE. How do you see, from a strategic standpoint, the right playing out – especially if Iran continues to control Hormuz?

Jean-Loup: The dispute between the UAE and Saudi Arabia is not a recent crisis. It is deeply rooted in the bilateral relations. There has always been suspicion between the ruling families in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. If you look at the history of relations between the two countries, they were more often difficult than easy. There was a honeymoon for almost 10 years between the moment Mohammad bin Salman became the crown prince in Riyadh and the last two years. This was mostly a marriage of convenience for several reasons that had to do with a common desire to put pressure on Qatar, Turkey… but that was it.

There were always lingering issues, border disputes, business competition, especially with Saudi desire to raise its profile as a place that attracts foreign investors. That’s not going to disappear.

One thing we can expect in the short term, is that they will try as much as possible to maintain that under the radar. There’s no appetite in either country to publicise and inflate this, to create a crisis. There might have been before the war, but for the moment, I think they will keep it under the radar. I’m not expecting there will be great relations, but at least they will try to manage those tensions away from the public eye.

Having said that, you mentioned Iran. One thing that is quite significant for the future of Gulf politics is that fact that Iran, during the war, tried as much as possible to isolate the UAE. For a while it was one of the biggest targets of Iranian attacks, and the narrative I heard many times in the region was that Iran targets the UAE, not just because it has US military presence, but because it has close ties with Israel.

This will also shape the evolution of Gulf politics. Because I can imagine the Iranian regime continuing with that strategy, even without military means. By propaganda, diplomatic rhetoric, other means, to push the idea that the UAE is destabilising the region, because it has those relations with Israel and the US. And this might feed the tensions among Gulf states.

RV: With Iran flexing its muscles, its ability to under the very basis of these economies, and the understanding that Trump will eventually look away, or eventually there won’t be a Trump… what happens next? Are these states going to become little Spartas? Can they? Are they going to find a detente with Iran? In five years time, will we see a fundamental reshaping of the Gulf, or do you imagine it’ll go back to what it was, with a few arrangements on the margins?

Jean-Loup: It’s hard to say. In the short-term, I don’t expect major changes. But right now, there’s the belief in the Gulf that, after the war, it’s impossible to come back to the status quo that prevailed before. That has implications for relations with Iran and with the US. One thing we have to keep in mind, is that the US may leave, but Iran is still going to remain in the Gulf. That will constrain the strategic calculus.

Some of those Gulf states, particularly Oman and Qatar will try as much as possible to build ties with Iran, partly out of necessity. But at the end of the day, even when there was a deescalation process between Gulf states and Iran in the last five years, there was never any illusion that they could have good relations. If you look at the Saudi-Iranian deal of 2023, this was basically a non-aggression pact. Both states agreed to reopen their embassies but there was not much behind that.

What I see in coming years is the US will stay a significant player. But, in the case of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, there will probably be a great interest in strategic autonomy, meaning modernising their armed forces. But, if we exclude Saudi Arabia which is, in terms of size, the only strong, credible regional actor here, there rest are a collection of small states. Meaning, they have no strategic depth, limited demography, and as a result, it’s very difficult for them to consider their security without external partners.

Even in the case of the UAE, arrangements with foreign partners will remain key. They may diversify more and more. This means that this will be more volatile, more complex, but at the end of the day, I don’t see that in five years time, the US will be gone and these countries will rely on their own armed forces. I don’t think that’s their objective.

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In March, India relaxed trade restrictions it had put in place in the aftermath of the 2020 Galwan conflict, easing the way for Chinese investment (two years after the Chief Economic Adviser suggested it). Preparations are being made for border trade to begin at Lipulekh Pass after six years. Following the critical military agreement on border patrolling in October 2024, there has been progress on visas, direct flights, the acquisition of critical equipment from China, as well as official engagement including a much touted visit by Prime MInister Narendra Modi to Tianjin for the SCO summit.

Relations are on an “upward trend”, said India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval last year. India and China are on the “right track of improvement”, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in March. Just don’t call it a reset. Or if you do, the term needs a qualifier, says Jabin Jacob.

“I’m tempted to call it a ‘timepass reset’… It’s a bit harsh, but I am also being harsh because of all the missed opportunities,” says Jacob, an associate professor at Shiv Nadar University where he is also director of the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies. “Given our capacity problems, I could be less harsh and call it a ‘marking time reset’, until the next conflict or problem. And the conflict and the problems are inevitable, because they are structural in the relationship between India and China.”

I first did a long interview with Jacob in 2020 (see: ‘Chinese are simply talking to keep India distracted’: Jabin Jacob on New Delhi’s Beijing challenge’) and wanted to go back to speak to him about why he calls this a ‘marking-time reset’, as well as what is actually happening on the India-China front as all attention has been focused on the Gulf as well as New Delhi’s Trump difficulties. Jacob was also recently guest editor for a special issue of India’s World magazine, focusing on “India’s China Challenge” – which assembles a range of scholarly voices on a wide variety of voices, something that wouldn’t necessarily have been possible a few years ago.

“The issue showcases work by scholars young enough to have started their research work on China only in the post-Galwan period. Pavan Raghavendra who wrote the piece on Chinese influence in cricket graduated from his BA programme in International Relations in 2021, a year after Galwan, and subsequently went on to do his masters in China Studies in the US. We can see the effect of Galwan already,” Jacob told me. “We have in the last few years, compressed time frames in order to pay attention to and get as many creative inputs as possible on China to figure out what’s going on.”

Over a call and email, I spoke to Jacob about how all the “gives” are coming from India, why he thinks there will inevitably be another crisis in India-China relations down the line and how science-fiction fits into his teaching of international affairs. (All added emphasis is mine).

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RV: The big question, off the bat: Do you think there’s a reset or a rethink happening in India-China relations? If not reset or rethink, how would you characterise the state of ties?

Jabin: I’m tempted to call it a ‘timepass reset’. That’s an expression most Indians will understand. It’s a bit harsh, but I am also being harsh because of all the missed opportunities. But given our capacity problems, I could be less harsh and call it a ‘marking time reset’, until the next conflict or problem. And the conflict and the problems are inevitable, because they are structural in the relationship between India and China.

Currently, the ‘gives’ are only coming from India. The Chinese have pretty much stuck to their guns, as we saw in the eventual conclusion of whatever agreement was achieved on the LAC. It is not a return to status quo ante 2020 by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply what has been called disengagement, and even that is not entirely complete, given the creation of ‘buffer zones’ which has limited patrolling by troops in certain areas. While these zones have been termed as being temporary in nature, the fear, as has been expressed by several observers, is that these buffer zones could become a long term or a permanent position. That’s the current state of affairs on the LAC.

RV: You mentioned missed opportunities. Can I ask what you meant by that? Do you feel there were opportunities to do something differently? And if so, was it to do the same things they were doing now, just earlier, or you mean taking a different approach?

Jabin: It’s a bit of everything. We’ve talked about this before. The first missed opportunity was to act in kind in order to let China know that its actions would have consequences. We should have acted promptly in a like-for-like manner when the Chinese transgressions began in 2020, for example, or at least after the Galwan clashes. Instead, India was slow. India decided to figure out what was going on, to calibrate, recalibrate, and by the time the first military response came, it was August. And even then India did not stick with the military response. All sorts of reasons have been given by military leaders, analysts, etc., about why India needed to pull back, needed to get the Chinese to the negotiating table. But none of them hold any water.

The fact that India needed to do an action in August, several months after June 15, already suggests an understanding that the Chinese were not going to move until there was a military response.

And yet, there were no more military responses and India decided to turn its soldiers into diplomats. India soon abandoned the position that they took on the Kailash range in August of 2020, as soon as the disengagement talks started the following year. I thought it showed a lack of stomach to stick it out. What is more, after the first breakthrough in disengagement talks, and when the Chinese realised that this was the extent of the military response from India, they slowed down the disengagement talks over the next few years with the result that restoration of status quo ante was pushed to the future.

The history record everywhere has shown that when you push back, when even a small country pushes back against the Chinese, they do take a step back. The one thing India has not been able to do is push them. You could say, yes, we have done a lot more than other countries might have done. But India is India, and other countries are watching. What is the example that India’s response to China has given? Take the case of what’s happening in West Asia. You quoted Mihir Sharma saying ‘India has friends everywhere and but leverage nowhere’.

That perfectly describes the situation. India being unable to respond adequately or in a suitable manner, sends signals not just to China, but also to the outside world. People realise that India can talk a great game, but when it comes to action, it either limits itself or its options are limited. I would say a lot of the difficult diplomatic situation India finds itself today in – in West Asia or vis-à-vis the Trump administration – has to do with a lack of faith in India’s ability to back words with action – and that these go back to the failures of India’s response to China post-the 2020 transgressions.

RV: Do you think it’s a question of political will or military capability? I can throw in the question of how decisions were made at the time – given the controversy around the unpublished manuscript…

Jabin: Political will obviously. We are a democracy after all. Everybody is supposed to take orders from the political leadership. So if the political leadership decides to backtrack or hold off, the message goes down the line. In the case of General Naravane’s point about him being handed a hot potato, I think that’s overdrawn. If the Prime Minister is saying, ‘Jo uchit samjho, voh karo’, he is telling you exactly what needs to be done. In that particular matter, blaming the politician is a bit unfair. In India, we have a tendency to blame politicians for everything, and a lot of the time it is unfair. Citizens also have a responsibility.

Now, having said that, why did General Naravane make that decision? In India, I’ve seen generals talk a lot like diplomats and politicians. The problem is structural. When you have for years seen constraints, lack of resources, when you have had to deal with a civilian bureaucracy which does not really take on board military or national security interests at times, when someone with 20 years of experience in the military has to report to somebody with far less experience in the civilian bureaucracy, in the name of civilian supremacy, then you condition the military to think a certain way. I’m not surprised the general would think of the larger picture. That he would think, if I start a firefight, will the politicians and bureaucrats come to my aid? Where are they going to get their resources from?

Anit Mukherjee has written a book, The Absent Dialogue, covering civil-military relations, and basically saying that it is dysfunctional. Frankly those of us who do China studies, we’ve also been seeing this for a very, very long time. If you’re dealing with China and Pakistan, you do get a sort of a wider remit or room to maneuver, but at the same time there are limitations because the stakes are so high. How is a general supposed to commit when he is absolutely not sure that there will not be a blame game?

Galwan also came at a time when civil-military relations were in flux. You had a new CDS. The chiefs were not exactly sure what the balance of relations was. And we are still figuring things out. Ultimately, though, the buck stops with the political class. This is again something we discussed when we last spoke at the end of June 2020. As long as the government doesn’t engage the Opposition in these matters, and there is no Parliamentary debate, Parliament doesn’t do – or isn’t allowed to do its job – I think we are headed for trouble. You have a lack of options and a lack of creativity. And other missteps follow. Our adversaries are looking at us, and seeing how we constrain ourselves. How India fights with one hand tied behind its back. They will make the most of it.

RV: To unpack that for the reader, the suggestion is that if the Opposition is taken into confidence or included, decisions will be made more confidently because there’s less chance it’ll just be pounced on?

Jabin: Absolutely. When the Opposition is taken into confidence, then the government can confidently act and nobody will blame only the government for outcomes. Similarly, the civilians, the military officials, they also have the confidence that India’s actions are backed by rational thought, and that this is what the nation wants. Not political motives, but a national consideration. People in government who are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution need that kind of confidence. World history is replete with instances where orders have been disobeyed or ignored if it doesn’t come backed by the entire political class, backed by consensus, or even if there is an iota of doubt that decisions are being made due to extraneous considerations rather than national interest considerations.

RV: It’s an important point, though an open question about whether you can build confidence on just one front – say India-China ties or military strategy – while there is deep distrust on so many other things. But let’s go back to the term ‘timepass reset’ or ‘marking-time reset’. What did you mean by that? Was it just the need to do something right now? What are the elements of this reset, however you see it?

Jabin: When I say ‘marking time’, a few things are happening – on the military front, on the economic front, and on the international relations front.

On the LAC, we have done the first step. We somehow swung an agreement - it’s not a satisfactory one, it doesn’t answer all questions. But for now we have created the impression of having resolved that issue. Since we failed to provide an adequate military response, maybe because of economic considerations, this is the next-best option.

On the economic side of things, Press Note 3 essentially failed to do its job. In the sense that neither Indian industry nor the government managed to do the work that was necessary in order to keep Press Note 3 effective. You can argue that 5 years is too short a time, or that it’s not just about what is happening in India, but also the rest of the world – Trump tariffs, the Iran conflict etc. But we have a structural dependency on China, which we needed to address – this, however, can only be done over the long term. Again, given the circumstances there was no other choice but to dilute Press Note 3.

However, Press Note 3 also did its job, in the sense that it has alerted the Indian system to issues related to China. At least within the government, I see a lot more alertness to the problems of dependency on China. It’s a different matter in the case of Indian industry. Indian industry continues to remain bereft of any grand narrative on China, beyond simply immediate terms. This is not true entirely of big industries, because they have a lot to do with the government, and the government has pushed them in certain directions. But, by and large the Indian economy is too heavily dependent on China, and we cannot move forward on some of our strategic plans without depending on China. So diluting Press Note 3 was inevitable. It is a different question if the Chinese will play ball now that India has revealed its hand.

Connecting all of this together is the international element. I went over our conversation in 2020, and much of it remains true. Charisma and soft power are not substitutes for hard power. While India has made a lot of noise, India is visible increasingly in international forums, there is no grand idea associated with India. There is no grand movement that India drives. This matters, because the US has its own set of actions. The Chinese are coming up with alternative narratives and approaches – the four global initiatives, for example. If you are Kenya or Peru or Algeria, they might ask, why should I pay attention to India? What is it that India is doing that fires them to pay attention to it? What is India’s weight in the world? India is now in the slipstream, rather than trying to guide or motivate events. Until we realise that our current approaches are inadequate, we will be marking time.

Finally, a point on capacity. Unless we have capacity on China, on foreign policy, on distant parts of the world, we’re just not going to be able to do it. India has maybe 10 universities that have international relations courses. China has a university in every city, and every university has a department of international relations. Every city has Chinese students studying foreign languages. Unless we in India produce the systems, build those capacities, we will only be marking time.

RV: I take it you don’t see digital infrastructure and AI and voice of the Global South as India’s visions for the world?

Jabin: When the Chinese talk about a Global Development Initiative, when they talk about BRI and infrastructure development, they are translating what are interests for ordinary Chinese and trying to take those abroad. And when they do that, they are also making sure that the standards are something China can live with or even try to set. My issue with India’s current focus on AI is that it is limited to the educated classes. We are still talking about the elite 5% who are going to use AI models. It’s the remaining 95% we have to worry about. By contrast, the Chinese model has been about ensuring its approaches apply to the majority, that 95%.

Take UPI. My colleague Anand P Krishnan has just written a piece about UPI banding together with Alipay for global connections. Now, India has spoken about exporting UPI, but only seven countries have accepted it so far. And even in Sri Lanka, one of the first to accept, you can hardly use UPI anywhere. Ordinary folk would love to use UPI when traveling abroad. Instead, I have to download Alipay – because it is everywhere, including in Sri Lanka. There is that mismatch.

I’m not saying that the government’s international efforts at standard setting, wanting to be in the room, are not important. But they need to speak to a larger audience than they have until now.

RV: We have talked about limited capacity in government, and you’ve spoken elsewhere about India focusing too much on Pakistan. I have this pet peeve of many in government preferring to deal with the West. Now with Trump becoming somewhat adversarial, do you see the focus on China as India’s biggest strategic challenge, become diffuse?

Jabin: No, the government is very alert on China. Galwan changed everything. But it still remains reluctant to take this public. Unless we take the interest and concern about China public, we are not going to have creativity, ideas, etc on how to deal with China. Whatever the government does, it does sotto voce. Press Note 3 has been diluted, and they want people to forget about it. The disengagement has happened, and they want people to forget about it. The LAC is no longer in the news. These are old government habits dying hard. The government prefers to keep things uncomplicated, to not be challenged on policy matters. This is normal behaviour for any government.

But there are consequences to this, especially at this moment. If ordinary Indians do not understand that China is a challenge, that we need to study international relations, that we need to study foreign languages, that we need to pay more attention to global relationships, then we are not going to be able to take advantage of situations, to spot opportunities, to deal with crises, today or in the future.

On China, there has been tremendous movement within the military, within the government. There’s a huge amount of interest, specialised studies, a great deal of work being done. Just like the differences between the government and the Opposition, there’s a problem in translating that work into effective policy, because a lot of it is being done behind closed doors, without drawing public input. Here, I’m not talking of think tankers and analysts. I mean inputs from ordinary people.

China has a massive internet culture of discussion on international relations. They have massive groups of military enthusiasts, who’re studying what China is doing or not doing in Iran, discussing Chinese weapons, failures in X,Y,Z scenario. Maybe the government will shut it down at some point, but it is also drawing from these discussions.

India may be obsessed with Pakistan, but is there a culture of ordinary citizens or professionals beyond the policy spaces, openly dissecting say, Pakistani military doctrine, its drone technology or in general, has in-depth niche knowledge of Pakistani society beyond stereotypes? That sort of thing exists in Europe, America, and China.

RV: I don’t know how plugged in to Ajit Doval fanboy groups you are…. But let’s keep that aside. I would argue that it’s not just that the government is being silent about China. It’s that they’re occasionally signaling in the other direction. Take the noise over the ‘Tianjin Summit’ last year, with Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin… the messaging seems to suggest we can relax on this front. That we can be friends with Beijing again.

Jabin: One of the reasons why I advocated for a like-to-like reaction to Galwan, not just in the military but all other fields, is because it conveys a signal that China is a serious challenge, a serious competitor. When you don’t do that, there are consequences. When you have to create the impression that we are or can be friends, like in Tianjin, that’s a consequence of not having done the needful in the first place. You have constrained yourself, and left yourself with no choices when somebody like Trump comes along. You are then scrambling to respond, and trying to signal to the Americans, but the public in India is also watching these signals and are confused about what exactly India’s China policy is.

Elsewhere I’ve said that it’s time we have a National Security Strategy document, and it’s time that we clearly identified adversaries and for rational and not emotional reasons, to do so through government policy documents rather than through dog whistles and WhatsApp forwards. We need to be able to put this on paper, and get all the best minds in India coming together to think about this. And it starts with Parliament. Discussions by the Standing Committees on Defence, Foreign Policy, and Home Affairs among others, in Parliament. Only then will ordinary Indians pay attention.

Rohan: To devil’s advocate that a bit, some could say that, by not turning the public entirely against China, the government gave itself space to change tack in response to Trump last year… as a way of hedging the West. The question then is… is there actually room to move towards China?

Jabin: The government is really relying on a short public memory. The relationship with the US is the most important foreign policy relationship India has. And the challenge from China is India’s most important challenge. The Indian public has over time become much more aware of foreign policy, and in that sense, it was a great embarrassment for the government that Trump imposed tariffs on India seemingly without a second thought. So, the government wants the public to forget the big Trump rallies, and is walking back from a position that it had taken.

But the policy on China hasn’t essentially changed. These are temporary movements, with the hope that the Americans will come to their senses eventually. The problem is that short-term considerations end up confusing the general public, and slowing down our eventual responses, our capacity building to deal with these challenges. The concern is to constantly keep the public on your side, to play up that we are the victors. These short-term considerations of image building rather than long-term ones of capacity building are really the heart of the issue here.

RV: Let’s flip the perspective then. You have often spoken of how China rarely concedes any Indian agency in its foreign policy, and prefers to just see India as working in concert with the US. Given how Trump imposed tariffs on India, has that changed? Are there voices calling to get closer to India?

Jabin: On the one hand, Chinese like Indians having some agency. It makes their job easier, because India can be relied on to stand up to the Americans on occasion. On the other hand, if India has too much agency, they might use it to align with the Americans and target the Chinese. China is under no illusion that New Delhi thinks positively about it. Whatever forward movement we’ve had in the relationship is tactical and temporary, as far as Beijing is concerned. They know that Indians are partners with the Americans, and for the Chinese, anybody who is with the Americans is against China.

So last year the Chinese imposed export controls on India. They tried to block the flow of expertise into India. They never really met any of their promises about investments. Now, partly this has to do with issues of administration and clearances within India, but there also Chinese scholars who have asked, ‘why should we support India’s growth to become a rival against China’? This is a dilemma that even the Chinese face. At some point they will need India to side with them to build up a coalition against the West. They know that without India, there is not going to be an alternative global order. Neither the US nor China can afford India to be an independent player. So both sides have problems with Indian agency, but they also want to make good with India.

This is well explained in an essay on Chinese political cartoons by a young PhD scholar, Cherry Hitkari, in an India’s World special issue on China. You see how the tone and tenor of Chinese cartoons on India in their state media change depending on the global context. This is par for the course as far as the Chinese are concerned. You could say we are also doing the same thing, except without a larger narrative.

RV: On the recognition of India as a potential ‘swing state’, is there a constituency in China pushing for engagement? You said earlier that the ‘gives’ in the current moment are entirely India’s…

Jabin: Common sense would dictate that the Chinese need to engage with India. This is true of any country – the fact that Eldridge Colby American under secretary of defense for policy just visited in India is, I’m sure also a case of the US attempting to repair bridges with India. In any big complex system, there will always be for and against voices. I don’t think the Chinese are completely in a position of dominance over India where they can ride rough-shod over Indian interests. The current moment in fact is one in which the Chinese don’t want attention drawn to their role in Iran, which is a strategic partner. So they would rather make the issue more diffuse and try to bring the Russians on board, the Brazilians on board… to say it’s not about what China does or does not do but about what the rest of the world can do.

That’s where India is useful for the Chinese. They will want to make sure that Americans don’t turn their attention to China, they will make use of this opportunity to build purchase with the Indians, to increase Indian interdependence on the Chinese economy. But, by no stretch of the imagination, does this mean that the Chinese are going to cede space in South Asia to the Indians. What the Chinese have taken, what they have achieved, they will hang on to. They might progress a little slower or less intrusively than they did before, but they will progress nevertheless.

The overall framework in which India is placed, is of a power limited to South Asia, so that China is free to achieve its interests and seen as the only peer power to the US. It’s easier to deal with a two-body problem than a three-body problem.

RV: You’ve been clear that there are structural elements at play. You don’t have a crystal ball, but, in the next few years, do you think it’s likely that we will have another issue on the border, or another incident?

Jabin: It’s hard to make predictions, but given the structural problems, China-India competition is not going anywhere. Xi Jinping says the world is going through changes unseen in a century, that the world is in flux. From the Chinese perspective, this is not a time to down your shutters but a time to look for opportunities, see what can be done. Like how the Chinese took advantage of Covid in 2020. Structurally, it is inevitable that another incident on the border will happen sooner rather than later. The current agreements on the border are not designed to last. They’re designed to hold your position. They are susceptible to larger considerations or events beyond what is happening at the LAC. And why just the LAC? An incident at sea is not very far off either. People pay too much attention to the land border. But it’s in the maritime domain that a lot of important changes are happening. The fact that the Strait of Hormuz can be blocked, has implications for how the Chinese will think of the Malacca Strait – they will want to increase presence in the Indian Ocean, and India will have to find ways to respond.

At the same time, I think we’ve reached a place in which countries are smart enough to not let conflicts get out of hand. Just the way India responded to China in 2020. Things will happen, but we might still have discussions, and maybe a compromise. Perhaps not one that is acceptable in the larger scheme of things, but a compromise regardless. It will be a function of power, of how big the gap between India and China gets. If it gets too big, India will compromise more easily. If it remains steady, we will have a steady state. If it starts closing, the Chinese might think they need to block or stop India somehow, as they have done on the LAC over the past couple of decades or so as Indian infrastructure got better.

RV: Tell us about the CSEP report on China engaging with South Asia, and the India’s World issue that you edited.

Jabin: The CSEP project was an attempt to bring in South Asian neighbours, who have important and interesting things to say about China. Many countries had already developed a certain degree of complexity of thinking about China in South Asia, because China has been engaged for such a long time in the region. Contrary to popular perception in India, we saw that China was not getting the free hand that the West or the Americans had in many parts of the world. Even small countries had agency to respond and react and think about what China is doing.

There’s also a capacity building question here. If India and Indian institutions do not support our neighbours in building capacity, who’s going to do it? It is a multi-year project, and we had authors from Pakistan to Myanmar, telling us what China has done but also what it failed to do. Despite South Asia being in China’s immediate neighbourhood and the density of China’s interaction with South Asia being much greater than in most other parts of the world, with the exception of Southeast Asia, studies of China in South Asia had been limited. The two CSEP reports, which I co-edited with Constantino Xavier, are a pioneering effort in understanding what is going on in South Asia in the voices of scholars from the region themselves.

With the India’s World special issue on China which I guest-edited, we brought the focus back to India. In our conversation in 2020, we talked about building capacity on China. One achievement since then, is that so many people have now started paying attention to China. In 6 years time, we have had a massive rise in the quality of analysis, and I think that is reflected in this issue. We had Indian scholars from not just New Delhi but from across the country as well as abroad who covered a whole gamut of issues. In fact, the issue showcases work by scholars young enough to have started their research work on China only in the post-Galwan period. Pavan Raghavendra who wrote the piece on Chinese influence in cricket graduated from his BA programme in International Relations in 2021, a year after Galwan, and subsequently went on to do his masters in China Studies in the US. We can see the effect of Galwan already.

The special issue is multigenerational. We have teachers and students writing in the same platform. This would not have happened so much in the past, but we have in the last few years, compressed time frames in order to pay attention to and get as many creative inputs as possible on China to figure out what’s going on. And this complexity of inputs is essentially what the special issue is on.

We did look at traditional issues. For example, we looked at how Indian military thinkers get China wrong – a very simple but profound essay by Captain TSV Ramana (retired, Indian Navy). We managed to combine years of experience and a range of topics, in trying to showcase what needs to be studied, what needs to be done, what are the different kinds of inputs that need to go into framing policy on China.

Some of the fundamental issues are clear, such as our analysis of China and the capacity of our universities. Dr Arvind Yelery and Prof. G Venkat Raman both studied in JNU as well as in China – the latter has a PhD from Peking University – and both worked in China before returning to work and teach in India. There can be no better people today in the country who really know how educational and research institutions and businesses work in the two countries. So, when they say something, you have to listen carefully and take them seriously.

There are several things we tried to do in the special issue, and it came out a lot better than I imagined. For me, especially, it was clear that we need to be able to write in a form and language that is accessible to the public, including policymakers. These articles address complex issues without dumbing down but are still intelligible to the lay reader. It’s a service that we as academics are duty bound to do in a country like India.

RV: Since it comes up in this issue, tell me about sci-fi… you teach a course on it.

Jabin: I’ve always been interested in sci-fi, from when I was a kid. For the course, I have to thank the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, where I teach. It is a young department but offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of the kinds of courses you can teach. One of the courses I teach – besides those on China – is called Reading Politics in Science Fiction and Fantasy. I just had a great time putting this together and enjoy the fact that students love it, too. We look at short stories, what kids see on streaming platforms, lots of work in translation from China and elsewhere, Afrofuturism, Sri Lankan sci-fi, Pakistani sci-fi. There’s the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, which is absolutely recommended.

But my course is about more than just science fiction, it’s also an opportunity get the students to read the original political classics. Ambedkar’s essays, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Mary Wollstonecraft on women’s rights, Aime Cesaire on colonialism. We talk about democracy, inter-race relations, world government. It’s a short course, with a lot packed in. The final assignment is that I give students a scenario. In the last iteration, I asked them how institutions would respond to ‘first contact’ with an alien species – religions, countries, international institutions, social media. They had fun with it.

With the essay in India’s World, it was in fact the very first essay that I had decided upon. Shanky Chandra’s PhD is on Chinese sci-fi and he has interviewed China’s top sci-fi authors. I really enjoyed working with him on this. We realised that Chinese science fiction is really about global orders. Science fiction has always been code for what is happening in real life, and projected futures; it is a commentary on current politics. So, for me this was another way of explaining what China is about. If you look at Liu Cixin’s Wandering Earth, for example, the movie especially, it clearly puts forward a parochial Chinese perspective, criticising the US and European powers, pushing certain stereotypes of Indians and Japanese. For me, it is another input into the study of Chinese foreign policy.

I’d lean towards the latter. The US and Israel have undoubtedly demonstrated tremendous superiority in the air. And yet, four weeks into their campaign, the Iranian regime (after years of sanctions) has yet to collapse, Iran’s missiles and drones continue to pose a real threat even to Israel (with some suggestions that US attacks are having to come from further away because Gulf bases are too vulnerable), and the proximate American goal of the conflict now (opening up the Strait of Hormuz) is one that was caused by the conflict itself.

I will leave it to the International Relations experts to continue debating whether the US-Israel war on Iran will end up being another ‘Suez’ moment, whether multipolarity is already upon us, and what it would mean for Tehran to survive this war with its ability to once again close the strait intact – or alternatively, what it would cost to take that capability away from Iran.

(On the bigger picture IR perspective, go see a piece I commissioned from for CASI’s India in Transition: What is happening to the Rules-based Order?)

It did make me think of a separate question, however:

Is there a global order version of the worry that Asian countries, particularly China, will ‘grow old before they grow rich’? Put it this way: What if a multipolar order arrives before India is recognised as a pole?

We have talked about this before on the newsletter, particularly when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted, in 2025, that the unipolar moment had indeed ended and that US President Donald Trump’s administration actually prefers multipolarity:

India, and specifically External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has spent the last half decade prophesying, portending and promoting multipolarity. This is usually depicted as a positive development by Jaishankar. Every once in a while, though, he finds himself having to clarify his vision of this new order, and in doing so, reflect a genuine vulnerability for India in this tense global moment: “if the world is to be multipolar, Asia has to be multipolar.” Note, not ‘is’ or ‘will be’ but, ‘has to be.’

Given the immediate reverberations of the conflict in India and the ways in which South Asia has been playing a role (see: Pakistan steps up as go-between in Trump’s Iran crisis), it is interesting to note that one analytical thread emerging from the conflict is that New Delhi doesn’t yet have many levers to pull on its own – despite the Gulf being vital to its interests (see the quote at the top of this piece for a reference to how that has been the case for more than a century now).

As Nicolas Blarel noted last week, sure India was competent at handling the immediate crisis for its diaspora, but beyond that what has its friends-with-all approach to the region brought New Delhi?

Here’s Bloomberg’s Mihir Sharma:

“The real facts are this: India is too close to Israel for Iran to trust it enough; but not close enough to avoid the humiliation of being blindsided by a war starting hours after an official visit. The Gulf monarchies, home to millions of its citizens, cannot rely on our defense at their time of danger. The US doesn’t take India’s concerns into account before throwing its neighborhood into chaos. And it is losing crucial assets — from Chabahar port in Iran to markets for rice exports. India has friends everywhere, but leverage nowhere.”

Eurasia Group’s Pramit Pal Chaudhuri:

“For decades, India has been a strident advocate for a multi-polar world, championing the concept as a theoretical corrective to the economic hegemony of the US and China… Today, however, New Delhi faces the distinct challenge of operationalising that rhetoric within a global reality that has finally caught up with its ambitions.”

And :

What followed was one of the more humiliating fortnights in the history of Indian foreign policy — a masterclass in the perils of choosing sides in a neighborhood where you cannot afford enemies. For a government that has spent a decade advertising India as the “Vishwaguru,” the world’s sage and civilizational guide, the next two weeks would offer a brisk tutorial in the difference between posturing and power.

This is not to suggest that New Delhi is powerless, simply that its current claim to being a pole in the global order depends heavily on borrowing from presumed capacities in the future, a phenomenon we discussed a bit last year:

So what happens if that future doesn’t come to be, or comes faster than expected? If Hormuz is indeed the next Suez, and we have an Ikenberry-esque ‘constitutional’ moment for global order that crystallises rules before India has been able to take its seat at the big table?

See also:

• C Raja Mohan: The multipolar delusion, and the unilateral temptation

• This useful NatStrat publication, putting together a wide variety of thinkers (Suhasini Haider, Shyam Saran, Zorawar Daulet Singh, DB Venkatesh Varma, Ashok Malik and many more) on India’s strategic autonomy.

• Weiling Deng: Why the Gulf Arab States Matter So Much – But Decide So Little

Should India Speak?

Perhaps that is the deeper question underlying the debate taking place on Indian Op-Ed pages over the last few days, on which we’ll have more in coming weeks.

• Srinath Raghavan: Modi government’s ill-conceived policy on West Asia jeopardises India’s interests and credibility

• Syed Akbaruddin: Iran-Israel War And The Limits Of India’s ‘Strategic Autonomy

• Shashi Tharoor: India’s silence on West Asia war is not moral surrender. It is responsible statecraft

• Amit Kumar: India chooses silence during war and crises because posturing will have costs

• Manoj Kumar Jha: Why Shashi Tharoor is wrong about India’s ‘responsible’ silence on West Asia war

Read also:

• Duttatreya Das, Rohit Chandra: The lessons of past oil crises have not been fully learnt

• M Rajshekhar, Paridhi Choudhary and Shaswata Kundu Chaudhuri: West Asia Shock Ripples Through India’s Kitchens, Factories and Supply Chains

• Anjali Deshpande, Kinshuk Gupta: How the Gulf War is affecting gig workers

• Pamela Phillipose: The Gulf War Is Destroying Human Lives in Real-Time but Where’s the Media Empathy?

Can’t Make This Up

Given our conversation about the global order, I held on to this graphic from Indian TV news that was put out last year:

We don’t even have good ties with Westarctica anymore:

Share India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

I remember being asked, while I was at university in the United States, whether I felt unsafe as a kid who grew up in the 1990s in Doha, Qatar, since I ‘probably heard missiles flying overhead all my childhood’. My usual response to this sort of question was to point out that it was in American cities that I heard weapons being fired for the first time. At least over the course of my childhood in Qatar, there were no missiles, and the only firing I was familiar with was the cannon announcing iftar on Ramadan evenings. (A few had indeed been launched towards the Gulf by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, but Qatar was not impacted – and I was a 1 year old).

All of which makes it even more surreal that, for members of my family – scattered across Qatar and the UAE – the sound of missiles (or more specifically, of missile interceptors) overhead has become a real thing over the last two years, and a daily occurrence over the last three weeks.

I have been meaning to write much more about the current conflict, not least because it speaks to a longer writing project of mine on the historical, economic and strategic ties between India and the Gulf. But I thought this week, I might go back to something that happened just before the war broke out.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a visit to Israel just over February 25 and 26, two days before the Israel-US attacks on Iran began, and when the massive mobilization of American military hardware made it evident that a conflict was in the offing. The External Affairs Ministry offered little explanation for why Modi was willing to go under such circumstances, where any visit would be seen as an endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanhu’s objectives of tearing down the Iranian state, with which – at least officially – New Delhi had friendly relations.

So I got on a call with Nicolas Blarel, associate professor at Leiden University and the author if The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922. I’ve spoken with Nicolas previously on this newsletter about India’s relations with Israel and West Asia more broadly:

So I took the opportunity to ask: What prompted India – which generally tends to be careful and balanced in its public diplomacy towards the region, even as the Israel relationship has grown steadily over the last decade – to take what many would say was a rather bold foreign policy gamble in the form of a Modi visit?

Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

Rohan: How does South Asia fit into this war?

Nicolas: South Asia is involved in multiple ways. First, there are the South Asians actually in the Middle East. There’s often a discussion of the close to 10 million Indians living in the Gulf, who are caught in the crossfire. I think 60 to 70,000 were quickly evacuated by the Indian government. But that’s just one part of the story, because you also have 5 million Pakistanis, a few million Bangladeshis, also Nepalis, Sri Lankans, Maldivians, all caught in this conflict. India has been quite successful at evacuating those who needed to go back. But with Iran responding to the US-Israel attacks by not just hitting US bases in the region, but also targeting other infrastructure in the Gulf states, that’s where a lot of the Indian, Nepali, Bangladeshi residents are vulnerable. That’s the first issue, and along with that is the issue of family remittances coming from the region, which would be a problem if they were cut off.

Then we have energy. The war is affecting energy prices for everyone, but South Asia is immediately at risk because of its dependence. South Asia is strategically located close to West Asia, which has been good for prices and access, but it also means heavy dependence, and now a difficult effort to find alternatives. We are already seeing this in India, but it applies also to Bangladesh, for example, which is seeing an energy crisis. Connected to that are things like fertilizers and other inputs, that also come from the Gulf or are connected to oil and gas.

Finally, there is the question of how the war directly spilled over into South Asia. We saw last week the issue of three Iranian warships that were participating in an exercise hosted by India. One of them was torpedoed by a US submarine, while the other two ended up taking refuge after distress calls, one in Kerala, the other in Sri Lanka. The location of where exactly the warship was when it was targeted appears to still be up for debate, though it looks like it was close to Sri Lanka’s economic zone. But the bigger problem is that it appears there was no coordination at all. The Americans just did this, without warning India, which is supposed to be – according to the US and others – the future net security provider in the Indian Ocean.

Rohan: On the issue of the warship (for more details see this), what do you make of it? You were in Delhi as the news broke out, for the Raisina Dialogue…

Nicolas: I reached Delhi the day after, and it actually took some time for the Indian government to have any statements about it. India at first didn’t mention that the warship had been participating in an Indian exercise, and later it put out that technically the official invite had been until February 25th, suggesting that everything that happened afterwards was the Iranians own responsibility. We have learned progressively about the actual events, and there are still more details emerging. But I think just the slow, gradual sharing of information and attempt to avoid specifics, or condemnation, or any opinion, suggests that the Indian government was really taken aback. It raises questions about how much coordination there is between partners, which India and the US are supposed to be.

Similarly, Modi was in Tel Aviv 48 hours before the bombings. A lot of questions can be asked about how much he knew, and whether he was briefed on the attacks. The Israeli ambassador to Delhi, and the foreign minister, have said that they hadn’t decided yet and so Modi wasn’t told. But the whole timeline raises questions about trust between Israel, the US and India.

At the Raisina Dialogue, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar, who is very good at communication and rationalizing decisions or non-decisions of the Indian government, almost seemed to lack words to explain the situation about the warship. Over three days he had basically very bland formulations, which at least suggested that they really didn’t know how to communicate over this issue and were still waiting to hear more from the US side. They are trying to navigate the tension without clearly condemning the US action.

It’s not that they need to speak up for Iran. India had its own problems with the Iranian regime, though it has never used the maximalist rhetoric of the US or Israel. A few European states – with very bad relations with Iran – still condemned the Israel-US attacks, saying they are outside international law. As a result, what you’re seeing is a lot of criticism for the Indian government. Not just from the Opposition also. We find elements within the BJP, within the analyst community that is usually supportive of the BJP, that were very critical of the silence and then the bland statements that came out of the government.

Rohan: They haven’t even trotted out the “not time for war” formulation they used, eventually, with Putin. But let’s go back to Modi visiting Tel Aviv, just a few days before what was clearly going to be war. From what you’re hearing, are people now clearly putting India in the Israel ‘camp’? You’ve written about India taking a non-zero-sum approach to the region, approaching all actors, but those visuals, that visit – has it tilted the balance?

Nicolas: For me, the timing was very surprising. Modi had been the first Indian PM to go to Israel, and that was nine years ago. There was not necessarily any hurry to go, there were no big deals announced, or at least none that were not already negotiated and known. This seemed purely symbolic, especially with the hug on the tarmac, the Knesset speech etc. I’m not saying that the visit was itself not important, but it’s that there was no clear tangible need for it to happen now, except maybe to reciprocate Israel’s support to India. Even that support – when it comes to material things, India is still buying weapons from Israel, it is still transactional, they’re not gifts. So I don’t really understand the visit, or at least its timing.

Modi and his government already knew there was a mass military mobilization, and something was imminent. The only way I can see this is, as I argued in an Op-ED, that India was confident that it can show its support for Israel, but that doesn’t mean that its relations with Iran would completely disappear. Now this may still show a misunderstanding about India’s actual interests in the Middle East. India has a lot of strong interests in Israel – defense equipment and technology especially – which was very decisive in the conflict with Pakistan in May 2025, and may explain why Modi went. To reciprocate the support from Israel not only militarily but also diplomatically, since Israel was one of the rare countries to support India unconditionally in the May 2025 conflict.

But if you look at India’s biggest interests in the region, they’re mainly in energy, mainly about the diaspora, and mainly commercial, and most of these lie in the Gulf and to some extent in Iran, if it can buy Iranian oil again. Any operation from the US and Israel would have affected those other interests, and if that wasn’t integrated into the calculation of the visit, that would be very problematic. I was surprised that it happened. The Modi government has been good about opening to all actors in the region, but it is also usually very careful and risk averse. This is probably the first time it signaled such a clear tilt, and perhaps it won’t do something like that again, given the consequences.

Rohan: Maybe this is speculative but what could have made it worthwhile for Modi to do this? We may not know everything that was discussed, even if the actual list of outcomes was modest…

Nicolas: It’s always easier in hindsight, but given what happened a few days later with the attacks and how Hormuz has affected India, I don’t think anything may have worth it. There was talk of defence cooperation, but no big deals. There had been an earlier MoU signed on joint-production of defence equipment. I think we have all heard about the Elbit-Adani factory in Hyderabad, where there is assembling of drones – not drone production, since most of the design is happening in Israel, but the assemblage happens in India and it helps Israel scale up. India has also had a fascination with the Iron Dome system, and there is a DRDO partnership with Israeli Aerospace Industries to jointly build a missile defence system. But the other interceptors that Israel has, which it has used successfully against Iran, have proven to be too costly and complicated to transfer. Perhaps there was some discussion about sharing technology or how India could build its own indigenous systems with technical collaboration, but we don’t know yet. In the days after the Israel-US bombing, there were a couple of comments on Israeli TV saying that if Israel runs out of defence equipment, that India will produce them for us. Perhaps this was also discussed?

I believe that the BJP is still divided over Israel. There is a camp that is more pragmatic, that understands that collaboration with Israel is fruitful but mainly transactional and a defence-buyer relationship. There’s also an ideological side to the BJP that sees the relationship and the Modi-Netanyahu ‘bromance’ as very important for domestic political reasons too. Remember, Netanyahu hasn’t received that many leaders since October 7. Modi was the first from the Global South to travel to Israel, and that was a major diplomatic and political success for him. There’s some degree of reciprocity there and some in the BJP who may think it could have an impact at the domestic level in India too.

I think there were tensions within the BJP, and maybe an internal debate, after which one side won. This is speculation, but it is a fact that details of the visit weren’t announced till the last minute, even though the Israelis had leaked it for a while.

Rohan: For me, even the fact that we’re having this conversation – why did Modi go – tells us that the Indian government doesn’t have a good narrative. They haven’t been able to explain it well.

Nicolas: Everything was reversed. The articles ended up being more criticism or questions about the timing of the visit, rather than the government explaining why Modi was going now and what it would mean for India. And clearly India is in no better position in the aftermath of the crisis than in previous crises. We see the same patterns – evacuations after the fact, lack of reserves to deal with the oil and gas price rise, the lack of access to reserves. Despite India developing good partnerships with all the actors, it’s still the same sort of crisis diplomacy.

The Modi government can’t be blamed for the crisis itself. No one else could have prevented what US and Israel did. The Europeans probably had discussions to prevent the US from acting this way, but they had no leverage or influence on the Trump government. I don’t think Modi had either. And Modi probably doesn’t even want to speak about it, given the negotiations over the trade deal with the US.

The problem for Modi is, at the domestic political level, it will be held against him, because of this visit, because he was in Tel Aviv just before. And this is an important political year because of elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and then UP in 2027. The BJP may be less able to deflect blame by saying that it has no leverage to shape outcomes in the Middle East, since Modi went to Tel Aviv just days before the attacks happened. State elections usually don’t involve foreign policy, but given oil and gas prices, these questions may come up.

Rohan: Which is a good opportunity to shout out your other work, on how regional politics plays into foreign policy. Speaking of visits, I wanted to ask about another that seemed significant, but didn’t have any major outcomes to discuss – this was the royal family of the UAE popping into India for just three hours a few months ago. What was that about?

Nicolas: In the press people always talk about India’s relationship with Israel being one of Modi’s big successes, and actually I have argued that it isn’t the case. It is more visible now, but the relationship was doing quite well under previous governments. There’s also talk about India-Iran relations and surprise about India’s position. But what has really changed over the last decade is the relationship with the UAE. This is not just about Modi going to Abu Dhabi and the UAE, which he has done 7 times. But it’s also about the UAE’s leaders coming to India, and the UAE have its own ‘look towards India’ policy over the last decade. This has been one of the most defining strategic partnerships in the Middle East for India over the last decade, and the Abraham Accords really helped India because it could develop this trilateral partnership with Israel and the UAE.

If India has to calibrate its position towards the Middle East, it will do so by looking at what the UAE does. It considers the UAE the most slick actor in the region, with intelligent hedging behaviour. In the first few days after the October 7 attack, it seemed as if India was tilting and supporting almost exclusively Israel without mentioning Gaza, and that was later corrected by looking towards how the UAE was acting – maintaining diplomatic channels with Israel, with I2U2 and IMEC still continuing in the background.

There’s a strong partnership based on economic connections, connectivity, energy, but also an understanding that they both have a lot of mutual advantages and similar partners. Even after the February 28 strikes, India took 2 days to react. And the first call by Modi was to UAE’s MBZ, before Israel, which is very important. I think there’s going to be even more coordination between these two actors.

I also think India was taken aback at the Saudis going back to Pakistan, last year. India has made a lot of outreach to the Gulf States, but it saw that in times of crisis, when the situation with Israel and Iran was escalating, that some of these old partnerships come back for Riyadh. But the India-UAE partnership now seems to be one that will stick.

Rohan: The question now is, if India is looking to the UAE for its cues, can Emirati diplomacy survive having a big angry neighbour on the other side of the Gulf? Iran has directed much more of its firepower at the UAE than even Israel…

Nicolas: Yes, this is often covered in terms of just influencers or finance people or even just oil resources, but the key thing about the GCC countries is that they have created an image over the years as an economic hub and a haven for business. We have to see what happens in the aftermath of this.

Rohan: For India they were also seen as a gateway to the future. I’ve written about how all the FTAs India has done have been to its West. And IMEC was supposed to be the lynchpin of the grander strategy. All of that is in question.

Nicolas: Broader discussions on IMEC have been suspended for a while. But it’s interesting that both New Delhi and Brussels never let go of the concept. And India concretely worked with the UAE to operationalise it. If you think the IMEC doesn’t exist, there is actually quite an integrated part of it between Gujarat and some of the ports in the UAE. Now, you still have to figure out the logistics of how it would work with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and all the way to Israel. But the discussions are on, and they got a boost with the EU FTA. It was mentioned by Ursula Von Der Leyen when she was in India in January.

Now, two months later, the IMEC is again a bit of a non-starter. It was always going to be a logistical nightmare. Getting from the Gulf to Haifa is going to be very complex. Both the point of departure from Emirati ports, and the point of arrival to the Mediterranean – Haifa – have been targeted in the current crisis. So IMEC is something everyone wants, because they want diverse supply chains and new corridors going through the region, but people will have to think about it in different ways, beyond just a connectivity project.

Also, you have to think about dealing with some of the structure problems of the region, and not imagine that the connectivity project solves all the underlying problems. You need to start with the political questions and then go to connectivity rather than the other way. This is a problem for India, since it has placed a lot of bets on this, and doesn’t have many alternative solutions. The other one – the North-South corridor through Chabahar port in Iran – it also moved away from.

So the EU-India FTA was a big deal, but there was a lot of hope that much of this commerce would go through the Middle East. But if the Gulf is difficult, and if the Red Sea becomes difficult again because of the Houthis, India’s in a tough situation. If those tensions are long-standing India may have to again ‘Look East’ and towards the Pacific as Modi did in his early years.

Rohan: Final question, perhaps bigger picture. Is this crisis an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how the Gulf will operate? It won’t just go back to the way it was between 1991 and now. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan played a big role in the region with their military. People have wondered if China will be more involved. Big picture, with India wanting to be net security provider in the IOR, do you imagine one day – in 10-20 years – New Delhi projecting military power into the region, to secure the space? There has been talk that the UAE leaders visit to India was a counter to the Saudi-Pakistan agreement, including questions about the nuclear element…

Nicolas: Over the last few years, with concerns over at least a partial US disengagement in the region, there has been talk about actors becoming more autonomous and taking security into their own hands. Even with the current US re-engagement, I think there are going to be a lot of doubts about the future and the need as well as the actual effect of US security architecture. Because the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi have been targeted for being too close to the US or hosting US bases. They may look to diversify their military partnerships, and not be too dependent on the US. After the June 2025 bombing in Doha, people also are asking questions about whether the US will restrain Israeli security policies in the region.

I don’t think that alone is what led to the Saudi-Pakistan security partnership, because that was negotiated for a while, but they clearly accelerated the timing and announcement of it. These series of developments have created unease, and I think a lot of the GCC were looking towards India stepping up security wise, and perhaps they were disappointed. India has done some maritime surveillance and patrolling to deal with non-state actors and other hybrid threats, but it isn’t ready to protect the Strait or majorly project power. Maybe it could work in coordination with other actors, but it is not ready to itself become a major actor. No one is expecting India to elevate its security role in the North-West Indian Ocean region. But while people have talked about China, it also doesn’t have a strong security role and I don’t see it having one in the immediate future. The Gulf states may also be reluctant about being too close to China, or depending on anyone as heavily as it did with the US. They basically have two options: Develop their own indigenous capacities, or to continue working with the US, while also perhaps relying more on other actors like India, while understanding that India will never fulfill the role that the US has in the region.

Read also:

• Christophe Jaffrelot: India Under Modi Chooses Israel (Without Saying So)

• Albert B Wolf: Pakistan’s Iran Trap

• Elis Gjevori: What’s Netanyahu’s planned ‘hexagon’ alliance – and can it work?

This week’s edition is just a linkbook, as we digest the outcomes of the AI summit and wait to see what the absolutely massive American military mobilization means for West Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.

Fare well, welfare

First up, plugging some recent work on India in Transition, a publication from the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor.

I asked Yamini Aiyar, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute, Brown University and the former President of CPR, to put together a short reading list for anyone interested in India’s welfare state and more specifically its employment guarantee act, MGNREGA, currently being significantly altered and renamed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

From Aiyar’s reading list:

Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India; Rajesh Veeraraghavan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

This book is also related to my own personal journey with the scheme—I was interested in NREGA when it was first launched in 2006, especially in what it was attempting to do in terms of its governance architecture.

There are two ways in which to think about a welfare scheme. One is the obvious question of what it is doing as a social safety net; how it’s contributing, or not, to broader economic outcomes in the scheme design itself.

The other side of this was particularly relevant when the NREGA was being debated in India—how state capacity shapes the “type” of welfare that governments can commit to. This is fundamentally about governance. When MGNREGA was being debated, there were two camps. One was saying this is fiscal profligacy of the worst kind; yet another scheme that populist politicians love that is not going to do anything for the development of rural India. It sat in that old school imagination of trade-offs between welfare and growth. And what was legitimizing these arguments was the view that the implementation architecture in India is so weak and so easily captured by elites that you’d be better off just dropping cash from a helicopter than implement this large, clunky scheme that will just see money going into the wrong hands.

The response on the side of those pushing for the NREGA was that this was designed as an entitlement. It is a law because it is a right, and the right articulates a set of core entitlements that are going to create sites of demand-making and claim-making from the citizens, and through that process, place pressures on the state to ensure that the realities of corruption are addressed through people power. NREGA was being presented as much a governance experiment as an economic one. As a student of governance, I was particularly interested in the governance side of things.

I came across Rajesh Veeraraghavan during his field work. What’s really interesting about Patching Development is that it’s a book that looks at the governance story of NREGA and what we can learn about state capacity through this program. But it also brings in the technology element. The term “patching” comes from IT, and again this matters, because in today’s debate, we hear about Direct Benefit Transfers-JAM technology, and generally the tech pipeline is presented as a magic bullet to resolve governance challenges.

But what Patching Development actually tells us, in a very live way, is how technology is an enabler rather than an end in itself. It shows us how it is used by champions within the bureaucracy to identify implementation bottlenecks and consistently seek to “patch” them. That identification requires deep embedded participation of society in the process.

That’s why I think it brings together some of the arguments about how to think differently about state capacity, how to recognize the role technology can play—and also its limits—and the importance of societal participation and democratic processes in ensuring technology is a useful enabler to strengthen state capacity.

If you want to read more about India’s welfare state, check out also our interview last year with Louise Tillin, professor of politics at the King’s India Institute and author of Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy.

Louise: I’ll start with one of my favorite discoveries when researching the book. The push to introduce contributory sickness insurance for industrial workers grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s in a context of growing industrial unrest and culminated during the second World War, when industrialists became increasingly concerned that there needed to be stronger national coordination of labor policies to prevent industrialists in one part of the country being undercut by competitors in other parts with access to cheaper labor.

Interestingly, the main kind of labor law that provincial governments had been experimenting with in the 1930s were maternity allowances, though I don’t really get into that in the book.

So, there was a push for stronger national coordination of labor policy, which is something that Ambedkar took forward when he became the member for labor on the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1942 in the wake of the Quit India movement. This was a moment when there was a lot of debate about what kinds of welfare states might be required in post-war Europe and especially in post-war Britain. Ambedkar extended an invitation to Sir William Beveridge, who had just published the Beveridge report in Britain, which was the blueprint for the post-war British welfare state.

Ambedkar wanted a Beveridge report for India. And Beveridge, for his part, was really keen to accept this invitation. He had been born in India, both his parents worked and lived in India when he was born, and he was casting around for the next project after the Beveridge report had been published. He was very keen to accept and was planning a fairly long visit. He was even in the process of hiring research assistants and planning his travel when the whole thing fell apart. It fell apart because Beveridge wanted a completely blank canvas to explore the problem of “freedom from want,” which was the term that he used in the Beveridge report. He wanted to explore “freedom from want” from first principles in India, whereas Ambedkar wanted him to come and report only on how to build social security for the industrial workforce. And Beveridge said no, because this isn’t where he would start if he was to really think about the problem of “freedom from want” from first principles. He wanted to take into consideration other issues such as the condition of the agricultural sector and agricultural productivity. The proposed visit fell apart because Ambedkar and Beveridge could not agree about the scope of the visit.

I refer to this moment because it gives us insight into why postcolonial India at a founding moment cut off the potential to build a more genuinely universal welfare state. Instead, it enshrined in legislation a particular set of rights to social and social security for what was then and what remains today, a very small proportion of the workforce. And indeed, it’s access to those social security policies (sickness insurance and then provident funds) that have even come to define the boundary between the formal and the informal sector today.

Linking Out

• India trade deal talks rescheduled as US Supreme Court scraps Trump tariffs

• Gautam Bhatia on the Supreme Court’s bail orders in the Delhi riots cases:

“How does the Supreme Court justify the continued incarceration of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, even after five and a half years in jail without trial? It does so by deploying two arguments: first, that the delay in the trial is not “solely” attributable to the prosecution or to the court; and secondly, that the “seriousness of the offence” is a relevant factor in deciding the question of delay. Neither reason stands up to scrutiny.”

• Veena Naregal writes about the Indian welfare state as it actually operates:

“The convergence across food security and health insurance reveals a distinctive governance pattern: freeze-as-policy. By not updating beneficiary rolls, the size of the entitled pool remains capped without requiring explicit retrenchment decisions, maintaining fiscal predictability while institutionalising exclusion by omission.

The platforms function as designed—delivering portability within bounded pools, enabling real-time monitoring, maintaining fiscal predictability. What they systematically produce alongside these documented efficiencies is stratified access and exclusion rendered invisible within the platform architecture itself…

A consequential shift is underway in how the state knows and governs its population: comprehensive periodic enumeration has been deferred while continuous transactional data from welfare platforms expands—monitoring the included, while the excluded remain effectively invisible.”

• has a long read on the AI summit:

Get Down and Shruti

India’s AI Wedding Buffet: Generous Portions, Political Economy Heartburn

The AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi is structured like a good Indian wedding buffet, which is to say, it tries to be everything at once. There’s the main event, the side events, the offsite roundtables, and whatever happens in the hallways between them. The world’s largest gathering of AI stakeholders descends on New Delhi from February 16-20…

Read more

4 months ago · 133 likes · 20 comments · Shruti Rajagopalan

• Amber Sinha on the summit’s missed opportunities:

“If you look closer, it becomes evident that both France and India have approached these summits as trade events with one clear economic objective outweighing all others — to seek private sector investment into domestic AI projects. The primary goal is not to gather the best minds to think about the broader social and geopolitical implications of AI, but to create a venue for governments and corporations to announce new ventures and pursue new partnerships. To that end, the summit is already a big success for India, with several large investments already announced, and over $200 billion more expected over the next two years.

But what of the broader social and political goals that many hoped would rise to the fore? Amid the dollar signs and demos, the opportunity to shift the global debate about AI and what world we are building appears to be a lost opportunity.

• Also, unrelated to India, read this fascinating bit of reporting from San Francisco, by Sam Kriss, on some of the personalities driving this new AI-powered agentic future.

• Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Paul Novosad, Anjali Adukia and Brandon Tan on residential segregation in India:

“We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighborhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighborhoods within cities—at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy.”

Also see this discussion by Novosad on AI-written papers:

• Ananth Narayan on India’s capital market ecosystem:

“One of the most striking shifts in India’s capital market ecosystem in recent years has been the rise of the Indian household as the country’s largest provider of risk capital… The rise of the household investor is a milestone in India’s financial democracy. But neither durable investor prosperity nor sustained capital formation can be built on domestic equity-centric savings alone. A mature investment ecosystem needs three avenues: Domestic equity; other domestic asset classes such as fixed income, real estate, commodities and alternatives; and, finally, some access to global markets.

India has made the first leg very efficient; the next phase should be to gradually strengthen the second and third.”

• Neha Virmani writes a lovely note on the history of sohan halwa, and her own connection to it.

• Devarsi Ghosh explains why Arijit Singh doesn’t want to do filmy music anymore.

Share India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

[Full AI disclosure: I have been trying to use NotebookLM to sift through the surfeit of links that I’m perennially bookmarking – if only to avoid having hazaar tabs open – but I have no intention of ever letting an LLM write the words you read here. Any overuse of em-dashes is a pre-GPT era failing that can be attributed to my long-standing penchant for overstuffed sentences].

This comes just as India begins hosting its massive AI Impact Summit (with the hope of signing an agreement on a ‘global AI Commons’), prompting a host of business heads and foreign leaders to make their way to New Delhi, most notably French President Emmanuel Macron, soon after the Indian government cleared the purchase of 114 Rafale jets for around US$ 40 billion.

To return to in subsequent editions: the 16th Finance Commission’s recommendations on allocations of funds to states, Marco Rubio’s Western Civ 101 speech at Munich and a G-4 meeting to discuss ‘reformed multilateralism’, the results of Bangladesh’s elections and their relevance to India, plus internal debates about how to re-open the economy to investment from China.

First, a few job openings that might be of interest:

Tricks of the trade

Last year, I wrote about the fundamental vulnerability that US President Donald Trump created for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi:

“The Biden administration, while not always on message, appeared somewhat sensitive to Modi’s needs at a domestic level, endorsing New Delhi’s G20 efforts, eventually dialing down the early criticism over Russia ties and choosing a relatively quiet approach to the extrajudicial killing allegations. The Trump administration appears to be uninterested in such sensitivities, or in any coordination on public messaging.”

Perhaps having an ambassador on the ground – indeed, one as Trumpian as Sergio Gor – might have mitigated some of this, but it didn’t seem to matter earlier this month when India and the US agreed to a “framework for an interim agreement on reciprocal trade.” (Yes, that’s an agreement to get to an agreement).

At first, before any details of the deal emerged, the immediate reaction painted New Delhi in a good light, suggesting that Modi had successfully conveyed his willingness to wait out Trump’s tariff aggression (with swashbuckling details later denied by the Indian government) and, as I wrote on the last edition, that he had used the signing of other deals like the EU-India FTA to change Trump’s mind. Much of that euphoria has dissipated following the reveal of the actual terms of the framework, seen as heavily tilted in DC’s favour with potentially major political repercussions, as well as the manner in which the Americans have handled the file.

As Suhasini Haidar pointed out, “every announcement on the deal thus far has been made by Washington unilaterally, with New Delhi racing to play catch-up.” The most egregious of the lot was a White House Executive Order announcing a panel to monitor whether India resumes importing Russian oil, which it claims New Delhi has “committed to stop” doing. Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, India has sought to push back against Western efforts to limit its Russian ties, defending its right to take actions based on Indian interests and sovereignty. Even if it were willing to cut Russia out of its energy mix, it would have preferred to do so quietly — rather than be subject to a Trumpian panel.

If you needed a sign of just how uncomfortable this narrative mismatch has been for the Indian government, witness how Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar sought to redirect questions about the deal and the oil import restrictions back at each other, with the MEA eventually choosing simply not to react to the White House’s Executive Order at all. Don’t forget, this is a Cabinet that usually prefers to lay all key decisions at the foot of the prime minister, and so their back and forth spoke volumes.

The questions at hand are whether,

• the India-US framework is potentially a good deal for India, and more specifically, whether it is the best deal India could have hoped to get given the circumstances and with this White House,

• and, separately, whether Modi and his government can convince the Indian public that the right decisions were made.

On each of these, there are a whole range of responses – some collected below – but the important thing is that these are interconnected but different issues. Over the past decade and a half, the BJP has relied on its successful control of the Indian media to convince the public that Modi always makes the right call. But that seemed to break down earlier this year during Operation Sindoor, not least because of the Trump factor. For those following Indian current affairs, it will be important to parse out these two intertwined threads, not least because they will play into each other as American and Indian negotiators attempt to hammer out an actual interim arrangement (which itself may precede a full trade deal) over the next few weeks.

In the Balance

Links to analysis on the India-US trade ‘framework’

🟢 C Raja Mohan: “Moving beyond the old anxieties that framed every engagement with the US as a threat to sovereignty or strategic autonomy, the agreement reflects a more assured India, willing to operate in a complex global economic order on the basis of mutual benefit.”

🟢 Ashok Malik: “From Britain and the EU to New Zealand and Canada, India's emerging basket of non-US trade agreements - concluded or under negotiation - was beginning to cause disquiet among individual US business and export constituencies… Narendra Modi's opponents obviously want him to make a public brawl of his irritation. Yet, he is nothing if not a fox with a shrewd eye on the long game.”

🟢 Tanvi Madan: “The announcement of an India-US trade agreement has led some to ask what happened to Indian strategic autonomy. This criticism, however, misses two points. First, Indian govts have often made foreign policy trade-offs when there’s a worthwhile payoff. Second, the deals with the US and the European Union can enhance rather than weaken India’s strategic autonomy. Used effectively, they can increase India’s capabilities, without which there is no freedom of action.”

🟢 Shekhar Gupta: “If not for Trump, this trade-averse BJP establishment, which reads much more from its own ideological scriptures than Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s, would not have rediscovered the magic of trade deals.”

🟢 NK Singh: “Having come of age, India can no longer prosper behind walls of excessive protection. Our current choices reflect a sophisticated understanding of strategic autonomy… Crucially, the new India-US interim arrangement does not leave us harshly exposed.”

🟢 TK Arun: “It will come as a surprise only to the politically naïve that the India-US framework agreement on an interim bilateral trade deal contains nothing that hints at a sellout of India’s national interest.”

🟢 Indrani Bagchi: “For everyone saying we'll now pay 18% tariffs when we were paying about 3% earlier, there seems to be collective amnesia that we were paying 50% tariffs for the past six months. In any case, Indian breast-beating about 'selling' ourselves to the US has been a near-constant refrain forever… The US deal would seem unfair if we were comparing apples to apples. We aren't. The prime target of this deal is to reduce US tariffs on Indian goods, particularly in comparison with India's competitors. That's happened.”

🟡 Akriti Vasudeva Kalyankar: “In the medium to long term, this deal signifies something broader for New Delhi — India needs capital and technological prowess to build its material capabilities, which the West and particularly the United States can provide. Thus, a trade deal with Washington is unavoidable and consequential.”

🟡 Evan A Feigenbaum: “Those who care about U.S.-India relations—have worked hard on them and have spent years struggling for them against domestic political pressure—should be happier than they were a few months ago. But let’s not talk as if the past six months never happened or somehow just went “poof” in a magical puff of fairy dust and smoke. International politics and domestic politics are not populated by unicorns and leprechauns, so there really is such a thing as collateral damage.”

🟡 Ashutosh Varshney: “In short, given the realities of the new world, the trade deal was bound to be more favorable to the US than to India. To expect equal benefits is to be entirely unmindful of power realities… The trade deal is a reflection of the great power differentials between India and the US.”

🟡 Nirupama Menon Rao: “Autonomy was never synonymous with equidistance or rigid neutrality. Flexibility, not ideological symmetry, has been the enduring thread. The debate over Russian oil imports illustrates this pragmatic tradition. Discounted crude provided short-term economic advantages for India, helping manage inflation and fiscal pressures. But longer-term considerations — access to Western markets, capital flows, advanced technologies, and defence collaboration — inevitably factor into policy choices.”

🔴 Ajay Srivastava: “The interim framework reflects a familiar US negotiating approach — securing market access, regulatory concessions, and strategic alignment without offering commensurate commitments in return. The agreement risks locking India into obligations that are difficult to reverse.”

🔴 Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “Acknowledging power asymmetry is realism. To internalise it so completely that one relinquishes independent judgement is something else. We might want to, in the name of pragmatism, give in; we could even make the best of this deal in a way that the consequences are not bad. But this is not a triumph. The perfume of official announcements cannot disguise the stench of our own diminishment.”

🔴 Andy Mukherjee: “To an older generation, the accord mirrors the 1991 rescue by the International Monetary Fund following a balance-of-payment crisis. That capitulation was cathartic, forcing India to dismantle a Soviet-style planned, socialist economy and embrace global trade and capital. Today’s bargain restores market access by asking India to repudiate strategic autonomy.”

🔴 Biswajit Dhar: “The interim agreement does not explicitly state that India would not reduce tariff-sensitive agricultural products, especially cereals, as has been the case in all its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), including the recent EU-India FTA. Does this absence of a clear statement that tariff protection on cereals would be maintained, suggest that India has yielded to Mr. Trump’s pressures to comprehensively open India’s agricultural market to U.S. agri-business?”

🪏 Harish Damodaran: What India has really given on agriculture in India-US trade deal

If I’ve missed useful analysis of the trade framework, send it my way. More on the next edition.

Share India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

I’m back just in time to put down some notes on the landmark visits of EU leaders to India and the FTA announcement, which also happens to be a good time to inform you – I promise, this is unconnected – that we will be moving to Brussels in the second half of this year. Please send me tips of whom to meet and what to do in Belgium, and if you are planning to make it down to Cairo before July, do give me a shout.

3 notes on the India-EU trade deal, plus lots of links:

Trading Places

India ‘look West’ trade policy

Between 2011 and 2021, India signed no free trade agreements. Its most notable action on the trade front in this period was withdrawing from negotiations to be part of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega-deal bringing together ASEAN, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The talk in New Delhi was of free trade – particularly early 2000s deals with ASEAN – having failed. In 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s big economic initiative to pull India out of the Covid mess (and now forgotten pre-Covid struggles) was ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, a self-reliant India. In a paper, Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian called it India’s “inward turn”, reflecting not just a refusal to enter trade pacts, but also an unmistakable push to increase tariffs after decades of post-1991 reductions.

This has changed. In 2025 alone, India signed trade agreements with the UK, Oman, New Zealand and the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland). In the years before that there were important deals with Mauritius (which, aside from its key Indian Ocean location, is also for various tax reasons a top source of FDI into India), the United Arab Emirates (a top 3 trading nation with India, and its key partner in the energy- and capital-rich Gulf) and Australia.

And it has now agreed to a major trade deal with the European Union, which European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen labelled ‘the mother of all deals.’

Also being negotiated currently: deals with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Israel, the South African Customs Union, Canada, Qatar, Bahrain, Mexico and, ahem, the United States (more on that below). In a useful analysis of this renewed trade focus, Viraj Solanki points out that “India is in active negotiations for 11 trade agreements covering 24 countries,” and that “If India can finalise its pending negotiations, it will have trade agreements with all the G20 countries apart from China and Turkiye1.”

By and large, the countries India targeted for trade deals before 2011 lay to the country’s east. Not counting immediate neighbours, since the new round of deal-making has begun, India has tended to look west. Here is how Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal put it:

“We already had an FTA with ASEAN, Japan, and Korea, all very poorly negotiated. Till date, we have not been able to grow our exports there.

RCEP was basically an FTA between China and India, which would have demolished India’s manufacturing sector, it would have demolished the MSMEs. We would today have been an importing nation, with no jobs in manufacturing. We would have become a B-team of China, as have many other RCEP nations which have seen a huge increase in imports from China post-RCEP. There’s no question of revisiting our decision.

We are doing deals with developed nations. We have done eight FTAs in this government, covering 37 countries. All of them are with developed nations. We have not done deals with our competitors.”

This burst of deal-making goes against a number of assumptions of our times: It’s a reversal of the ‘inward turn’ mentioned above, it takes a different route than US President Donald Trump’s tariff-driven foreign policy and it seeks to unsettle a more long-standing assumption that New Delhi was a difficult player when it came to trade deals.

How that plays out for India – which has seen steady trade growth post-Covid without being able to grab as much of the ‘China-plus-one’ market as it hoped to – will also depend on several other domestic efforts, writes Shoumitro Chatterjee:

“India… exports about 18 percentage points less than its potential — equivalent to roughly $160 billion in annual export headroom. Signing an FTA is an important first step. But market access must be matched by domestic readiness. Converting these agreements into sustained export gains will require action on four fronts that sit outside the FTA text… standards compliance, simpler regulation, access to competitive inputs, and sustained commitments after agreements are signed.”

Stuck-in-the-middle Powers

Trump catalyzes an under-performing relationship

Of course, this is no longer just about China-plus-one. Donald Trump looms large over the India-EU deal, and even if the American president wasn’t the reason the two were in talks – negotiations for this agreement first began way back in 2007 – he was certainly a catalyst.

In the short run, New Delhi is seeking to build resilience in the face of 50% tariffs from the US, which had steadily become a larger destination for Indian exports in recent years. This may mean simply replacing an export market rather than expecting major gains for Indian goods exporters2. As Anil Sasi pointed out:

“Notably, more than 75% of India’s exports to the EU attract less than 1% tariffs even without the trade deal. Most of these Indian goods may not gain significant market access even after the FTA is signed compared to what India would have to offer by pruning its own high tariffs on a broad range of European goods.

Amid the negotiations, it was also increasingly becoming clear to India that as the steep 50% US tariffs, which kicked in from August 27, 2025, were weighing on Indian goods exports — including product categories such as shrimps, gems and jewellery, auto components and electric machinery — it could redirect some of that output into Europe and other Asian markets… leveraging India’s trade linkages with other parts of the world, including the EU, could help mitigate the blow if a trade deal with Washington DC does not fructify soon.”

There are, of course, a few catches here. Agriculture was entirely kept out of the deal, given sensitivities on both sides. While initially contemplated, the FTA hasn’t come with either an agreement on investment or geographical indicators. (Mobility, somewhat surprisingly, did see some movement). And the big pain point of Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism has been attended to – see the five ‘assurances’ India received – without being entirely addressed.

But the relationship between India and EU potentially goes well beyond broadening already important commercial ties, given that the European bloc was already among New Delhi’s biggest trade partners. For years, decades even, there have been calls for Brussels and New Delhi to understand each other better, and make common cause. While the EU began to take this more seriously in the last 2010s after rebranding China as “partner, competitor and systemic rival,” New Delhi continued to see European ties (at least at the bloc-level) as a second-order benefit to the real goal – a closer embrace with the US.

Trump’s capricious handling of India has unsettled this. Here was ECFR’s last year:

“American hostility towards India should not drive New Delhi to shift away from the West entirely. Europe provides a promising pathway—one that can help India balance its risks without rapidly escalating tensions with China or necessarily undermining its vision of multipolarity….

Historically, Europe and India’s relationship has underperformed, hampered by differences in political priorities as well as often incompatible bureaucracies that have struggled to find the right mechanisms to push closer cooperation…

[Global] changes mean India’s broader geopolitical calculations are evolving in ways that favour deeper engagement with Europe. European leaders share India’s concerns about Chinese economic practices and security threats. Trump’s return means both sides are struggling to deal with a far more capricious America. For those seeking stronger ties between the two sides, it is hard to imagine a better set of geopolitical circumstances—although there is no room for complacency.”

And so, the FTA has come alongside with a security and defence partnership, and the expectation of closer ties not just envisioning India buying European military hardware (more announcements on French Rafale jets and German submarines expected soon) but also seeing Indian manufacturers participating in ReArm Europe. The two also announced the beginning of negotiations on a Security of Information Agreement that would allow the sharing of confidential information, as well as more cooperation on green hydrogen, IMEC, and data and tech, through the EU-India TTC.

Given all this momentum though, it is interesting that strategic thinkers on both sides of the deal have advised some caution.

Happymon Jacob:

“There is little doubt that India will continue to get closer to Europe (just follow the direction of trade, tourists and students for evidence), but it will not abandon its strategic autonomy (and it shouldn’t). It will maintain its deep reservations regarding the inequities of the global order and will continue to champion the cause of the Global South even if some of it is just left-over rhetoric from its non-aligned past. It will not bend over backwards to please Brussels, nor will it shy away from criticising Europe’s selective outrage regarding global conflicts. Europe will have to reconcile itself to an India that is a power on its own terms.

And India will have to get used to the fact that Brussels is not a ‘state’ that engages in quick, agile, conventional statecraft, that its pursuit of norms and values is an integral part of its statecraft, and moderate expectations accordingly. Whether or not we agree with all of them, norms and values are integral to European power, and that EU’s insistence on them is very much part of the DNA of what makes the European Union what it is.”

And, Lizza Bomassi, in a paper for the in-house think tank, EUISS:

“As long as China and Russia define the immediate security environments of India and Europe respectively, this asymmetry will be structural rather than temporary. And this implies that the EU-India partnership cannot be built on expectations of alignment, or on any single organising bargain. It will have to be engineered to function under persistent misalignment, through distinct and purpose-built forms of cooperation….

To mature in the new strategic environment, the EU-India relationship must move away from a single organising centre and towards a more modular partnership… Coherence emerges not from denying misalignment, but from engineering the partnership to function where interests overlap and to remain viable where they do not.”

Look over your shoulder

No one is ditching the US just yet

The meme above was impossible to resist, given the photo between Modi, Von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa, but, even though EU-India ties do have momentum of their own, at least some of this is also aimed at Washington, DC (rather than against it). Meaning, the hope that the deal might spur a rethink in the US, which has sought to use tariff weapons against both the EU and India.

New Delhi had been unsure about how an EU-India deal might play in DC (would it anger the White House and cement the break in ties, or drive a demand for even more concessions?) while Brussels is struggling to figure out how it should handle its own US deal (I found it interesting that, on the day the India-EU FTA was announced, the first item on Politico Europe’s Brussels Playbook was about… the EU-US trade deal).

So far, the response from DC hasn’t been fiery (no matter what you may have seen on social media). US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “I've looked at some of the details of the deal so far. I think India comes out on top on this, frankly… On net, India is going to have a heyday with this.” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar heads to the US this week to participate in a ministerial on critical minerals, which should provide an opportunity to begin bridging the massive gap that has opened up between New Delhi and DC.

Voices in the US continue to call for Trump to change course, while also asserting that the EU-India deal shouldn’t be “overhyped.” Here is CNAS’ Richard Fontaine and Lisa Curtis:

“The relationship between India and the United States is not quite lost. Even as their leaders feud, the two governments have continued to cooperate in the background. But it is teetering badly, and if U.S. officials want to fix it, they will need to move quickly. The Trump administration will have to lower tariffs on Indian goods. It will need to back away from claims that the United States negotiated peace between India and Pakistan and stop offering to mediate their eight-decade conflict over Kashmir. These may be tough asks of Trump, who is fixated on cutting the U.S. trade deficit and becoming a Nobel laureate. But repairing the U.S.-Indian relationship is of paramount importance. India is a global swing state, one whose outlook and actions will disproportionately influence the international order. It shares U.S. concerns about Chinese power, and it wants to ensure that the Indo-Pacific democracies are strong and work together. New Delhi, in other words, remains an essential American partner. Washington will miss it if it’s gone.”

The main problem, for New Delhi, as it is to a much greater extent with the EU, is that even if DC decides to begin rebuilding ties, there is little trust that signing an agreement will guarantee anything other than opening up demands for even more concessions – making the next few rounds of negotiations particularly tricky, even if Piyush Goyal continues to insist that a deal is just around the corner.

Also read/watch/listen:

• 🎧 How big a deal is the EU-India trade agreement? | Soumaya Keynes speaks to Nicolas Köhler-Suzuki and Ajay Srivastava, Financial Times

• 🎧 The EU-India mega-deal | Mark Leonard speaks to James Crabtree, ECFR

• 🎧 Alliance of the Betrayed: The Quiet Rise of India-EU Relations | Tushar Shetty speaks to Tobias Scholz, The Diplomat

• ▶️ What is the geopolitical context to the India-EU FTA? | Worldview with Suhasini Haidar, The Hindu

• ▶️ (fr) Sommet UE Inde: un accord commercial et stratégique historique sous condition? | Christophe Jaffrelot, Sylvia Malinbaum et Ingrid Therwath, Les Forums France Inde

• 📖 The Fine Print of the ‘Mother of All Deals’: What India Conceded in the EU-India FTA | Varna, Policygrounds.press

• 📖 A Long Time Coming | Garima Mohan, GMF

If I’ve missed any good reads/videos/podcasts on the EU-India deal, please do send them – and any other feedback – my way.

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Why has US President Donald Trump turned on India?

Among other things, over the last two months, the US president has slapped 50% tariffs on Indian exports; urged the European Union and the G7 to go even further and raise the rate to 100%; hiked H-1B visa fees (70% of which annually go to Indian nationals) to $100,000; imposed a 100% tariff on branded pharmaceutical products and doubled down on closer relations with the Pakistani government and its army chief.

How did we go from Jaishankar saying last November that “a lot of countries are nervous about the US, let’s be honest about it – we are not one of them” to Trump declaring India’s economy “dead”? Whatever happened to Modi’s “MAGA + MIGA (Make India Great Again) = mega partnership” formula? Who is to blame for bringing about “the lowest point in U.S.-India relations since the late nineteen-nineties, when the United States slapped sanctions on India in the wake of the 1998 nuclear test”?

A few answers have been floated:

One is that this is really about Russia, with the White House willing to blow up ties with New Delhi in order to put pressure on Vladimir Putin, now that Trump has flipped on the Ukraine war. Although Trump himself and his ‘prime minister’ Stephen Miller have used this line of attack, it has broadly been owned by Trump’s friend and trade counselor Peter Navarro, who has referred to the conflict as “Modi’s war,” said that India had become a “laundromat for the Kremlin” and talked about “Brahmins profiteering” from the fighting.

Another is that this is about American business interests sensing a chance to crack open the Indian market. This line has been personified by Howard Lutnick, who has insisted that the US will have to ‘fix’ India, and had this incredible argument – “India brags that they have 1.4 billion people. Why won’t 1.4 billion people buy one bushel of U.S. corn?”

Or, as Aakar Patel summed it up:

A more personality driven theory – one that, given all we know about Trump’s White House, is quite compelling – suggests that this has everything to do with India’s unwillingness to credit Trump with having ended the India-Pakistan conflict earlier this year. Not just because of New Delhi’s longstanding refusal to countenance third-party involvement but also because it would dent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strongman image.

Soon after Operation Sindoor, I wrote about how Trump’s ego and his lack of sensitivity to Indian narrative preferences represented a major vulnerability for Modi:

“The Biden administration, while not always on message, appeared somewhat sensitive to Modi’s needs at a domestic level, endorsing New Delhi’s G20 efforts, eventually dialing down the early criticism over Russia ties and choosing a relatively quiet approach to the extrajudicial killing allegations. The Trump administration appears to be uninterested in such sensitivities, or in any coordination on public messaging.

Given that years have been spent selling the idea that Modi and Trump are close friends alongside the claim that India is the global ‘vishwaguru’, it is hard for the pro-government media to now go out and simply dismiss anything that the US president says (although they are trying to course correct).

And so, outside of the challenges created by Trump’s policies on the foreign policy front, he also represents a very real domestic danger, through his ability to puncture a hole in the reality distortion field that pro-government Indian media have assiduously built. And given that Jaishankar can’t simply throw out angry rhetoric directed at DC, there seems to be no way to respond to the ‘Trump narrative vulnerability’ other than throwing dry bureaucrats at the problem – and hoping the American president will just move on.

That, then, may also be why so many pro-government voices appear to be disappointed by the outcome of Operation Sindoor, even if the military acquitted itself well: The communications failures during the conflict have revealed the limits of the Modi administration’s reliance on a pliant domestic media, and Trump’s rhetoric has made it clear that New Delhi’s narrative building has a massive, unpredictable White House-sized hole that will not be easily plugged.”

We’ve now gone well beyond just narrative discord in the region, however, with Pakistan happy to step into the breach, as Muhib Rahman recounts in War on the Rocks:

“On Sept. 25, President Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at the White House, marking the latest sign of improving relations. The warming up began with Trump inviting Munir to lunch at the White House earlier in June — the first time a U.S. president had hosted a Pakistani military chief unaccompanied by civilian leaders. Munir was back within two months, sitting in the front row at U.S. Central Command’s change of command ceremony in Florida. Concrete policy moves accompanied this burst of protocol. Islamabad secured the lowest tariff rate it enjoys in any major market. The Balochistan Liberation Army was elevated to full Foreign Terrorist Organization status by the U.S. Department of State. A long-dormant joint counter-terrorism dialogue was reconvened in Islamabad. Washington also signaled new cooperation on critical minerals and hydrocarbons. For a relationship long defined by suspicion and drift, these developments suggest a significant recalibration in U.S. South Asia policy.”

How long this US-Pakistan bonhomie will last remains an open question, given the rather set patterns in that relationship, and the inflated claims about oil and mineral resources that have been used to entice the White House. But the recalibration in how the US is approaching South Asia is also reflected in a broader rethink about Asia overall, which may also help answer the ‘why India’s stock has nosedived’ question.

Is balancing China – especially in Asia – really a Trump priority? A shared view of the danger posed by the rise of China was the bedrock on which US-India ties rested over the past two decades, gaining bipartisan acceptance in both countries. Trump’s first-term aggression towards Beijing, including by reviving the Quad grouping, provided a platform for the two countries to broaden their engagement across a number of arenas and weather storms like the ‘mini-trade war’ of Trump’s first term or, once former President Joe Biden was in power, the allegations of extrajudicial killings, without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Despite Trump 2.0’s trade hostility towards China, and the presence of numerous hawks in his team, there has always been a fear that the US president would be happy to do a ‘G-2’ deal that recognizes Chinese primacy in Asia in return for domestic wins. A draft of the US National Defense Strategy currently being considered will reportedly make some version of this explicit, while Trump’s moves elsewhere – from delaying his tariff threats to reversing a ban on the sale of high-tech chips to Chinese firms –have led many to question whether the US president actually cares about taking on Beijing.

As Tanvi Madan writes,

“Strategically, there’s currently a missing element: convergence on China. Shared views of the challenges posed by an assertive China have fueled cooperation between the two countries—and, crucially, incentivized New Delhi and Washington to manage their differences. Within the Trump administration, however, there isn’t a consensus or even a dominant view on China. The president himself wants a deal with Xi Jinping. A U.S.-China détente, even if temporary, independently poses problems for India. It also means that China competition hasn’t provided the motivation that it has in the past to keep India ties steady or manage differences

And that may take us to a larger point about Trump and his movement, and how it has affected the relationship with India. spells this out in an interesting exploration of the “malign coincidence” between MAGA and Big Tech currently in the throes of hyperscaling AI:

“Both MAGA and the hyperscalers are in the mode of “If not now, when?” and “If not now, never!” A malign coincidence of technological and industrial imperatives with political momentum has created a powerful alliance of convenience, in which both partners are racing to shape the future over the time horizon of Trump’s second term…

The MAGA dismantling of the US state, the erratic trade policy, the blows to migration regimes like the H1B visas, face no serious resistance from the most powerful business and technological force in the world right now - the hyperscalers - because they too are running against the clock. Conventional medium-term worries, the risk of institutional failure, or declensionist stories of America’s dark future are irrelevant, because the entire future is being decided NOW. Between the “fierce urgency of now” and dramatic vistas of the rest of time, the middle-ground of the medium-term future is emptied out.

The hyperscalers don’t care about anything five years hence because they believe that our collective destiny is being decided in the current moment by the manic accumulation of compute power and AI algorithms…

There is a disastrous overlap between the timeline of AI-capital and the political calendar. The hyperscalers and MAGA zealots may not share much on substance. They don’t have to. But they agree on one thing: the long-term future will be defined between now and 2028.”

The argument that the India-US relationship will be a “defining partnership for the 21st century” has always lived in that ‘medium-term future.’

It has for decades now been described as a bet that will take time to come good, which is in part why Robert D Blackwill and Ashley Tellis described American policy towards India as “strategic altruism”. Not everyone agreed with that formulation – see Tellis’ most recent appearance on ’s Grand Tamasha for his defence of the phrase – but few would argue that the relationship was expected to unlock immediate gains, at least for Washington, DC.

While that bet may have been somewhat circumscribed in Trump’s first term, it never disappeared. Yet, earlier this year, even before the trade battles began, we got a sense of how a more circumscribed view of the world – not just geographically but temporally – would alter calculations regarding India. New Delhi may have been pleased at the US embracing ‘multipolarity’, a concept that has long been key to India’s strategic vision for the world.

But, as I wrote in February, what did it mean for the US to move away from its global hegemonic role before India had a chance to become one of the poles – a geopolitical version of ‘growing old before getting rich’?

“Modi’s team may have been irritated by Biden era lecturing, but the framework of the ‘democracies vs autocracies’ set-up meant the US accounting for New Delhi’s rise and the potential for it to say no to DC on occasion. It was always interesting how Jaishankar’s ‘savage’ barbs were most pointedly used against India’s potential partners in the West, rather than New Delhi’s more proximate adversaries, in part because Western liberal rhetoric allowed space for a post-colonial state to push back in this manner.

As Rajesh Rajagopalan explained to me in 2023, “the US, given its power, can afford to be more forgiving of its partners. Whether it is France, during the Cold War period, or Germany, Turkey or Israel – all of these are countries that have done things that the US had disagreed with, but it has been able to ignore because it can afford to do that. In India’s case, Ashley Tellis’ piece indicates concerns [from DC]…. Our value to the US is being partly exaggerated, because the US is very forgiving and good at doing alliance management, not standing on ceremony, not taking offence at various things and so on. But we tend to think that their solicitousness is because of our indispensability.”

If the US is dropping that idea that it is the singular pole and defender of the ‘rules-based order’, will it continue to be as forgiving if, say, India continues to buy oil1 and missile defence systems from Russia and fighter jets from France?”

Pakistan has spotted the opportunity here and cleverly exploited it, bolstered by developments in West Asia (even if “today’s tactical romance”, as Muhib Rahman puts it, “may become tomorrow’s strategic hangover.”)

Can India find a way to claw its way back into the discussion, with a more short-term argument that could appeal to Washington, DC rather than the long-term China-balancing narratives that have fueled this relationship for decades now?

RSJ, over on suggested the following:

“One, go back to him with a statement that acknowledges his role in impressing upon Pakistan to step back and thus being instrumental in stopping the skirmish back in May. There is always a way to draft this in a manner that works for both parties. Then, India should nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize (that he so wants) and promise him a Bharat Ratna next year (I’m not kidding).

Two, India should get a couple of its biggest conglomerates (the usual suspects) to sign a few accelerated deals with the Trump extended family for building tens of Trump Towers and golf courses across 7-8 cities in India. India can afford a few more high-rise residential and office spaces, and nothing makes Trump happier than seeing his name bathed in neon light in the night sky. This is a low-cost move for everyone involved in India.

Lastly, India should try to move a billion dollars or so of its forex reserve into crypto (preferably some Trump or Melania coin) with the pretext of diversifying risk. That’s it. These will hardly cost India a thing (maybe a few million dollars of real costs), but it will work like a charm. Trump will move on to some other ally (Japan, South Korea, Denmark, whoever) to harass instead of India. It is a low-risk, high-reward trade. All it needs is just a fraction of the shamelessness of Trump in implementing this solution, and this persecution will be over. We should choose it for the sake of national interest.”

Finally, are Modi and Jaishankar to blame for failing to protect what is undoubtedly New Delhi’s most consequential international relationship?

On the one hand, as Evan Feigenbaum has argued, it is hard to lay too much at New Delhi’s doorstep simply because other countries that have tried different approaches –see South Korea for example – have hardly fared better.

On the other, given the claim of personal rapport between Modi and Trump – recall Howdy Modi and Namaste Trump – it is hard to understand why New Delhi did not immediately grasp the implications of disputing the American president’s claim of having ended the India-Pakistan conflict. A few have argued that Modi could have easily found a formulation that acknowledged Trump’s role, without conceding India’s core principle that the issue is a bilateral one. To do so presumes a level of dexterity in handling from an administration whose grand response to the Trump-announced ceasefire was to put out a statement insisting that the ‘pause’ in India’s operations was “an understanding not an agreement.”

For now, Indian officials are being praised for holding their fire and not tanking the relationship further. Over August and September, some efforts were made to suggest that India can use warming ties with China as leverage. True enough, the trust with the US may have been lost, as many have pointed out, but if New Delhi’s only alternative is to turn towards an overweening neighbour desirous of Asian hegemony with which it had a fatal conflict just a few years ago, just how much does the loss of trust actually matter?

Read also:

• India can shrug off Donald Trump’s tariffs (Tej Parikh, FT)

• Pivot to Europe: India’s back-up plan in Trump’s world (, ECFR)

• The Stunning Reversal in U.S.-India Relations (Isaac Chotiner speaks to Milan Vaishav, the New Yorker).

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For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is taking another break, courtesy Baby #2, who came early in July.

I’m still on paternity leave over some of August (still attempting to stay away from the headlines, even as Trump decided to blow up the US-India relationship), and so this week I’m sending out another interview I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar. It’s a long one this time, but worth clicking through to the end, given the subject and the interviewee…

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How well do we understand Indira Gandhi’s legacy? The former prime minister’s momentous years in power carved deep lines into India’s political landscape—but what shape did they leave behind?

In Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India (Yale University Press, 2025), historian Srinath Raghavan reexamines this turbulent era through a wide lens—challenging entrenched narratives with new archival material. Raghavan, a Professor of History and International Relations at Ashoka University, focuses on what he calls the “long 1970s”—a pivotal stretch from Gandhi’s rise in the mid-1960s to her assassination in 1984. The “long 1970s,” he writes, “were the hinge on which the contemporary history of India turned, transforming the young postcolonial country into today’s India.”

The book reframes major events—bank nationalization, the 1971 war and the birth of Bangladesh, the Emergency, and its aftermath—within the context of global economic shocks and shifting political norms. Rather than fixating on Gandhi’s motives, Raghavan foregrounds the outcomes: how her attempt to move leftward on the economy paradoxically opened the path to liberalization, and how the authoritarian turn of the Emergency was enabled by a deeper institutional breakdown that the Janata government ultimately failed to reverse.

I spoke to Raghavan about the lessons of the “long 1970s,” his Caesarist reading of Gandhi’s rule, why the Emergency didn’t turn into a lifelong dictatorship, and what he’s working on next.

Rohan: You write in the acknowledgements that Ramachandra Guha encouraged you to turn toward contemporary political history, but I wanted to just ask about where this book came from and whether you saw it as a different challenge than your previous work or an extension of some of the research you were doing on 1971?

Srinath: It's really a bit of both. When I was working on the book on the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, which was a project I was researching toward the end of the 2000s, it became clear to me that there were private papers, various kinds of documentary collections at the Nehru Memorial Library (as it then used to be called) which were becoming available. So, the P.N. Haksar papers had come on stream. I was perhaps among the first to access those for my doctoral work, but there were other things as well. For instance, the Charan Singh papers were becoming available to scholars.

At that point, my work on the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 was to write a global history of the creation of Bangladesh. I wanted to situate the creation of Bangladesh and the emergence of a new country there in 1971 in the context of the global currents of the time, and to show how those shaped what was usually seen as a subcontinental event. While I was working on that, it became clear to me that there were many more sets of materials available even on Indian politics, on political economy, and other things, but that it was also important to rethink the Indian political history of the 1970s in a similar global framework.

Over the last decade, there has been quite a lot of new, interesting work that has helped us understand that period. Somewhere around 2011-12, I decided that when I was done with my work on the international history of South Asia, on which I had at least two or three more projects lined up, I would turn to working on Indian political history and political economy in the 1970s.

Interestingly enough, that project actually took its first concrete shape at CASI when I was a visiting scholar in spring 2012. Devesh Kapur was then director, and I had long discussions with him, and got to access the phenomenal library services at Penn Van Pelt-Dietrich and others. Devesh also pointed me to some archival collections, available in the Penn archives, which were actually quite interesting. He also very kindly gave me a chance to see many documentary collections from the World Bank, which he had worked on as the official historian of the bank. I actually wrote a chapter while I was at CASI for a book that Ramachandra Guha was editing called Makers of Modern Asia, in which I have a chapter on Indira Gandhi. That was the down payment on this book. It took me a long time to cash out the whole project, but I think I owe both Devesh and CASI a debt as well as to Ram Guha.

But as I said, it took me a while because I had at least another three books to get done before I could turn to this. In 2013, the National Archives in India started making various kinds of papers available from the 1970s. That declassification made available a very wide range and interesting set of materials, which allowed me to rethink many of the assumptions I had even when I was working on the paper at CASI.

Rohan: Outside of the materials that become available, you mention in the book that while there has been lots written on Indira Gandhi, more of the recent work is concentrated on the Emergency, and you sought to expand the frame beyond that…

Srinath: The Emergency naturally tends to attract a lot of attention, partly because it's this dramatic, traumatic interlude in Indian political history, in the history of Indian democracy. So, there ongoing debates on what the Emergency meant, how it shaped us, what came after and so on. But I felt that an excessive focus on the Emergency was distorting our larger understanding of the period because there was a sense that everything that happened before the Emergency was in some ways leading up to the Emergency. The Emergency then becomes a terminal point of a range of things—which is true, but also distorting.

What I wanted to do was get a grip on the larger period, both before the Emergency and after it; to try and understand what I call the “long 1970s”—a period in not just Indian history, but global history, running from 1967-68, all the way through to the mid-1980s. If you think about it in global terms, this is the period that begins with worldwide student and youth revolts and also a generational conflict and the Cultural Revolution in China. Then, in the early to mid-1970s, you have a series of interlinked economic crises. You could think of the Nixon administration's decision to get off the gold standard in 1971, which unhinged the entire framework within which exchange rates used to operate in international economy, and then the oil shocks of 1973 and another oil shock in 1979.

What we do know is that by the end of this period, the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, most historians tell you that even in advanced economies, we were moving away from the Keynesian consensus about economic management, to what came to be called neoliberal ideas. That is the broad arc within which all of this is playing out.

I wanted to situate Indian history in that arc and try and understand how this global context shapes the things that happen in India. Of course, Indian history in this period has its own specificities, but we must first place these dynamics in the context of those global currents, and then try and get a grip on India. The idea was to both bring to bear new materials and to craft new sets of questions and embrace new ways of thinking about what seemed like a familiar period in our history.

Rohan: Do you feel like you're addressing a gap on the academic side or on the lay understanding of this period, or some combination of both?

Srinath: I've asked myself that quite a few times as I was working through this book. Let me put it this way. My own intellectual, and to some degree professional identity—at least half of my professional identity—is that of a historian. I have a joint appointment between IR and history, so my instinctive tendency is to think like a historian. I think the questions that historians are most interested in are about change over time. But if you look at some of the best secondary scholarship available on this period, most of it is by political scientists, by people who studied constitutional law, and by economists. We have materials from the social sciences which are much stronger as opposed to materials by historians, partly because this is a new period, and Indian history, despite Ram Guha's example, still finds it difficult to move beyond 1947.

Postcolonial history is still a very nascent field, but you do have some historians like Gyan Prakash who wrote about the Emergency and brought to bear a longer-term historical perspective. So, there isn't much by way of what we would, in our trade, call historiography of the 1970s. There is a historiography of the Emergency, perhaps, but I didn't think that there was much more. There were some older biographies of Indira Gandhi, there were other kinds of studies—especially one I thought was very useful by P.N. Dhar, who was her principal secretary, and wrote a very reflective book.

This was the landscape of existing scholarly works. In a real sense, I had to transpose many of those things into terms a historian would try and understand the question, which is to say, "How did we get to this point? How do we explain significant change?" To me, that was at least as important as getting into debates about what is the nature of a certain political regime that the Emergency became. I don't deal with those questions, and I think it's fair to say that much of my thinking is very influenced by the existing materials. But I was trying to set it in a longer timeframe, and then try and explain what changed over this period and why.

Rohan: You mentioned that even when working on the chapter about Indira Gandhi, there were some assumptions that you found yourself rethinking. What were those assumptions?

Srinath: From the very beginning, I had a certain idea about how the global context of the 1970s impacted the Indian economy and a sense that the terms of how we understand the economic history of this period needs to be rethought considerably. For instance, there is a sense that the Indira Gandhi period in economic history reflects much higher levels of state control of the economy, dirigisme, socialism, call it what you will. But even as I was getting into this project, I had a sense that the impetus toward a much more state-driven, state-controlled economic order peters out by 1974, partly out of the pressures of the global economy. India has to resort to more conservative macroeconomic policies and some deregulation—which slowly start coming into play. You see that even before the Emergency, but during the Emergency it starts accelerating.

A lot of economists, like Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and others, have written about how the 1980s reflect a pro-business turn in Indira Gandhi's thinking and policies adopted. I actually feel that you can see a lot of that working out even around the Emergency. When she comes back to power in 1980, there is a public reception in The Ashok Hotel in New Delhi, and the host there is Dhirubhai Ambani. You can actually see a photograph of them—and that tells you that the relationship between business and politics was changing. It's not a broad brushstroke story of saying that Indira Gandhi became pro-business altogether. There were still lingering concerns about existing big businesses and how to deal with them, but certainly there is a change, not just in terms of attitudes, but policies and approaches, which you can see from the mid-1970s itself.

Rohan: That takes us, naturally, to the idea of the “long 1970s.” My generation thinks of the 1990s—with liberalization and the Babri Masjid demolition—as the turning point that led to modern India, but you describe the long 1970s as the “hinge” that leads to the India of today. Tell us about that framing.

Srinath: There are many things that go into the making of any moment in history. Frankly, our vantage points change, so we tend to look for different points of origin. That is how history as a discipline develops. My view of the whole spectrum of post-colonial history of India would be that between approximately 1937-67, you had a 30-year period when you had the making of a certain kind of political system, a certain form of political economy, and a certain global orientation.

What is that political system? The period of Congress Raj, the complete dominance of the Congress Party at all levels of Indian politics, especially post-Partition. That continues until the fourth general elections of 1967, which is where my book really begins.

In terms of political economy, from the late 1930s onward, there is a move toward thinking about what postcolonial development will look like. A certain idea—planned economic development—comes into play. Again, I would caution against assuming this is socialism. In fact, this is very much capitalism. The Indian constitution aims to create a capitalist economy. I think it's very important to just say that flat out. Property rights are a fundamental right; that's as far from socialism as you can get. Regardless of the rhetoric of the times, the fact was that you wanted state-led capitalist growth. How do you create the conditions for that against the backdrop of a stagnant agrarian economy that has been underdeveloped through the colonial period? Planning was seen as the framework within which all of this would operate.

The third dimension is India's international orientation. I have worked on the Indian role in the Second World War, and I see that very much as the precursor to the international role that independent India comes to have—which is that even when you are a relatively weak player, you are looking to play an outsized role. The Second World War is the last of the phases when India operates as a sub-imperial power. Thereafter, it wants to get out of imperial control, it wants to be non-aligned—which is to say it doesn't want to commit itself to any alliances precisely because of this sub-imperial experience that it has had where you are conscripted for all kinds of causes you have not signed up for. Of course, there are new things happening like decolonization—India is amongst the vanguard countries—but there are others, like the Cold War. So, you have a certain political system, Congress dominance; you had a political economy of a mixed economy to be achieved via planning; and an international orientation, where pursuit of non-alignment is seen as a very important objective.

If you shift to the period from the 1990s, what you have is a political system which is much more fractured, where there is no single dominant party, let alone of the Congress variety. You have an economic political economy which is tilted very decisively toward liberalization, giving the private sector a more leading role, and embracing globalization. It's the opposite of what you were trying in the context of the first phase. Then you have an international order, where India still prizes strategic autonomy, but is nevertheless now much closer to the United States than it is to Russia or other kinds of powers.

The intermediate phase is where we must explain how we went from phase one to phase three. Now, of course, somebody coming to this question from an entirely different perspective, say, of social history, would look at a different periodization. But as a political historian, I think this is a good starting point for me.

Rohan: Turning to Indira Gandhi herself, you choose to engage with her through the frame of “Caesarism.” Why is that?

Srinath: I don't think that's the only frame to analyze Indira Gandhi. It is a conceptual framework that I found useful to get a fix on the particular style of politics that she inaugurates at a certain moment—approximately 1969 when she decides to break the Congress Party andcraft a different popular appeal.

Let’s talk about Caesarism as a concept and then we'll come to the Indian context. The idea of Caesarism refers to a certain kind of popular rule, where the ruler or the leader tries to bypass existing structures of the party, which is seen as an important mediating institution in 19th century thought particularly, or of various kinds of institutional checks and balances, parliaments, etc.—and tries to forge a direct appeal to the population and then claims to rule on the basis of what is called popular acclamation, or popular admiration for the ruler as the person who leads.

The idea of Caesarism in terms of modern political theory comes to the forefront in the mid to late 19th century. There's a lot of writing around this concept in different ways in the early 20th century as well. The reason I think this becomes important at that moment is because, in western countries particularly, democracy goes from being something only reserved for a few people who have the eligibility to vote to becoming something that is extended to the entire male adult population. It is about the massification of democracy.

What you then have is the emergence of new political figures who are charismatic, who want to use new modes of reaching directly across to the people—whether it's technology, new forms of organization, political style—and who claim power on the basis of public acclamation rather than that of parliamentary processes empowering them. Caesar himself was historically seen as a dictator, but a popular dictator. The first serious study of Caesarism is Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is in the mid-19th centuries, at the moment when universal adult franchise actually comes to start to work in the context of France.

In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, you see writers from across the political spectrum—Antonio Gramsci on the left, Max Weber in the center, and Carl Schmitt on the right—all of them think that electoral parliamentary democracy of the 19th century variety is giving way under pressures of democratic deepening or massification to something that looks very different. You have the emergence of leaders who can break the impasse that parties face when having to aggregate so many disparate constituencies with various kinds of interests. In fact, Weber, if you look at his writings even before the first World War, says that there is a constant thrust toward a leader who can command the confidence of a party. It's not so much the party who makes a leader, but the leader who makes a party. That’s the thumbnail history of the concept of Caesarism.

I found that entire literature a useful way of thinking about what is happening with the Congress Party post-1967, because what the Congress Party faces in 1967 is a similar crisis of representation. Because we've had universal adult franchise in India from 1951, we tend to think that Indian democracy is born fully formed. It isn't. If you look at the levels of electoral participation, the kinds of electoral literacy that existed at that point of time, it is something that people are learning as they go along.It's only really in the 1967 election that, for the first time, we see that significant social groups capable of mobilizing electoral bases pull away from the Congress Party.

That makes it much more difficult for the Congress Party to claim that it speaks for the entire nation. Its very poor performance in the 1967 election leads to a crisis within the Congress Party. After a turbulent couple of years, what you have is a decision by Indira Gandhi to actually break the Congress Party. But she then decides that what will have to work is her own personal appeal to the people, and the willingness to reach out to the people rather than relying purely on the party machinery, which in any case has been disaggregated under the impact of her own decisions.

What you have, therefore, is a move toward a Ceasarist model. There are two alternatives in the literature, and we can think about them. One is to simply think of it as charismatic politics, and the other is to use the term “populism,” which is a very common term these days. Neither of these really appeal to me.

The first is that charisma in modern politics is actually an ironic quality, because when we say somebody is a charismatic individual, I mean in the Webarian sense, typically you tend to assume that these people are seen as being endowed with some special qualities. But in democratic politics, charisma doesn't operate like that at all. Weber makes this very important point, that in democratic politics, charisma itself gets rationalized. When you have a highly competitive and fractured political system, once in a while you have this political leader who's actually capable of mastering that system and delivering extraordinary victories, and then people start attributing a degree of charisma to them. It's not as if people vote because they see you as charismatic, but they come to see you as charismatic because you've won those votes for whatever reasons. Charisma is a retrospectively endowed attribute rather than something people directly perceive. Charisma is therefore only one aspect of a Caesarist regime, it's not the sum and substance of it.

The reason I don't use the word populist is because I just felt it was too broad. It tends to be applied to a variety of regimes left, right, center, whatever you want. In any case, I just felt that democratic politics is, by definition, populist. It is based on the idea of popular sovereignty. At the core of democratic politics, the idea of populism—the people—is very much there, so it's not very clear to me that calling someone a populist is giving us that much more analytic specification on what we are talking about. Whereas, invoking this older idea of Caesarism, even if it seems somewhat unfamiliar to modern readers, I think was a more useful way for me of trying to specify what was distinctive about the style of politics that Indira Gandhi inaugurates from about 1969.

Rohan: How much of this distinctive style of politics do you think of as being deliberate from Indira Gandhi? One of the things the book does very well is to point out that whether it is bank nationalism, the Emergency, the 1971 war, there is a lot of improvisation in Indira Gandhi’s responses. It’s not all carefully planned out. Would the same be true for this Caesarist shift?

Srinath: There is a tendency when we think about political leaders, particularly political leaders who have wielded as much power as she did, to believe they are powerful political actors. The task of historical or political explanation is then restricted to understanding what they were thinking about. What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she broke the Congress Party? What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she went for bank nationalization? What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she imposed the Emergency?

But the intentions of even the most powerful political actors in any system cannot explain what the outcomes were. As historians, outcomes are much more important. Even when we say a simple thing like “Indira Gandhi did this,” there are two ways in which we can understand what that word means: that she wanted to do this and did this, or that she actually accomplished something else.

The example of bank nationalization fixes this point very well. Much of the literature on bank nationalization repeatedly tells us that it was done for political reasons, and that it was because she wanted to show that she has progressive leftist credentials, and it was a way of outranking the more conservative aspects of the Congress Party. It is true that her intentions were political in making the decision, but what we learned from all the materials that are now available is that, having done that, they then moved toward constructing what I call a fiscal-monetary machine. It's a phrase and a concept that I borrow from the work of Anush Kapadia.

The construction of that machine was an extraordinary rewiring of the entire Indian state. In fact, the entire substructure of the Indian political economy undergoes a dramatic shift. The Reserve Bank's official history of that period, which is written by the bank's historians, quite rightly says that this is the single most important economic decision taken in independent India's economic history. Now, the decision to undertake bank nationalization was not taken for economic reasons, but it ended up having consequences that were so long-term and so important that right down to the present, we are dealing with the consequences of that particular move.

We are only doing half the work if we try and understand what the intentions were. We also have to understand how they interacted with broader structural contingent forces of the time in order to produce outcomes, which actually matter a lot more. So, mine is at least as much a consequentialist as an intentionalist reading of Indira Gandhi.

I want to foreground that because too much of the debate tends to get personality-centric, precisely because we misunderstand what a personality-centric reading means. If you're going to only focus on what she thought that she wanted to do, then we are never going to get beyond her particular intentions to the extent that they are transparent—and often they are not. For me, therefore, the important things were the consequences, and the consequences of what she did at the timewere absolutely important in shaping the longer-term trajectory of the Indian political system. She wanted to have more of what she thought a state-led socialist economy would look like, but ended up producing something very different.

It was a combination of something like half-hearted liberalization with a turn toward targeted welfare schemes, both of which are very much a part of the Indian landscape today, and a certain kind of political style where the party apparatus becomes secondary to the leader. As a recent example, Boris Johnson in Britain was ousted by members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The Parliamentary Party is supposed to act as a subtle check on the prime minister and the executive. But when you go into the Caesarist world, that entire relationship gets overturned—and that was important. It’s important not just to understand national politics in India as it were today.

A lot of people keep trying to make comparisons between Mr. Modi and Indira Gandhi and so on. Actually, look at the states. You will see that political parties after political parties are operating in this mold, where you use various appeals by the leader in order to give the party greater footing rather than the other way around. All of these were changes, which I don't think she necessarily intended quite this way. But when they got assimilated into the context of the time then produced outcomes, which I think were quite orthogonal to her intentions, had lasting consequences. It's a classic story of how agency and structure comes together to produce outcomes in ways that are quite unpredictable.

Rohan: You have said that what is interesting is not necessarily that Indira Gandhi set out for the Emergency to happen, but what conditions permitted it to happen. I think especially in light of what happened in South Korea just a few months ago, to take one example…

Srinath: Much of the discussion on the Emergency, even today, tends to be centered on why Indira Gandhi chose to impose the Emergency. What were her considerations? Was she looking to protect her own office after it had been brought into question by the Allahabad High Court verdict? Or was it that the popular protests against her took a certain turn with leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan calling for the Armed Forces not to obey orders, etc.? So, is it Indira Gandhi doing it to protect herself? Is she doing it to defang an Opposition, which was going after her? Or how much should we give credence to what she says—that there was a serious internal threat to India?

Those debates will continue because they are about the intentions of an individual. New evidence will hopefully come to light, or it may not. But I think that doesn't get us very far to understanding how the Emergency came about because, as I said, the intentions of Indira Gandhi are not the only way we have to understand how the Emergency happened. At the end of the day, however powerful a prime minister is, she was supposedly operating within a system that had various centers of power, of responsibility, of authority—from her party to parliament, to the judiciary, to democratic accountability by the press, etc. How did all of that crumble so quickly, and allow this authoritarian moment to emerge?

If you want to understand what caused the Emergency, rather than why Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, then we should bear in mind that those are two different analytical questions. I want us to make the distinction because when we take a causal explanation saying, “what conditions permitted the Emergency, or rather the absence of what conditions allowed the Emergency to happen?” then we see that the game is to be understood in a somewhat different way. That's where I come up with a structural explanation,to which we need to tack on certain other considerations.

What is the structural explanation? Every actor in a political system is shaped by at least two attributes of the system. The first is what you would think of as the differences in terms of roles and functions of various kinds of agencies which constitute that system. In the context of a parliamentary democracy like India, that would be the executive, the legislature, the judiciary. There is a differentiation of functions and there is a differentiation of capabilities or powers—a balance.

The second is what may be called the constituting rules of the game. Parliamentary democracy, like any other kind of collective activity, is structured by certain rules. Those rules are not only written down in constitutions, they also come up as a result of informal understandings, norms, principles, things that you develop over a period of time. If you want to play cricket, you have to play it by the rules. If you start changing the rules of the game, it will soon stop looking like cricket. The game may continue, but in other ways of playing.

If you take both of these attributes, my argument in the book is that the Indian political system underwent a systemic or structural change along both these system-wide components even before the Emergency was declared. You have a very strong accretion and shift of power toward the executive, away from the party, away from parliament, and away from the judiciary. There's a steep tilt in the balance of power, which happens between approximately 1969 to 1973. It happens with the party because Indira Gandhi breaks it up. But what really cements her hold over the party is the extraordinary rebound of Congress' political fortunes in the general elections of 1971, her handling of the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, and the massive victory over Pakistan, and the subsequent state elections in 1972 where the Congress Party has a clean sweep. All of this means that her hold over the party by 1972 is ironclad. The party is now beholden to her in a way that is inconceivable even during the Nehru era. That also means that the Congress commands extraordinary majorities in parliament, and it has control over the states—so various kinds of constitutional amendments can be done if they want to do it.

Then in the early 1970s, Indira Gandhi goes after the judiciary. There is a running battle between her and the judiciary going all the way back to 1967 around the powers the judiciary holds to review laws made by parliament. Indira Gandhi wants to insist that parliament is supreme, and in this context, parliamentary supremacy means executive supremacy, which in turn, means her own supremacy in the context of executive. She goes after them by effectively packing the Supreme Court of India. Two of the senior-most judges are superseded when a new chief justice has to be chosen. A more pliant candidate is put into place. You can see the effects of all of that during the Emergency, when the Supreme Court just rubber-stamps all kinds of rules that are made. This is the shift in balance of power, which is the first of those system-wide attributes.

The second is the rules of the game. Again, 1967 is the real turning point. With the emergence of various non-Congress governments in the states, there is a competitive abandonment of the rules of the game. You start poaching people left, right, and center. You use various kinds of powers that the center has to destabilize governments, put assemblies into suspension, into abeyance, and various things. That, in some ways, becomes even more acute by 1972, because in 1971 the opposition has a crushing defeat. Even in a state like Uttar Pradesh, where they had the elections against the backdrop of this provincial armed constabulary revolt, the UP Congress is actually a pretty ramshackle machinery, but they still managed to pull through.

The Opposition then decides that is not in the electoral arena that they can really get a grip on this particular political machine, but it has to be done other ways—which dovetails with the rise of popular protests. By the time Jayaprakash Narayan comes along, there are various movements calling for the dismissal of elected governments—in Gujarat, in Bihar. What you'll find is that both the Opposition party and the prime minister have, more or less, felt that the rules of the game are constraining rather than enabling, and we should just dispense with them. These two dynamics of structural change are absolutely important to understand what happens by the time we come to 1975.

By June 1975, the executive is extremely empowered, and both sides feels they don't need to play by the rules of the game—which then means that when Indira Gandhi decides to impose the Emergency, there are hardly any countervailing checks and balances within the system as a whole. One of the reasons the popular protests were happening before the Emergency is because of the global oil shocks and the huge inflationary impact it has on the Indian economy. India undergoes the most concentrated period of inflation during those months, and that means people are hitting the streets. Of course, economic grievances of this kind then get channeled in other political ways. You need to have both this explanation of structural change along with the popular movements, which is triggered by global currents. Then you have the actual event of June 12, 1974, when the prime minister's position is directly threatened, and it's only then that her intentionality really comes into place.

It's very important for us not to get mired in this discussion of “what was she thinking?” because by the time the Emergency is imposed, everything else that should have been in place to prevent it is no longer in place. That's where I think your analogy with South Korea is interesting, because there you had a president who actually tried and thought he could push it through, but then you suddenly found that you are constrained by a thicket of other forces, which may not be as empowered as the executive is, but are still willing to come in its way. That becomes a very important distinction. The conditions that should have been obtained in order to prevent a slide toward outright authoritarianism were not obtained because those conditions had changed even prior to the Allahabad High Court decision.

Rohan: Given how the Emergency’s legacy remains potent politically in India, was it tricky to write the portions about the Opposition choosing to go the extra-constitutional route? Did it risk playing into Indira Gandhi’s explanations?

Srinath: For me, it was not so much about saying it's tricky territory, but about how to use those as levels of explanation. The fact is that various opposition parties—as I cite by 1974 and 1975—think that extra constitutional agitations, in order to get elected governments out of power, is somehow legitimate, that it is a way of proceeding which is acceptable by the rules of the game, when it's clearly not. But at the same time, I cite this extraordinary letter that Indira Gandhi writes to the great musician Yehudi Menuhin saying, “Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds toward the goal.” She doesn't even believe that there is an importance, a procedural value, to democracy in India. She just says that democracy is a means to an end, and the end is more important—that is safeguarding this country, making it developed.

She is the most powerful person in the land, so the abdication of any set of norms by the powerful is what matters rather than those who would have lesser power. But it doesn't mean that others do not share some collective responsibility for having abandoned these rules. As I see it, Indira Gandhi is directly culpable for having imposed the Emergency and brought all the various kinds of havoc that it created in its way. There is no taking away from her culpability, but just focusing on her intentions is not enough. We had a political system that was supposed to operate on very different principles and prevent such a lurch toward outright authoritarianism. Yet, we actually slid into it. That slide happens because there is a shift in both the balance of the power, but also an abandonment of the rules of the game. So, I do think there is an element of collective responsibility.

As I see it, there are some truths that are truths of the surface, and there are some deeper truths. One of the truths is that Indira Gandhi was very much culpable for imposing the Emergency, she is directly responsible for it. But a deeper truth is that the entire Indian political elite also bears some degree of responsibility for having abandoned the rules of the game and brought the system to such a pass that this kind of an action would actually be taken, and taken successfully. This is why the best historical verdict seems to be, to borrow the famous line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "All are punished." That is exactly what happens. Ultimately every one of these people is punished.Nobody seems to realize how complicit they all are in terms of changing and disregarding these rules of the game. I believe no game can continue to be played when you continually disregard the constitutive rules of a practice.

Rohan: Within that framework, you have these moments when Indira Gandhi's coterie is contemplating a second republic—some are saying "make her prime minister for life," and calling for a new constituent assembly. Is there also a systemic answer for why India doesn’t get a second republic, a prime minister for life, and Indira ultimately calls for elections?

Srinath: There definitely was a push on the part of Indira Gandhi's close advisors, important voices, and leaders within the Congress Party, that having taken this very momentous decision to impose the Emergency, they should bring about broader, important systemic changes to the way that the political system was structured, which would ensure these kinds of situations never came about again. That was the starting point of much of this discussion. What exactly should be the nature of those changes was what came to be debated in various ways.

My own feeling is that Indira Gandhi, throughout all of this, was very much focused on the short and medium term. In the short term, she wanted her own office to be protected against any kind of legal challenge in the future. So, there were all the important amendments, which had tried to encase or protect the prime ministerial office from legal challenge, particularly on election cases and so on. But at the same time, she also got P.N. Haksar, her former principal secretary, to go and individually meet every judge who was sitting on her case. She got everything done in order to make sure there was no legal challenge. That was the trauma of the June 12, 1975 judgment. She focused very much on that in the short-term.

In the medium-term, she was focused on ensuring that the shift in the balance of power that had happened in practice already, would then be immune to various challenges from the courts. That is what the 42nd amendment to the constitution really attempts to do—entrench this imbalance of power. Some of the more ambitious measures that were initially mooted, like trying to convert India into a presidential system on the French Fifth Republic model, peter out partly because, in their enthusiasm to be more royalist than the queen, some of the leading figures of the Congress Party leaked out drafts to the press, which immediately creates a lot of bad publicity, even in the context of the Emergency.

There are meetings held. There are statements issued by prominent public figures saying that this is unambiguous authoritarianism, that the Emergency is supposed to be a temporary measure. Some of it is dropped. But even while that is happening, the 42nd amendment is pushed through. As I see it, Indira Gandhi's vision during the Emergency was pretty much a short-term one, of protecting her own office, and the medium-term one of making sure that the differentials in power that had been put into place would remain in place. I don't think she thought much more about moving toward a presidential system or other forms of curbing the judiciary, which some of her advisors wanted. Yes, in a sense, her choice was important, but it was also partly because she felt that this would suffice in order to secure her key objectives.

This is why the Janata regime, when they come in, their most important concern is to undo all of these very controversial amendments. And of course, they themselves are not able to undo them entirely. For instance, when the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), which is the most despised, reviled,and misused act of the Emergency, under which so many people were detained preemptively without any recourse to legal help—when the act to repeal MISA repealing is brought, the Janata government actually wants to introduce another bill for preventive detention.

This is where the broader question around the orientation of the Indian political elite comes. Because many of the senior figures of the Janata government have been people in politics for a while. If you are a politician in power, then preventive detention is a good tool to have. Why would you dispense with it? Morarji Desai, in fact, writes—and I cite the letter—where he correctly says the Constitution provides for preventive detention.

One very interesting fact I learned while doing this research is that when one of the attempts to repeal the pernicious effects of the 42nd Amendment are conceived of, and the draft bill is legislated, Shanti Bhushan—the law minister in the Janata government—actually suggests that maybe we should have a provision where certain kinds of constitutional amendments require a public referendum. It's worth recalling that even the original Indian Constitution was not put to a referendum. It was just adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Now, this was potentially a move to democratize the political system in interesting ways, and it's shot down by pretty much everybody in the Janata Party, and by the Congress Party as well.

The overarching conservatism of the Indian political elite, and their orientation toward these things, remains the same. And that, to me, is the tragedy of the Janata period. They saved Indian democracy in some ways. The emergence of the Janata regime showed for the first time that transfer of power is possible, that people can get rulers out of office when they overextend their powers, and that the regime could actually come back and unroll some of the very negative dimensions of what happened in the Emergency. But at the same time, there were no commitments to rethinking the rules of the game or to shoring up those rules on a new basis. I don't think you could've gone back to what was there before, but you could have at least made a new start saying, "What kind of politics do we want?" There, I think the Janata government failed to deliver the goods.

In fact, they continued to ignore the rules of the game in certain ways. For instance, soon after the general elections of 1977, they decided to dismiss all the Congress state governments, saying they don't have any legitimacy. Those governments go to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court rubber-stamps the move of the Janata government. So, what happens? In 1980, when Indira Gandhi comes back, her line is, “You did this to me, I'm going to do the same thing to you.” So, she dismisses all the Janata state governments saying they don't have any legitimacy left, and lo and behold, the Supreme Court upholds that also. This is the consequence of a continual disregard of all kinds of systemic framing rules of the game, and I think that was something that the Janata government never recognized as a problem.

In fact, I would say that even senior leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan, who led the Janata Party to victory in 1977 and were important moral voices, simply did not understand this dimension of their own actions and what they were doing. That kind of collective self-reflection was very much in short supply in the Janata period, and they focused very much on the culpability of Indira Gandhi, and on bringing her to book. They just overplayed their hand in foolish ways and ended up ceding the ground to her once again.

Rohan: It’s interesting that the Emergency neither turns into a second republic and a lifelong prime minister, nor does it end up crushing the Opposition—and once it is over, the Opposition doesn’t end up crushing Indira Gandhi either. What a contrast from India’s neighborhood and other post-colonial countries…

Srinath: What the 1977 elections really do is bring the importance of elections to the center stage of Indian democratic imagination. It's a process of collective political education that we undergo as a country. We see the first stirrings of it in 1967, but 1977 is very important because for the first time, an extremely powerful leader and her party are voted out of office in the center, against the backdrop of a period of straightforward authoritarian rule, and of institutional failure. The victory of 1977 is an important affirmation of popular sovereignty because it tells you that the vote is perhaps the best way to express it.

Of course, I don't want to minimize what happens after the Emergency. There is a lot of efflorescence of what you would think of as “civil society.” There's a lot of new media. The Emergency unleashed that huge energy. Robin Jeffrey has written a very important book on that subject

. But you also have various kinds of civil society organizations. There is a lot of thinking about non-party politics. Nevertheless, in the long run, I think what we are still left with—and I think this is the legacy of the long 1970s—is the centrality of elections to Indian democratic imagination. I think this is both empowering, especially for the poor and the powerless, but it's also debilitating because it means we can hardly think of other modes of collective action outside of the one time we vote.

It reminds me a bit of what Rousseau used to say, that the British people were free once every five years, that's the only time. In a sense, it has both deepened democracy in India, and one of the salient facts of India is this extraordinary deepening of democratic participation throughout this period. But effectively, the entire story of our democratic existence turns on elections, and I think that is the central weakness, as well as the central strength, of the Indian political system today.

Rohan: On to our final few questions. What misconceptions about this period, about Indira, about what you've been working on do you find yourself frequently combating, not just from the lay public, but from students or from fellow scholars?

Srinath: One meta framework which shapes a lot of the scholarship, particularly the social science and political science scholarship on this period, is the kind that seeks to explain what happened in the 1970s, whether it's the Emergency or other things, by recourse to a combination of institutional decline and a surge in popular participation. That's a framework that Samuel Huntington first laid out in his book on political development, and that has been extensively used by various scholars to explain various aspects of what was happening here. Again, the institutional decline story is something I agree with, though I characterize it in very different ways from what the social science literature typically tends to do. But I think the idea that the problem in the 1970s was a surge from below is, I think, a serious misconception of what was happening. As I see it, the problem in the 1970s was not increasing democratic demands from below, but the abdication of certain kinds of democratic processes by those who are sitting above the system: the political elite.

That tends to mischaracterize what is happening, and I hope we will have an opportunity to revisit the idea because those frameworks are still very prevalent in most of the readings that students will pick up. The other kinds of misconceptions, as I said, have more to do with how we characterize this period and the policies. Thinking of Indira Gandhi as a person very much on the left or a socialist, I think, is just to take her own rhetoric at face value. I think it does no justice to what the facts of the case were. It's extremely incorrect to just assume that those labels will do the work of analysis and understanding, which I think can only be done if we get into the nitty-gritty of what is happening at that time.

The third thing is that when we tend to think of what happened with the Congress Party, much of the scholarship is very correct to say that Indira Gandhi's decision to break the Party then meant that it became quite weak, and then it became slowly dominated by her, and then became something of a family firm. Let's assume the existing reading is correct. But it still misleads us by suggesting that the older Congress Party, which came unstuck in the 1967 elections, could somehow have continued on the course if only Indira Gandhi had not come along and wrecked it. That it was somehow this perfect machinery, which was aggregating various kinds of local preferences. I think that was not even true by the time of the general elections of 1962.

One of the things Indira Gandhi writes to her father about in the late 1950s is to say, listen, your party has this federalist structure, where chief ministers are important because they aggregate power through their local networks. You have this machinery which is constructed. It's what is called the Congress System by Rajni Kothari. But that system was already coming unstuck by the late 1950s and 1960s. Indira Gandhi's own view was that, far from it being a perfectly working machine, it had become on oligarchy, which was controlled by various kinds of regional grandees, and that is what the syndicate then comes to symbolize for her. I actually think that we have to take a hard look at what the Congress Party's situation was before 1967, because we have this idea that it was a fairly well-oiled machine, and this lady came along and just wrecked it. She did wreck it, but I don't think it could have continued on its own course either.

Those are the kinds of broader misconceptions I hope we will deal with. It's not so much about facts of this or that thing, but these interpretive questions that interest me.

Rohan: Are there specific areas or tools of research or analysis that you would point to for younger scholars looking into this period, or things you didn’t have time to get to that you wish others would?

Srinath: I've had a lot of time with this book, I think my publishers will bear that out, so I don't think time was the issue, but space definitely was the issue. As I said, there is now so much more archival material available, which is not important for its own sake, but it raises new questions. The thing with new archival material typically is that it helps you reframe the questions with which you think you want to approach the matter, and that is what I found myself doing. At every turn, practically in every chapter, every section, I just felt I had not done justice because there was so much more to be said. There is so much more material. Even from Morarji Desai's own prime ministerial papers, which are deposited at the National Archives. I had some 2,000 pages of photocopies, and I could cite less than 1 percent of that.

So, there are so many more avenues of research that have been opened up by this new material, not in the empirical sense of saying, "Oh, we can just learn more," but you can ask new questions. I think that's what I'm hoping that others who will work on this period and be able to do more intensive work can do. For instance, on bank nationalization, there is not just one book, but multiple books waiting to be written on that particular episode and what it meant. Similarly, the whole question of how this imagination of poverty comes into being. Even as I was finishing this book, I read a book written by my former colleague and friend at King's College London, Louise Tillin, who again has an interesting, but somewhat different story to tell about that. I think that's the way we want the literature to develop. That we have questions that are somewhat common, but approaches and perspectives and explanations that are different.

Similarly, on 1971, I have written an entire book, but I think there are things to be done by younger scholars. I think the entire period of economic policymaking around the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act from 1970 to 1975 is worth looking at. There is a huge amount to be written about the nationalization projects because, again, we are working on fairly high-level assumptions based on materials that were available previously, but now we can get a much greater handle on these questions. I really think there is a range of things now opening up for scholars of the 1970s to work on, especially on aspects of political economy, which, at least in my discipline of history, tends to be neglected.

I think historians are doing a great disservice by neglecting the economic history of the postcolonial period. That's partly because of the way the discipline is developed. Other kinds of aspects of history—cultural history, environmental history—have much larger cachet. But it's interesting to see how some younger scholars are now coming to the economic crisis of the 1970s through an environmental lens, the Green Revolution through an energy lens—all of which, I think, opens up a new range of things. This is fertile territory for future work, and I have only scratched the surface in a very literal sense.

Rohan: Can I ask what you're working on next?

Srinath: Well, first of all—to take a break from writing on politics, foreign policy, and those kinds of things—I've been working on a biography of the astrophysicist and Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. It is far afield from what my previous work was, but in a sense, for me, it is an intellectual homecoming because I started out as an undergraduate studying physics. I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I actually wanted to do a PhD in theoretical astrophysics, which is the reason I first got interested in Chandrasekhar as a teenager. Fortunately for me and for theoretical physics, that did not work out, but I think this is a nice opportunity to come back and look at it from a different perspective, both from the history of science, but also as a biographer.

Even though this book is about Indira Gandhi, this is not really a traditional biography of hers. It's a study of her years in power situated against this broader contextual backdrop. Here, I'm hoping to write what will be a biography of this individual, which I hope will also be an exploration of various kinds of questions around what the pursuit of science meant for people who were born in colonial India and then had to pursue those ambitions in very different sites—whether in the UK or in the United States, and even the constitution of certain disciplines like astrophysics, which is very much a 20th century phenomenon. I'm quite excited—and relieved!—to move away from politics and political history to work on something else.

Rohan: Very exciting! Finally, do you have three recommendations for our readers?

Srinath: The first is a book which came out a few months before mine called The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, two great historians of China. That book is a history of China's long 1970s, and it's interesting to read having written this book. It is an instructive and interesting read, simply because it tells you the story of another country through the same period, and then perhaps forces us to rethink some of the standard assumptions that we have about, "Oh, China began reforming its economy a decade before India did, etc.” It challenges some of those ideas, and I would highly recommend that people take a look at the book.

The second are a couple of books that were particularly useful to me. They have been around for a while, but haven't gotten the kind of attention, at least amongst scholars, that I think they deserve. These are a collections of essays by Sudipta Kaviraj, one titled, The Trajectories of the Indian State: Politics and Ideas, the other, The Enchantment of Democracy and India: Politics and Ideas. Those are a set of essays that Kaviraj has been writing and publishing over at least 15-20 years. I think they raise many interesting analytical questions about how we even think about Indian politics in this period in which I was working and how we understand the specificities of those trajectories. These are analytical, theoretical reflections, but I found them to be very useful, and I've been pressing them upon every young and impressionable student I can find because I think those are exactly the kind of works that force you to think anew.

A third book recommendation, not pertaining directly to Indira Gandhi but to the broader period—and not a new book, but one I thought important because it still has not been replaced by anything comparable—is The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 by Robert Brenner, a great economic historian. It’s about the onset of the long economic slowdown in the West from the 1970s. I think that book still merits careful study by students of South Asia and others. In terms of analytical rigor and the way in which he's able to lay out the exact nature of the problem with the global economy, it’s still a very important book to me.

For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is taking another break, courtesy Baby #2.

While I’m on paternity leave over this month, I thought I would send out some of the interviews I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.

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Irawati Karve, regarded by many as India’s first female anthropologist and certainly the first woman to occupy a university position in the discipline, ought to be a household name. While some may know her for Yuganta, a series of Marathi essays examining the morality of figures in the Mahabharata that won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1968 and received great acclaim in its English translation as well, Karve’s life (1905-1970) and work encompass much more.

As Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa lay out in Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve (Speaking Tiger, 2024), Karve was a pioneering scholar working across anthropology and sociology, path-breaking researcher unafraid to spend weeks and months out in the field, prolific essayist, feminist, and public intellectual. Beyond these prodigious achievements, the book uses the arc of her life as an opportunity to engage with a whole host of questions about 20th century Indian society, the academic world, caste, gender, and much more.

Iru begins with Karve’s remarkable journey to Berlin in the 1920s, where she would end up disproving a racist theory about skull sizes in defiance of her supervisor, Eugen Fischer, whose work would later influence the Nazi party’s ideas of racial superiority and its approach toward science. It ends with a series of ruminations from Karve, grappling with the nature of societal violence and how each one of us is implicated in it. In between, Iru paints a picture of Karve’s life, scholarship, and writing without shying away from the less celebrated aspects of her work—such as applying German-inspired tools of physical anthropology on Indian subjects—that have mostly been discarded by the discipline today.

Deshpande, an author who is also Karve’s granddaughter, and Barbosa, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Anthropology at Leipzig University, collaborated to create a nuanced portrait of Karve as an important figure of 20th century Indian thought. CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Deshpande and Barbosa about their unlikely collaboration, what it was like to engage with Karve’s complex legacy, the impact of Eurocentrism in social sciences, and how they settled on “critical fabulation” fact-derived storytelling as the form for this biography.

Rohan: Is there an elevator pitch for the book?

Urmilla: The book is about Irawati Karve, who is my grandmother and the subject of a case study for Thiago's dissertation. We came to it from these two different sides and we were just incredibly lucky to meet each other and be able to collaborate on this. It's about her life, her work, an exploration of the sort of person she might've been, because she died when I was seven, and Thiago never met her. It's an exploration, trying to put together who she might've been from everything that we could find.

Thiago: The book tries to portray a very intimate image of her and her work. And by doing so, the book also tries to talk about some questions related to anthropology and science and social history, crossing all the decades of her life, right from the moment she was born in the beginning of the 20th century until 1970, when she died. The mid-twentieth century was an important time in history for many discussions in science, including racism and the question of women in science.

Rohan: Many might know Karve from Yuganta, a prize-winning series of essays. Why should we know her beyond this work?

Thiago: We never thought that we wanted to write about her because she, as a figure, deserves more attention. But we did think that there were many interesting things about her life and work that are worth discussing, even today. And this might cover some of the questions we talked about earlier: the question of racism in science, the question of what it means to do anthropology, the question of what it means to be an Indian subject doing anthropology, to be a Hindu doing anthropology, and what it means to be a woman in science. I think these are all questions that are worth discussing.

Irawati, to some extent, was the first to do some of these things. She was the first female anthropologist/sociologist to occupy a university position in India. And she caught my attention because she was the first and the only person in this research center in Berlin—which used to be called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics—to articulate a critique of racist theory in the 1920s. And I thought, it is no coincidence that it had to be a woman and a racialized person to do that kind of work.

Biographically, there are many parts of her work that are still relevant for discussions today, including the way that she thought about citizenship and nationality in India, religion, culture, and the place of women in Indian society. Apart from ‎Yuganta, much of what she wrote can still be relevant for some of the discussions we're still having today.

Urmilla: I came to this work because I wanted to write fiction. I wanted to write a novel. Not about her, not about her life, not a biography. A novel based on a woman who was in Berlin at that time. But the publisher wanted a biography of Irawati. I didn't really know who she was until we got into this. For me, it involved talking to the people who knew her, including her daughter, thinking back on all the things that I'd been told or knew about her. All these questions began to come up about who she was and then, slowly, why she is relevant today. Those who know her anthropology work are in one very small niche area, and those who know her Marathi essays are in another small niche area. Otherwise, she's relatively unknown.

Thiago: Also, the history of science has a tradition of making women invisible. And I think part of the motivation for writing this biography is to rewrite women in marginalized positions in some way back into the history of science.

Rohan: Tell me about the form you chose: “critical fabulation.”

Thiago: Critical fabulation is an idea coined by Saidiya Hartman and also used by Projit Muhkarji. It comes from the discussion of what historians do about the fact that we cannot find any documents about the millions of women who were in the slave trade and who happened to have died in crossing the ocean, or were captured in Africa and then put to work in America. Do we not write history about them because the knowledge is not there? How do we fill those gaps in history that are important, because those stories need to be told? We need to develop ways of being able to craft narratives with the little material that we have, but still be able to tell a story somehow. This is the principle, this idea of crafting stories that are still based on very solid research.

And that's what we did. We did thorough research, we researched in archives, we interviewed many people, people who knew her, ex-students, ex-colleagues, we read all her texts, many different texts about her too, and we gathered different stories. Urmilla and I would meet in Berlin and go for walks, going to the places where she lived, where she studied. I have a long engagement with the history of the institution where she did her PhD in Berlin because I was working there. Based on all those facts, we allowed ourselves to be creative in forming a narrative that was still based on the real facts, but to try to make a biography that would still be more accessible to the reader and somehow try to get as close to her as we could in this portrayal of this person.

I didn't want to write a boring biography. I think this was also our concern because there's so much poetry in the things that she writes as well. And I think working with Urmilla was a real blessing because I'm an academic writer. I'm not so trained in writing things beautifully, even though anthropology has many discussions about how to write and engage with the poetics of reality. That's something that Karve herself also did in her writings. And that's something Urmilla did really well. So, I think our collaboration managed to get the best of each of us.

Rohan: Karve was remarkably eclectic and prolific across a huge range of subjects. What was it like engaging with her, her body of work, and then also going up to the people who remembered her? Some of that may not have been easy to put down or to engage with. Urmilla, you talk specifically about your mother (the writer and poet Gauri Deshpande) and her fraught connection to Karve as well.

Urmilla: I think Thiago interviewed my aunt [Karve’s daughter] who, when I said I wanted to talk to her, she said, "I don't want to talk about my mother anymore"—which is fair; she's 90 years old and talked about her mother her whole life. But yes, I did have to engage with the way my mother dealt with her mother. I also read all of Irawati’s Marathi work. And that was interesting to me because I didn't know her as an adult myself, and it was like getting to know her. Her voice is really clear in those very personal essays. They're not like her academic work at all. She talks about the smallest little things and she connects the strangest things with each other. And that was really wonderful for me.

I think for Thiago it was different because he really spoke to people who knew her and her colleagues and her students, and so he got a very different picture of her. And yeah, I can hear the admiration that some of these people had for her, what influence she had, from listening to his interviews and his work. It was strange, because this is someone I knew of course, and yet found out that I entirely didn't know her. It was like finding this whole new person, so it was wonderful in a way.

Thiago: The interviews were really interesting, and I think it was surprising to me, a lot of people had many memories about her, even though she died 55 years ago.

Rohan: What is Irawati Karve’s legacy within the academy?

Thiago: In my PhD, my focus was very much on thinking about the legacies of scientific racism and thinking about the legacy of the idea of race in science. And also the impact of this very German emphasis on racial anthropology in this school of physical and biological anthropology, which, not just Irawati Karve, but also many other Indian anthropologists were trained in. Part of Irawati’s work can be seen with critical eyes today, and I think there's a lot of nuance here, and we might need a word of caution because usually the press shows people as either the hero or the villain. And what we're trying to do here is portray the story of a person who is neither hero nor demon. The hero aspect gets picked up a lot in many reviews. But I think there are many aspects of physical anthropology in general, including her work, but also that of many other people from that time should be criticized.

Even at that time, there were critiques. And I think she was remarkable in making the critique of a certain racial theory about the sizes of skulls [at the institute in Berlin]. In that regard, she's very remarkable and progressive. At the same time, her whole obsession with measuring bodies to study the castes and tribes of India and many other places, it's something that today I think we have reached the agreement that there are many flaws in there, and a lot of that comes from racial sciences. And that's also something we showed in the book. At the same time, her work on many other issues is still very remarkable and could still be articulated for a lot of progressive thinking today, such as her attention to the situation of women in Indian society. She formulated some theories about the origins of caste difference, which are still debated today. And I think some of it also needs critical attention because some of her ideas are being picked up by geneticists in the US, sometimes rather uncritically. And of course, questions of the national cohesion and diversity in India is something that she wrote about.

Rohan: Was there a fear that you would find yourself explaining or apologizing for the more criticized bits of her work?

Urmilla: From the beginning, Thiago and I got on, because we both knew, particularly me because I'm her granddaughter. And I think Thiago needed to know this before he engaged with me—that I wouldn't apologize for her. I had no intention of creating some mythological figure.

Thiago: If I would have had the impression that we wanted to write a hagiography, I wouldn't have been in this boat. I think we connected very well on this. The way the book ends, I think that's the antagonism of an apology, because it actually ends with—and people have interpreted this differently in some of the reviews—on this kind of confessional, philosophical rumination, where she sees herself very implicated in bigger processes of societal violence. And that's something that she does also to think about her relation to those German scientists who did happen to be Nazis after she left Germany. When she writes about [German anthropologist and Nazi social scientist] Eugen Fischer when he's very old, I think for his 80th or 85th birthday, the word she uses to describe him is humanity. That's a positive word. Because I think that was in a time where maybe one might have thought Nazis are monsters. Similarly, today we might think of fascists as monsters. But she goes on to say they're human, and the implication of this statement is quite profound. And then she thinks about the concept of Atma to reflect about these questions, because she sees herself also implicated in this collectiveness of being in a world where there is a lot of evil, which is also very human. And I think that that's the opposite of an apology.

So, to that extent, I think the beginning of the book is a bit catchy and might make the impression that she's an anti-racist hero. But I think the end is the opposite of that. And I think those are the kind of discussions that are worth having. Also, in thinking about racism, about labeling a person racist or non-racist, I think there are different ways to be racist and different ways to be anti-racist. And sometimes the same person can have contradictory positions in this discussion, right?

Urmilla: I think that's why both of us are a little frustrated sometimes. We are very delighted with the reviews. I wasn't expecting the book to get so much attention. But I think we get a little frustrated sometimes with the hero element. We didn't say she was one, we tried very hard not to do that, to let her intentions be clear, to portray her as this complicated, nuanced person.

Rohan: It's something that both of you engage with, not just on the question of race, but also on feminism, given that Irawati was a true pioneer in her field and in thinking about women in society, but then had to grapple with these ideas personally.

Urmilla: I always wondered why my mother didn't talk about her mother [Irawati] as a feminist, because that was not her experience. And that's really important to me. Although Irawati may have been a certain way ideologically, she did not follow those things through in her own personal life. And my mother did. She always did. So, I saw that contrast very clearly. Your parents can be models for what not to be. And I think my mother took that to heart. She didn't behave with me and my sister the way Irawati was with her—my mother didn't get the support she should have. Now, my mother didn't articulate these things, but I could see them, and I can see them in the way she was with me. It was a contrast to what her mother did.

So, for sure, Irawati’s feminism is questionable to me. But of course, it existed. She did what she did in her time, and it was a lot, but from my mother's point of view, that's the nuance. You can't just say, “oh, she was a feminist” and leave it at that. That’s not good enough.

Rohan: It also shows up in the work. In one portion you have a reference to her nuanced response to wife-beating while out in the field.

Urmilla: That was in her Marathi essay, where she was clearly talking about it being widespread. She said, look, as an anthropologist and as a social scientist, I know and I see that this happens and this is widespread everywhere, that's all I'm commenting on. I'm not trying to say it's good or it's bad, because clearly it's bad. I mean, she said, I shouldn't have to comment on that. You know it's a bad thing. But I am saying that it's absolutely widespread and we shouldn't act as if it doesn't exist, it exists everywhere. And she was trying to prove that. She did have a nuanced way of looking at things, for sure, but sometimes I think it frustrated her that she was saying the obvious thing. At one point, she talks about her being introduced always as some man's appendage—wife or daughter or student, and so on. And when she said that in an ironic essay, people took it seriously. They thought she was celebrating it. She was always frustrated by that. She's like, I'm stating the obvious, and yet people don't get what I'm saying.

Rohan: Tell me about the presence of French anthropologist Louis Dumont, his space within Indian anthropology and the dialogue between him and Irawati. I found it interesting because, in the Q&A at the end of the book, you mention that there is still much Eurocentrism in the field.

Thiago: Because I'm also from Brazil. I was a bit scandalized by this when I went to Germany. That's something—thinking about Eurocentrism—that I will take with me through my life. And that's why I also thought Irawati’s case was interesting to think about because she was an Indian person in Berlin in the 1920s, and being trained in this very Eurocentric school. She was trying to find her way through that, but still being trained in a tradition and wanting to remain a part of that community. And I think that's the challenge for a lot of us who think about those things and who are not from Europe or the US, this double bind. That debate was fascinating for me because that's something that Nandini Sundar observed in her short essay about Karve's life and work, which was also the beginning of our collaboration because Urmilla and I met through Nandini.

She pointed out that the critique that Dumont made of Karve’s most international book, Kinship Organization in India, demolished Karve's international career. In the critique, you can sense that very old French male anthropologist using a sarcastic, very bitter tone, really taking the whole thing apart and calling her this Brahmin lady from Maharashtra, and also emphasizing the gender, which is a little detail, but very telling. And then asking the question of whether she is mixing all these different things, history with the reading of mythology and ancient text with anthropology, what is this? Is this even the proper anthropological method? Is this a Brahmin method? He made the same critique with other Indian anthropologists. That's something Veena Das also wrote about in her book, Critical Events

. She has a chapter about the legacy of Dumont for Indian sociology and anthropology because he was this gatekeeper figure, editing the first very internationally known journal of sociology, Contributions to Indian Sociology. And that review came out in the first edition of that journal.

The funny thing is, apparently someone from that journal wants to write a review about our book. So, it's going to be a full circle moment. Or they could repeat what Dumont did and destroy our book. And then in both cases, I'm going to laugh about it.

Urmilla: We're already laughing about it.

Rohan: I wondered if you might be anticipating similar pushback from critical fabulation—"Is this real biography?” that sort of thing.

Urmilla: I can answer this in just two examples. There are two people in my family who I love very much, one is a young white man, one is an older white man. But they read the first chapter and they were like, "What is this? This is not how biographies are written." But beyond that, I wasn't expecting pushback or anything else because I'm honestly amazed and shocked at how far this book has gone.

Thiago: To be honest, for me writing this book was very liberating because I learned that, even though it's very much based on research, to be able to just craft a story and not think about what people are going to think and make a story that is real, but still not being subjected to a journal's format or to what an academic publishing process would want. I enjoyed it a lot. And Urmilla had to also take me out of that place because sometimes I was obsessed with the format and the language and changing little words, and Urmilla said, just write, and then we see. We wanted to do something that is true to the person, something that is also beautiful. I think we are happy about that.

Rohan: Are there misconceptions about either Irawati and her work, or this book, that you find you'd like to answer or respond to?

Thiago: The heroism, turning her into a hero in the reviews, is something I didn’t expect to happen. It's not something that bothers me so much. But I think if readers are going to grab that book thinking they're going to be reading about a hero, and then they end up seeing a lot of Nazi stuff and a lot of complicated existential questions, maybe that works for me.

Urmilla: That's a good way to look at it. If it makes them pick it up, that's not a bad thing.

Thiago: We had a few moments where some people doubted that some things happened when they actually happened.

Urmilla: We didn't make up actual incidents.

Thiago: For instance, one of the most critical reviews that we received so far was someone who was basically saying the book wasn't critical enough because it was so close to the person. And I think that's okay as a critique. But that person said some things were maybe made up, like an encounter with the Mahars. And, well, it was not made up. She wrote about this. Maybe it comes from that conception that a Brahmin anthropologist could not have talked to someone from a lower caste that way. So, in some cases we have some people doubting that some things actually happened, when there is actually a lot of evidence that they did.

Rohan: I wanted to push you on the hero question. Wouldn’t some of it come naturally from choosing a subject and devoting a book to them?

Thiago: That's maybe the risk of writing a biography because then you single out a person, and then it might sound like everything she achieved was on her own. But we were careful about that. And also showing even her privilege of being an upper caste, from a family with very good economic condition. We did highlight that to say, okay, it's not that everybody could go to Germany back then because they wanted to. There was a lot of will and personal agency, but also a lot of social circumstance. So, there are risks in doing a biography. At the same time, I think a biography is a very good genre to talk about the complexities in life and to trace complex relational stories from the perspective of a person. The stories are very relatable to the person reading because they're personal. So there are many benefits of writing a biography too. And I wanted to do this too because in my other book, which is coming out in May, I'm focusing on the questions of scientific racism and the racializing legacy of the German school where she was trained, the legacy of herself in this discussion about the racialization of caste. And that's a very different book because I'm looking at the context, I'm looking at academic discussions, and so on.

Urmilla: To be fair to us, neither of us intended to write a biography. We got this opportunity because I wanted to write a novel and he had done his dissertation already. For me, it was more about not wanting someone else to do the biography because I feared it would have been this whole, “Irawati Karve, the first anthropologist who crossed the seven seas” sort of thing. We didn't want that to happen. So, I also volunteered because of that.

Rohan: I'll also put it to the both of you that the equivalent American or German or French figure probably has five biographies about them, and one can be critical and one can be intellectual, and one can be personal. You also run the risk of this being the only major work about her, and then assumptions that get built into that.

Urmilla: Yes. Again and again, I'm really coming back to the same answer, which is that we didn't know beforehand, which I think ultimately has been good for the book—to not have thought through all these things and to not have assumed that it's going to get attention, that people are actually going to read it.

Thiago: The things that I was concerned about were the things that we highlighted here, the nuance and showing the contradictions of the person. And I think we invested in that.

Rohan: What else would you recommend to readers who are interested, including your own work?

Urmilla: If someone wants to go further into scientific racism history, that would be Thiago's book that's coming out. And if someone wants to read more about Irawati's work, I'm actually working on translations of her Marathi essays, which are going to be with Speaking Tiger. And then I'm still working on my novel, which one day I will complete, so there's that. And I'm working on a new translation of ‎Yuganta after that.

Thiago: I think from my side, my book that is coming out called Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) looks at the more critical aspect of Karve's work and thinks about the impact of this German school of racial anthropology. Besides that, I was very fascinated by the work of Projit Muhkarji, who is now at Ashoka University in Delhi. He wrote this book called Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, where Karve is also featured along other scientists from India. I'm now still reading something that I think is also interesting to think about in the context of Berlin in the 1920s and in Nazi times, as well as from the 1930s on, called Racism and the Making of Gay Rights; A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love by Laurie Marhoefer, which is about the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German psychologist, and the complications of, limits to, or the contradictions of being anti-racist but, at the same time, being racist. This book really is a biography of Hirschfeld and his Chinese lover and student, and through these two biographies, the book thinks thoroughly about legacies of racism, also in connection to a discussion about queerness and gay rights. And I think the book does that in a very nuanced way as well, while also showing aspects of life in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is taking another break, courtesy Baby #2.

While I’m on paternity leave over this month, I am sending out some of the interviews I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.

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Toward the end of India’s Near East: A New History (Hurst, 2024), Avinash Paliwal noted that India’s “over-investment” in Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could lead to trouble, given her growing unpopularity. “Hasina,” wrote Paliwal, a Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, “could well experience a groundswell of protests going forward.” As events would have it, by August 2024, Hasina had fled the country, taking refuge in India, after millions took to the streets in what would become known as the July revolution. Meanwhile, New Delhi’s Bangladesh policy—heavily dependent on Hasina’s iron hand—would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Paliwal’s book—his second following 2017’s My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal—proffers a new analytical framing, which he calls India’s “Near East,” i.e. the neighboring nations of Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also the Indian states that are collectively known as the “northeast.” Why mix the domestic and international? “This book argues that India’s domestic state-building is inextricably connected to its international diplomacy,” writes Paliwal, particularly in a region that was “once administratively united under colonialism.”

Understanding the trajectories of the northeast states and India’s struggle at nation-building in what was once seen as the periphery of the Raj, the book argues, would be impossible without factoring in New Delhi’s engagement with Dhaka and Yangon or Naypyidaw. And India’s relations with both Bangladesh and Myanmar have been heavily influenced by the state’s aims in the northeast.

CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Avinash Paliwal about the “near east” framing, what history can tell us about how India is reacting to Bangladesh and Myanmar today, how the US and China fit into the region and why “connectivity” alone is not the answer to the myriad issues facing the region.

Rohan: How did you settle on the “Near East” framing?

Avinash: The idea of writing this book was, in the initial years, about India's relationship with Myanmar. Having worked on India-Afghanistan relations, I thought I would look in the other direction, at a neighbor that has been relatively understudied. The more I went into that particular relationship, it became apparent that this book cannot be just about India-Myanmar. It has to be about something bigger, because you cannot explain India's relationship with Myanmar without understanding India's approach toward the states in India’s northeast—and Bengal. So midway into this project, it became clear that I had to write a book which will cover the entirety of the region, including Bangladesh, including West Bengal, including the entirety of India's northeast and Myanmar.

With the title, that was where the struggle truly came—whether to use the term “Near East” or not. I settled on it partly because I felt that this is an act of liberating that term from its old British or Ottoman colonial connotations. This is not just any Near East, depending on where the sun rises and where the empire is. It is simply India's Near East. I could sense that New Delhi was thinking about this region with much more coherence and cohesion at least in certain policy corridors than we usually merit New Delhi with, and that was not often reflected in academia.

Rohan: Essentially, you're putting India's post-independence approach to neighboring states of Burma/Myanmar and Bangladesh in conversation with its own state-building struggles in the Northeast. You've spoken of a silence in the literature that needed to be addressed in the literature, and of these areas being separated by “epistemic boundaries.”

Avinash: If you look at it historically, the literature has been siloed. You will have scholars who look at bilateral relationships, or India's foreign policy choices and practices in its neighborhood who are, if not completely, somewhat disconnected with how India was building its own state during this period post-independence. That silo makes very little sense. You simply create an analytical blinker.

This is a history in inverse, where I'm telling the story of India's state building outside in. By which I mean, how events and processes in Bangladesh and Myanmar or, for that matter, in China and Pakistan made India take decisions within its own territorial political boundaries in its northeastern states. It is also a history in inverse of India's diplomacy and statecraft with its neighbors by looking at it inside out, where India's domestic imperatives—whether those were electoral, party political, developmental imperatives or ideological—shaped India's foreign policy toward immediate neighbors.

I felt there was a crying need for analytical unity or some kind of linkage between these different literatures, which often were never truly in conversation with each other.

Rohan: The title has been brought up in at least one review critiquing it as hewing to a colonial view. How do you respond to that idea?

Avinash: Yes, that's an interesting standalone review by a former practitioner, and needless to say, I disagree with it. I felt the review struggled with certain basic understandings of political science concepts and how actual politics works, even though policies could be much more siloed in terms of how a bureaucrat looks at policymaking, either domestic or international. In some sense, that review clarified to me the need for a book like this where you have to move beyond policy framings, which can create binaries or partitions between the domestic and the international. The book is not saying that India is a colonial power or that India has a colonial approach toward its neighbors, quite the opposite in fact. It is a story of India's struggle even when it wants to respect the sovereignty and integrity of its neighbors.

Rohan: You also mentioned that the approach taken by New Delhi and the Indian State was more cohesive than the literature betrayed…

Avinash: The official policy lines that come from the Ministry of Home Affairs, from the Ministry of External Affairs, from the Prime Minister's Office, prima facie often indicate that these policies also are siloed just like in academia. But when I started to engage in archives and with policymakers, there was much more appreciation of these interlinkages at an operational working level. The desk in the Ministry of External Affairs includes Bangladesh and Myanmar together. It's a single desk, headed by a joint secretary level officer. And that officer is very aware of the domestic political constraints and opportunities that guide their thinking in real time on the relationship with Dhaka and Naypyidaw as much as they have to engage with the chief ministers of various Indian states in the northeast of India as well as in West Bengal. There was much more analytical awareness of these interconnections. Now whether that necessarily leads to an effective policy is a different issue, but I could not fault the Indian policymaker with failing to look at the region with some degree of cohesion.

Rohan: Could you nutshell your themes for readers, to just give us a sense of what's in this book?

Avinash: This journey starts in 1937 when Burma was separated from India. And it comes all the way up to early 2024, when I finished writing the book and we could see signs of political stress in Bangladesh and a raging civil war in Myanmar since the February 2021 military coup. To handle such a big historical canvas, I took the support of four analytical themes. One is identity politics, the second is cross-border migration, the third is political economy, and fourth is official antinomies or official contradictions.

Let me very briefly talk a little bit about each of these themes. Identity politics is one of the most powerful features that defines India's approach toward this region. These could be ethnic identities, communal identities, or even ideological or revolutionary identities around which political or militant mobilization was and is observable. Not only is India’s Near East one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on earth, but it also gave birth to various ideological extremes from ethnic nationalism to very extreme left-wing mobilization and violence to being the birthplace of the Hindutva movement's political manifestation—thanks to a very violent process of targeting religious minorities, which were Hindus in East Pakistan as it was then called, and Muslims in West Bengal and other parts of India—to also being the cradle of the liberal constitutional idea that defined India for a good part of its independent life after 1950.

A very important example of this is the ethnic nationalism that the Naga communities expressed, using political channels and in social and cultural ways, but also in terms of armed separatist militancy. One of the longest running separatist insurgencies anywhere in the world is in India and Myanmar, with the Naga demand for autonomy. We have had a ceasefire between the Naga movement and the state of India since 1997. That ceasefire stands still today, but we don't know that it will continue to remain in place moving forward. So, you can see how different forms of identity politics were really shaping India's Near East and in so, shaping India itself.

Cross-border migration is another very central feature, arguably not just of India's Near East, but to all of India's social, political, and economic life. This particular concept includes cases of mass displacement, during Partition and in 1971 when almost 10 million people were basically pushed out of East Pakistan because the Pakistani military went on a genocidal spree against its own Bengali citizenry. It also includes the transborder movement of Naga or Mizo or Manipuri communities across the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, which is central in some sense in defining both the opportunity of cross-border trade and cultural connect, but also movement of armed insurgents, which increases anxieties in India about its security dynamics.

The politics of Assam, for example, has been defined by the movement of people from Bangladesh prompting the anti-foreigner, anti-Bengali sentiment there. Even today, the Citizenship Act and the National Register for Citizens, which have been central to the Indian state’s contract with its own people, is being defined by the historical movement of people in India's Near East. So, this was a very central theme to my mind that had to be addressed.

The third is political economy. If you look at India's Near East, especially Indian states in the northeast, these are relatively underdeveloped places. Apart from being dominated by agriculture and some natural resources, these are states which have not seen heavy industrialization. These are not states which have enough revenue generation capacity to feed their own populations adequately. So, they have historically been reliant quite significantly on loans and subsidies by the central government. This has also been the case because of the disruption that was caused during Partition in 1947 when, especially in Bengal, the jute and the cotton industries were completely disrupted. Undivided Bengal under colonial period was one of the largest suppliers of jute and jute bags to the world, which was a key product to global trade then. Partition split this up. All the jute production went into East Pakistan and the jute processing mills were in Calcutta and in Alipore. And that created a fundamental disconnect, which fed into communal disturbances, political disturbances, and partisanship at a social political level, the effects of which we continue to see today.

When you create these borders, you make what used to be legal, legitimate economic or other interactions suddenly illegal overnight. What we see after 1947 is an expansion in illegal trade across the border between different parts of India's northeast with Bangladesh as well as Myanmar. Today, illegal trade in timber, rice and drugs has been absolutely pivotal in shaping the political economies of this region. The city of Moreh, which is in Manipur, is the trans-shipment hub for most of the drugs that come from the Golden Triangle (the term for a region of Southeast Asia that produces large amounts of illicit drugs). And a lot of this economic interaction creates finances which are unaccounted for, but are absolutely central to the electoral landscape or the dynamics of India's Near East and India's own states in the Northeast. That's why political economy was absolutely essential.

And finally, there was the element of official antinomies, contradictions. The state of India would want to change or organize this region based on its own administrative or political views, would initiate policies and acts which were done in good faith, but this created second-order negative effects which have continued to riddle the state of India with a lot of insecurity and violence still, as we can see in the case of Manipur.

A couple of examples. The first is the ever-loaded Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives legal immunity to armed forces to combat an insurgency. That act also goes against certain constitutional rights that the people of states like Nagaland or Assam or Manipur or Mizoram are entitled to. Some of the fundamental rights are being trampled upon because the security of the state becomes much more important than the rights of an individual citizen. That's a potent contradiction, which has continued to stymie India's political ambitions of integration and unity in the region until today.

The second example of this could be another article which is not talked about much, but I think is important: Article 244A of the Constitution of India, which basically allowed the creation of a state within the state of Assam previously. This became a shortcut to the creation of new states like Meghalaya. The idea was to give more autonomy to communities within Assam that felt underrepresented, with the hope being that giving them statehood within the union would reduce identity politics. But what we saw was a second order negative effect where Assamese pride got hurt so much that Assamese nationalism itself took a very violent turn and ended up completely reshaping the vocabulary of politics from primarily parliamentary processes to armed politics, especially in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Rohan: Is there a capital A or small A argument through the book?

Avinash: There is no singular argument but I think there is a singular learning. Given the situation we see in India, and across the world, it appears easy to spark social disunity or social communal disharmony for various political reasons in a region, especially one as sensitive as India's Near East. But it's very difficult to build bridges between people. The last few years are a testament to this particular learning. I'll give you three dates. The 1st of February 2021 when the Myanmar military undertook a coup. The idea was to actually secure the state under military rule. Instead what we have seen is a raging civil war and the balkanization of Myanmar over the last four years. Then the 3rd of May 2023 when Manipur imploded with a huge social conflict between the Meitei and the Kuki communities within India. That was a sign of what can happen when majoritarian ideas come to define national and state level politics and practices in India, and how overconfidence can really kill some very well intended ideas of bringing people together. And of course, most recently, the 5th of August 2024 when we saw the collapse of the Sheikh Hasina regime in Bangladesh. This I would say is the core learning of this book. These are regions that require very sensitive handling, they require humility. They require, especially for governments sitting in national capitals, respect for local customs and requirements with a lot of care rather than shoehorning ideologies, which often are ill-fitting with the lived realities of people in these parts of the world.

Rohan: The implication is that governments have not been treating the region with care?

Avinash: Let me take the case of India. Over the past few years, we have had the Hindu nationalist BJP in power. And I think even within the BJP, there was a realization that in Manipur something failed. We have seen recent moves that are helpful, with the removal of the chief minister and President's Rule. There is an acknowledgement, even within the Government of India, that something went horribly wrong. The fact that it took them two years to replace the chief minister of a state who belongs to the same party ruling in the center shows how difficult these things can truly be.

But this is not just a failure of the BJP. Most of the book covers periods where the Congress was in charge, and its desire to remain electorally dominant in the northeast and to fight insurgencies using divide and conquer strategies and tactics at a ground level really ended up fostering more disunity and discontent and mistrust among communities both within themselves and with the Government of India. The same charge can be made with governments in Bangladesh, or Pakistan before 1971, and Myanmar. It is something that these governments have struggled to deal with, and it's not that they're not right. They've somewhat succeeded in making sure there's no more territorial revisionism, but it has come at the cost of constant corrosive political tension in India's Near East.

What we saw with the last three, four years was really a much more expanded, violent manifestation of processes that were already tense, which exploded into the open. The relationship India has with Bangladesh today is a testament to what can go wrong when you lose sight of what the people are actually thinking.

Rohan: Part of the official antinomy comes because, perhaps unlike India’s relationship with China or Pakistan, there is a desire here for better relations and connectivity that is then undone by other policies that lead to more division.

Avinash: The more I hear the term “connectivity,” the more it becomes clear that the region is disconnected. You cannot expect strategic unity or economic connectivity while fostering social division. The two things just don't go hand-in-hand. If you don't want people to come and travel across borders for whatever reason, whether it's political, security sensitivities, or economic sensitivities, you cannot expect to build roads and bridges and ports and expect that infrastructure to become the hallmark of connecting. Ultimately, you have to connect people, and most of the focus that we have seen when we look at India’s Act East or previously Look East policies, was on infrastructural connectivity, which would invariably favor a few businesses rather than communities writ large.

If the question of distribution of wealth, cross-border generation of wealth or people-to-people connectivity is not addressed with some degree of honesty, this is where you can see the antinomies play out very vividly. How do you expect to connect with the people, such as those of Bangladesh, when you term them termites? That just does not work. And we can see the anxiety that particular kind of narrative has created even today when India is trying to refigure its approach toward the interim government.

Rohan: In your last book, you engaged with differing groups of thought within India with regards to Afghanistan, and particularly questions of either conciliating or taking a harder line. Is the intent versus execution question one of differing groups of thought in India or a more cyclical matter?

Avinash: Unlike the first book, the scope of India's Near East is much bigger. This made looking at parochial bureaucratic debates very difficult, even though it is important. The theme of official antinomies is what allowed me to address some of those debates and to show them using the frame of the contradiction.

Now, there has been a lot of cyclical flow of ideas that we see play out, where Delhi is struggling over whether to support a junta in Pakistan or in Burma, whether to deal with democratic forces, whether it was Aung San Suu Kyi in the late 1980s, or to support elections in Bangladesh, or to really figure out whether it is worth it to push an inclusive democratic politics in the region. And again, the learning here is that India is effectively regime agnostic when it comes to its neighborhood. It is happy to deal with the autocrats. It is happy to deal with democrats. It is happy to deal with everything in between and beyond until its national interest, as defined at a particular point in time, is being addressed.

This was a consistent feature, which I believed to be the case both in India's relationship with Bangladesh and Myanmar. One central element of this was India's perception—both its threat perception and the reality—of how its strategic adversities in the region, China and Pakistan, were exploiting India's vulnerabilities in its east, both in India's domestic politics, whether it was the Naga movement, the Mizo movement in Assam, but also in India's relationship with Bangladesh, where Islamist politics is quite rife historically and increasingly on the rise today, or Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, which creates certain awkwardness when dealing with Naypyidaw or previously Rangoon. In this book, I felt that Indian debates were much more about how to handle what you get rather than having strong preferences about regime type as such.

Rohan: Regime agnostic it may have been, but some of the analysis makes it clear that New Delhi struggled to figure out an approach that didn’t put all its eggs in one basket. The book was prescient on what was likely to happen in Bangladesh. How do you see the current moment?

Avinash: I think history is rhyming when it comes to India and Bangladesh. And rhyming with such a degree of precision, it’s somewhat scary, I must admit. The relationship right now is just about stable. It's not an outrightly hostile relationship, even if it's riddled with a lot of anxiety on both sides. India does not trust the interim government to be able to deliver long-term state stability. It desires elections in Bangladesh, and that desire for elections is not just limited to India. There is uptake for that idea of having elections sooner than later in the armed forces of Bangladesh and the opposition parties like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and other groups. And Bangladesh continues to feel that not only did India put all its eggs in one basket by over-supporting Sheikh Hasina and enabling her excesses, but also that it is unwilling to respect some of the popular desires and demand for respect as a sovereign nation by Indian policymakers in New Delhi. The Bangladeshi perspective is manifesting in a rise of conservatism and Islamist politics as well as the Jamaat-e-Islami making a comeback.

But none of this has not happened before. I'll give you a very specific example. If you look at Chapter 7 of this book, seven months after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of independent Bangladesh, it led to a period of huge instability both domestically and with India. The relationship went from being very friendly because India trusted and relied a lot on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to becoming very frosty. And that's exactly what we see happening after August 2024, where India was quite reliant on and quite comfortable working with Mujibur Rahman's daughter, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. And since her ouster, which was also violent, India’s relationship with Dhaka has been very frosty.

India is insecure about how China and Pakistan will exploit the situation. That is exactly the kind of concern India had in 1975. India is insecure about the rise of serious Islamist politics in Bangladesh. That was exactly the concern in 1975, where India felt that Bangladesh might convert from being a constitutional republic to an Islamist theocracy. Then, there are concerns about what will happen to India's connectivity projects. The fate of the Adani project, the Godda power plant, which is supposed to supply energy to parts of Bangladesh, is in limbo.

These concerns, and of course, the big question mark about the situation of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, also deeply animated Indian politics and policy in 1975, 1976, and are continuing to animate India's politics and policy today. The causal mechanism of it could be different. India was a very staunchly secular country in 1975 and is quite Hindu nationalist in 2025. But you can see history rhyming today, and this is where I feel the value of the book truly comes in. If you want to see what is likely to happen in the future, I would say look in the past and the trajectory of this relationship will become more or less clear moving forward.

Rohan: If we're looking at the past for what's going to happen, well, what is going to happen?

Avinash: Once the elections happen, I think there will be a phase of renegotiation of this bilateral between most likely the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is poised to come back into power, and the government of India. Both sides are clear, at least privately, that they do not want the bilateral relationship to go toward a hostile direction. I can again see India renegotiating its relationship with the BNP just like it did in November 1975, where it worked with the then military strongman, Major General Ziaur Rahman. It was a cold relationship, but not fully hostile. I think a similar renegotiation happening between Delhi and an elected BNP-led government, most likely. Would that mean that the relationship will go from anxiety to happiness or some degree of comfort? I don't know. But I do feel there is a desire both in New Delhi and in Dhaka outside of the interim government to stabilize this bilateral because this constant corrosive anxiety on both sides is not sustainable. It can lead to very unexpected, unintended outcomes and consequences.

Rohan: One of the points of the book is, if India was not on good terms with Dhaka, it usually then needed Yangon or Naypyidaw much more. Where are things likely to go in India's relationship with Myanmar, which doesn't have as much public attention within India, broadly?

Avinash: First, let me very quickly speak a little bit about the situation in Myanmar itself before coming to the India-Myanmar relationship. There is a civil war and there is very powerful militant pushback against the junta by the Three Brotherhood Alliance—the Kachin Independence Army, the Karens, all the ethnic armed organizations, as well as the National Unity Government that came into being after the coup in 2021. So much so that the junta has lost control of almost all its territorial boundaries and checkpoints and crossing points with both China and India. And even its connection with Thailand is under stress by ethnic armed organizations. So, this is an embattled junta. This is a country which has been de facto divided into statelets, operating on their own. This is a multi-sided stalemate of sorts where the junta is not powerful enough to win back all territory or people, but neither are the ethnic armed organizations and resistance forces able to lead to a total collapse of the junta itself.

Both India and China have decided to engage with the junta. Unlike India, China has also engaged and supported a lot of these ethnic armed organizations much more intimately. It is a much bigger strategic force in Myanmar's domestic conflict and can create strategic effects, though even Beijing does not have the magic wand of bringing all these sides together into a negotiated settlement. India's engagement with the resistance has been very tactical, very limited.

In Manipur, we have already seen India’s policy toward the junta ricochet in terms of the cross-border support that the conflict in Manipur has received. I'm not saying that the situation in Myanmar caused the Manipur conflict, but it fed into it. I do not foresee India increasing its equities in Myanmar substantially. It is trying to connect Mizoram through a road to a port in Rakhine State. Most of that road is under rebel control. The port is still under control of the junta because of Sittwe, but the rest of Rakhine State and Chin State is under control of the Chin National Front and the Arakan army.

So, India has to take a call. Do you want to engage with these ethnic armed organizations to realize your connectivity ambitions or not? China has taken a call that it will deal with them and it will deal with whoever comes in between to make sure that the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor becomes a reality, even if a truncated one. That's a debate that is going on in Delhi today. And I think moving forward, when the penny drops, whether you keep going or not depends truly on the civil war in Myanmar itself. If we look at a moment where the junta collapses, which I think is unlikely, then it completely puts India's policy toward Myanmar in serious jeopardy. But we are not there yet.

Rohan: Is history rhyming there as well in India's policies with Myanmar? Is India stuck in a cycle of dealing with autocrats, then dealing with insurgencies, then dealing with democrats and just condemned to sort of go round and round, or is there space for India to learn from the past rather than simply repeat the cycle?

Avinash: In Bangladesh, where India's policy has really fluctuated between supporting autocrats, whether it is civilian autocrats or military dictators to supporting elections in the hope that a friendly democrat will come to power. With Myanmar, I think there has been a uniformity of policy direction in favor of the junta. The only time India did not support the junta and, in fact, went outrightly against them, was in 1988 when the 8888 movement began, and Aung San Suu Kyi came to the fore as the leader of the democracy movement. That particular moment has had an out-sized impact on the interpretation of India's approach toward Myanmar, where it came to be known as a country that supports democracy, that wants to work with inclusive forces in Myanmar. But on deeper interrogation of the causes of that decision in '88, taken by Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister, you realize that it had very little to do with democracy.

A lot of that decision-making was centered around the Congress Party's desire to change its political fortunes in the state of Assam, which was facing a raging insurgency. And the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was both popular and militarily potent at that point in time. ULFA cadre were operating from bases in Bhutan and in Burma in 1988-89. And in Burma, they were operating from territories held not by the junta or the government at that point in time, but resistance forces or ethnic armed forces, which was the Kachin Independence Army. To change that calculus, India needed to engage with the KIA, KIO and some other groups, the Chin groups, and then Karen groups. That tactical negotiation of working with an ethnic armed organization led to a strategic blunder where India couched that tactical support, which was effectively a counter-insurgency operation really, as a bigger political strategic play in which it was supporting the democratic forces. And the arrival of displaced student activists in Delhi, and the arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi, lubricated that calculation. But that was not the cause of why they supported the democracy movement.

The narrative overtook reality to a certain extent, and I think that was an anomaly. You can see very quickly New Delhi realizing that the junta was absolutely not going anywhere. And after 1991, when the elections took place in Myanmar and were quashed again by the junta, it became very clear to India that it had to deal with the junta in Myanmar, otherwise it would lose out to its other strategic rival, China, which was engaging the junta to a considerable degree even then. There is an element of continuum when it comes to India-Myanmar relations today rather than cycles. That continuum is what is defining or shaping the faith in New Delhi of making sure that it does not burn any bridges with Naypyidaw because the last time they did it, it did not pay dividends. Now, one can argue that the situation today is different from the 1980s and the 1990s, and I would agree with that assessment. But that has not led India to really overhaul its policy toward Myanmar in any fundamental sense.

Rohan: India is growing closer to the US, but as you point out toward the latter half of the book, this is one of those spaces where India and the US do not have simple agreements on how to handle the region. And given that we're going into a potentially more fractious period, thanks to Trump, I'm curious, how do you see the involvement of these two big powers—the US and China—and how India has to deal with them here?

Avinash: Let me tackle the China question first before I come to the United States. China has always defined India's strategy in the region, whether it be East Pakistan or India's relationship with Bangladesh or Myanmar. It has always been a very powerful strategic feature, and this is something which I learned while doing research for this book. The impact of Chinese covert support, armed support, and even political support to the Naga movement, to the Mizo movement, to the Manipuri outfits, which took the root of violence in the 70s and 80s, cannot be underestimated. This was not just an India-Pakistan proxy warfare story. This was as much a Sino-Indian rivalry, especially during the Maoist period, until 1976. Of course, when Deng Xiaoping came, things started to calm down, which would eventually lead to a resetting of relations post-1987, when Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing.

But that element of Chinese excess and interference cannot and must not be underestimated. Today, we are seeing a much more heightened and a much more at-scale version of that kind of engagement of China with India and its neighbors. There is the Belt and Road Initiative. There is Chinese financing and Chinese arming of various armed forces in India’s neighborhood, including Bangladesh and Pakistan. Sri Lanka has a very strong Chinese footprint, so does the Maldives. And Myanmar is effectively again being shaped by Chinese diplomatic and economic approaches. Today, unlike in history, China is a much more resident power in South Asia. And that is the biggest challenge for India. How do you deal with the region, where you were the resident power and you wanted to make sure that no other extra-regional powers become as potent as you do, but today you have failed in achieving that objective? This is where the question of India working with its Western partners truly kicks in.

India has worked with the US or the Soviet Union before, but it was on its own terms. And whenever it would feel that the Americans were getting too deep and tight with the Pakistanis, it would go toward Moscow. It would try to calibrate its relationship with Beijing to a certain degree. But the intensity of the great power politics today and the involvement is of a very different degree. You're absolutely right in saying that India does not get along well with the US everywhere in the region. Right now, post-Trump, it's a whole new world, so we need to see where this goes. But during the Democratic administration under Joe Biden, you could see the Indian vs. American divergences on Bangladesh play out quite openly and quite strongly. The whole idea that the Americans did a regime change—which, by the way, it's absolutely false, and that did not happen—really defined the quality of mistrust between India and the US in India's east. For that matter, the US completely looking away from the situation in Myanmar and not engaging with the junta, despite India continuingly asking the US to support India's case in Myanmar by engaging with the junta—you can see these divergences.

In my view, it shows that India does not work with its partners in the region in a uniform sense. It wants to select where to work together and with whom it wants to shape the terms of those interactions. It wants sight of what the Western partners are doing in the region. If the Americans are coming to Sri Lanka, they need to work with India. If the Americans are coming investing money in Nepal, there have to be silent guarantees and acceptance from New Delhi. So, I think you can see this element of selectivism, where in some neighboring countries, India is more comfortable with having its Western partners work with it than in other countries. Bangladesh is one case where India has been a lot more skeptical of Western power, even though it was not inimical. Moving forward, I think this is likely to remain the case, unless of course the Trump administration does a full 180 degrees—which it is perfectly capable of doing and says that "No, the Indian viewpoint on Bangladesh is the valid viewpoint." But of course, that would create second-order effects in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Rohan: You mentioned China being a resident South Asian power, unlike in the past. We also hear, on a larger scale, the story of India's rise, its global heft and so on. So, does India have more capacity today to influence its neighborhood than it did fifty years ago? How does China’s presence in the region square with the idea of a more powerful India?

Avinash: India is absolutely more powerful today than it was even ten years ago. I have absolutely no illusions about that in the region and elsewhere. This might not seem to be the case when we look at India's relationship with its neighbors, but in absolute terms, India is a bigger power today than it was before. And it's a more assertive power today in some senses, at least when you look at the post-Cold War period. The problem, of course, that India faces is that China is even more powerful and much more powerful. So, this is an issue of relativity rather than absolute numbers.

China was relatively much more equal to India in the 1950s and 1960s or the 1970s than it is today. And this asymmetry is growing at scale—in the tech sector, in the defense sector, in terms of Indian and Chinese economies. India is not a match to China's national power today as perhaps it could have been in let's say the 1950s or the 1960s. This is what really complicates India's regional dilemmas and anxieties.

I'll give you an example somewhat away from India’s Near East. In Sri Lanka, India was able to assert its red lines of not allowing Chinese military vessels or submarines to take base in Sri Lanka or really shape Columbus' calculus on China quite strongly. It has struggled to do so over the past few years. We have seen Chinese spy ships take dock in Sri Lanka. We have seen, even in Maldives further south, China becoming much more important and much more present, if not socially and culturally or politically, but definitely in a strategic sense by just having a lot more investments in these countries and working with the elites. And that is where India truly is when it comes to its power. It is a powerful country. It is not someone that India's neighbors can ignore just because there's China. That has to be noted. No Indian neighbor, perhaps barring Pakistan, can discount India today despite Chinese presence. And India has those capabilities. But the neighbors are also not as fearful or concerned about Indian sensitivities as they used to be a couple of decades ago.

Rohan: Are there misconceptions about India and India's Near East that you found yourself constantly having to correct?

Avinash: What I've struggled with is a lack of appreciation of how important this region actually is for India itself. When we talk about India as a power or India even as a modern contemporary independent nation state, there's a lot of focus on India's boundary dispute with China. There's a lot of focus on India's ongoing rivalry with Pakistan and the Kashmir issue. There's a lot more focus on the wars that India has fought with Pakistan in the west and of course 1971 to a certain degree. But the place where debates in India about citizenship, state building, and statecraft truly happened were actually in the east. In an intellectual sense, that's the fight—to lend focus to a region whose value is absolutely central to the making of India and is likely to remain central to the making of India moving forward. But it is not seen as much in public popular discourse as the Kashmir issue or Pakistan.

The second misconception, especially I see myself being frustrated by, is this idea of connectivity. That you can build a road, build a port, build a bridge and build a rail line and you'll connect and you'll be fine. It just doesn't work like that. Connectivity is not a panacea.

Rohan: Finally, do you have recommendations for our readers?

Avinash: I have recommendations, but they might not all be directly about India or India's Near East. I will give you a recommendation of books, more in the spirit that they speak to some of the themes that we have been discussing.

We spoke about China and I think these two books are ones which I would highly recommend to your reader. One is Zhou Enlai; A Life, a biography by Chen Jian. It's a great piece of scholarship and it’s effectively a history of modern China. The second book is a personal political history of China, At the Edge of Empire; A Family’s Reckoning with China by Edward Wong. He is a Chinese-American journalist, and was the chief correspondent for The New York Times in Beijing for many years. It's a great piece of work, a very personal history of his family and its relationship with China.

The third book that I would recommend very, very highly, is a piece of powerful political fiction called You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. It reimagines the meeting of Spanish conquistadors with the Aztecs in Mexico. Everyone should read it. It really puts questions around colonialism and decolonization into sharp focus. Two more books I would recommend are Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan. This is political fiction based on the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1980s, coming up all the way to 2009 from a Tamil perspective. And lastly, My Friends by Hisham Matar. Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American author who has written a lot about the politics of Libya and more. It is a great introduction to life in exile, to friendship, and political violence and autocracy, and what that means for people who are democratically minded and liberal in their world views.

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This interview was first published on India in Transition, earlier this year.

For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is taking another break, courtesy Baby #2.

While I’m on paternity leave over this month, I thought I would send out some of the interviews I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.

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Jawaharlal Nehru still looms large over India. The ideas and ideology of the country’s first prime minister continue to shape debates about its past and future. As a giant of the freedom movement and the leader who steered India through Partition and into its postcolonial life, Nehru left a lasting imprint on the nation’s political institutions and its global outlook. Yet, Swapna Kona Nayudu argues, Nehru remains under-studied, and his thinking is often flattened—both by admirers and critics.

In The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Nayudu—a Lecturer in Social Sciences (Global Affairs) at Yale-NUS College—revisits one of the central ideas that shaped Nehru’s foreign policy: non-alignment. Commonly seen today as a Cold War-era attempt to avoid being drawn into rival geopolitical blocs, Nayudu shows that non-alignment had far deeper roots in Nehru’s anti-colonial worldview—long before the Cold War had begun.

“Non-alignment is anti-imperial politics that predated and outlived the Cold War,” Nayudu writes. “The early life of the idea was an iterative process, with waves of unmaking and articulating political thought… [which] began in the late nineteenth century and came to a crescendo with the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

The Nehru Years enlarges our understanding of this often-invoked concept by tracing its intellectual lineage—through figures like Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore—and by examining how non-aligned India actually responded to Cold War flashpoints, including the Korean War, the Suez Crisis/Tripartite Aggression, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the Congo Crisis.

CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Nayudu over Zoom and email about her motivations in tackling Nehru and non-alignment, the lack of a “Nehru studies,” the idea of non-alignment as a form of civil disobedience and the former Indian prime minister’s blindness to race.

Rohan: Tell us about your background in academia and how you arrived at this book.

Swapna: My first degree was in history, after which I was trained in International Relations with a specialization in security studies. Then I had a few years of working in policy. I was in South Asia for a while—in New Delhi, in Sri Lanka, in Kabul. I then went back to England to do my PhD at King's College London with Sunil Khilnani and Claudia Aradau, King’s College London. I also dabbled in international law, and I think you can see all these interdisciplinary strands come through in the book. Since completing my PhD, I've primarily worked on the Cold War in Asia, particularly India in the Cold War. I also work on the UN, including peacekeeping, and global political thought.

Rohan: That’s a big range of things. Where does it put you in terms of discipline today?

Swapna: I've been very lucky—all the departments I've been at since my doctoral studies, including the Department of War Studies at King's College London, were fundamentally quite interdisciplinary. The reason I went to King's was because I was more interested in focusing on studying war than doing it through a particular discipline. When I arrived at the Department of War Studies, I loved the fact that we had geographers and historians and political scientists and everyone thrown into the mix. My primary PhD supervisor was a trained philologist, for instance. So, we had quite a good mix of people. I would say I mostly do political history. In a sense, my home department is always politics, and I'm always worried about calling myself a historian. But having now produced historical work, hopefully that claim is not too dubious.

Rohan: Tell us the genesis of this project. Where did this book come from?

Swapna: When I arrived at the Department of War Studies, I knew I wanted to work on India, and I wanted to work in the mid-twentieth century period; the founding of the Indian nation, but also the founding of the United Nations. I was quite interested in that crossover, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with it. I was coming from a critical security studies perspective, so the idea really was to go into the archives, find material, and let the research question take shape organically.

That's what eventually happened. I spent a lot of time at both the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, as it used to be called. I concluded that we needed some retelling of the fundamental axis on which India's external affairs was first formed. For instance, in one of my journal articles

, I worked on the founding of the Indian Foreign Service. I was quite interested in the question of how a new nation begins to have diplomatic ties or begins to have a diplomatic presence.

A lot of these questions that I had academically became more and more driven as I interviewed erstwhile diplomats. I spent a lot of time interviewing the first few batches of Indian diplomats, like Ambassador Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra and Ambassador Eric Gonsalves. They were all wonderful in illuminating my view of that time. The more time I spent with them, I also realized that a lot of these policies were put together in the spur of the moment, as and when needs arose. And India was very closely examined by other powers as well, both the great powers and other nations that were looking to decolonize or had recently decolonized.

It gave me a sense of that moment being really alive in their minds and helped me animate what seemed really dead and far away in the books. I started thinking about how India chose not to align itself with either of the blocs and how that impacted, so strongly, its position, which is why one of the chapters in the book is called “A Lonely Furrow.” I was quite interested in seeing how Nehru managed to take that position without isolating India. How does someone say no to everything that is current in world politics and then still carve out a position for the nation state, which is so new, so fresh?

Obviously, in many ways, this was happening even before India was independent. So, I had to go back further in time. That's where the book came from. Asking how does one nation have such a meteoric rise in international affairs after being newly independent and refusing to side with anybody? This was quite puzzling. I wanted to look at how it was actually carried out. Someone in a recent review of the book called it very granular. And the reason for that is because I wanted to know how these things actually took place on a daily basis. We understand them as lofty ideas, but how does one actually go about making something like this happen?

Rohan: Forgive me if this is too pithy, but why return to non-alignment? Why return to Nehru?

Swapna: I came to this topic because of my interest in the idea that politics had become subsumed by war, conflict, and ideas of security. When we look at the Cold War, which, from its origins to its consequences, spans nearly the entirety of the twentieth century, we think of conflict as inevitable. Our thinking around this sort of warmaking is also captivated by binaries—capitalism vs. communism, US vs. the Soviet Union, north vs. south. I wanted to look at these questions anew, only to find out through an extensive reading around India’s founding moment, that others before me had also been motivated by this unrest with two-pronged thinking, and had resisted it quite staunchly through thought, word, and action. I wanted to tease out what this resistance looked like and what solidarities it employed.

The scholarship, particularly in International History, that does look at these sorts of questions is also rightly interested in the subaltern narratives of these resistance movements, especially around feminist voices and Afro-Asianist solidarity. I think those are exceedingly important projects. But when it came to the view from India, I thought that the centrist, statist, governmental view had not been studied enough either. So, I decided to excavate what the center was saying.

Rohan: You mentioned getting into the archives and an interest in the period. Did you always know that it would be heavily foregrounding Nehru as a personality? Or is it something that emerged as you started focusing on the material at hand?

Swapna: Not at all, actually. I didn't have Nehru on my mind when I went into the archives. A lot of the focus was actually on Gandhi and Tagore. I was very interested in these two figures. But when I went into the archives, I found that they were completely absent by that point because it was all completely driven by Nehru. And the more I did the interviews with the diplomats, that also really helped me understand his centrality to the project. I started off thinking about Gandhi quite a lot and then moved at some point to realizing that if I wanted to do non-alignment, it would have to be Nehru.

Rohan: For readers who, as you say, might be more familiar with thinking of non-alignment through the lens of Nehru, where do Gandhi and Tagore fit in?

Swapna: Before I answer that, I wanted to say that during the time I was doing my PhD, there was also a sudden surge of writing on Gandhi. There was Faisal Devji's great book, The Impossible Indian. Ram Guha, of course, has his seminal volumes. And there was quite a lot of other writing. Karuna Mantena was doing work on Gandhi as a realist. There was this new way to situate Indian thinkers, not just in global political thought, but also in International Relations. That propelled me to start thinking about figures other than Gandhi who could, perhaps, be situated similarly. And I found that Nehru was quite difficult to place in these categories.

I remember having a conversation with a pretty big intellectual influence on me and saying "Oh, I was interested in Nehru studies," and this person said, "That field doesn't exist, Swapna. It's only Gandhi studies." And I remember thinking, but why doesn't it exist? Because if he's had such a huge impact on India's international affairs, then why don't we have anything that's about him? In terms of the archives, Ram Guha did a talk in London many years ago where he said to students that they should go look at Nehru’s five-volume Letters to Chief Ministers. And I was thinking, there's all this material, including The Selected Works—his own writing; why isn't anyone using that in a comprehensive way? Of course, since I started doing my work, others have also published books using those materials. But this is to say that the interest also came from what was in the materials.

In terms of Tagore and Gandhi, for me, they became really important in the book as sources of thought for Nehru. I kept flitting between reading Nehru as Gandhian and Nehru as Tagorean and trying to figure out which parts he had borrowed from whom. The Gandhi-Nehru relationship is chronicled vastly, and there's a lot of material on that, but not so much on Nehru and Tagore. I was wondering why that was the case and wanted to dig deep. The more I read up on Nehru's travels to China and his view on Asia, the more I could see Tagore peep through. There was a lot of this Tagorean inflection, and it wasn't as Gandhian when it came to international affairs.

I was quite interested in the mixing of methods. There's this Tagorean view of what Asia is like, mixed with a Gandhian method of negotiation and mediation. What was Gandhi if not a great diplomat? A lot of the statecraft is from Gandhi. I was quite interested in how these two sources of thought become a third and completely different approach in the person of Nehru and in his political thought. That's where these two figures come in.

Rohan: You draw on Gandhi’s belief in negotiation—anti-colonial but never anti-British—as something Nehru drew on in his non-alignment thinking. It was even a reason to have discomfort about the NAM…

Swapna: Yes, I think there was a real belief that the door must always be open, and a fear that a new grouping might convey more boorishness than intended. Nehru was quite cautious about India not becoming entwined with others’ issues.

Rohan: To take the other element of the book—non-alignment—you write, “One of the anxieties driving this book was ahistoricism of narratives about non-alignment and attendant inaccuracies.” What do you mean by that? Are the inaccuracies popular or academic?

Swapna: I think there's not enough academic work to make the claim that the academic work is not sophisticated enough. There's been a huge lull between the 1960s and now. After the 1960s, until Srinath Raghavan wrote War and Peace in Modern India, there was almost nothing for a very long time. There might have been some books here and there, but nothing that had a huge impact. Academically, I think a lot of work was done when Nehru was still alive. There are certain inflections and biases there from it being contemporary history.

Today, there is some very interesting work and scholarship that came out over the past decade. But the issue is with writing in the public sphere. I think that there isn't much understanding, but there's also quite a lot of focus on the unraveling of non-alignment. You asked about a popular misconception that I have to keep clearing up. For me, it's the idea that non-alignment failed in 1956 with Hungary, in 1962 with China, or in 1971 with the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. There's always this anxiety around the failure of non-alignment. Let's chart it. Let's bring it down. Let's talk about when non-alignment ceased to be important or completely failed. And I think that that's actually quite redundant as an approach, and we need to get past it and stop talking about the rise and fall of non-alignment and just talk about what kind of ideas were generated when it was very much alive and active.

Rohan: To lay readers, it might come as a surprise that Nehru and non-alignment are under-covered. Where do you think that comes from? Is it simply a paucity of available work, is it that the academy moved on, is it Western centrism?

Swapna: Three things, I would say here. First is the idea that the Cold War did not “happen” in India. The Cold War is always happening elsewhere, with consequences for India. That idea is being debunked with a huge fresh wave of literature from Cold War history, about the Cold War in Asia in general, and Southeast Asia and South Asia. That is one big change. The second is disciplinary. International Relations as a field is not—and was not for a long time—very popular in India. Whenever it was taught in India, it was taught very much through a Western curriculum. We didn't really think of, for instance, Gandhi as a subject for IR. So, that change is very new and not still fully functional in that sense.

On the history side, however, I draw a lot from the Subaltern Studies Collective. But the collective was pretty much focused on the colonial period or on domestic social-cultural histories of India. The international as a space is not a key subject for them. And so those thinkers, historians, and political scientists who would have perhaps given this period or this subject a fair treatment have not quite been motivated by these questions.

Nehru's international affairs, I would say, is not as extensively studied as his domestic actions. He was in office for 17 years, he was India's first prime minister, he was one of the founding figures, etc. So, of course, there's a lot of work on him and scholarship about him, but I’m not sure how much of that centers on non-alignment, especially after the 1960s.

Rohan: You're making the argument in the book that we need to situate non-alignment outside of the Cold War and also take it away from the non-alignment movement or the idea that India was neutral. Could you tell us a little bit about what you are setting out within the argument of the book?

Swapna: You've touched upon three facets of the book. First and foremost is this idea that non-alignment and neutrality are the same thing. This is actually more prevalent in western scholarship on India. So, to a large extent, that argument is made in the book not for Indian audiences, but for audiences outside India trying to understand Indian politics. A lot of that has to do with the history of the first World War and the ways in which we understand countries like Switzerland and their positioning. Non-aligned states like India, Egypt, Yugoslavia, etc., which are post-second World War, get thrown in with that understanding. A lot of my work in the book is to disrupt that and to separate them from each other and talk about how, for want of a better phrase, this is more of a positive neutrality, where the nation is very active and, just like I had said earlier, it's not isolationist. It's not a position removed from the politics of the day. In fact, non-alignment propels India to be even more politically active.

In terms of going beyond the Cold War, again, I want to rephrase that a little differently because when we say beyond, we often understand that this means non-alignment extends beyond 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. What I'm trying to say is that it existed before the Cold War, and it continued to exist after the end of the Cold War because it had already existed before the Cold War. An argument in the book is that non-alignment is not a response to the Cold War, and therefore the end of the Cold War doesn't mean anything to non-alignment as we understand it as political thought. Now, if we take it as a foreign policy approach, of course there are changes once the Soviet Union goes away, because that's a huge change in the way the international system functions. Any nation would have to adapt its foreign policy to that. But I'm also quite interested in its life before the Cold War—Tagore and Gandhi and the political thought behind non-alignment.

The book also talks about how the Cold War is actually a second-order question. The first issue at hand here is non-alignment as a response to questions of peace and empire, which are seen as mutually incompatible. This idea that Western nations would colonize large swaths of Asia and Africa to keep the peace and to help the uncivilized govern themselves is hugely destructive for Indian thinkers. And they're thinking that something has to be done about this. Non-alignment comes out of that very deep anti-colonial sentiment. Because decolonization and the Cold War are overlapping periods, we have some intertwining there that sometimes gets confused with periodization. Those are conceptually two things happening at the same time, but it doesn't mean that non-alignment becomes limited to that period of history.

Rohan: Partly that sense of it being of the Cold War comes with how it has been appraised more recently. But I like the way the book grounds it in the anti-colonial movement, describing non-alignment as coming out of civil disobedience. Tell us a little bit more about its genesis before the Cold War?

Swapna: I can speak to what you said about civil disobedience. Both those words are so striking in their coinage as descriptors of non-alignment. Civil, because active participation in international society is quite important to non-alignment. But also, disobedient because this very international society is in the throes of conflict, and this conflict is playing out on the basis of blocs. And non-alignment is not just a refusal to be in either bloc, but also a denunciation of the blocs, on the whole, as a system. It's quite interesting because they want to actively participate in this society while fundamentally reordering it. And I think that that's so ambitious. That’s actually very exciting to study.

Rohan: In the book, you then set out to see how this played out, in the Korean War, in the Suez Canal Crisis/Tripartite Aggression and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and then the 1960s conflict in Congo. What drove you to these moments?

Swapna: The subtitle of the PhD thesis on which this book is based was “Critique, discourse and practice of security.” The idea was that there's a critique of security as ordering international politics. Then there's discourse where there's a lot of discussion about what this means, what this will mean for India, what it means under different circumstances. And then there's practice where India basically says, "Okay, we have to use force to keep the peace." We move quite a lot along that arc, and a dismantling, almost, of the original ways in which non-alignment was thought. I was quite interested in picking up case studies that would demonstrate that arc, but also in looking at different parts of the world: Asia, Europe, and Africa. In terms of the diplomatic history, it was quite interesting to see how they were all approached differently.

The book functions on multiple levels. In terms of the actual political thought, I wanted to look at various figures who had informed the ways in which Nehru and the Indian Foreign Service were thinking about these conflicts. In Asia, in the Korean War chapter, you have Tagore. In the chapter on the Suez Canal crisis with Egypt, there's this correspondence from diplomats talking about how Egypt might be in Africa, but it has its face turned to Europe. So, there's this coming to terms with Arab nationalism. And then with the Soviets, it's always interesting, India's interface with Soviet notions of empire or aggression or nationalism. I wanted to pick up a case study that looked at anti-colonial nationalism, but from within the second world. And so, we have that with Hungary. And then the Congo for me was very interesting because it was the first peacekeeping mission where Indian troops had used force. Because I wanted to talk about the practice of security, it all came together in that way.

Rohan: There is one way of looking back at non-alignment and seeing it as purely a rhetorical device, which is heightened by the question of how Nehru handled the Soviet invasion of Hungary (refusing to condemn the USSR even as India clearly took Egypt’s side on the Tripartite Aggression/Suez Canal Crisis). The sense I get from the book is that it was more grounded in the politics of the time, so I wanted to ask how you might respond to a cynical reading of non-alignment.

Swapna: In any work on Nehru and using Nehru's writing, especially because he wrote so much and he spoke so much, the question of rhetoric is always in the room. How much of this is actually intended as political action? A lot of Nehru's writing, I have tried to view not as rhetorical but as pedagogical. He needs to constantly educate his diplomats, the people who work for him, the ministers, etc., because of this idea that India is a very young state and he's running the country. There is a sense that everyone has to be taught how to be political and how to function in this world. Whilst doing that, of course, there is some amount of political-speak which comes into the picture.

More precisely with Hungary, I think that one of the functions of trying to remain non-aligned at that time is also to continuously speak to both blocs. And it's much easier to keep speaking to both blocs when none of them is in the middle of an aggression. That's why if you notice I have the Suez Canal crisis (when Israel, France, and the UK invaded Egypt) and Hungary in the same chapter. Why do we not criticize Nehru for speaking to the British and the French while the Suez Canal crisis is on? When he does that, it’s mediation, but when he speaks to the Soviets, it's pandering. That seems a bit unfair, which is why I put those two together.

Having said that, I do think that this moment represents an unraveling of the idea of non-alignment. Because there is a delay in his responses and there is a reluctance to alienate the Soviets. That does cast somewhat of a shadow on Nehru’s handling of the crisis. The reason the chapter is so detailed is because we're trying to get to the point of understanding what's going on in his mind at this time, and why the ministry of external affairs is doing what it chooses to. From a purely technical point of view, not having had a mission in Budapest really hampers India's response to the crisis. But again, India is only nine years old as a nation state at this point. Naturally, it cannot have diplomatic missions all over the world. So, some of the reasons why that episode turned out the way it did are rather technical.

But in terms of a more macro view of non-alignment and what happened to non-aligned thinking around the time, I do think that it was a moment where there was some unraveling. It's a bit of an inside joke in my mind because when someone picks up the book and it's called The Nehru Years, and it's a history of non-alignment, I don't think people are expecting the book to be critical. And I think that I am interested in it because I view it as, in the end, a failed political project. Even so, there's always something to learn from it. Even if it eventually failed, whenever that might have been, the decline also teaches us so much because even during the decline, it had such a hold on India's external affairs. So, one can only imagine at its peak how powerful an idea it might have been.

Rohan: You write at some point in the book that “Nehru is not a thinker of our century.” Why?

Swapna: Nehru is seen as an institution builder because he built so many institutions, but he's much more than that. Perhaps only second to Gandhi, he really suffers from an oversimplification of his thought. There's a lot of burdening him with ideas or labels that are quite simplified. And a lot of this oversimplification comes from those who look at him with admiration. Those who look at him with adulation end up seeing him as a source of relief in these present political times.

After spending a long time, more than a decade, looking at his writing, I have concluded that he was very good at maneuvering the international space, and he created a space for India to move about in, internationally. And he was an extraordinarily prescient man. He could really see conflict coming from quite the distance. Those are very particular skills that had a very particular function in that historical moment. For instance, he was incredible in the ways in which he supported the UN. At some point, the UN secretary general was writing him private letters asking him to support the UN, because without it, the UN would fall or fail.

What India does today at the UN, we cannot, in a sense, borrow from that historical moment. It would be quite discordant to think about his ideas and transplant them to the UN of today or India's role at the UN today. In that sense, I do think that he was extraordinary for his moment in time. But that moment is now behind us. One of the fears with engaging in this sort of work is to try and transform those ideas into ones of today. And I think that as tempting as it might be, these legacy questions always land us in a soup. And so, I'm quite wary of doing that.

Rohan: Another critique of Nehru comes up in the Congo chapter, on how Nehru and India, at the time, looked at Africa and sought to fit African questions within non-alignment. You describe it as a blindness to race in the handling of both the Congo situation as well as Africa broadly. What do you mean there?

Swapna: The summary argument is that race is a deeply contentious historical issue in African politics already in the 1940s and 1950s. It's already at the crux of decolonization in African politics. And I think there is a parallel and separate Indian experience of that racialized politics both in Africa and outside of it, as we know from, for instance, Gandhi's experiences in South Africa. So, there's a certain multi-layered racialization going on there that Indians experience in a very different way.

Nehru simply viewing all of this through the lens of Afro-Asianist solidarity was just inadequate as an approach. Bringing African nations to the Bandung conference or having solidarities with Nkrumah and Kenyatta and the big leaders of the time was simply not enough to really understand what was happening in Africa. In the Congo, the main pitfall in Nehru's thinking at the time was assuming that because the Congo said that when they become independent, they’d be non-aligned, that Congo's entry into international society would be similar to, say, that of India's or Indonesia's. I think there is blindness there. That ends up going quite wrong.

Rohan: I wanted to engage more with non-alignment as a failed project, and the failure to understand race and assume that African nations will come out of colonialism in the same way. I found that point echoes a reflexive assumption today that India can lead the Global South, just automatically because of its presence outside of the developed world…

Swapna: I disagree because I think these might actually be opposite problems. With Nehru, the difference is that he didn't want to take on this mantle at all beyond what was required to gain India a position at the UN and in international society in general. As I argue in the book, there's a lot of handwringing and reluctance on his part. Even as India keeps increasing its material commitments, at some point it's too deep in the throes of the peacekeeping and cannot pull out.

Nehru is also much older at this point—he dies in 1964 when the Congo crisis is still ongoing. And he just doesn't want to take this on. Personally, he's older, he's struggling with so much at home post the 1962 war with China. So, the last couple of years of his tenure, and indeed of his life, are quite fraught. In that sense, it might be quite opposite to what's going on today, in the sense of India wanting more responsibility and perhaps visibility. By the point we get to Congo, I think that Nehru, and those ambitions, at least on a personal level, are starting to fade. And you can see that with the non-alignment as well.

Rohan: Tell me about Nehru keeping at a distance from even like-minded leaders of the NAM and why you write that “this estrangement did nothing to revitalize non-alignment that would have perhaps benefitted from contestation over its meaning and reflection from a wider variety of sources.”

Swapna: The reluctance didn’t translate into alternative visions of what NAM could look like. India simply receded further and further from solidarist ventures. I don’t expect, anachronistically, for Nehru to have taken that on. We cannot view India’s external affairs in a vacuum—there was always so much going on domestically and the international situation was hugely volatile, so perhaps there was only so much interlocution possible. But yes, the estrangement was not very fruitful for anyone in the end.

Rohan: Did working on this book update your understanding of what happened with non-alignment subsequently, both then in the immediate post-Nehru years and going on to the way we continue to talk about it today?

Swapna: I'm wary of legacy questions. So, I like to think of this as confined to Nehru’s time and then fading out into a completely different foreign policy under Indira Gandhi. I see many more continuities between that latter period and today than I would between the Nehru period and today. But of course, there's a lot to be said for how India still conducts itself in peacekeeping, how India conducts itself at the UN. That is a glorious tradition, and that has continued for decades.

There are parts to this which can be traced back to that period. In terms of understanding what today's politics are based off, I think that it's too much in the past to have that much resonance. What's interesting is that while other nation states are still reckoning with their own histories of participation in these conflicts, these questions come up. So, for instance, a couple of years ago I provided testimony at the Irish Parliament on Ireland's involvement in peacekeeping in the Congo and their interaction with Indian troops in 1964. So, other states are also coming to terms with their own national histories. And some of these questions get thrown up again for discussion when that happens.

In terms of Indian foreign affairs, I think a lot has happened between 1964 and 2025. One doesn't want to make jumps from then to now, but I think under Indira Gandhi, and then again under Rajiv Gandhi, I think there were many changes to non-alignment. Including of course, getting rid of the hyphen. The concept was still very much a matter of discussion until both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were in power. After that, we see it less and less as a phrase coming up. And then eventually it gets replaced. I mean, today, there's just a variety of other phrases used. In fact, I think they want to put a distance between non-alignment and themselves.

Rohan: What do you feel people get wrong about this period, about Nehru or about non-alignment all the time? What are the things that you find yourselves having to correct quite frequently, whether it's from the lay world or the academic world?

Swapna: Academically, I think there's way too much discussion on when exactly non-alignment failed and also this idea that some things are obsolete and should stay in the past. If we think that then why are we writing history? This is also a disciplinary dispute. So, you often have this from political scientists who say that it’s long gone and dead and buried. But it's the task of historians to resurrect that which is long gone and dead and buried.

With lay persons, I think the idea that Nehru faltered in 1962 with China overshadows so much of everything else he did, especially in foreign affairs. It's very difficult to get people to move past that and talk about anything else or go before that and talk about everything that happened between 1947 and 1962. So, that's one very big issue that I face. And the other is also just having to answer questions about Edwina Mountbatten. I wish I didn't have to do more of that.

Rohan: What are you working on currently?

Swapna: I'm in the midst of writing my next book, which is a history of India's internationalism in Asia through a study of Tagore's cosmopolitanism in Japan and Bose's militarism in Singapore.

Rohan: Do you have three recommendations for our readers?

Swapna: I am a student of war so Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, which will probably always be the most lyrical treatment of war; Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule is terrifying and, therefore, excellent on war in peacetime; and the documentary Best of Enemies, about the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.—a real window on what has been happening in the US for the last many decades, and where it all came from.

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This interview was first published on India in Transition.

For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is about to take another break, courtesy Baby #2.

While I’m on paternity leave over the next month, I thought I would send out some of the interviews I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.

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Tariq Thachil took over as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2020, just as the world was grappling with the uncertainty of a global pandemic. He steps down in June 2025, at a time when American academia faces a new wave of pressure—from funding challenges to deepening questions about the role of international students and academic freedom. Thachil’s five-year tenure may have been bookended by crises, but it was also marked by a surge of interest in India—an era that CASI was uniquely positioned to navigate and shape.

What did it mean to steer CASI through this moment? How has the growing attention on India—from donors, students, and the public—reshaped the role of a university-based India center? Why is there such a disconnect between how India is studied in the U.S. and the questions that matter within India itself? And what lies ahead for future leaders of institutions like CASI?

CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat sat down with Thachil to discuss building research bridges between India and the U.S., why American political science can sometimes miss the mark on India, and how running a center like CASI has become a far more complex—and consequential—task.

Rohan: Tell us about your pathway to CASI.

Tariq: My path to CASI began when I came to CASI as a graduate student and found it to be quite refreshing. As a political scientist, I had not been in a space like CASI. I felt like I had a divided life between an “area studies” community in which there were very few political scientists, and a disciplinary community where there was really not that much focus on India. I'd often be the only India scholar in the room. CASI was one of the few places where everybody was focused on discussing India, but there were also many from either my discipline or adjacent disciplines.

Ever since then, I have been very enmeshed with CASI. At different stages of my career, I came back—as a junior faculty member, as a tenured faculty member, to present, to participate in workshops, etc. From very early on, I had the feeling that it was a unique space, and so I was very excited about the possibility of being part of that space as director when the opportunity came up.

Rohan: Just to understand, what made it unique to you?

Tariq: Two things. One, a lot of the typical venues where somebody who works on India or South Asia got an interdisciplinary area studies engagement in the US were at places like the Madison South Asia conference, or even going to other South Asia centers, which were very valuable for me. But those centers really are dominated by particular disciplines—history, anthropology, etc. This is not about assigning blame, but fields like political science, economics were very underrepresented in those fora. CASI was really the only place where I could see a blending of people who were from disciplines that were adjacent to mine in the social sciences, but were fundamentally interested in India. The Center also encouraged you to frame your research, and provided feedback with a sharper emphasis on connecting to debates and discussions happening within India, and not simply in the American academy.

That was different from what I had experienced in the US at either South Asia centers, on the one hand, or within my discipline, on the other. It was intellectually unique. And that made me feel attracted to the idea of directing CASI, because I did see it as a space that spoke to my interests in cultivating both social scientists who really put India front and center when thinking about their projects, but also Indologists who were interdisciplinary.

Rohan: What did you see as your task when you took over?

Tariq: My first response is a somewhat prosaic one, but one of vital importance when thinking about academic centers. CASI, for all its successes, was not very financially stable when I came in. And honestly, the first task was the unglamorous work of making it financially stable, which was especially difficult in 2020, at the outset of the budgetary uncertainties imposed by the pandemic. The second: CASI’s prior directors had done an amazing job of fostering policy-oriented conversations both in India and about India in the US, especially with respect to India’s political economy. I wanted to preserve that, but also broaden CASI even further as an interdisciplinary space to include contemporary historians, anthropologists, sociologists. It's not that CASI had had no interactions with those disciplines, but I wanted to increase the proportion and space being given to them, and the scope of collaboration that CASI engaged in and supported across a wider swath of the university.

Then, organizationally, I wanted to institutionalize CASI. As with many centers in their earlier days, CASI had relied on a lot of transient populations—visiting fellows and part-time researchers. I wanted to build up the everyday research capacity at CASI, among both faculty and non-faculty. We still have lots of people who are visiting and coming through, including yourself, but putting a faculty associate director in place as a permanent appointment, expanding our postdoctoral program from one fellow to three, starting a pre-doc program, expanding the number of PhD fellows—all of those things increased the everyday “peopling” of the Center.

Tariq Thachil in conversation with filmmaker Mira Nair (2023 Saluja Global Fellow Lecture)

Rohan: I want to ask about the broader environment over the course of your tenure. You started off during Covid, and you’re ending just as some fundamental questions are being asked about academia in the US. How did that impact what you set out to do?

Tariq: I took over at the apex of the onset of Covid. For me, that meant learning how to do a new job at the time that the job itself was fundamentally different. To run an India center where you couldn't bring people from India, you couldn't send people to India—students or faculty—you couldn't really do research in India...a lot of our research, which relies on interactions with human subjects, was not ethically possible at the time. A lot of the core activities of CASI couldn't happen.

An underappreciated negative was that a lot of centers, including ours, depend on fundraising, which was uniquely difficult to do during the pandemic—not to mention, it was such a difficult time in India. As a center you're trying to figure out a way to contribute or have events that shine a light on what's happening in India during the pandemic, but at a time where you also feel very painfully disconnected because you're not there. That was an intellectual challenge.

One way we tried to address this challenge was by moving to a fully virtual platform for all our events, which allowed us to showcase a lot of voices within India. A very high proportion of our webinars from that time featured scholars and practitioners from India, which budgetarily we're not otherwise able to do. Also, a lot of our audience for those events came from India. One of my favorite things was how hungry people were for scholarly content at the time.

We had a lot of students signing on, not just from the elite universities of India, but also regional universities. They would write to me afterwards saying, "We never thought that we'd be able to attend a University of Pennsylvania event or an Ivy League event and hear from this speaker or that speaker, and even ask a question." That part stayed with me and is the main reason we've maintained at least some virtual programming post-pandemic.

It was a difficult moment, but it also provided opportunities to force us to reorient. Even with India in Transition, our bi-weekly publication, which you edit, we conducted a review during the pandemic and found that the Hindi IiT page was actually the most visited part of our website—which was surprising to all of us—and forced us to rethink our assumptions about who our audience was. That was when we increased the number of translated languages that we published in IiT—not just in Hindi, as we did before, but also into Bengali and Tamil.

While I came into CASI at a challenging time, the current moment is, to me, a much more pernicious and precarious one. Covid was a universally shared challenge. Right now, universities in the U.S., including Penn, are being specifically targeted and constrained. Not just CASI, but all centers are going to have to reckon with how to navigate this moment in terms of making decisions about the preservation of academic freedoms, the pragmatics of protecting the students and faculty and intellectual communities that you house and support, and the budgetary uncertainties staring us all in the face. None of these decisions are simple, and the implications of any decision are complex. That's one of the things that I've learned in this job. It's all very well to take particular strong lines, but often you, as the director, a tenured professor, will not pay the consequences for drawing those lines. It'll be international students affiliated with you on visas or staff members or contingent faculty, or even staff working internationally, who will bear the brunt of any fallout.

How do you navigate these decisions, not just with your own personal reputation in mind, but all the interconnected and often more vulnerable people who are associated with and supported by the center? The importance of navigating such thorny questions will only be ratcheted up. So yes, my five years at CASI have been bookended with these two very different kinds of challenges. Without minimizing the trauma of the global pandemic, it is fair to say from the specific perspective of academic centers like CASI, I feel more troubled about this current moment than I did in 2020.

Rohan: There’s an interesting contrast there, because even as this period has had its difficulties, it has also been a time when interest in India in academic circles has gone up. There seems to be more money, more donors, more India centers popping up. You said there were not many places like CASI when you were younger. Is that changing?

Tariq: Yes. There are opportunities now that were just not available even 10 years ago, let alone 15 or 20 years ago. It's worth acknowledging that. There are many more centers devoted to the study of not just South Asia, but India specifically. CASI was the first such center at a US university, but there are other India initiatives or India-focused centers that have been set up now. That is its own interesting intellectual phenomenon, because a lot of the support for such centers really seek to identify India as its own source, really not wanting to support a center that is largely about South Asia and whatever that means as a regional idea. That current has only grown over time. A lot of the support, a lot of the donor money is really interested in de-hyphenating India from South Asia and thinking about it as its own country for study. While CASI, in many ways, spearheaded the idea of an “India Center,” I have concerns about this larger effort to separate the study of India, especially at a time when collaborative thinking and engagement within the region of South Asia feels as urgent than ever.

With respect to this rising interest in India, it’s not just among donors and alumni, but also current students. The number of students who I have, for example, taking my class—democracy and development in India—which I have taught a version of for almost 20 years now, has gone way up. The proportion of students I have who are non-Indian or not of Indian heritage has also gone way up. It's over half of the class now. When I started teaching at Yale in 2009, only about 20 percent of the class was non-Indian or non-Indian heritage students. So, the change is not just among donors and alumni, but among students. And even in the intellectual environment of the US in general, interest in India has gone up. That offers an important opportunity for centers like CASI to secure support, visibility, to expand and support research, to increase faculty hiring on India. That's all to the good.

Even as we no longer suffer from the problem of irrelevance—just shouting to have India be considered relevant as an object of study for the university—the concern now shifts to being more careful and judicious with the support that you're going to take, or not take. In terms of fundraising, there might be a lot of interest in funding a center on India. But what are the imperatives of donors? Earlier we struggled to find any donors. Now you may have multiple people who are interested, but it is important to be very clear about the motivations for that support. Will there be explicit or implicit pressures for the center—in sharing its programming, its research activities, its ability to remain impartial or even critical in its commentary?

Beyond such concerns about intellectual freedom, there is also often a misconception among donor communities about the role of academic centers like CASI. Often, the desire is for them to function like a think tank like Brookings or Carnegie; having lots of glitzy, high-profile events that are on the circuit of India hands and foreign policy communities. In my opinion, that is really not the comparative advantage of places like CASI. We are, first and foremost, a university-based academic center. Which means our mission should be centrally about conducting deep research, fostering new generations of scholars, and educating students—none of which are in the wheelhouse of think tanks. So, part of my job is to both explain this difference as well as convince this newly infused class of donors that it is worth pursuing and supporting.

Rohan: To then focus on the research side, I’ll draw you back to a piece you wrote with Milan Vaishnav right before you came into this role, entitled “The Strategic and Moral Imperatives of Local Engagement: Reflections on India.” This also connects with a few things that a previous CASI director, Devesh Kapur, wrote in an IiT article as he was leaving this position, titled “The Study of India in the United States.” Before I ask you to reflect on those thoughts, what was your argument in the piece?

Tariq: Devesh’s piece and ours were making distinct arguments, but they were both jointly motivated by developments in some social science disciplines, primarily economics and political science. Increasingly, the kind of work we were seeing being done on India in these fields was in service of the disciplinary imperatives of, in our case, US-based political science, and often at a remove from the big questions animating scholars working in India. Just to give you one example, which was true in 2018 and I think sadly is still true. If we think of the dominant electoral phenomenon in India today, it's been the rise to dominance of the BJP and the leadership of Narendra Modi. I don't think US-based political science, absent maybe one or two pieces, has had anything especially useful to say about that. I'd be hard pressed to find a book coming out of the US that offers us a great explanation of what might be the most significant political development in India in the past decade.

On the other hand, we've had a proliferation of studies of the working of local democracy, of the workings of affirmative action quotas, and the functioning of local governments, which is very important. I, myself, have worked on local urban politics during this time. But if you were reading US-based political science on India during the past decade, you would come away thinking this has been an era of unprecedented decentralization, devolution of power, and that the most important tier of government in India is local government, and the most significant political issue is that of caste and gender quotas. Yet much of what we know from scholarship and policy-oriented writing from India itself suggests the country has experienced considerable political centralization. And while affirmative action is no doubt important, the focus it receives is disproportionate to its importance, simply because it is an issue amenable to establishing causality. After my first book, on the rise of the BJP pre-Modi came out, I remember a senior scholar in my department telling me I should really focus my future work on gender quotas, because they are randomly assigned! That's the kind of disconnect we were talking about.

Rohan: Where does that disconnect come from? Is it just the gestational period of academia? Is it the interests of academics trying to conform to the US academy?

Tariq: I think conformity plays a big role, and in our disciplines, a big driver of conformity comes from particular methodological trends. The imperatives of positivist social science in political science and economics, the attention to causal inference, has elevated the study of certain questions, and sidelined others. I'm not quite as critical as I think Devesh was in his piece about this development. I think there are lots of merits to that form of scholarship, and useful things to learn from it. But I do agree that there have been considerable costs to the increasing homogeneity in our fields in terms of what we study, the kind of work that is valued and that will get you jobs, get you tenure. The strategic incentives to produce research have pushed it in the direction of very micro-level work, and thematic areas that lend themselves to particular methodological techniques. There is no doubt creative work being done, but I do feel it has led to only being able to ask certain kinds of questions and completely ignoring others.

I don't think it's that scholars in the US are unaware of these other political phenomena or economic phenomena that might be of interest. But they don't see it as strategically feasible to work on those topics and publish in the kinds of journals that they need to, in order to have successful careers in the US. The chances that you can get tenure in a top department in the US working on India, certainly in my discipline of political science, and produce work that is of interest to a broad community in India has become more difficult.

Maybe the biggest place where I see that is in teaching. A lot of the pieces that our community writes, we don't actually teach to undergraduates or it's difficult to teach it to them in an India class. When I'm looking to have these readings that summarize big developments in India on a given topic, it's typically not peer-reviewed journal articles coming out of US political science or economics departments that I'm assigning. And that wasn't as true one or two generations ago. A lot of the top scholars working on these topics were writing the pieces that we could assign to students back then.

Now, of course, something has been gained in terms of the precision, the kinds of data and empirical evidence that we have access to and are generating. There is a lot of valuable stuff that has come out of these intellectual trends, but something has been lost as well. And that was what was motivating the hope of a corrective that Milan and I were talking about.

Rohan: How are those two trends interacting? From the outside, one might imagine the proliferation of India centers and the student interest in India might counteract the built-in expectations of American academia, allowing scholars to focus on things of more interest to those in the country. But actually, the rise of interest in India has not been such a big phenomenon that it can upend more structural trends in your disciplines.

Tariq: I think that's right. We have to be very humble running a modest-sized regional study center. We are not going to change career incentives and the academy. But what we can do, what CASI has tried to do and definitely something that I have tried to do, following that piece with Milan, is to offer scholars in the US—who are dedicating their lives to understanding and studying India—the kind of feedback that might embed their research more firmly within the communities they study. One question I ask scholars is whether they seek and receive any criticism or constructive commentary on their work from a room full of people who know India really well.

You've attended the political economy workshop that CASI runs. The scholars who attend are people who will get a lot of comments on the best methods to use and the best models to run from lots of different audiences. But perhaps CASI is one of the few venues where they will get 35 people in the room, all of whom know India well. People who can say "Well, here is a problem with that data source," or "Here is somebody who's working on that in a university in India who you might connect with," or "We don't know whether we would actually use that term, which is a Western framing that will not resonate with India audiences for these reasons.”

If we are optimistic about the potential for such conversations, there is a role for centers like CASI to curate communities that will provide that kind of engagement. And to do so for disciplines like political science and economics, for which this problem might be most acute.

But the role of such a community can be even broader, which is to foster a wide interdisciplinary community where every week you are engaging with a speaker from a very different disciplinary background. Interdisciplinarity is one of the most overused terms in academia. It's celebrated by almost everyone, but practiced by very few.I can say that now with some authority after directing CASI. You can say you champion interdisciplinarity, but almost always, it is anthropologists who come to the anthropology talk, economists come to the economist talk, and relatively rarely do they come to each other’s talks.

But if you can create a community where such cross-field interactions do happen and you actually do the work of coming every week to engage with people on their terms from different disciplines, there is real learning to be had that might also influence the way you do research. Our pitch is that even if you are narrowly concerned with your career, you might actually do better and more creative work even within your discipline. So, there is a strategic incentive that you might actually come out with something and an idea and an approach that distinguishes you from the 20 other people who are doing a version of what you are doing. Because with that increasing conformity, there's also increasing homogeneity. And so, this might actually be a way to foster a comparative advantage if you're willing to put in the work.

Rohan: The idea of the Center as being, in some ways, an interdisciplinary counterweight to the department, perhaps?

Tariq: Exactly. Especially for junior scholars, I think that the department and the “discipline,” in the Foucaultian sense, weighs heavily on you. Understandably so. And I don't think we're trying to disrupt that. People have to get jobs and make their careers. But I think we are providing a little oxygen so that you have other voices in your head, so that you can still be aware of a broader conversation in which your work is being situated. And maybe it gets you to make the marginal effort: you write a piece for India in Transition and an audience beyond your discipline, or for an interdisciplinary community. Even just the act of coming to give a talk at CASI, we tell every speaker, “This will be an interdisciplinary audience, there will be maybe only 20 percent from your discipline.” I've seen people have to then frame their talks differently and make them more accessible, less reliant on jargon, less narrowly embedded within specific literature. And even that is an intellectual exercise that is useful for everybody to do.

An anthropologist may lean in more into their ethnography when talking at CASI because they know that that may be the most accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. An economist may actually shorten their fifty-thousand slides showing the robustness of their study design and spend more time situating the larger phenomenon they're trying to study. There is value in that. And again, we're trying to be humble about how much this can do, but just being known as that kind of space, even for people early in their career, is valuable.

And then for people who are more senior, the idea is to provide a space to say, "Well, you're now at a stage where you can afford to maybe take more risks, embed yourself in a community that asks questions a little bit differently than what your discipline demanded." But even if you decide to do that, where do you look to for models of people who have done that? And one place might be to look up the events list of CASI and see—"okay, who are the senior scholars who came there?" Typically, we try and invite those people who we think are making that effort.

Rohan: You've covered, to my mind, two elements of what you laid out in that paper with Milan. But there’s a third that you also discussed in an interview with Penn Today as you were starting off at CASI. And this is the importance of taking your research back to India and connecting to the research community back there.

Tariq: That is super important. The point we made was that engagement with local communities in India should be both for strategic and what we call, for lack of a better term, moral reasons. Strategic in the sense that we actually think it makes your work better. If you're not getting your work vetted by Indian communities, you could make very, very fundamental errors, like using the wrong phrase or the wrong translation for a key concept in a survey. Or the use of data sets that seem great, but which a lot of local journalists, scholars, or policymakers will point out have many problems. So, there are strategic reasons for more rigorous scholarship. We define rigorous often in very truncated ways, but part of “rigor” is actually having work vetted by the communities you're purporting to study.

The “moral” reason we note is, are you actually asking questions that are of importance to people in India? Sometimes you could have a very rigorous paper on something that a local community finds utterly trivial. It is useful to actually face that music in the hope that it would influence you in the future to do better.

In the piece that I wrote with Milan, it was a lot about us sharing our work in India and getting feedback. But my thinking with CASI has made me realize that the number one thing we can do is provide our resources and platform for voices within India to connect with scholars—in the US, but also with others from different academic communities in India. CASI's role in that has been twofold. One, we curate academic events in India for academics and scholars to present their work, and usually those feature predominantly India-based academics. That's really important, to showcase voices of all the terrific work that's being done in India, not just helicoptering in as Ivy League professors to share our findings with an India-based audience.

The second is bringing people to Penn and to CASI. To really think, what would make a meaningful opportunity for not just an academic but a journalist, a policy maker, a practitioner? How can we offer them value in taking time out of their busy lives in India to come to a place like CASI and Penn? A lot of it is to give people time and space to have thoughts and develop projects that the daily grind prevents, and also to integrate within a broader network at Penn, go and give talks at other places in the US, and then use CASI as a space to facilitate that. Those two things are different ways in which we work with intellectual communities in India. Having them come and populate our Center also provides some of the engagement that we were talking about earlier, as does showcasing those voices in India. Those have been the two pillars of what CASI has been trying to do. One great example was hosting the data journalist Rukmini S., who is a mutual friend of ours, during a time when she was conceiving and beginning to execute a fantastic new initiative, Data for India

. I think being at CASI gave her both time and space to work on that idea, as well as opportunities to get input from scholars and practitioners at a formative time. She, in turn, helped organize and curate a hugely successful data webinar series for us, featuring a lot of folks from India to whom we had not previously given a platform.

Rohan: We talked about what’s happening in the US to academia. What is happening in India, too, is relevant. On one hand, there seem to be more universities and centers showing up, attempting to take their work to a wider audience—and to keep talent in the country. On the other, there are key questions of both academic freedom but also the complex incentives of returning/staying in Indian academia, something that another CASI hand, Neelanjan Sircar, has occasionally talked about

.

Tariq: We're in a moment where there are different challenges in both countries that CASI is situated between. We already spoke about the challenges in the US right now, and those are newly salient. But the challenges in India have been apparent for some time, and intersect with CASI in a couple of different ways.

We all know of the significant and growing constraints on critical and open intellectual inquiry for academics and research communities in India, in particular, in the fields we work in and the topics we work on. Centers in the US are not immune from such duress, especially in the age of social media.

Previously, a lot of what these centers like CASI did was only locally visible. I have talked to former directors about this. When they were running CASI, very few people outside of CASI, let alone Philadelphia, knew what was happening at the Center. That is no longer true. Whatever we do is known everywhere, including in India. And that is both an opportunity for engagement and it's also a challenge. Because any larger controversy that not just CASI, but a given speaker might be enmeshed in, now has a much higher potential to become inflamed. Navigating those currents, again bearing in mind all the different constituencies that depend on CASI at Penn and in India, therefore becomes all the more difficult.

These pressures also intersect with the new currents in the US in strange ways. One example is the study of caste. Speakers who talk on the issue of caste come from a range of different perspectives. There are demographers and sociologists working on compositional or occupational shifts within caste populations, political scientists working on changes in caste voting, or scholars within the critical caste studies tradition. Yet often when we have a speaker whose talk has caste in the title, we receive criticism from within both the U.S. and India, an odd email asking, "Why are you platforming conversations on this divisive issue?" These voices often echo a growing strain of commentary within the Indian diaspora in the US, echoing particular narratives in India, that sees any discussion of caste as inherently divisive and unnecessary. Interestingly, we now also hear some eerily similar echoes from “anti-DEI” voices within the U.S. who see discussions on caste as troubling illustrations of an overemphasis on questions of diversity, inequity, and inclusion.

This example illustrates the challenge. For me, it is impossible to imagine running an India center without curating substantive discussions on caste, but that is an issue that is now in the sight lines of powerful communities in both the US and India. To me, this should not result in us shying away from these conversations, but it does signal the increasing difficulties in preserving spaces for these discussions. These challenges were more significant for me than for past directors of CASI, and I think will be even more significant still for the next director. They will have to manage walking the fine line of preserving space for open discussion while maintaining all the different elements needed for the institution to survive and thrive. All I can say is that I don't think there's any magic formula for doing so. It has to be a careful, considered set of decisions. But it is over a terrain that is increasingly tricky.

Rohan: For me, that brings up the question—to your mind, what is the role of an India center at a US university? And how is that different from a think tank, or the department, or policy advocacy and so on?

Tariq: I think university centers like ours are really foundationally about research, and supporting research. Ideally, first and foremost, supporting the research of younger scholars. We've talked about all these different challenges for academics. But the people who face all these challenges most acutely are graduate students, PhDs, postdocs, who are trying to make a career and facing all of the currents we've talked about, but in extremely vulnerable stages of their life. What can a center like CASI do to support their work?

At the same time, in supporting young researchers, what can a center like CASI do to promote certain kinds of research from US scholars that is embedded in India? Because in India, your research will necessarily be embedded in the country and conversations happening within it. But in the US, there's a real danger that the research on India can increasingly become disconnected, for reasons we spoke about.

What can CASI do? It can select and promote scholars, especially younger scholars, who are not swimming against disciplinary currents, but are really trying to do their best to be as embedded in India, even when it may not always be their most straightforward career incentive. We can provide at least some of those career incentives by giving them postdoctoral fellowships, or graduate fellowships, or space to publish in India in Transition, or come and give a talk, or be invited to our workshops—showcasing their work and saying that these are the kinds of people that we want to support.

For example, we have three postdocs. We have an informal rule to have them from different disciplines, and to pick people who are doing work that we see is deeply attentive to context and speaks to the interests of scholars beyond their discipline. Sometimes those kinds of contextually embedded, interdisciplinary scholars fall through the cracks of traditional department hiring. So, can we be a space that provides at least some support and platform for that kind of work? I think that, first and foremost, is our mission, to help shape the intellectual currents in the US around the study of India in ways that are productive. And for me that means work that is deeply embedded in India. It can go in many different directions, but it is really rooted in deep connections and time spent and engagement with India and intellectual communities in India.

Tariq flanked by former CASI Directors Devesh Kapur and Marshall M. Bouton

Rohan: In the 2018 paper, you mentioned that some of these elements are specific to India, because it is large, and has a lot of anglophone research. I’m curious, as head of CASI, did you have a chance to draw from experiences of the leaders of centers or equivalent institutions focused on other geographies?

Tariq: I absolutely have. I think one distinctive feature about India relative to many other geographic areas, and especially other low-income countries, is the surfeit of younger scholars working on India in US universities, who are from India. As one observation specific to my own discipline, I'm in the process of doing a review of research on India published in US political science journals since the 1960s. One trend I can already see is that a lot of the early scholarship in the field was being done by non-Indian scholars, who also held a lot of the senior, faculty positions in leading universities. And they did lots of good work—so this is not a narrow argument about identity credentialing.

But it has been heartening to see the increasing representation of political scientists from India in US-based academic research on India. And this has also shaped the kind of work they can do, as many of these scholars come into graduate school with language skills, and have personal experiences in India. Of course, there remain significant limitations to this trend, most notably that those coming from India are from highly elite class and caste backgrounds. In fact, CASI’s predoctoral program, which I established, hopes to address this issue in a modest way by emphasizing the selection of underrepresented students from India to come to CASI to work as research assistants, and get help in applying to US PhD programs.

That said, even the limited representation of scholars from India we see is not true of other regions. Take, for example, the study of the region that in the US is referred to as “sub-Saharan Africa,” where there really isn't that kind of pipeline of scholars from the region. Or even other South Asian countries, there's a much smaller pipeline of scholars coming from Pakistan, even smaller still coming from Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. There’s no one country from sub-Saharan Africa that quite dominates faculty positions in the same way as India does for South Asia. And that's also true for Latin America. And that dominance can perversely crowd out the potential for growing the study of non-Indian South Asian countries. This is especially true if departments in the US continue to regard one faculty member from South Asia as sufficient, which has often been true even at the well-resourced universities in which I have spent my career. Compared to other regions, such as Latin America, there remains a far lower appetite for multiple hires of faculty working on South Asia. In such a constrained setting, the scope for hiring South Asianists working outside India remains limited.

Rohan: What do you think most people get wrong about having to run a center like this? What are the misconceptions that you have to face frequently, from donors, students and so on?

Tariq: From donors, the misconception is what an academic center is. In particular, a big misconception among donors is that the central life of our kinds of centers are high profile events. Or platforming government officials. Or having our research papers immediately shape public policy, which is both unrealistic, and for many academics, not necessarily desirable. And often there are misconceptions about the timelines of university research and conversations. A lot of what we do takes time, but that is also our comparative advantage. We are never going to have 70 commentators ready to comment on, say, the Indo-Pak conflict today. Instead, it'll be to make progress on long, thorny questions that may take years and years to collect data and analyze.

But equally, there are also misconceptions about donors among academics—and often a condescension or unwillingness to engage with these communities. The misconception among people in academic communities about places like CASI is twofold. One is that very few academics, even faculty, are aware that the nitty-gritty of running a center, including fundraising, is a huge part of these spaces. They aren't just spigots that have easy access to resources for activities. Academics are used to engaging with centers just as places that can provide support or resources. But I've been surprised by how poor an understanding most academics have of the supply side of what makes centers run. We're used to departments that don't have to necessarily engage in those activities in their own ways.

Somewhat irritating to me is that many academics express condescension or unwillingness to engage with donor communities, even as they are eager to request financial support. I am often told by faculty that they don’t want to have to explain their work to non-academics, and especially potential donors. But, leaving aside larger debates on philanthropy as a model, if you want to run a center in these spaces, you have to be willing to do that translation work of explaining our mission to folks who work in very different institutional settings. We shouldn't expect people who are not involved in university life or our institutional spaces to fully understand what they do and why. For example, most donors may not understand the value of a postdoctoral fellowship. It's not a role whose value is intuitively obvious to somebody outside academia. But once you do explain it well, many donors are receptive, which is how we were able to build our program.

Another misconception among academics is what it takes to host academic programs. I understand it, but we receive many requests from people saying, "We want to come, we're in the US, or the East Coast, and we'd love to come and give a talk." And I think the misconception is with what constrains us from accepting all such offers. It isn’t our desire, or the quality of the scholar’s work. It is the sheer work involved in ensuring engagement with their visit.

Especially in the US, even at Penn there's not a natural constituency of 100 people who will come to an academic seminar on India. Actually, getting people to engage with scholars' work—and this may be very humbling for scholars to hear, but I would include myself in this—involves having to really recruit your audience every single time. There is no natural departmental constituency for what centers do. There is no natural undergrad constituency for an academic talk. You could do something in Delhi and have 50 people show up without blinking. That will not be true here. And so, I think there's often disappointment that we cannot have even more and more and more events, and that the limiting factor is just the speaker’s availability or travel costs. It's not. The grinding work is in ensuring a robust turnout for the people we have come to CASI, and ensuring their visit was worth it.

Rohan: Do you want to tell us what you'll be working on next, what you'll be doing next? You’re not leaving Penn…

Tariq: No, I’m not leaving Penn. I'm just moving up one floor, back into the political science department, and will still remain very connected with CASI, and happily so. I think that next year, I'll be working on a couple of projects. One is looking at policy-making around air pollution and the politics of policy-making on air pollution. Trying to understand why it's not a more electorally salient issue, which, given the level of the public health crisis in India, is an interesting question. The second is a long-standing research project on smalltown governance and on the challenges that small towns in India face. These are towns with less than 100,000 people, which is the vast majority of urban centers in India. But most research on urban policy, which is what I've been working on in the last decade, really focuses on million plus cities. Those are the two big areas that I'm interested in.

This interview was first published on India in Transition.

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Subscribe below to our contributors' Substacks:

• ET Write Home by Emily Tamkin

• India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

The Political Tricycle is a Podot podcast.

It's presented by Emily Tamkin and Rohan Venkat.

Executive Producer: Nick Hilton.

Producer: Ewan Cameron

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“It is a coincidence, today Congress is getting weaker in India and as Congress is dying, Pakistan is crying,” Modi said in 2024. "Now Pakistani leaders are offering dua for Congress. Pakistan is eager to make 'Shehzaada' the Prime Minister and Congress is already Pakistan's fan. This partnership between Pakistan and Congress has now been completely exposed.”

Barely a year after those comments, it turned out to be a Congress leader – Shashi Tharoor – who received the most coverage as a member of a set of all-party delegations dispatched across the globe by Modi’s government in the hopes of overturning Pakistan’s ‘narrative victory’ following Operation Sindoor.

Coverage of the delegations (7 groups, with 59 members from across political parties, visiting 32 countries) that fanned out globally in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor has to some extent focused on what they actually achieved: Did they manage to make headlines in the local press? Did they convince leaders of other countries to reframe the conflict from ‘just another India-Pakistan skirmish’ to ‘India’s righteous efforts at combating terror’? Was this all mainly for domestic purposes? Did they meet senior leaders and have the chance to make India’s case?

(As V Sudarshan quipped, “Now that we have been told that Colombia has finally swung around to our side on Operation Sindoor after our delegation’s visit to Bogota, we can all sleep better.”)

Those are all important questions, which have received some attention elsewhere. But what does Tharoor’s prominence, as well as the fact that this was an ‘all-party’ effort tell us, from a domestic political standpoint? Why has a party that has dedicated itself to a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, one that has always been willing to declare its political opponent as an ‘enemy’, one that treats Parliament as a rubber-stamp and Opposition MPs as hindrances, suddenly embraced cross-party solidarity and dipped into India’s long institutional history of relying on Parliamentarians for diplomacy (which, until now, the Modi government seemed to have judged a historical error)?

One answer is failure. Diplomatic, that is. There is a sense that despite India’s geopolitical heft, its deepening ties with partners around the world and its military success in the May clash, New Delhi struggled to make its case internationally – and was eclipsed by Pakistan.

As we discussed last week, this failure is partly1 to do with the strategy built by the BJP over the last decade for political communications, which relies heavily on its ‘IT cell’ and obsequious TV networks to put out convenient narratives regardless of facts on the ground. This approach fell apart under international scrutiny and in circumstances where the targets were more diverse (global audiences), the narrative needed to be more nuanced (rather than the unrestrained jingoism and communalism that the BJP relies on domestically) and the environment was more dynamic (not just filled with India’s threatened and frequently feckless Opposition).

The delegations, in a sense, served as an acknowledgment of this communications debacle – and the government’s efforts at damage control.

Baked into this point was the implicit failure of two other elements of the BJP’s strategy, at least in combating Pakistani narratives: Hindu majoritarianism, as Sarayu Pani explained in the immediate aftermath of Operation Sindoor, and the deliberate conflation of Modi and the BJP with ‘India’. The delegations, by virtue of being cross-party and multi-religious, sought to obscure or even repudiate both of these, despite their centrality to the BJP project.

Another answer may well be that this was all aimed at a domestic audience. The BJP leans heavily on chest-thumping nationalism and, the combination of Pakistan’s communications strategy and US President Donald Trump’s undercutting of the Indian position, meant, as we also discussed last week, that the Modi government may have been uniquely vulnerable to domestic criticism (never mind the deeper questions about the security lapses that led to the Pahalgam attacks, the fact that the terrorists have yet to be apprehended, and the lives and materiel lost on the Indian side).

By insisting that Operation Sindoor is ‘not over’ and by corralling Opposition MPs into the delegations – including by choosing which leaders from the other side of the aisle it wants, rather than the ones put forward by the Opposition parties – the BJP attempted to maintain a grip over the issue and blunt political criticism by insisting on unity in the face of national security challenges. The prominence of Tharoor, in this reading, is less a symbol of cross-party solidarity than a deliberate BJP strategy to undercut its political rival (not helped by the Congress repeatedly taking the bait and squirming at his success).

If this were to be the case, it would only be deepening the error of the original IT Cell style communications strategy. Here is former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran:

“Domestic politics will influence foreign policy but foreign policy should not become a tool to be used in domestic politics. Diplomacy is outward-oriented. Its audience is the international community, including friends and adversaries alike. Inward-oriented diplomacy, seeking validation from a domestic audience, will undermine the pursuit of national interests.”

A third potential answer is that the 2024 elections actually changed the BJP. Having lost a simple majority and being forced to govern with the aid of coalition partners for the first time under Modi, the BJP is now returning to Parliamentary institutions and not just accepting but even encouraging the legitimacy of Opposition parties in India’s democratic processes. After all, the BJP didn’t rely on all-party delegations following the two previous conflicts with Pakistan (Uri & the surgical strikes in 2016; Pulwama and the Balakot skirmishes in 2019), nor after the clashes with Chinese soldiers in Ladakh in 2020.

The government’s endorsement of Opposition MPs appears to be the most genuine acknowledgment by the BJP of the legitimacy and, indeed, utility of parties and politicians that aren’t part of its coalition since at least the negotiations over the Goods & Services Tax Bill, early in Modi’s first term.

(There has been continued lip-service to the need for a strong Opposition and even a claim that ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ doesn’t actually mean… what it means, even as actual cross-party institutions have been neglected and more than 140 Opposition MPs found themselves suspended on flimsy grounds in a 2023 Parliament session. Over the past decade, other ‘all-party’ efforts, like the reading down of Article 370 and the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill were classic Modi ‘shock and awe’ efforts, that didn’t involve any genuine consultation with the Opposition. All parties were invited to the inauguration of the new Parliament building in 2023, but a number of Opposition parties boycotted the event, claiming that Modi was turning it into a PR event, while discarding constitutional norms. Has there been an all or cross-party effort in the interim that I’ve missed?)

I’m not holding my breath for this last answer to the be the right one – not with recent remarks by Home Minister Amit Shah (“Under Operation Sindoor, we conducted a deep strike 100 kilometers into Pakistan, targeting their headquarters. Numerous terrorists were killed, but this seems to trouble Mamata Ji”, referring to the Chief Minister of West Bengal), or UP Chief Minister Adityanath. Yet, even if was narrowly motivated, the decision to involve leaders from across parties in a diplomatic effort that was then endorsed by the prime minister is an unambiguous positive for Indian democracy.

The government seemed to realised that the party’s old classics – Modi in fatigues, domestic dogwhistling etc – cannot win in the global information space. So it took a different, more inclusive approach at the international level, that is determinedly at odds with the way it operates domestically. Will these global waves lead to ripples back home as well?

Having endorsed Tharoor, Kanimozhi and Asaduddin Owaisi on the global stage, can the BJP continue to portray them or their parties (the Congress, the DMK and the AIMIM, respectively) as ‘anti-national’ without some amount of dissonance? Can the Opposition leaders turn their newfound Modi government endorsements into platforms that allow them to make other political points – including criticism of the BJP – without their patriotism being questioned?

The reflexive response is probably yes to the first question, and no to the second, not least because the BJP appears to be firmly in control of its political terrain, with the delegations at most being portrayed as the patriotism of individuals from the Opposition, rather than those broader political projects. Still, unconventional actions can have unexpected outcomes, and the change in the BJP’s approach towards international diplomacy may resonate in ways that we have yet to grasp.

Read also

• Sarayu Pani on the delegations:

“The political compulsion felt by the opposition to perform in this seemingly fruitless public charade is interesting. It is unlikely that seasoned politicians in the opposition could not foresee this outcome. Their participation was therefore likely driven by what they imagine their own voters expect of them. These expectations are the product of a domestic public discourse where foreign policy has increasingly been taken out of the realm of political contestation and elevated to the realm of security, where the act of criticism is in itself seen as “anti-national”.”

• Nirupama Subramanian on the failure to isolate Pakistan:

“Caught flat-footed by the apparent return of the hyphen between India and Pakistan, New Delhi's first reaction was denial. So, even the ceasefire is not a ceasefire, but a ‘stoppage of firing’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself declared that the operation had not ended. India had only agreed, at Pakistan's request, he said, to a “pause”.

The second reaction was to send out all-party delegations across the world to spread the word about Pakistan's use of terrorism as an instrument to achieve strategic goals in the region. While what the delegations achieved is not clear, the government has clearly been more successful in the other unstated aims of these missions, such as blunting criticism by the opposition parties at home, and unsettling the Congress by seeming to detach Shashi Tharoor from the party.”

• Bharat Bhushan on the Opposition’s lack of coordination:

“If everyone — especially MPs cutting across political lines — is standing behind the government’s narrative, then what will the special session of Parliament or a discussion on the Pahalgam tragedy and Operation Sindoor achieve? The Opposition will have already become a stakeholder in the official narrative of the government. As a consequence, its leverage in Parliament to question the Modi government’s strategy and political messaging through Operation Sindoor will diminish.

How far the Opposition can overcome this self-inflicted wound and be able to convey to the public that its support for the government’s foreign policy is distinct from critiquing the government for domestic accountability, remains uncertain.

Modi who was on the backfoot globally (for military aggressiveness) and domestically among his supporters (ironically for not being aggressive enough), will have diverted the public narrative. This may prevent close scrutiny of Operation Sindoor by Parliament as well as the path his government has embarked on through its new doctrine against terrorism.”

• Suhasini Haidar on whether the delegations were a success.

• At a more macro level, Studies in Indian Politics has a special issue on Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy, curated by Siddharth Mallavarapu, including Nicolas Blarel on The Domestic-International Nexus in Indian Foreign Policymaking, Ian Hall on the Jaishankar Doctrine and Medha on an Alternative Foreign Policy Imaginary for India.

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Diplomacy also has a role here, not just comms.