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  • On Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 9/11, the Unfinished Task of Counterterrorism

    On Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 9/11, the Unfinished Task of Counterterrorism

    Introduction

    Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the central question is no longer whether the United States and its allies defeated groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS). The more consequential question is whether counterterrorism has kept pace with the transformation of terrorism itself.

    The answer is mixed. The post-9/11 counterterrorism campaign achieved a major strategic success: it prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11 and dismantled much of the infrastructure that had enabled al-Qaeda to operate from a secure sanctuary. Yet terrorism was not eliminated. Instead, it adapted, from centralised organisations to decentralised networks, from fixed training camps to dispersed and virtual infrastructure, from directed operations to self-radicalised individuals, and from global terrorist organisations to increasingly localised insurgencies and criminal-terrorist ecosystems.

    The lesson of the past quarter-century is therefore not that the “war on terror” succeeded or failed. It is that counterterrorism became an evolutionary contest.

    The Transformation After 9/11
    The 9/11 attacks fundamentally altered how terrorism was understood. Before 9/11, terrorism was largely treated as a matter of intelligence, policing, border security and criminal justice. Al-Qaeda demonstrated something different: a non-state organisation could maintain leadership structures, financing, recruitment, training, logistics and communications across borders, while exploiting state sanctuary to mount a sophisticated attack thousands of miles away.

    The response consequently became global and preventive. The United States expanded intelligence collection, aviation and border security, financial sanctions, terrorist-financing controls, international intelligence cooperation, targeted operations, and partnerships with local security forces.

    The strategic principle was straightforward: disrupt terrorism before an attack could occur. Governments sought to intervene at every stage—from radicalisation and recruitment to financing, travel, training, communications and operational planning. This created the concept of pre-emption or preventive strikes, which, however, became problematic going forward.

    That strategy produced substantial results. But it also generated difficult questions about surveillance, civil liberties, executive authority, targeted killing, detention and the legal boundaries of counterterrorism. The challenge for democratic states has always been to prevent terrorism without letting counterterrorism undermine democratic institutions.

    Three strategic phases of counterterrorism

    During the first phase, from 2001 through 2003, the goal was to eliminate al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan. The international coalition destroyed training camps and operational infrastructure, killed or drove away senior leaders, and deprived the organisation of the relatively secure environment from which it had planned international operations. Al-Qaeda survived, but its centralised operating model was severely damaged.

    The second phase began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein created political disintegration, insurgency and sectarian conflict that facilitated the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq. That organisation eventually evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The Iraqi experience demonstrated one of counterterrorism’s most important lessons: military action can eliminate one terrorist ecosystem while inadvertently creating conditions for another.

    The third phase (2011–19) witnessed the killing of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Islamic State (originally named the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria -ISIS). The death of Bin Laden in 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, further decimated al-Qaeda’s central leadership. IS, created by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, was a different challenge. Rather than simply conducting terrorist attacks, it sought territory, administration and political authority. At its height, it functioned as a hybrid of a terrorist organisation, insurgency, and proto-state, complete with taxation, administration, military structures, recruitment, propaganda, and financial systems. This created the conditions for a rush of thousands of fighters and civilian cadres from more than 100 countries to serve the purported Islamic State.

    The destruction of the IS caliphate by 2017 demonstrated the effectiveness of conventional military power against territorial terrorist organisations. But it also demonstrated its limitations: defeating territorial control did not eliminate the ideology, networks or organisational capacity that sustained the movement.

    The Terrorist Threat Has Changed
    The most important development since 9/11 has been organisational fragmentation of key terrorist organisations.

    The al-Qaeda of 2001 depended heavily on hierarchy, centralised leadership, training camps, financing and communications. Today’s terrorist environment is dominated by affiliates, provinces, local insurgencies, clandestine networks and independent actors. Al-Qaeda and IS have both become increasingly dependent on regional branches that possess considerable operational autonomy.

    To be sure, decentralisation has made terrorism less efficient but more resilient. Killing a group leader no longer necessarily cripples an organisation. Destroying a geographical base does not eliminate a network that can relocate. Disrupting one communication channel can simply push operatives toward another.

    The geography of terrorism has also changed. In 2001, the Afghanistan-Pakistan region represented the principal centre of gravity for transnational jihadist terrorism. By 2026, significant activity has expanded across Africa, particularly the Sahel, as well as the Middle East, South Asia and other fragile regions. Weak institutions, porous borders, communal conflict, political instability and local grievances provided fertile environments for terrorist organisations.

    From Global Ideology to Local Grievances
    Another important transformation is the increasing fusion of global ideology with local political grievances.

    Contemporary terrorist organisations frequently exploit ethnic tensions, corruption, poverty, state repression, competition over resources, weak governance and political exclusion. This has blurred the distinction between terrorism and insurgency. In many conflict environments, terrorist groups simultaneously operate as armed organisations, criminal enterprises, political actors and providers of limited governance.

    This means counterterrorism cannot be reduced to kinetic operations alone.  Where governments fail to provide security, legitimacy and political order, terrorist organisations can regenerate even after their military defeat.

    The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan reinforce this point. Military force can disrupt terrorist organisations, but it cannot by itself resolve the political and social conditions that allow violent extremism to regenerate. Governance, legitimacy, economic opportunity and regional diplomacy are therefore not peripheral to counterterrorism; they are part of it.

    The Digital and Lone-Actor Challenge
    The contemporary terrorist threat is also increasingly digital.

    The internet has transformed recruitment, propaganda, communications, fundraising and radicalisation. The shift has been particularly important from “commanded terrorism” to “inspired terrorism.” A terrorist organisation may no longer need to recruit, train and deploy an operative. It can disseminate an ideology, provide encouragement and leave an individual to select the target and method independently.

    This creates a major intelligence challenge. A lone actor may have no international travel history, terrorist bank account, training camp or conventional terrorist communication network. Traditional organisation-focused intelligence can therefore miss individuals who move from online radicalisation to violence.

    Artificial intelligence could intensify this problem. Extremist actors could use automated systems (chatbots) to create propaganda, manipulate audiences, develop persuasive content and radicalise people. Digital ecosystems can also enable polarisation and ideological mobilisation at unprecedented speed.

    Counterterrorism must consequently evolve from simply identifying organisations toward identifying credible pathways to violence while avoiding the dangerous assumption that ideological expression alone constitutes evidence of imminent terrorism.

    What Should Counterterrorism Do Next?

    Twenty-five years of experience suggests several policy priorities.

    First, intelligence must remain the foundation. The greatest achievement since 9/11 has been the ability to disrupt terrorist plots before execution. Intelligence cooperation, financial tracking and international information sharing remain indispensable.

    Second, leadership targeting should remain a tool, not a strategy. Removing terrorist leaders disrupts organisations but rarely eliminates leadership permanently. It must therefore be combined with measures that attack recruitment, financing and organisational regeneration.

    Third, governments must target terrorist ecosystems rather than organisations alone. Financing networks, criminal economies, propaganda systems, local political grievances and permissive environments are increasingly interconnected.

    Fourth, good governance is counterterrorism. Fragile states provide the political and economic space in which terrorist organisations can regenerate. Strengthening legitimate institutions and preventing state collapse should therefore be viewed as preventive counterterrorism.

    Fifth, digital radicalisation requires new methods. Security agencies need capabilities to identify credible pathways from online radicalisation to violence while protecting freedom of expression and avoiding indiscriminate surveillance.

    Finally, democratic resilience must remain central. Terrorist organisations seek more than casualties. They seek fear, polarisation, political overreaction and declining public confidence. A counterterrorism policy that damages the rule of law, institutional legitimacy or social cohesion can inadvertently advance the objectives of terrorists.

    The Unfinished Task
    Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States is considerably safer from the specific threat posed by the al-Qaeda network that planned the attacks. Its leadership has been decimated, its training camps and logistical, including financial, infrastructure largely destroyed, and its capacity to reproduce a 9/11scale operation has been dramatically reduced.

    But terrorism has adapted.

    From Afghanistan, it has dispersed worldwide – Iraq and Syria and increasingly Africa and other fragile regions. It has shifted from centralised organisations to affiliates, from physical training camps to digital ecosystems, and from tightly controlled operatives to self-directed individuals. Its financing has increasingly diversified into criminal economies.

    The central paradox of the past quarter-century is therefore clear: the world community became better at defeating terrorist organisations, while terrorist organisations became better at surviving defeat.

    The policy objective going forward should accordingly be more realistic than the permanent elimination of terrorism. The goal should be to prevent terrorist organisations from acquiring sanctuary, resources, technology, political opportunity, social legitimacy and organisational capacity necessary to produce another strategic catastrophe.

    That is the unfinished legacy of 9/11: not the elimination of terrorism, but the continuing effort to keep it from becoming a strategic alternative to legitimate political order.

    Feature Image Credit: nypost.com

  • The Mask of Western Liberalism Has Slipped

    The Mask of Western Liberalism Has Slipped

    This is an interesting analysis published by ‘Global Geopolitics’ that highlights the aggressive, ruthlessly ‘might is right’ strategy the US employs to restore or sustain its fast-declining hegemony by disrupting global energy security. India’s petroleum minister announces that India’s LPG procurement from the US has climbed to 67%, from less than 10% last year. Nothing could be economically more unwise and disastrous for India. But the petroleum minister is proud of it!                          – Team TPF

    Western Industrial Policy and the Abandonment of Market Orthodoxy Expose the Class War in the Face of Chinese Competition.

    The ideological edifice upon which Western global dominance was constructed has collapsed with remarkable speed. For decades, the United States and its allies justified their hegemony through a simple formula that presented liberal democracy and free markets as the natural endpoint of human development, with China condemned for its authoritarian state capitalism, its violation of free market principles, and its excessive government intervention in the economy. The entire apparatus of liberal ideology rested upon the claim that decentralised markets, guided by the invisible hand, would always outperform the clumsy, coercive hand of the state, and that any deviation from this path represented a regression toward tyranny and economic stagnation. This narrative proved remarkably durable for as long as the West maintained its productive superiority, but the emergence of China as the world’s second-largest economy and the principal strategic competitor to the United States has exposed the lie at the heart of the liberal project (13).

    The West is now adopting China’s methods to defeat China, and in doing so, it is proving through its own actions that the Marxist analysis of the state was correct all along. The state is not a neutral arbiter of national interest, but an instrument of class rule, and the free market was never a universal principle but a weapon wielded against rivals and a self-serving narrative advertised to the masses. The same ruling class that preached fiscal discipline and limited government is now centralising power on an unprecedented scale, coordinating industrial policy, and weaponising the state not for the benefit of the working class but for the preservation of oligarchic hegemony. The mask has slipped, the class war is explicit, and the consequences will determine the trajectory of the twenty-first century.

    Now, the United States is practising the most ambitious state-directed energy strategy in modern history, constructing a global energy monopoly through deliberate acts of sabotage, sanctions, and military aggression. The Nord Stream pipeline, which supplied cheap Russian gas to Germany for decades, was destroyed in an act of industrial sabotage bearing all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of the world’s oil, is now effectively blockaded through a US-led military encirclement that has deliberately escalated regional conflict to disrupt global energy flows.

    The energy front provides the most dramatic demonstration of this ideological volte-face. The West spent decades lecturing the world on the sanctity of free markets in energy, demanding that governments privatise state oil companies, open resources to foreign investment, and refrain from any interference that might distort the efficient allocation of supply and demand. Now, the United States is practising the most ambitious state-directed energy strategy in modern history, constructing a global energy monopoly through deliberate acts of sabotage, sanctions, and military aggression. The Nord Stream pipeline, which supplied cheap Russian gas to Germany for decades, was destroyed in an act of industrial sabotage bearing all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of the world’s oil, is now effectively blockaded through a US-led military encirclement that has deliberately escalated regional conflict to disrupt global energy flows. Qatari liquefied natural gas exports, once a major source of energy for Asia, are statistically at zero after Iranian strikes on the Ras Laffan refinery, an attack made possible by the regional conflagration that Washington ignited (1).

    Asian countries that once bought from Qatar are now forced to purchase American LNG at extortionate spot prices that have spiked from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars per million British thermal units, and Japan’s imports of US LNG have increased fifteenfold since February.

    The consequence of this centrally planned energy blockade is the systematic transformation of Asian energy dependency from West Asian producers to American suppliers. Asian countries that once bought from Qatar are now forced to purchase American LNG at extortionate spot prices that have spiked from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars per million British thermal units, and Japan’s imports of US LNG have increased fifteenfold since February. Europe’s gas reserves are so depleted that the entire continent would run out of stored energy in less than six weeks of a cold winter, while American LNG tankers divert to Asia to chase higher profits. This is not a market; it is a centrally planned energy blockade designed to control global energy flows and weaponise them against China, the world’s largest oil importer, whose industrial base depends upon affordable energy imports. The empire’s strategy is to deny China access to affordable energy, fracture its supply chains, and force its vassals into permanent dependency, while the profits for Exxon, Chevron, and the LNG cartel represent a welcome side effect of uncontested global hegemony.

    The financial front reveals an equally stark contradiction between liberal ideology and imperial practice. The West built its ideological dominance on the myth of fiscal responsibility, imposing austerity on the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while governments that printed money to fund development were condemned as irresponsible populists. Now, the empire is debasing its own currency on a scale that would make the populists blush, borrowing trillions to fund the artificial intelligence arms race, the military buildup, and the energy war, while weaponising the dollar through sanctions, reserve freezes, and exclusion from the SWIFT payment system. The recent intervention to support the Japanese yen reveals the true nature of this financial architecture, as the United States Treasury sold euros to purchase yen in a rare market operation, marking the first American intervention to strengthen the currency since 1998 (1-13).

    The mechanism of dependency is the Federal Reserve’s Foreign and International Monetary Authorities Repo Facility, which allows Japan to swap its US debt holdings for dollars without selling them on the open market, but the price of this facility is permanent financial vassalage. Japan is structurally prevented from diversifying away from the dollar, and the US Treasury now holds effective veto power over Japanese monetary policy, ensuring that Tokyo cannot chart an independent course, trade freely with China, join alternative financial architectures, or refuse to participate in the empire’s economic war. A Japan locked into the FIMA Facility must hold US debt, defend the dollar, and follow Washington’s lead, and this dynamic is being replicated across the empire’s network of vassals. The empire is tightening the leash not merely to enrich Wall Street but to ensure that when the order comes to isolate, embargo, or wage proxy war against China, its vassals have no choice but to obey (13).

    The military front demonstrates the empire’s willingness to abandon its stated values in pursuit of strategic advantage. The United States presented itself as the indispensable nation defending freedom and democracy against tyranny, with NATO portrayed as a defensive alliance and wars justified as humanitarian interventions to liberate the oppressed and spread universal values. Now, the mask has slipped entirely, as Washington constructs the institutional architecture for a global war against multipolarity. NATO is expanding not to defend against a non-existent Russian invasion but to encircle China, and AUKUS, the Quad, and the deepening US-Japan-South Korea trilateral military alliance are not defensive arrangements but the scaffolding of a centrally planned military encirclement designed to control the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the sea lanes on which China’s trade depends (1).

    The US-Israel military merger, which passed the House in late July by a narrow vote, directs the Secretary of Defense to designate a permanent executive agent to accelerate the integration of American and Israeli defence technology, research, and production, authorising seven hundred and fifty million dollars for joint projects and making the relationship institutionally permanent. Once a supply chain is integrated and a production line is established, it becomes nearly impossible to dismantle, and this represents class interest institutionalised through a permanent military alliance that will be used to project power in the Middle East against China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group sails through the South China Sea, challenging Beijing’s territorial claims, while Washington coordinates the defence industries of its vassals, directs their military spending, and integrates their command structures. This is not about selling weapons, though the defence contractors profit handsomely; it is about strategic encirclement, preparing for a confrontation that the empire knows it cannot win through economic competition alone (1).

    The technology front represents the most complete abandonment of liberal ideology, as the West practises the most aggressive state-directed industrial policy since the Soviet Five-Year Plans. The CHIPS Act pours tens of billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing, explicitly framed as a response to China’s dominance, and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries are not temporary adjustments but permanent walls designed to strangle China’s green technology advantage. Export controls on advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence chips, and chip-making equipment are not about national security but about denying China access to the technological base of the twenty-first century. Japan’s $2.3 trillion industrial revival plan is explicitly dependent on American technology, including 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to build artificial intelligence-powered robotics systems to challenge China in manufacturing, ensuring that any challenge to US hegemony would mean economic collapse for the vassal (13).

    The same policies that the West condemned when China practised them, including state subsidies, industrial policy, and protectionism, are now the official doctrine of the empire, and the goal is not to enrich Silicon Valley but to strangle China’s technological independence. A China that controls its own semiconductor supply chain, its own artificial intelligence infrastructure, and its own green energy technology is a China that cannot be stopped, and the empire’s technology strategy is designed to prevent that outcome. The West’s embrace of state-directed industrial policy is the most explicit admission that the “free market” was always a weapon to be wielded against rivals and abandoned when it ceased to serve the interests of the ruling class (5-13).

    The contradictions documented across these four fronts are not accidents, policy mistakes, or temporary deviations from liberal principles; they are the exposure of a lie that was always at the core of the liberal project. The Western ruling class never believed in free markets; it believed in markets when it was winning and abandoned them when it started losing. The rules-based order was a weapon to discipline rivals while the empire did whatever it wanted, and now that the rivals are too strong to discipline, the empire is tearing up the rulebook and revealing its true nature: a centralised capitalist dictatorship organised for class war. The liberals are no longer liberal, because the material conditions no longer permit the luxury of ideological consistency. When the empire was ascendant, it could afford to preach free trade, open markets, and limited government; now that China is overtaking it, the empire must do exactly what it condemned China for doing: plan, direct, and control (5-13).

    This is the class war revealed, with the Western oligarchy consolidating a centralised capitalist dictatorship to defend its global hegemony against China’s socialist-oriented state, while the liberals who once defended freedom and democracy now cheer the empire’s authoritarian turn.

    The difference between these two systems is the class that each serves. China’s planning serves the working class, lifting eight hundred million people from poverty, building the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and leading the green energy transition, while the empire’s planning serves the oligarchy, enriching the few, immiserating the many, and preparing for war. This is the class war revealed, with the Western oligarchy consolidating a centralised capitalist dictatorship to defend its global hegemony against China’s socialist-oriented state, while the liberals who once defended freedom and democracy now cheer the empire’s authoritarian turn. They were never defenders of liberty; they were defenders of a system that benefited their class, and now that the system requires centralised, authoritarian methods to survive, they embrace those methods without hesitation (5-8).

    The mask has slipped, and what remains visible is the reality that Marxism has always insisted upon: the state is an instrument of class rule, and the free market was always a lie sold to the masses while the ruling class did whatever it wanted. The Western ruling class is adopting China’s methods to defeat China, proving that China’s methods were always superior and revealing that the ideological contest was never about freedom versus tyranny but about which class would control the fruits of production. The empire is preparing for a confrontation that will determine the future of humanity, centralising power on every front, sacrificing short-term profits for long-term domination, and willing to immiserate billions to achieve its goal. The struggle continues, and the outcome will be determined not by the sophistication of liberal ideology but by the capacity of the working class to recognise the class war and unite in opposition to the oligarchy that wages it.

     

    References

    China Daily. 2026. “Deepening Geopolitical Differences Highlighted Before Munich Meeting.” China Daily, 11 February.

    China Daily. 2026. “Negotiating the ‘Gracchi Trap’.” China Daily Global, 6 August.

    Dawn. 2026. “Dawn of Highly Volatile Multipolar Order.” Dawn, 23 March.

    Munich Security Conference. 2026. Munich Security Report 2026. Munich: Munich Security Conference Foundation.

    Xinhua Español. 2026. “Latinoamérica y el Caribe Posee Activos para Sortear Nueva Era Geopolítica.” Xinhua, 5 August.

     

    This article was authored and published earlier by Global Geopolitics

    Feature Image Credit: ussc.edu.au

     

     

  • On the wrong side of History

    On the wrong side of History

    So, at a time when Israel finds itself on the back foot and bereft of friends, the question arises as to how have we ended up backing this losing horse? In actual fact, we have, as a nation, leaving aside the odd oligarch, little to gain from this relationship and much to lose.

    Some may be aware of the global internet-based market research and data analytics firm, YouGov, that continuously collects and disseminates data from around the world on all manner of topics, concerns, and opinions, including political opinion polls. In fact, the banner headline on its website reads “YouGov: What the World Thinks”.

    However, a caveat here worth keeping in mind, however accurate their polls, perceptions and opinions tend to be highly subjective and not necessarily an accurate reflection of ground realities.

    For example, the vast majority around the world must necessarily be quite upset with the intemperate behaviour and antics of President Trump, especially his blatant racism, misogyny and the horrendous Epstein allegations. Apart from the horrific devastation he has wrought in Iran, his clampdown on immigration and the tariff fiasco have had a debilitating impact globally.

    Given his multitude of sins, one could easily be forgiven for believing that he must surely be the worst performing and least popular President in American history. One would be wrong in drawing such a conclusion, because YouGov in its latest polls ranks him 38th out of the 45 Presidents to date. Incidentally, not unexpectedly, Abraham Lincoln leads this poll, with George Washington a close second, followed by John F Kennedy.

    Interestingly, among the top three Presidents in popularity, two ended up assassinated. This not only makes popularity a questionable aspiration in the States, but also speaks volumes about the American psyche. Indeed, Trump would probably do well to avoid topping the charts, though if history is any indication, the real threat to his life may well lie elsewhere, and not necessarily from Iran, if some commentators are to be believed.

    There is an interesting series on Substack by US Navy veteran, Rolf Kvalvik, on the JFK assassination that makes fascinating reading—-

    In this eight-part series, he delves into new documentation that has recently been unclassified, ironically enough by President Trump, on the assassination of President Kennedy.

    He points out that President Kennedy was extremely upset with Israel over its secret nuclear weapons programme and had put in motion various robust steps to shut it down. Going so far as to threatening to cut off all aid to that country, apart from clipping the wings of the very influential Zionist lobby in the States. So much so, that his actions were perceived as an existential threat by the Israeli leadership.

    In Kvalvik’s view, he was thus neutralised by the Israeli Intelligence Services working in collusion with rogue elements within the CIA, the Mafia, Zionist lobby groups in the United States and some senior politicians.

    Indeed, following his murder, Israel benefitted the most. Within days President Johnson ensured JFK’s directives against Israel were watered down sufficiently enough to make them ineffective and within two years Israel had produced a workable nuclear bomb.

    Trump must be fully aware of what these and other documents hold, as well as of the brutal truth that the Zionist regime will stop at nothing, including blackmail, assassination, deception and false flag operations, in its pursuit of its Greater Israel agenda.

     

    As remains evident, Zionist influence on Congress and the Government is fairly obvious, and in the circumstances one can clearly understand Trump’s fawning over Netanyahu, and as to why the Israeli tail gets to wag the American dog when it comes to West Asia.

    Unfortunately for Israel, however, their pet project appears to have hit a dead end, thanks to Iran’s intransigence, against which even American military power seems rather ineffectual. Of course, America does have the ability to initiate massive destruction all around, but that in turn is bound to result in a military confrontation with Russia and China. Even Trump’s compromised military leadership must baulk at such a possibility.

    So, at a time when Israel finds itself on the back foot and bereft of friends, the question arises as to how have we ended up backing this losing horse? In actual fact, we have, as a nation, leaving aside the odd oligarch, little to gain from this relationship and much to lose.

    Aside from advanced weaponry, whose value in the transformed conventional warfare environment is highly questionable, seeing their inability to stop Iranian attacks, they have little to give us. In any case, those weapons don’t come cheap.

    Of course, there is the employment factor, as Israel is keen; we provide the menial and blue- collar labour they require as replacement for the Palestinians who performed those tasks earlier. Ironically, one could say we are Israel’s equivalent of the much-maligned Bangladeshi’s here. In any case, this will amount to around a lakh or so at best finding employment.

    Our importance lies in what Brigadier General (Reserve) Erez Winner told a mainstream television channel: “Israel has 1.4 billion Indians as a production line”. We are perceived by them as bonded labour available to them to fulfil their Zionist agenda.

    From the Israeli point of view, however, apart from providing their murdering conscripts a safe and cheap haven to chill out in after completion of their terms, our importance lies in what Brigadier General (Reserve) Erez Winner told a mainstream television channel: “Israel has 1.4 billion Indians as a production line”. We are perceived by them as bonded labour available to them to fulfil their Zionist agenda.

    Being perceived as lackeys of the Israeli-American duopoly is hardly helpful for the government’s reputation and plainly demeaning for us as well. Clearly, in purely geopolitical or socio-economic terms, there is hardly any reason to justify our pro-Israel tilt. Especially given that around 10 million of our citizens are employed around the region, other than in Israel.

    Some opposition politicians, analysts and commentators here tend to believe that our government’s tilt towards Israel is predicated on the fact that the Hindutva and Zionist agenda have much in common, especially in regard to their virulent hatred for the Muslim community. While there may well be some truth to this, it is inconceivable that any government would risk its relationship with other countries of the region over this, given the socio-economic impact that would have.

    In the circumstances, it increasingly appears, as Mr Gandhi and the Congress allege, that our government is being held hostage to other extraneous factors that could well embarrass the government if they ever came into the public domain. One cannot help but wonder what cost the general public will have to pay in the long term to keep these secrets out of the public eye.

     

    Views expressed are the author’s own.

     

     

  • Analysing India’s Trade Bottlenecks

    Analysing India’s Trade Bottlenecks

    U.S. is raising vague arguments and challenges such as ‘forced labour’ and ‘surplus capacity’, while advanced countries do not help with technological development.

    On July 15, the India-U.K. trade deal came into force. That day, India banned the import of goods made using forced labour so as not to get unfavourable treatment from the U.S. under Section 301. A day later came the news that a bipartisan Bill has been proposed by U.S. Senators to levy up to 100% tariff on India and others for buying Russian crude. One way or the other, India’s trade with the U.S. is being buffeted by bottlenecks.

    China’s trade
    In contrast, without a trade deal, China has become India’s largest trading partner. Imports from China in the first half of 2026 have shot up by 21.8% while exports have risen by 37.2%, though on a small base. The already-high trade deficit with China of $116 billion last year is likely to rise since it has already topped $67 billion in the first half of the current year. The imports from China are high- and low-tech items, while exports are mostly low-value-added items.
    India’s dependence on China is overwhelming. Factories and exports increasingly depend on China for machinery and intermediates. For instance, pharmaceuticals depend on imports of API from China. The average wage rates in key sectors such as automobiles and apparel are half to one-third of China’s. Yet, India is unable to outcompete China in global markets because of the huge technological advantage the latter has gained in the past 35 years.
    While multinational companies (MNCs) have invested in China, as a share of total investment, it has been small. Further, to capture markets, China has been investing in other countries under the One Belt, One Road initiative. Thus, net foreign investment in China has been small. Finally, as Chinese companies have become big, they are outcompeting MNCs such as Tesla. And many U.S. companies have left China, including Amazon, Apple, Dell, IBM, and Uber.
    India is unable to finalise a trade deal with the U.S. since at least July 2025, though Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal keeps assuring the nation that it is almost done. Last August, India’s exports were hit by a 50% tariff, leading to a decline in labour-intensive exports of apparel, shrimps, leather goods, and so on. India’s overall trade deficit increased in 2025 to $120 billion from $94 billion in 2024. China faced high US tariffs, but by diversifying trade, it increased its trade surplus in 2025 to $1.19 trillion from $992 billion in 2024.
    Technology and investment
    The lesson is that technology is the key to trade in today’s globalised world. China is accused by the West of currency manipulation and massive government help to cheapen its exports. The implication is that China is draining its surplus to sell to the rest of the world. And, it is supposed to have been doing so for at least the past 35 years. Such trade over long periods of time should have drained resources and made China suffer. Instead, the Chinese economy has boomed and become five times larger than India’s economy.

    The reason is China’s high savings rate of above 35% of GDP since the 1980s and at times reaching close to 50%. This has been able to finance its huge investments of 40% and more, peaking at 47%. Its growth has not depended on foreign investment.
    This massive investment has enabled China to invest in technology development and expand its industry. This has fuelled rapid economic growth, and initial low consumption levels have risen rapidly, as is visible in any modern Chinese city. The U.S. has tried to thwart Chinese advances in technology by putting restrictions, but China has managed to circumvent that and continue upgrading technology. So much so that the U.S. has come to depend on Chinese imports.

    Since Trump has squeezed India, the latter has entered into trade agreements with important trade partners — the U.K., the European Union, the UAE, New Zealand, and so on. But caution is required since the earlier trade agreements with Japan, Korea and Australia led to a larger trade deficit with them. India could not increase its exports as much as others could because of their technological advantage.

    The advanced countries have not helped India with technological development. They want to export but not share technology. The United States Deputy Secretary of State said at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi that the U.S. made a major strategic and economic error roughly 20 years ago by giving China extensive access to American markets, technology, and capital. He said such a mistake would not be made vis-a-vis India. The implication is that India has to develop its own technology; otherwise, it will lag behind the advanced countries and China.

    Forced labour
    By investigating India on “forced labour” under Section 301, the U.S. is seeking to create a bottleneck to extract concessions. Forced labour implies coercion to work. Workers have no choice but to do the bidding of the employer because the option is hunger. Employers take advantage and pay low wages. This gives an exporter an advantage as its produce becomes cheaper. The U.S. says that is unfair to its producers.

    But wages in the developing world are much less than in the advanced nations. Does that mean that all production in the developing world is using forced labour? In India, unorganised labour receives low wages since it has little bargaining power to obtain decent wages. Thus, most of India’s production can be said to be based on forced labour. And its imports from developing nations can be said to be based on forced labour. This is a non-tariff barrier that the U.S. wants to apply to India.
    Another non-tariff barrier the U.S. is threatening to use is “surplus capacity” in steel, textiles, and so on. Any export by any country is over and above what it uses within its own territory. So, all export is based on surplus capacity. The U.S. has a massive agricultural surplus which it wants to dump on India. Its companies provide massive amounts of defence armament to the rest of the world. Which country does not produce for export so that it can import what is needed by its economy? Entire trade depends on these surpluses based on “comparative advantage”. So, what is India being penalised for? Are these bargaining chips to extract concessions?

    India’s trade with the U.S., till recently its largest trading partner, is being buffeted by vague arguments and challenges. Earlier it was the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and now, Russian crude purchases, “forced labour” and “surplus capacity”. This huge uncertainty is buffeting Indian exporters. Indian officials negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. were hoping for favourable treatment, but that seems unlikely.

    Meanwhile, trade with China has boomed, though there is no trade agreement with it. India avoided joining the RCEP in 2019 to stall Chinese dominance. Given U.S. coercive steps on trade, both India and China have diversified their trade with the rest of the world. That is the way to go. And the lesson from China is that trade deals or not, India needs to upgrade its R&D to become globally competitive.

    This article was published earlier in ‘The Hindu.”

    Feature Image Credit: aninews.in      US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer meeting Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal in New Delhi in June. | Photo Credit: ANI 

  • The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    Series Prologue: Part 3

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices and Civilisational Responsibilities

    The ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    In the previous two posts in this prologue, I traced the material foundations and ideological engine of five centuries of Western domination. I argued that India’s civilisational traditions offer a fundamentally different foundation for the emerging world order: pluralist, ethically grounded, and rooted in the universal kinship expressed in Kanian Poongundranar’s “Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir” and the Thirukkural’s vision of Aram, Porul, and Inbam. But intellectual honesty requires that the mirror be turned inward. Because the logic of exceptionalism — the claim to a uniquely chosen identity that exempts a community from the ethical constraints applying to others — is not exclusively a Western pathology. It is a temptation that every civilisation faces when political power finds it useful. And India is not immune.

    The ideology known as Hindutva, which exercises dominant political influence in India today, must be examined with the same analytical rigour we have applied to Western and Zionist exceptionalism. Not because the comparison is comfortable — it is not — but because intellectual integrity demands it, and because India’s civilisational integrity depends on it. The examination is best conducted in three stages, because the ideology was not built in one.

    Stage One: The Founder Who Separated the Nation from the Faith

    The first and most important fact is one the movement rarely acknowledges: “Hindutva is not Hinduism.” Hindutva was founded by an atheist, and it was not, in its original formulation, a religious idea at all. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who coined the term in his 1923 pamphlet ‘Essentials of Hindutva’, was a self-declared atheist, rationalist, and materialist. He rejected scripture, ridiculed cow worship and ritual superstition, and championed European scientific temper over what he saw as the dead weight of religious tradition. He was explicit that Hindutva was not Hinduism. He defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture. A Hindu, in Savarkar’s definition, need not believe in any god at all. What mattered was that India was both his fatherland and his Holyland — a territorial and ethnic test, not a spiritual one.

    Savarkar defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture.

    Johan Caspar Bluntschli

     

    Where did this conception come from? Not from the Vedas, the Upanishads, or any Hindu philosophical source. It came from Europe. Savarkar’s framework of organic ethnic nationalism drew on the nineteenth-century European tradition of the nation as a racial-cultural organism — the tradition of the Swiss-born jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, who worked within German Staatslehre and distinguished between a nation’s racially rooted ‘principal’ people and those he regarded as alien to it. It drew, too, on the ethnic nationalisms then ascendant across Europe, the same intellectual currents that were hardening elsewhere into far darker forms. This is the first irony, and it is foundational: the ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    Stage Two: The Fusion of Ethnic Nationalism with Religious Sentiment

    If Savarkar’s Hindutva was a rationalist, secular-ethnic nationalism, how did it become the religiously charged mass movement we see today — mobilising temple, festival, deity, and devotional feeling for political ends? The answer is that this was a second and distinct stage, carried out by different men, for a different purpose: mass mobilisation.

    M S Golwalkar

    M.S. Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from 1940 to 1973, shifted the register decisively. Where Savarkar grounded the nation in race and territory and had little use for religion as such, Golwalkar infused the project with Hindu spiritual and metaphysical content — the sacredness of Bharat, the dharmic mission of the Hindu people, a civilisational destiny cast in religious language. Deendayal Upadhyaya’s doctrine of ‘Integral Humanism,’ adopted in 1965 and later made the official ideology of the Jana Sangh and then the Bharatiya Janata Party, further anchored the political project in a claimed Hindu spiritual essence. The reason for the shift is not difficult to understand. An abstract theory of ethnic nationalism, however rigorously constructed, cannot move a population. Religious sentiment — festival, symbol, deity, the deep and genuine devotional attachment of hundreds of millions of people — is among the most powerful mobilising forces in human affairs. The movement discovered what its rationalist founder had not prioritised: that to win a nation, you must reach its heart, and in India the heart is substantially religious.

    One need not impute cynical motive to any individual to observe the structural result. A political ideology founded on secular-ethnic lines was, over subsequent decades, fused with the religious devotion of the Hindu masses — and in that fusion, the crucial distinction Savarkar himself had insisted upon, between Hindutva the political-national identity and Hinduism the faith, was quietly erased. The movement that claims to defend Hindu dharma was built on a foundation laid by a man who had little personal use for dharma as religion at all.

    And Savarkar himself never crossed over. He remained an atheist and rationalist to the end of his life — campaigning against ritualism and caste orthodoxy through his Ratnagiri years, opening the Patit Pavan Mandir to all castes, arguing for care of the cow as a useful animal rather than worship of it as a sacred one. His relations with the RSS were notably cool; he scorned its abstention from politics, and Golwalkar’s mysticism belonged to a register the materialist Savarkar never adopted. His death in 1966 was a final statement: he ended his life by voluntarily renouncing food and medicine, justified in a rationalist essay, and his will forbade religious rites — no priests, no rituals, a motorised hearse in place of the traditional bier. The founder kept Hindutva and Hindu religiosity separate for eighty-three years, to the point of a ritual-free funeral. The fusion of the two was not his evolution. It was a second construction, built around him and after him — which is precisely why it can be unbuilt.

    The Zionism Parallel: A Precise Structural Homology

    This two-stage pattern is not unique to Hindutva. It follows, with striking precision, the trajectory of political Zionism — and the comparison is instructive rather than incidental. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was a secular, largely non-religious Viennese journalist. His 1896 work Der Judenstaat is a political and national argument, not a religious one; early political Zionism was in large part a secular nationalist movement, and many Orthodox religious authorities initially opposed it precisely because it presumed to force a national project onto what they regarded as a matter of faith and divine timing. Only later did the movement fuse itself with religious claim — the theological reading of the land, the mobilisation of scripture, and the memory of the Holocaust deployed as a unifying and legitimating force. The structure is identical to the Hindutva trajectory: a secular founder formulates an ethnic-national ideology; later leaders infuse it with religious sentiment and collective memory to achieve mass appeal and to place the project beyond ordinary political criticism.

    The Warning: Where this Trajectory Leads

    Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor brought out this report after the first year of war in Gaza by Israel. It has now been on for more than three years and has engulfed the entire West Asia.

    And here the parallel carries a warning that thoughtful Indian people cannot afford to ignore. For if Hindutva’s path resembles Zionism’s in how the ideology is built, we must look honestly at where that path has led. The fusion of a secular-ethnic nationalism with religious claim did not strengthen the moral standing of the project it produced. It corrupted it. The state that emerged now stands, in the aftermath of Gaza, in a condition of profound moral and political isolation — its conduct condemned across much of the world, its claim to act in the name of an ancient faith increasingly repudiated by the faithful themselves. Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    The warning for India is exact. Hindutva today shows every sign of being on a similar trajectory — the same fusion of ethnic nationalism with mobilised religious sentiment, the same erasure of the distinction between a faith and a political project, the same tendency to place that project beyond criticism by wrapping it in the sacred. If it continues down that path, it risks doing to Hinduism what political Zionism’s corruption has done to Judaism: isolating it, discrediting it, and betraying its deepest moral content — all in the name of defending it.

    Why This Matters: And What is at Stake

    This is why the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva is not academic hair-splitting. It is the difference between a civilisation and an ideology that has captured its name. Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain. Its foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain.

    Hinduism’s foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    A country with over 200 million Muslim citizens — the second-largest Muslim population in the world — cannot credibly champion the Global South, the voice of universal human dignity, or the reform of the world order, if its dominant political ideology frames those citizens as the internal Other. And an ideology founded by an atheist on borrowed European ethnic-nationalist theory, later dressed in religious sentiment for political mobilisation, cannot be the authentic voice of the tradition of Ekam Sat and Anekantavada. It is, in the most precise sense, that tradition’s negation.

    The strongest argument against Hindutva, therefore, is not secular liberalism, and not the critique of any political party. It is Hindu philosophy itself — the Upanishads, the Thirukkural, the Anekantavada, Vallalar’s Ocean, the Sangam world’s ‘Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir’. These traditions do not need political exceptionalism to survive; they are diminished by it.

    “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one; the wise call it by many names” – Rigveda

    Safeguarding India’s civilisational soul from the exceptionalism now deforming it from within is not an act of opposition to Hindu culture. It is its most authentic defence — and it is a task for every Indian who understands the depth of what is being risked.

    — This is the third and final part of the series prologue. The series proper begins with the next post.

    A companion essay, ‘The Constitution or the Manusmriti: India’s Civilisational Choice,’ extends this argument and is available at thepeninsula.org.in.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that India’s greatest strength is its civilisational pluralism — and that any ideology, domestic or foreign, that threatens that pluralism threatens India itself.

    Further Reading:

    On Savarkar, his atheism, and the formulation of Hindutva:

    Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva (1923); republished as Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1928).

    Janaki Bakhle, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (Princeton University Press, 2024).

    The definitive intellectual biography; on Savarkar’s atheism, rationalism, and the territorial-ethnic (not religious) definition of the Hindu.

    Vikram Visana, ‘Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c. 1900–1920,’ Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

    On Savarkar’s debt to European ethnic-nationalist thought, including Bluntschli.

    Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, The Theory of the State (1875; English trans. Clarendon Press, 1885).

    Bluntschli was Swiss-born (Zurich, 1808), working within the German tradition of Staatslehre.

    On the shift to religious mass mobilisation — Golwalkar and Upadhyaya:

    M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966).

    Deendayal Upadhyaya, Integral Humanism (1965).

    Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (Hurst, 1996).

    On the RSS’s development and the religious infusion of Savarkar’s originally secular-ethnic framework.

    Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Berg, 2001).

    On political Zionism, its secular origins, and Jewish dissent:

    Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) (1896).

    Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009).

    Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Fernwood/Zed Books, 2006).

    On the theological and secular Jewish opposition to political Zionism, from its origins to the present.

    On Hindu philosophical pluralism:

    Rigveda, 1.164.46: Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural. Trans. P.S. Sundaram (Penguin, 1990).

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Feature Image Credit: Savarkar and Hindutva – image made with AI assistance.

  • The Constitution or the Manusmriti

    The Constitution or the Manusmriti

    The Indian Constitution is not merely a legal document. It is a civilisational achievement, and arguably the most important moral document India has ever produced — more consequential than any scripture, because it carries the binding force of law and the democratic legitimacy of a sovereign people’s collective commitment to one another.

    On 25 December 1927, in the small coastal town of Mahad in Maharashtra, Dr B.R. Ambedkar stood before a specially constructed pyre and set fire to a copy of the Manusmriti. It was not an act of rage. It was an act of civilisational critique — the most deliberate and consequential symbolic gesture in the history of India’s struggle for human dignity.

    The Manusmriti — the Laws of Manu, composed between approximately 200 BCE and 200 CE — is a Dharmashastra, a text of social and legal prescription that codifies a system of human inequality so comprehensive and so absolute that it assigns worth, rights, duties, and punishments on the basis of birth alone. It is not a text that merely reflects the prejudices of its era. It is a text that systematises those prejudices into an architecture of oppression — and then claims divine sanction for it.

    Its prescriptions are worth stating plainly, because the groups that invoke its authority today rarely quote them. A Shudra, the Manusmriti declares, is created to serve the three higher varnas. Even if emancipated by his master, he is not released from servitude, “since that is innate in him — who can set him free from it?” A Shudra who dares to recite the Vedas shall have hot molten lead poured into his ears. A Shudra who presumes to sit on the same seat as his superior shall be branded and banished.

    On women, the text is equally explicit: “In childhood, a female must be protected by her father; in youth, by her husband; when her lord is dead, by her sons. A woman should never be independent.” Women and Shudras are grouped together in multiple passages — as categories of humanity requiring permanent supervision, incapable of autonomy, and unfit for learning.

    The Manusmriti does not merely describe inequality. It prescribes it as sacred duty — ordained by creation, enforced by punishment, and justified by divine law. It is, by any ethical standard that takes human dignity seriously, a blasphemy against it.

    These are not peripheral verses. They are the structural logic of the text. The Manusmriti does not merely describe inequality. It prescribes it as sacred duty — ordained by creation, enforced by punishment, and justified by divine law. It is, by any ethical standard that takes human dignity seriously, a blasphemy against it. This is what Ambedkar understood — and what he burned.

    But Ambedkar did not stop at rejection. He built the answer. The Indian Constitution, which Ambedkar went on to draft as Chairman of the Drafting Committee and which was adopted on 26 January 1950, is the most comprehensive and systematic repudiation of the Manusmriti’s vision of human society that any civilisation has ever produced. Every foundational provision of the Constitution is the precise negation of a Manusmriti prescription.

    Where the Manusmriti assigns human worth by birth, Article 14 guarantees equality before the law to every person. Where it prescribes differential punishment by caste, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. Where it declares that a Shudra is created to serve, Article 17 abolishes untouchability in all its forms and makes its practice a punishable offence. Where it assigns women to perpetual dependency, Articles 15 and 16 guarantee equal rights and opportunities regardless of gender. Where it reserves learning for the upper castes, the Constitution establishes education as a fundamental right for all.

    The Constitution does not merely reject caste. It replaces the entire ontological framework of the Manusmriti — the idea that human beings are born into fixed, divinely ordained hierarchies — with a radically different proposition: that sovereignty resides in the people, that every citizen carries equal dignity, and that the state exists to serve all of them without distinction. This is not merely a legal document. It is a civilisational achievement, and arguably the most important moral document India has ever produced — more consequential than any scripture, because it carries the binding force of law and the democratic legitimacy of a sovereign people’s collective commitment to one another.

    Which brings us to the present. There are political forces in India today that invoke the Manusmriti — not always openly, but through the framework of social hierarchy and caste assertion it codifies — and regard the Constitution’s egalitarianism not as India’s greatest moral achievement but as an obstacle, an imposition of Western liberal values on an ancient civilisation. This argument must be met head-on, because it is both historically false and civilisationally dangerous.

    The Constitution is as Indian as the Rigveda. It is more Indian than the Manusmriti, which codifies a hierarchy that India’s own deepest philosophical traditions — the Upanishadic teaching that the Atman is one in all beings, the Thirukkural’s insistence on a common human dignity, the Tamil Sangam’s declaration that every person is kin — explicitly reject.

    First, the Constitution is not a Western import. It was drafted by an Indian — among the most intellectually formidable Indians of the 20th century — who drew not only on Western constitutional traditions but on the Buddhist principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, on the Bhakti movement’s radical egalitarianism, and on his own lived experience as a Dalit denied water from a public well because of his birth. The Constitution is as Indian as the Rigveda. It is more Indian than the Manusmriti, which codifies a hierarchy that India’s own deepest philosophical traditions — the Upanishadic teaching that the Atman is one in all beings, the Thirukkural’s insistence on a common human dignity, the Tamil Sangam’s declaration that every person is kin — explicitly reject.

    Second, to elevate the Manusmriti above the Constitution is not a defence of Hindu civilisation. It is its betrayal. Hindu civilisation at its greatest has always been characterised by philosophical openness and the recognition that truth cannot be confined to a single text. The Manusmriti is not the tradition. It is a single prescriptive text from a single period — and it is contradicted by the tradition’s own deepest currents.

    Third — and this is the point that must be made most clearly — the Indian Constitution is the instrument through which India chose, as a sovereign people, to become something better than its worst historical inheritance. Every nation has texts and traditions that codify inequality. What distinguishes a civilisation is not the absence of such texts but the courage to repudiate them and the wisdom to build something better. Ambedkar gave India both: the courage to burn the Manusmriti, and the wisdom to write the Constitution.

    The choice India faces today is the same one Ambedkar posed in 1927, and the same one the Constituent Assembly resolved in 1950: whether India’s social and political order will be governed by a text that assigns human worth by birth — or by a document that declares, with the full force of democratic sovereignty, that every Indian citizen is born equal, lives equal, and deserves equal dignity, opportunity, and protection under the law. That is not a political question. It is a civilisational one. And for those of us who believe in India’s civilisational greatness — in the Rigveda’s declaration that truth has many names, in the Thirukkural’s universalism, in the Sangam poet’s conviction that every person is kin — the answer is not in doubt.

    The Constitution is not the enemy of Hindu civilisation. It is its finest modern expression.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), an independent policy research think tank in Chennai, grounded in the conviction that India’s civilisational greatness lies in its pluralism — and that the Indian Constitution is its most important institutional guarantee.

    This essay is a companion to the third article in the prologue in the series ‘India’s Strategic Choices and Civilisational Responsibilities,’ published at thepeninsula.org.in.

    Further Reading:

    On the Manusmriti

    Patrick Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Manava-Dharmasastra (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    The authoritative modern critical edition and translation; source for all verse citations in this essay.

    Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu (Penguin, 1991).

    On Ambedkar and the Mahad Satyagraha

    B.R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, vols. 1–17 (Government of Maharashtra, 1979–2003).

    Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (Hurst, 2005).

    Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Navayana, 2013).

    On the Mahad Satyagraha and the Manusmriti burning of 25 December 1927.

    On the Indian Constitution

    Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press, 1966).

    Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution (Oxford University Press, 1999).

    Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018).

    On Ambedkar’s intellectual sources

    B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957; repr. Oxford University Press, 2011).

    On the grounding of the Constitution’s egalitarian principles in Buddhist philosophy and the Bhakti tradition.

    On Hindu philosophical pluralism

    Rigveda, 1.164.46: Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.

    Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural. Trans. P.S. Sundaram (Penguin, 1990).

    Kaniyan Poongundranar, Purananuru 192: ‘Yaadhum Oorey, Yavarum Kelir.’

     

    Feature Image Credit: liberation.org.in

  • The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices, Civilisational Responsibilities, and the Contest for the Emerging World Order

    This is the second of a three-part prologue to a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    Ideological Engine crafted with Religious Endorsement

    In my previous post, I traced the material foundations of the current world order — the knowledge borrowed from the Islamic world, the wealth extracted from the Americas, two-thirds of humanity colonised and enslaved. It was the extraction, the enslavement, and the colonial architecture that built Western dominance. But material power alone does not sustain five centuries of global domination. It requires an ideological engine — a moral framework that converts extraction into mission, conquest into duty, and atrocity into the necessary price of civilisation. That engine was exceptionalism. And it was powered by religion.

    The mechanism was constructed with precision. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, authorising the King of Portugal to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ” and “reduce their persons to perpetual servitude.” Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended this authority to conquer the lands of infidels for “the salvation of all”. In 1493, following Columbus’s return from the Americas, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — the foundational document of the Doctrine of Discovery — declaring that any land not under Christian rule could be seized, its peoples subjugated, and its resources claimed, in the service of Christianising the world.

    Columbus at the court of Barcelona. Christopher Columbus standing before the King and Queen of Spain, presenting Indians and treasures from the New World, 1493. (Newscom TagID: whphotos146159.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

    These were not peripheral theological documents. They were the legal and moral architecture of the colonial project, establishing in explicit terms sanctioned by the highest religious authority in the Western world that non-Christians were less than human, that killing them was not a sin, and that converting or enslaving them was a sacred duty. The Doctrine of Discovery was subsequently incorporated into the legal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other settler-colonial states, where it shaped land law, property rights, and indigenous dispossession for centuries. The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery only in 2023 — more than five centuries after the damage was done.

    And here is what makes that repudiation hollow: the doctrine did not stay in the fifteenth century. It became the operating law of the settler-colonial states, and it remains so.

    In 1823, the United States Supreme Court, in Johnson v. McIntosh, formally incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery into American law. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples did not own their lands once those lands had been “discovered” by Christian colonists — that discovery itself conferred title on the discovering Christian nation, reducing the original inhabitants to mere occupants on their own soil. Marshall himself conceded the principle was “extravagant.” He made it law regardless. It has never been overturned. Two centuries later, it remains the foundation of all federal Indian law in the United States.

    Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place.

    The living force of this doctrine was demonstrated in 2023 — the very year of the Vatican’s repudiation. In Haaland v. Brackeen, the US Supreme Court affirmed the modern form of the doctrine: the “plenary power” of the federal government over Native peoples. The term is not incidental. Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century Popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place. The Vatican renounced the doctrine in March 2023. Three months later, in June, the highest court of the United States reaffirmed its modern expression as settled law. One institution let go of the fiction. The other continued to build on it.

    Terra Nullius and the Concepts of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny

    The pattern is not confined to the Americas. In Australia, the entire continent was claimed under the doctrine of terra nullius — the legal fiction that the land belonged to no one, that sixty thousand years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation and hundreds of distinct nations simply did not count as habitation. The Australian Constitution, when it came into force in 1901, contained Section 127, which declared that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” The original inhabitants of the continent were constitutionally excluded from the population of their own country. That exclusion was not removed until a referendum in 1967. The fiction of terra nullius itself was not overturned until the High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1992 — one hundred and ninety-two years after colonisation began.

    The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is the point that must be understood clearly. The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is not a distortion of Christianity. It is the documented institutional expression of a specific tradition within it: the doctrine that one’s own community occupies a uniquely chosen position in the divine order — that the Other is not merely different but lesser, and that this difference legitimates domination.

    The same logic operated, in different institutional forms, across other traditions. The conquering caliphates that used the concept of jihad to justify forced conversion were not the whole of Islamic tradition, which contains rich pluralist and humanistic streams. They were the weaponisation of religious exceptionalism by those who held political and military power. Political Zionism, in its most extreme contemporary expressions, follows the same pattern: the theological claim to exclusive divine right over territory and the dehumanisation of non-Jewish populations, ruthlessly visible from the Nakba in 1947-48 to the present conduct of the Gaza war, in full view of the world and with endorsement by the West. It follows the same pattern: religious exceptionalism converted into political licence for dispossession and violence.

    The pattern is not one religion. It is a specific logic — the claim to divine chosenness that exempts a community from the moral constraints that apply to others – that has been institutionalised, at different moments and in different traditions, wherever political power has found it useful.

    In Western civilisation, this logic found its most durable and consequential expression in American exceptionalism. In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, preparing to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called for the creation of a community that would be “as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” This was not yet a global claim.  It was a theological self-conception: a chosen people, on a divinely appointed errand, under special divine scrutiny. But the seed was planted. Two centuries later, in 1845, John L. O’Sullivan gave it political form: “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” God-given expansion across a continent — regardless of the peoples already living on it — was reframed as destiny, not conquest.

    The indigenous peoples of North America experienced what that destiny meant in practice. At Sand Creek in November 1864, a Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village whose chief, Black Kettle, was flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce. Roughly 150 people were killed, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly; the soldiers mutilated the dead and paraded body parts through the streets of Denver. Three separate investigations — two congressional, one military — condemned it as a massacre. Not one man was ever indicted. The campaigns that defined the conquest of the West — villages destroyed, food supplies burned, non-combatants killed as a matter of strategy — were not the excesses of rogue commanders. They were the method.

    And the men who carried them out were not disgraced but memorialised. George Armstrong Custer, who at dawn on the Washita River in 1868 attacked the village of that same Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek and was again seeking peace, killed him and his wife in the assault,  while his aggressive forces killed a large number of unarmed women and children. Custer was mythologised into a national hero, his death at the Little Bighorn recast as a noble sacrifice. This is exceptionalism completing its work: not merely committing the atrocity, but converting it, in the national memory, into valour. The conversion of conquest into heroism is not a distortion of the exceptionalist project. It is the project.

    It is worth pausing to see precisely how this engine is built, because it reveals something the comfortable version of history conceals. There are two broad models of colonialism, and they are not the same. Extractive colonialism — the Spanish in Peru, the British in India — needs the colonised population alive: to mine the silver, to work the plantations, to pay the taxes. It subjugates.

    But settler colonialism, of the kind practised in North America and Australia, does not primarily want the people. It wants the land. And a population that comes to stay on land already inhabited requires something darker than subjugation: it requires removal. The historian Patrick Wolfe named this the ‘logic of elimination’ — the observation that in the settler-colonial project, invasion is not an event but a structure, and the indigenous inhabitant is not a labour force to be exploited but an obstacle to be cleared. This is why the settler variant needed its ideological engine to run at maximum power. To subjugate a people, you need only believe they are lesser. To eliminate them, you must first erase them — conceptually, legally, theologically — before you erase them in fact. Terra nullius, the empty land; the savage without real title; the wilderness awaiting God’s chosen — these were not decorative rhetoric. They were the necessary vocabulary of replacement.

    A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    And here is the fact that removes every excuse: the conscience was present. It was not that no one knew, or that no one objected. Roger Williams argued in the 1630s that the Crown had no right to grant land it did not own, that it had to be purchased from its actual inhabitants — and he was banished for saying so. The Quaker John Woolman condemned the dispossession on moral grounds a century before it reached the Mississippi. When the Indian Removal Act came before the United States Congress in 1830, it passed by 102 votes to 97 — a bitter, closely fought debate, not a silent consensus. When the Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that they possessed sovereign rights the state was bound to respect. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and carried out the removal regardless; on the Trail of Tears that followed, thousands died. This is the point that must be held onto. A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    The same logic was exported globally. In 1898, the United States entered the Spanish-American War, having suggested to Filipino independence fighters that it was their ally against Spanish colonial rule. When Spain was defeated, the Philippines was not given its independence. It was purchased for twenty million dollars and then colonised. The Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians through violence, famine, and disease. McKinley called his policy “Benevolent Assimilation.” The Philippines did not receive full independence until 1946 — forty-eight years after the liberation that was promised.

    This is the pattern that repeats from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran: intervention justified as liberation, freedom invoked to mask extraction, and sovereignty violated in the name of the values that sovereignty was supposed to protect.

    The Civilisational Alternative 

    Now consider the contrast. India, China, and Persia are rooted in civilisational traditions that are fundamentally pluralist in their relationship to truth and the divine. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism do not claim exclusive possession of truth. They understand the search for ultimate reality as a path that admits multiple valid routes — that the divine is too vast and complex for any single tradition to comprehend fully. This epistemological humility produces a fundamentally different relationship to the Other: not as a lesser being to be converted or eliminated, but as a fellow traveller on a different path through the same reality — or, in the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image, rivers of many names flowing to a single shoreless ocean.

    A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    The distinction I am drawing must be stated carefully, because it is easy to misread as a claim that one civilisation is virtuous and another is wicked. That is not the claim, and it would be false. The impulse to dress conquest in sacred language is close to universal — it appears wherever power seeks to launder its crimes, and no civilisation, India’s included, is innocent of it. Ashoka built his empire by the sword before he turned to the dharma. India’s own caste hierarchy was given cosmic sanction, as I have argued elsewhere in examining the Manusmriti. The human capacity to summon the transcendent in defence of the indefensible is not the property of any one people. What differs is not the impulse to justify but what each tradition installs as its highest principle — and therefore what any justification of atrocity must first overcome. A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    One can still commit atrocity within such a tradition — humans always can — but one cannot easily make the tradition’s own highest principle bless it. A covenantal structure built on a chosen people, an exclusive truth, and a promised land contains that raw material at its theological core. It does not compel atrocity, and most who inherit it are decent people who read it toward mercy — the abolitionists and Roger Williams drew on it too. But the doctrine of chosenness is available to be weaponised in a way that Ekam Sat structurally is not. That is the civilisational difference that matters: not that one people is depraved and another pure, but that traditions differ in whether their deepest ideal resists the engine of exceptionalism or supplies its fuel.

    Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    This civilisational disposition is not merely philosophical. It expresses itself in conduct. In December 1971, India made the decision to intervene militarily in East Pakistan in response to one of the most egregious humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century — the Bangladesh genocide. The intervention was swift and decisive. Indian military forces liberated Bangladesh in thirteen days of formal war. Pakistani forces surrendered on December 16, 1971. The Indian military then withdrew completely. No occupation. No extraction. No installation of a client government. No strategic bases retained. Full sovereignty was transferred immediately to the people of Bangladesh. India returned over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war through the Simla Agreement. Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    These are not coincidental differences. They are civilisational ones. The world is now in contest over what the emerging order will be built upon. The declining Western order was built on exceptionalism — the claim to divine chosenness that converts domination into duty, secularised into legal doctrine but never abandoned. The Asian civilisational alternative — pluralist, non-exclusivist, epistemologically humble — offers a different foundation. India’s 1971 conduct is the most precise proof available that this alternative is not merely philosophical. It has been demonstrated operationally.

    The question is whether India — in Gaza, in Iran, in the institutions of the emerging world order — is willing to act consistently with the civilisational tradition it inherits.

    — This is the second in the series prologue.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that power without ethics is tyranny — and that India’s civilisational traditions offer the world something Western exceptionalism cannot.

     

    Further Reading:

    On the Doctrine of Discovery and the Papal Bulls

    Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452. Full Latin text and English translation: Doctrine of Discovery Project, doctrineofdiscovery.org.

    Pope Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.

    Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 4 May 1493.

    Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008).

    On the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation

    Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, ‘Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery,’ Vatican, 30 March 2023.

    On the incorporation and persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery in US law

    Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

    Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. 255 (2023).

    On the affirmation of ‘plenary power’ over Native peoples as the modern descendant of the Doctrine of Discovery, see the analysis by Peter d’Errico and the essays in the ‘200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh’ series, Canopy Forum, 2023.

    Robert J. Miller, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery in American Indian Law,’ Idaho Law Review, 42 (2005).

    Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    On Australia, terra nullius, and constitutional exclusion

    Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.

    Section 127, Constitution of Australia (repealed by referendum, 1967).

    Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987).

    Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Allen & Unwin, 2003).

    On Section 127 and the 1967 referendum: National Museum of Australia, ‘Indigenous Referendum,’ and George Williams’ analysis of the ‘race power’ in Australia’s constitutional history.

    On American exceptionalism — Puritan origins and Manifest Destiny

    John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’ (1630).

    John L. O’Sullivan, ‘Annexation,’ The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), July–August 1845.

    Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang, 1995).

    Hilde Eliassen Restad, American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Made a Nation and Remade the World (Routledge, 2014).

    On the Sand Creek Massacre and the conquest of the Plains

    U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians (38th Congress, 2nd Session, 1865).

    The contemporary Congressional investigation that condemned the massacre; the primary documentary record.

    Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

    On the Washita (1868), the killing of Black Kettle, and the pattern of village attacks; also on the mythologisation of George Armstrong Custer.

    Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Viking, 2010).

    On the Philippines, 1898–1946

    Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Random House, 1989).

    Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

    On India’s 1971 Bangladesh liberation

    Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).

    On Asian civilisational pluralism

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    The metaphor of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. See thiruarutpa.org.

     

  • Venezuela’s Earthquake Tragedy: A Natural Disaster that Worsened an Already Crisis-Stricken Nation

    Venezuela’s Earthquake Tragedy: A Natural Disaster that Worsened an Already Crisis-Stricken Nation

    On June 24, 2026 Venezuela experienced one of the most devastating natural disasters in its modern history when two powerful earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck within seconds of each other along the country’s north-central Caribbean coast. The shallow earthquakes, centred near Morón, sent powerful tremors across Caracas, La Guaira, Carabobo, Yaracuy and Miranda, causing widespread structural collapse, crippling transport networks, disrupting electricity supplies and severely damaging hospitals and other critical infrastructure. Hundreds of aftershocks further complicated rescue operations, making this the country’s strongest seismic event in more than a century.

    The Humanitarian Catastrophe

    The scale of destruction has been staggering. Thousands of buildings—including residential apartments, schools, hospitals and public facilities—either collapsed or suffered extensive damage. Rescue teams, supported by international search-and-rescue missions, continue to search through debris for survivors. Recent estimates place the death toll at well over 1,450, with more than 3,000 injured and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. While international humanitarian assistance has begun arriving from multiple countries, damaged roads, disrupted communications and recurring aftershocks have slowed relief efforts considerably. India on its part has sent two C-17 Indian Air Force aircrafts under Operation Amistad to aid the crisis stricken country.

    From a disaster management perspective, the earthquakes have exposed the vulnerability of ageing infrastructure and inadequate urban preparedness. Hospitals already operating with limited resources have struggled to cope with the influx of trauma patients, while shortages of medical equipment, emergency supplies and trained personnel have further constrained rescue and relief operations. As in many fragile states, the disaster has demonstrated how natural hazards become significantly more destructive when institutional capacity is weak.

    Geopolitics, Sovereignty and Venezuela’s Oil

    The earthquake also unfolded against an exceptionally volatile geopolitical backdrop. Barely six months earlier, Venezuela underwent a dramatic political transition following a U.S. military operation that resulted in the capture and removal of former President Nicolás Maduro. The operation generated widespread international debate, with several international law scholars, United Nations experts and governments describing it as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and questioning its compatibility with the principles of the UN Charter.

    The post-Maduro transition has also reshaped U.S.–Venezuela relations. Washington has moved towards supporting Venezuela’s interim administration, easing selected sanctions and reopening engagement with the country’s energy sector. Given that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves, renewed American interest in rebuilding the country’s petroleum industry has inevitably fueled geopolitical debate regarding the strategic importance of energy security in shaping U.S. policy. While some commentators argue that access to Venezuela’s vast oil resources has become a central strategic consideration, others view the engagement primarily through the lens of regional stability, democratic transition and humanitarian assistance. These competing interpretations continue to shape international discourse surrounding Venezuela’s future.

    A Disaster that Struck a Nation Already in Crisis

    This national tragedy is particularly severe because it has struck a country that has spent over a decade grappling with profound political, economic and humanitarian challenges. Years of economic contraction, hyperinflation, international sanctions, declining oil production, institutional deterioration and the migration of millions of Venezuelans have considerably weakened the state’s ability to prepare for and respond to major disasters. Public investment in infrastructure maintenance, healthcare and emergency management had already declined substantially before the earthquake, leaving many critical facilities vulnerable to seismic damage.

    Consequently, the earthquake has not merely created a humanitarian emergency; it has compounded an already fragile national situation. Reconstruction costs are expected to run into several billions of dollars at a time when Venezuela continues to face severe fiscal constraints. Although the country’s oil production infrastructure largely escaped catastrophic damage, disruptions to electricity networks, ports and petrochemical facilities have slowed industrial activity and complicated recovery efforts. The earthquake has therefore added another layer of economic uncertainty to a nation that was only beginning to show modest signs of stabilization after years of decline.

    Conclusion

    Venezuela’s twin earthquakes illustrate how natural disasters rarely occur in isolation. Instead, they intersect with existing political instability, economic fragility and geopolitical competition, magnifying their human and developmental consequences. While international relief efforts may alleviate immediate suffering, long-term recovery will require far more than rebuilding damaged infrastructure. It will depend upon restoring institutional capacity, strengthening governance, revitalizing the economy and ensuring that humanitarian assistance remains insulated from geopolitical contestation. For Venezuela, recovery is therefore not merely a question of reconstruction—it is a test of whether a nation burdened by years of crisis can rebuild both its physical landscape and its political future.

  • Kautilya, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: A Complementary Grammar of Strategy — and Why the Indian Tradition Begins with the King’s Self-Mastery

    Kautilya, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: A Complementary Grammar of Strategy — and Why the Indian Tradition Begins with the King’s Self-Mastery

    TPF’s Distinguished Adjunct Scholar, Andreas Herberg-Rothe analyses not only the interconnectedness between Kautilya, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz but develops a syntheised understanding that highlights Kautilya’s larger statecraft, realism, and the ethical underpinning exemplified later by one of India’s and the world’s greatest emperors – ‘Asoka the Great’.

     

    Abstract

    It is right to insist that any serious Indian debate on strategy must return to Kautilya. Kautilya is not merely one strategic thinker among others whom India happened to produce early, but the most complete account we possess of the state as a system — of war as one instrument within a standing order of economy, administration, intelligence, and alliance. Where I part company with the tendency to treat Kautilya as sufficient is this. A grammar of statecraft is not the whole of strategy. Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are not rivals to be defeated or predecessors to be surpassed; each addresses precisely what the other two leave dark. Clausewitz corrects Sun Tzu’s confidence that war can be won in the enemy’s mind before the first blow; Sun Tzu and Kautilya together correct Clausewitz’s fixation on the symmetrical clash of mass armies; Kautilya anchors both in the institutional foundation on which any campaign, and any peace, must stand. I therefore argue for two theses that operate along different axes. Horizontally, the three thinkers form a complementary system in which each compensates for the others’ blind spots. Vertically, within the Indian tradition itself, Kautilya’s realism already carries the seed of its own moral limit: the Rajarishi, the self-mastered king, is the hinge on which Ashoka’s later turn to Dharmavijaya could swing. Power without an ordering purpose is self-destructive, and a moral purpose without power is defenceless. That is why I begin with Kautilya — but do not end there. In the end, I attempt to apply my brief discussion of Kautilya, Clausewitz, and Sun Tzu to India’s situation.

    Why Begin with Kautilya

    In the Western reception, there is a habit of turning to Kautilya only as an exotic confirmation of something already believed — “the Indian Machiavelli”, as though the Arthashastra were a footnote to The Prince. I want to begin with Kautilya for three analytical reasons.

    First, the order of explanation. Sun Tzu tells us how to prevail in a campaign; Clausewitz tells us what happens when force is actually used; Kautilya tells us what must exist before either question can be asked — a treasury, an administration, an intelligence apparatus, a body of allies, a food supply. His Saptanga, or the seven limbs of the state, is not a list of assets but a theory of what a polity is. If we are looking for the ground on which the other two operate, it is here. To begin with Kautilya is to begin with the state, and only then to ask how it fights.

    Second, the Indian frame of the conversation is examined. This is a dialogue conducted in and about India, and it would be a small intellectual dishonesty to use Clausewitz as the measure against which the Arthashastra is graded. The more interesting movement runs the other way: to take Kautilya as the primary text and ask what the European and Chinese traditions add to it and where they expose its limits. This is the posture I adopt throughout.

    Third, the moral question is already present in Kautilya. The reason I do not treat Kautilya as a pure realist to be balanced, from the outside, by Ashokan ethics is that the balance is internal to his own text. He opens the Arthashastra not with tactics but with the education and self-conquest of the ruler. Begin anywhere else, and one misses the seed. Begin with Kautilya, and the path to Ashoka is already visible in the first book.

    Kautilya’s State: War as One Instrument Among Many

    Kautilya’s account of foreign policy and security in the Arthashastra is a pragmatic synthesis of realpolitik and administration. It treats the relentless pursuit of the state’s interest, the management of alliances, and comprehensive security as a single problem, refusing to separate the external from the internal: domestic stability and external deterrence are the same pillar seen from two sides. Five elements carry most of this weight.

    The Mandala: geography as the map of friendship and enmity

    Kautilya reads a state’s environment as a circle of states, the Mandala, in which relations are dictated less by sentiment than by position: the immediate neighbour is a presumptive rival; the state beyond the rival is a natural ally — the ancient form of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The Vijigishu, the would-be conqueror or the home state, must work this circle continuously through diplomacy, espionage, and alliance to maintain a regional balance. What matters for my argument is that the balance is structural and permanent, not the product of a single campaign.

    The six measures (Sadgunya): policy as a spectrum, not a switch

    Toward other states, Kautilya prescribes not a choice between peace and war but a graded set of six measures, selected by the balance of power of the moment:

    • Sandhi — peace: treaties made when the opponent is stronger, to buy time and rebuild.
    • Vigraha — hostility: open conflict when victory is likely, or provocation demands it.
    • Asana — neutrality: remaining still when neither attack nor submission is advantageous.
    • Yana — the expedition: active mobilisation and the march.
    • Samsraya — shelter: seeking the protection of a stronger power under immediate threat.
    • Dvaidhibhava — the double policy: peace with one power while preparing for war against another.

    The point is the continuity of the scale. War is not a rupture of politics but one register of it — a formulation to which I will return, because it is also, in a different key, the core of Clausewitz.

    The four expedients (Upaya): force as the last of four, not the first

    Before using force, Kautilya insists that peaceful avenues be exhausted. He orders them:

    • Sama — conciliation: negotiation and treaty.
    • Dana — gift: economic inducement or concession.
    • Bheda — dissension: the covert splitting of an adversary’s alliances from within.
    • Danda — punishment: the last resort of military or economic coercion when other means have failed.

    It is easy to read Bheda and Danda as evidence of unlimited cynicism. I think that is a misreading, and the reason is the placement: coercion is fourth, not first, and it is the servant of an order it does not itself define.

    Comprehensive security: the Saptanga and the ecology of the state

    Kautilya’s Saptanga, the seven limbs — sovereign, ministers, population, fortified towns, treasury, army, and allies — treats security as an interconnected ecology rather than a military department. He counts as threats not only invading armies but also famine, disease, and economic collapse; a powerful army, he warns, is worth nothing if the treasury is empty or the population is in revolt. This is what modern strategists relabel as “comprehensive security,” and it is the element of Kautilya that the twentieth century’s narrower schools most conspicuously lack.

    Intelligence as a permanent organ of the state

    A standing, state-run intelligence network is not an accessory to Kautilya’s system but one of its organs. Its agents gather foreign intelligence, gauge public mood, detect internal dissent, and assess the capabilities of allies and adversaries alike. For Kautilya, security is dual and requires continuous vigilance — outward against the rival and inward against decay — and the two are never separated.

    Three Thinkers, Three Grammars

    Set beside Kautilya, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz look less like competitors than like specialists in different parts of a single problem. All three are realists — none mistakes war for a moral pageant — but they are not, for that reason, immoralists. They simply enter the subject through different doors.

    • Kautilya — comprehensive statecraft. War is one instrument within a standing political, economic, and intelligence order.
    • Sun Tzu — the psychological and the subversive. The ideal is to win without fighting by breaking the opponent’s will and cohesion.
    • Clausewitz — the philosophy of war itself: its violence, its friction, its stubborn refusal to be dictated to by the opponent; “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

    Reduced to a sentence each: Sun Tzu teaches how to defeat the opponent’s mind; Clausewitz how to survive the violent clash; Kautilya how to run a state so secure that its rivals are undone before they know the contest has begun. Stated that way, the three are obviously incomplete on their own, which underpins my next argument.

    The Complementary System: How Each Compensates the Other

    The three should be read neither as competing dogmas nor as ingredients to be blended into a single syncretic paste. They form a dynamic system in which each addresses, quite precisely, the blind spots of the others. This is the horizontal axis of my argument, and it is where I most respectfully qualify the claim that Kautilya suffices.

    Kautilya compensates Clausewitz: the foundation and the aftermath

    Clausewitz’s genius lies in exposing war as a duel of reciprocal interaction — Wechselwirkung — and in locating its decision in the destruction of the enemy’s centre of gravity. However, his lens narrows to the clash. He tells us that war is an instrument of policy and says remarkably little about how a state builds the economic, social, and institutional resilience to endure a long conflict, still less about how to construct a durable peace after it. Kautilya fills exactly this void. The Saptanga presents military power as the product of a whole ecology — treasury, justice, alliance — rather than a free-standing lever. For him, war is a temporary phase within a permanent condition of statecraft, and military action is subordinated to a protective, welfare-oriented purpose (Yogakshema). Kautilya thus anchors Clausewitz’s volatile escalation on a foundation that can survive it.

    Clausewitz compensates Sun Tzu: the shock of reality against the illusion of control

    Sun Tzu’s fascination with deception, intelligence, and manoeuvre culminates in the ideal of subduing the enemy without fighting. The hidden danger is the assumption beneath it: that conflict can be run like a rational game of chess or wei-qi, in which a clever enough commander reads and moves every piece. This structurally underestimates what Clausewitz called the remarkable trinity: the primordial violence and passion of the people, the play of chance and friction in the hands of the commander, and the rational calculation of the government. Clausewitz is the reality check on Sun Tzu’s optimism. The adversary is an independent will whose hostility, courage, and counteraction (Gegenhandeln) can shatter the most elegant deception the moment violence is unleashed. While Sun Tzu assumes that the theatre can be read, Clausewitz insists on the non-linearity of force once it is in motion.

    Sun Tzu and Kautilya compensate Clausewitz: beyond the symmetrical clash

    Clausewitz’s model grows from a European tradition of symmetrical clashes between mass armies; his dialectic of attack and defence is at its sharpest in the open shock of forces. He attends far less to the asymmetric, the irregular, the purely psychological — to forms of conflict that bypass the battlefield altogether. Here, Sun Tzu and Kautilya jointly enlarge the field. Sun Tzu shows how informational asymmetry and psychological paralysis can collapse an enemy before a blow lands; Kautilya details Guda Yuddha, the clandestine war of subversion, diplomatic friction, and internal destabilisation, dismantling an opponent’s cohesion from within. The most decisive victories, on this combined view, often occur long before a Clausewitzian duel can take shape.

    The Vulnerability of Deception: A Critique of Sun Tzu

    The result is a balanced matrix rather than a hierarchy: Kautilya secures the institutional foundation; Sun Tzu reduces material costs through psychological agility; Clausewitz provides the analytical honesty to confront violence when it arises. Remove any one, and the account bleeds at the seam the other two were covering.

    Perhaps the most important aspect of Sun Tzu’s strategy is deceiving the enemy. However, this approach has a fundamental problem. In order to deceive the enemy, we must make our deception so realistic that we risk deceiving ourselves.

    A personal anecdote illustrates this point. During the era of “real existing socialism”, it was customary for the population to march in large crowds past the Politburo building in East Berlin. One participant explained it to me this way: “When these ‘crowds’ marched past the podium, they turned off, walked behind the stage, and then reappeared at the front.” He added that, initially, this had been a pleasant Sunday stroll with the family, but later, people had to run at a brisk pace because there were so few participants. Everyone knew the truth, yet everyone participated in the charade.

    However, a deeper structural problem was that although the Politburo members were technically aware of the operational deception, they gradually came to believe that their performance was genuinely being mistaken for reality by the outside world and by their own apparatus. In terms of Sun Tzu’s principle of deception, it becomes profoundly self-destructive if the political and military leadership believes their own deception is effective—and by doing so, they ultimately deceive themselves. They mistook the simulation for the baseline of power.

    The Clausewitzian Corrective

    This is precisely where the matrix requires Clausewitz’s analytical honesty to stabilise the structure. Sun Tzu’s deception operates in the realm of appearance, yet it remains a dangerous epiphenomenon. If a state relies too heavily on psychological manipulation, its strategic calculus becomes hollow. Clausewitz provides the necessary antidote to this self-induced “fog of war.” By anchoring strategy in the immutable, violent friction of reality and in the strict relationship between political purpose and material means, Clausewitz forces the strategist to look beyond the theatre.

    In the contemporary context of India’s rivalry with China, this critique is vital. While China employs Sun Tzu-inspired psychological and informational warfare to project an aura of absolute dominance, India must avoid competitive simulation. Kautilya could guarantee that India’s domestic and institutional foundations remain structurally sound. Clausewitz ensures that India retains the unvarnished analytical clarity to evaluate China’s actual material capabilities—rather than Beijing’s self-deceiving theatre—while preparing for the physical reality of conflict if deterrence fails.

    The Vertical Axis: From Danda to Dharma, from Kautilya to Ashoka

    The complementarity above is horizontal — three grammars of how a state contends. There is a second axis, vertical and internal to the Indian tradition, concerning the purpose of the instruments of power. It is here that I locate my disagreement with any reading of Kautilya as merely amoral, and here that the Kautilya–Ashoka relationship, so often drawn as mere opposition, is better drawn as a sequence. Machiavelli is the useful analogy: the sharp realism of The Prince serves, in the Discorsi, the longer survival and freedom of the republic. Kautilya’s pragmatism is likewise anchored in a wider order — Dharma, the moral and cosmic law. His ideal of the self-mastered king, the Rajarshi, is not the opposite of Ashoka’s later Dharmavijaya, victory through righteousness. It is its seed.

    Self-mastery (Indriya-jaya) as a hard security requirement

    Kautilya opens not with the army but with a discussion of the ruler’s character. The Rajarshi must achieve Indriya-jaya, the conquest of his own senses and passions — lust, anger, greed, arrogance, and vanity. This is not soft counsel. For Kautilya, a ruler’s ethical integrity is a national security requirement: a leader enslaved by his passions will corrupt the state and drag it to ruin. Read this forward, and Ashoka’s remorse after Kalinga, his turn away from conquest, is the historical fulfilment of Indriya-jaya — the king conquering his own imperial ambition in the service of a higher duty.

    Collective welfare (Yogakshema) as the purpose of the state

    One of Kautilya’s most cited lines states this point without ambiguity:

    “In the happiness of his subjects lies the king’s happiness; in their welfare, his welfare. What pleases himself he shall not consider as good, but whatever pleases his subjects he shall consider as good.”

    This is not the charter of a predatory elite. The state exists for Yogakshema — the security, livelihood, and welfare of its people — and coercion (Danda) is legitimate only because it holds back Matsya-nyaya, the law of the fish, in which the strong devour the weak. Ashoka adopted this protective philosophy in its entirety and expanded its radius. When he declared that “all men are my children”, he was extending Kautilya’s duty of care from a particular political community to all living beings.

    From power to righteousness: inversion, not demolition

    In Kautilya’s universe, coercion is the material instrument that upholds the moral law: without institutional power, justice cannot survive in an imperfect world, so power is subordinated to order. Ashoka’s achievement was not to dismantle the efficient Mauryan apparatus he inherited — an apparatus shaped through and through by Kautilyan principles — but to invert its priority. Recognising that conquest through raw Danda leaves generational trauma in its wake, he used the resilient vessel of the Kautilyan state to carry the universal ethic of the Dhamma. The machine was Kautilya’s; the purpose poured into it was Ashoka’s. That is why I hold that power without an ordering purpose is self-destructive, and a moral purpose without the machinery of power is defenceless — the two are complementary in exactly the same way that Kautilya and Ashoka are.

    Conclusion: A Framework for the Present Dialogue

    Ashoka’s ethical turn was not an ahistorical break; it was the flowering of a seed already present in Kautilya’s insistence on the king’s self-conquest and on welfare as the state’s purpose. This is the vertical lesson. The horizontal lesson is that no single tradition — not even one as complete as Kautilya’s — holds the whole of strategy: Clausewitz keeps us honest about violence, Sun Tzu about the mind, and Kautilya about the state that must outlast both. Put together, the two axes give a usable framework for the contemporary Indian debate: a strategy that is Kautilyan in its comprehensiveness, Sun Tzuan in its economy of force, Clausewitzian in its clear sight of what force actually is — and Ashokan in its sense of what all of it is finally for.

    My claim is only this: begin with Kautilya, by all means — but do not stop with him, and do not forget the Rajarshi who stands, self-mastered, at the very front of his book.

    Possible Strategic Implications for India’s Security Architecture

    1. Maritime Space and “Hinterindia” (Southeast Asia): Expanding the Mandala
    • The Clausewitzian/Kautilyan Baseline: Clausewitz’s Centre of Gravity (Schwerpunkt) in the Strait of Malacca cannot be controlled by India through mere operational posturing; it requires physical mass, sustained naval projection and logistical depth. This aligns with Kautilya’s insistence on Dravyaprakriti (the material resource base) and Durga/Kosha (fortifications and financial reserves) as the mandatory prerequisites for external power projection. Through the lens of India’s Act East Policy, “Hinterindia” (Southeast Asia/ASEAN states) constitutes the outer ring of Kautilya’s Mandala theory—the “neighbours of the neighbour” who share India’s existential concerns regarding Chinese expansionism.
    • The Sun Tzu Leverage & The Critique of Deception: Sun Tzu’s hierarchy of success dictates that we must “prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces.” China attempts to counter this by creating a simulated narrative of inevitable regional hegemony, seeking to deceive Southeast Asian nations into bandwagoning with it.
    • The Strategic Balance: India must counter China’s psychological narrative not with empty rhetoric but by offering a robust institutional and material alternative for Southeast Asia (e.g., defence exports such as BrahMos missile transfers and shared maritime domain awareness). By anchoring Kautilya’s Mandala in tangible material foundations, India may create a structural counterweight to “Hinterindia.” This turns Sun Tzu’s “victory without battle” into a tangible reality: China’s strategy to dominate the Strait of Malacca is thwarted because the littoral states of Southeast Asia are firmly integrated into a resilient, material balancing system led by New Delhi.
    1. The Two-Front Reality: Prakashayuddha (West) vs. Tushnimyuddha (East and Cyber)
    • The Clausewitzian/Kautilyan Baseline: India faces two fundamentally different forms of warfare that demand distinct structural foundations. On the Western Front (Pakistan), India confronts Prakashayuddha—open, visible, conventional warfare. This theatre is dominated by Clausewitz’s trinitarian element of “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity.” It is a highly emotionalised, zero-sum clash, with the danger of rapid escalation to absolute war ever-present. Conversely, in the Eastern and Maritime domains (China), the conflict takes the form of Tushnimyuddha—the silent, concealed grey-zone warfare. This involves cyber subversion, maritime encirclement, and informational pressure, aimed at eroding India’s power from within before a single shot is fired.
    • The Sun Tzu Leverage and Critique of Deception: Pakistan has historically used asymmetric deception (proxy networks and nuclear brinkmanship) to mask its internal systemic decline. Applying the critique of self-deception, Pakistani leadership became victims of their own theatre—believing their deceptive proxies could paralyse India, while in reality this strategy hollowed out Pakistan’s economic and institutional foundations (Saptanga). In the East, China utilises highly sophisticated, automated deception (AI-driven cyber operations and the “Three Warfares” narrative) to project an aura of absolute dominance over the Indo-Pacific.

    The Strategic Balance:

    • In the realm of Prakashayuddha (the West): India needs the unvarnished analytical honesty of Clausewitz to confront raw violence without allowing the conflict’s emotionality to dictate its grand strategy. India must economise on this front through unyielding, visible conventional deterrence, ensuring that Pakistan’s self-deceiving provocations do not drain India’s core resources.
    • In the realm of Tushnimyuddha (East/Cyber): India cannot counter China’s silent warfare with empty psychological manoeuvres. True resilience in Tushnimyuddha requires solid domestic, institutional, and societal foundations. In the cyber domain, this means building domestic technological sovereignty and public trust to make society immune to external fractures. By standing firmly on its own domestic ground (Saptanga), India can ensure that its political purpose (Clausewitz) remains independent.
    1. The China-USA Dilemma: Strategic Autonomy in a Multi-Polar Mandala
    • The Clausewitzian/Kautilyan Baseline: Clausewitz strictly warns that the political purpose must always remain the “original measure” of war. If India relies on the USA to balance China, it risks subordinating its political objectives to Washington’s global design and fracturing its strategic autonomy. Kautilya resolves this dilemma through the Saptanga theory, in which the state’s internal pillars (Swami-Amatya-Janapada) must be structurally robust enough to resist external co-optation.
    • The Sun Tzu Leverage: Sun Tzu warns against protracted external dependencies and conflicts that drain the state’s core resources: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
    • The Strategic Balance: To preserve strategic autonomy between China and the US, India’s deterrence cannot be borrowed or faked—it must spring from its own Comprehensive National Power. Kautilya’s Shadgunya framework permits temporary, transactional alignments (Samsraya), strictly as a breathing space to build internal material strength. Combined with Clausewitz’s insistence on the primacy of the independent political purpose, India should use its relationship with the US not as a strategic crutch but as an institutional catalyst to accelerate its domestic economic, technological, and military foundations. Deterrence against China is thus achieved not by proxy diplomacy but by the undeniable structural weight of a self-reliant Indian state.
    1. Strategic Autonomy and Internal Emancipation: Beyond the Prussian and Meiji Trap
    • The Structural Challenge: True structural deterrence against an external adversary such as China cannot coexist with deep systemic fragmentation at home. India’s historical vulnerabilities—the persistence of the caste system, the marginalisation of Dalits, and pervasive poverty—constitute severe internal fractures (Vyasanas) in Kautilyan terms. Kautilya’s warnings against internal rebellion (Abhyantara-Kopa) explicitly state that internal fractures are far more dangerous than external invasion. A state that systematically excludes or impoverishes a vast segment of its population violates the core principle of Yogakshema (the material and moral welfare of the people).
    • The Historical Matrix: Historically, states facing existential external pressure have often resorted to a “revolution from above” to modernise their societies, as seen in 19th-century Prussia and Meiji Japan. However, both historical trajectories fell into the trap of hyper-militarism by subordinating the entire social fabric to the military apparatus, ultimately leading to catastrophic conflicts.
    • The Kautilyan Alternative: Kautilya’s Saptanga framework offers a safeguard against militaristic traps. Unlike the Prussian or Japanese models, which elevated the military (Danda) to an absolute end in itself, Kautilya strictly subordinates military force to civil governance (Amatya), as Clausewitz does, and to the material welfare of the population (Yogakshema).
    • The Strategic Balance: For contemporary India, overcoming internal problems is not a secondary moral goal but a primary strategic imperative. A just, inclusive, and cohesive society is India’s ultimate defence infrastructure. By operationalising national self-preservation and defensive modernisation as vehicles for internal emancipation—expanding technical education, institutional trust, and industrial opportunities for the most marginalised echelons of society—India can dismantle archaic barriers through the pragmatic necessity of its national survival. Securing the external realm is achieved by immunising the domestic foundation.
    1. Epilogue: The Civilizational Horizon and Intercultural Recognition
    • The Demographic Gravity of the Northern Belt: Looking beyond the immediate operational timeline towards 2050, India’s long-term geopolitical architecture cannot be detached from global demographic shifts. While the Russian Federation faces a massive population surge along its southern “Islamic belt,” from New Delhi’s geographic perspective, this same space constitutes an expansive northern and western Islamic belt. A purely militaristic and exclusionary response to this demographic reality is unsustainable. Instead, this development demands a shift from religious fragmentation to a broader civilisational paradigm. While religions, by their doctrinal nature, tend toward theological exclusion, civilisations have historically possessed the capacity for pluralistic inclusion and cross-cultural balance.
    • The Balance of Kautilya and Ashoka: To articulate a genuinely Indian contribution to the global order without falling into the ideological trap of contemporary Hindu nationalism (Hindutva), India’s strategic culture must synthesise its two foundational, dialectical pillars: Kautilya and Ashoka. Kautilya provides the unyielding institutional, economic, and structural baseline (Saptanga) necessary to preserve state survival and sovereignty. Yet this material power remains hollow—and prone to internal fracturing—without Ashoka’s ethical and universalist horizon. Ashoka’s edicts did not establish a homogeneous religious empire but rather a civilisational space anchored in Dhamma (righteousness, social ethics, and mutual tolerance), which actively accommodated diverse belief systems and ethnicities.

    Selected works by the author:

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas, Clausewitz’s puzzle. The political theory of war. OUP: Oxford 2007. (published in Chinese in 2020).

    References to Kautilya:

    • Encyclopaedia Britannica Online; Entry: “Artha-shastra” com.

    The entry defines the Arthaśāstra not merely as a military manual, but as a comprehensive treatise on statecraft that integrates legal codes, economic management, and administrative systems into a unified standing order. It explicitly demonstrates how external warfare and foreign policy are treated as internal instruments of a highly organised, centralised state apparatus, which relies extensively on domestic stability, economic oversight, and sophisticated intelligence networks

    • Encyclopaedia.com

    “Kautilya” https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/britain-ireland-france-and-low-countries/british-and-irish-political-geography/kautilya

    This text emphasises the rigorous institutional and structural foundations of Kautilya’s polity, outlining how military campaigns are subordinate to and dependent upon a robust domestic administration. It details Kautilya’s intricate systems of taxation, social welfare, and resource regulation, illustrating that a state’s capacity for external war or lasting peace must firmly stand on its internal institutional infrastructure.”

    The article challenges the reductionist view of Kautilya as a purely amoral realist, highlighting that the Arthaśāstra is fundamentally concerned with securing the welfare and prosperity of its citizens under a just government. This underscores that the king is not an absolute despot but merely one of seven interdependent institutes of the state (Saptanga), tasked with safeguarding the good of the people in a dharma-sanctioned manner. This structural insistence on the sovereign’s self-discipline directly anchors the moral limits of power, providing the conceptual bridge to the tradition’s later ethical evolution.”

    A note on further sources about Clausewitz, Kautilya, and Sun Tzu:

    For readers who wish to check the argument against the texts rather than against summaries of them, the standard points of entry are as follows:

    • Kautilya, The Arthashastra, ed. and trans. L. N. Rangarajan (Penguin, 1992); and R. P. Kangle, The Kautiliya Arthasastra, 3 vols. (Motilal Banarsidass) — the Saptanga, the Sadgunya, and the Upaya are set out in Books 6–7, the education and self-mastery of the ruler in Book 1.
    • Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford, 1963) or Roger Ames (1993) — “to subdue the enemy without fighting” and “all warfare is based on deception” appear in chapters 3 and 1, respectively.
    • Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976) — the definition of war as the continuation of policy, the remarkable trinity, and friction are in Book 1; see also A. Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz’s Puzzle (Oxford, 2007).
    • On Ashoka, the Rock and Pillar Edicts in Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford, rev. ed.) — “all men are my children” is from the Separate Rock Edict at Dhauli/Jaugada.

    Feature Image and other Images: Made with AI assistance

  • The World Order we Inherited — and Why it must Change

    The World Order we Inherited — and Why it must Change

    This is the first in a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    The Material Foundations of Western Power

     

    The world of strategists is familiar with the quote of Lord Palmerston, Britain’s nineteenth-century Prime Minister. He famously declared: “There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.”

    Lord Palmerston

    As a description of statecraft, this is not wrong. Every civilisation that has endured has pursued its interests — including the ones this series will spend considerable space defending. Kautilya’s Rajamandala is, at its core, a theory of interest-based alignment. The Cholas sailed across the Bay of Bengal to protect Tamil trading interests. No serious tradition of statecraft has ever pretended that interest does not matter, and none should.

    The question worth asking is not whether interests are permanent. It is whether anything else is.

    Palmerston’s formulation, taken as a complete theory of how a state should conduct itself — not as one true observation among several, but as the only thing that needs ever to be consulted — becomes something different. It becomes a licence. If interest is permanent and nothing else is, then ethical limits on how interest is pursued are, by definition, temporary: honoured when convenient, discarded when not. That is not realism. That is realism with the safety catch removed.

    This is the civilisational fork in the road, and four hundred years of history show which branch the dominant powers took — and still take.

    The Islamic Golden Age — spanning roughly the 8th to the 14th century — was one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. Scholars at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom undertook a systematic, state-sponsored project of translation and synthesis: gathering the accumulated knowledge of Greece, Persia, India, and China, translating it into Arabic, and building upon it with original contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, optics, and chemistry. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine became a foundational text in European universities. Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle shaped medieval European philosophy.

    Exhibit in Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon – Photo by Author

    Europe in the early medieval period was not the centre of the world. It was its periphery — impoverished, fragmented, and in the grip of what its own historians call the Dark Ages. While Europe’s literacy rates collapsed and theological conformity suppressed inquiry, something extraordinary was unfolding in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo. The Islamic Golden Age — spanning roughly the 8th to the 14th century — was one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. Scholars at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom undertook a systematic, state-sponsored project of translation and synthesis: gathering the accumulated knowledge of Greece, Persia, India, and China, translating it into Arabic, and building upon it with original contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, optics, and chemistry. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine became a foundational text in European universities. Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle shaped medieval European philosophy. The numeral system through which all modern mathematics operates — including the zero — came to Europe through the Arabic transmission of Indian mathematics. This was not borrowing. It was the rescue and synthesis of civilisational knowledge — and without it, the European Renaissance would have had no foundation on which to build.

    The numeral system through which all modern mathematics operates — including the zero — came to Europe through the Arabic transmission of Indian mathematics. This was not borrowing. It was the rescue and synthesis of civilisational knowledge — and without it, the European Renaissance would have had no foundation on which to build.

    Europe’s intellectual reawakening in the 14th and 15th centuries drew directly on this Islamic transmission. The Renaissance, together with the gunpowder revolution and the state system formalised at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, gave European civilisation (viewing it as a single civilisation may not be truly appropriate – disparate kingdoms, fused by the race for maritime trade dominance and military conquest – Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Russian, etc.) something it had never possessed before: military-technological superiority, organised state power, and the bureaucratic capacity to project both across the world.

    This wealth — extracted through conquest, forced indigenous labour, and the systematic destruction of existing civilisations — capitalised the European empires that would go on to colonise two-thirds of the world

    Columbus – Truth vs Myth

    The rise of the West that followed the maritime route discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama needs to be understood correctly, devoid of the myths built around them. The West celebrates them, but the truth is they were plunderers who unleashed the genocidal expansion of the West. This truth is now being brought out by brilliant and unbiased historians such as Howard Zinn and Utsa Patnaik. Howard Zinn writes – ” what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons – the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay for the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism…These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.”

    What followed was not a story of civilisational achievement. It was a story of extraction on a scale without precedent in human history — extraction conducted on the understanding that, once interest was engaged, nothing else needed to be weighed. From the Americas alone, Spanish colonial mining operations extracted approximately 150,000 metric tonnes of silver between 1500 and 1800 — representing 80 to 90 per cent of global silver production over three centuries. By 1600, 25,000 tonnes of silver had crossed the Atlantic. This wealth — extracted through conquest, forced indigenous labour, and the systematic destruction of existing civilisations — capitalised the European empires that would go on to colonise two-thirds of the world. The Atlantic slave trade transported an estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans into forced labour over three centuries.

    The British were ruthless in pursuing their interests at the expense of the people and the geography of their colonial empire, particularly in India. The economy under the British Raj was not a system of governance or development – it was a system of systematic wealth extraction unprecedented in scale and duration. From 1765 (when Robert Clive obtained the Diwani Rights, that is, the right to collect taxes and revenue, from the Mughal emperor as a result of the Battle of Buxar) to 1947 – 182 years – Britain drained India’s wealth through every possible mechanism. The scale of this drain was staggering. Britain extracted the equivalent of about $45 trillion (in current dollar terms) from India during its colonial rule. This wasn’t accidental impoverishment or the natural result of economic evolution. This was deliberate policy, implemented systematically through revenue extraction, deindustrialisation, trade manipulation, and infrastructural control.

     

    500-year Commemoration of Vasco-da-Gama’s voyage to India -Lisbon – defining moments of colonialism. Photo by Author
    The Russian empire was equally consumed by Western Europe’s passion for colonies. Catherine the Great, Russian Empress and originally a German princess, was a ruthless expansionist of the Russian Empire. However, Russia differed significantly from Western colonialism. Catherine the Great’s Statue in St. Petersburg. Photo by Author.

    None of this was an aberration from Western values. It was the expression of them. Palmerston’s formulation was not a description of how all states behave. It was a justification for a specific civilisational approach: that power exists to be exercised without ethical constraint, that the strong may do what they will, and that the legitimating language of civilisation, Christianity, and later human rights, are instruments of justification rather than a genuine limits on conduct.

    Slavery was the most crucial contributor to the West’s development. This was a critical element of the transatlantic world. exhibit in the African American Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo by Author.

    The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 is its most clinical illustration. Otto von Bismarck convened the European powers to divide Africa between them. Not a single African leader was present. A request by the Sultan of Zanzibar to attend was dismissed. The Congo basin — a territory larger than Western Europe, home to millions of people with ancient civilisations, cultures, and governance systems — was assigned as the personal property of Belgian King Leopold II, one of the vilest European monarchs in human history. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Congolese were worked to death on rubber plantations. Those who failed their quotas had their hands amputated. Leopold accumulated one of the largest personal fortunes in history from the proceeds.

    This was not an exceptional act of cruelty. It was Palmerston’s formulation taken to its logical and undiluted conclusion.

    Whatever the merits claimed for each individually, taken together they represent the same formula: interest declared permanent, leading to the ruthless pursuit of national interests; ethical limits declared situational, that is, practically irrelevant.

    The pattern did not end with empire. It changed vocabulary. The wars launched and led by the United States since 2001 — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond — were conducted in the language of security, liberation, and the defence of human rights. By the most careful independent estimates, their costs have run into the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and their stated justifications have repeatedly diverged from their actual outcomes. Whatever the merits claimed for each individually, taken together they represent the same formula: interest declared permanent, leading to the ruthless pursuit of national interests; ethical limits declared situational, that is, practically irrelevant. The vocabulary had changed since 1884. The structure of the choice had not.

    The economic register tells the same story. The formal end of colonialism did not end the system. It adapted it. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, established at Bretton Woods in 1944, became the institutional mechanisms through which the global south’s economic policies were directed from Washington. Structural adjustment programmes imposed fiscal austerity, market liberalisation, and debt dependency on nations that had barely emerged from colonial rule.

    Francophone West Africa became perhaps the most striking contemporary illustration of this persistence. Fourteen countries continued to use the CFA franc — a currency whose reserves were held in the French Treasury, whose exchange rate was set in Paris, and whose monetary sovereignty had never been genuinely transferred since formal independence. Long-term analysis tells the structural story: The Ivory Coast reached its peak in income per capita in 1978, in less than two decades after independence. It then stagnated over the next fifty years. Niger reached its highest level in 1965 — the year of independence. Seven decades of formal sovereignty. Not a single decade of genuine economic progress. France’s control was not only monetary. It was political and military. French intelligence maintained deep ties with governing elites. French military bases ensured that no elected government that moved too far from French interests would survive. The system corrupted the democratic process itself.

    When Thomas Sankara became President of Burkina Faso in 1983 and attempted to secure genuine sovereignty — nationalising land, refusing IMF debt, building schools and healthcare, and articulating a vision of African self-reliance — he was assassinated in 1987. French agents were present in the capital the following day. Blaise Compaoré, who replaced him, immediately reversed every policy of sovereignty and ruled for 27 years. When a popular uprising removed him in 2014, French troops exfiltrated him to the Ivory Coast. He was later convicted in absentia by a Burkinabe court and sentenced to life imprisonment for Sankara’s murder. The system did not merely extract wealth. It murdered the leaders who sought to end the extraction.

    “Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds” – Captain Ibrahim Traore

    Then, between 2021 and 2023, something changed. A new generation of young, educated, patriotic military officers — shaped by Sankara’s tradition — moved. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States, expelled French and American military forces, and announced their intention to abandon the CFA franc entirely. Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traore declared: “Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds.” These are not coups in the traditional sense. They are the consequence of a system that used democratic institutions as a mechanism of foreign control for seven decades. As I write this essay, Burkina Faso officially severed all diplomatic relations with France on June 26, 2026. The African nation’s Communications Minister announced the decision on national television, stating that the essential conditions for mutual respect, trust, and non-interference were absent. President Ibrahim Traore accused Paris of harbouring “neo-colonial ambitions,” backing terrorist groups, and acting against Burkinabe interests. African countries are rising against the strangulating control of the West and its neo-colonialism of the last seven decades.

    This is the order that India inhabits. This is the order India is being asked to join as a rising power. The contest for a new world order is not simply a geopolitical competition between states. It is a civilisational question —not the one Palmerston’s critics often imagine. The question is not whether a rising power will have permanent interests. Of course it will, and should. The question is whether it will articulate, with equal permanence and equal seriousness, the ethical limits within which those interests are pursued — limits that hold even when honouring them is costly.

    India has the history, the philosophy, and the standing to make that commitment. The question is whether it has the will.

    —

    Further Reading:

    On Palmerston’s statement and interest-based statecraft

    Lord Palmerston, Speech to the House of Commons, 1 March 1848. Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 97, cols. 66–123.

    Kautilya, Arthashastra, Books VI–VII (Mandala theory of interstate relations). Trans. R.P. Kangle, The Kautiliya Arthashastra, 3 vols. (University of Bombay, 1960–65).

    On the Islamic Golden Age and knowledge transmission to Europe

    George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007).

    Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation (Bloomsbury, 2009).

    Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (Routledge, 1998).

    Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (Wiley, 2000). On the transmission of Hindu-Arabic numerals, including the zero.

    On colonial extraction — the Americas

    Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-18th Century,’ Journal of World History, 13(2), 2002.

    Source for the 150,000-tonne / 80–90% global silver production estimates, 1500–1800.

    Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Harvard University Press, 1934).

    Foundational source for the c. 25,000-tonne figure by 1600.

    On the Atlantic slave trade

    David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010).

    The Slave Voyages Database, Emory University. slavevoyages.org.

    Basis for the 12–15 million estimate.

    On the Berlin Conference and the Congo Free State

    Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

    S.E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885 (Longmans, 1942).

    Matthew Craven, ‘Between Law and History: The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,’ London Review of International Law, 3(1), 2015.

    On the Sultan of Zanzibar’s exclusion.

    On post-2001 conflicts and civilian costs

    Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. costsofwar.org.

    Cumulative estimates of direct and indirect deaths in post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen).

    Iraq Body Count project. iraqbodycount.org.

    Independent database of documented civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003.

    Gilbert Burnham et al., ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,’ The Lancet, 368(9545), 2006.

    One of several widely-cited epidemiological estimates; cited to indicate the range of credible estimates rather than to adjudicate between methodologies.

    On Bretton Woods, the IMF/World Bank, and structural adjustment

    Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2014).

    Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers (Cornell University Press, 2006).

    On the CFA franc and Francophone West Africa

    Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story (Pluto Press, 2021).

    World Bank, World Development Indicators (databank.worldbank.org).

    Basis for the Ivory Coast (1978 peak) and Niger (1965 peak) GDP per capita figures.

    On Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré

    Ernest Harsch, Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary (Ohio University Press, 2014).

    On the French intelligence presence following the 1987 coup: reporting by Jeune Afrique and Radio France Internationale (RFI), 1987.

    On Compaoré’s 2014 exfiltration: Reuters and Agence France-Presse, October 2014.

    On Compaoré’s conviction: ‘Burkina Faso: Blaise Compaoré sentenced to life in prison over Thomas Sankara’s assassination.’ Reuters, 6 April 2022.

    On the Alliance of Sahel States (2021–2024)

    Formation of the Alliance of Sahel States, September 2023, and withdrawal from ECOWAS, January 2024: Reuters, Al Jazeera, and AfricaNews coverage, 2023–2024.

    Captain Ibrahim Traoré, ‘Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds.’ Public addresses, widely reported across pan-African and international media, 2023–2024.

    On the closure of the US drone facility at Agadez, Niger: ‘Niger orders US military to leave the country.’ BBC News, 17 March 2024.

    —

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), an independent policy research think tank in Chennai, rooted in the conviction that governance must serve conscience and that the world order India helps shape must be grounded in ethics, not merely in interests.