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  • 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.

  • Guyana’s Energy Rise and the US-China Contest

    Guyana’s Energy Rise and the US-China Contest

    Introduction

    In just five years after oil production began, Guyana has become the world’s largest per-capita oil producer and South America’s second-largest supplier of crude. Daily output now stands at ~926,000 barrels, with recoverable reserves exceeding 11 billion barrels in the Stabroek Block alone. Guyana has recorded a GDP growth of 43.6 per cent in 2024, one of the fastest rates globally. The former British colony has very rapidly transitioned from being a peripheral Caribbean economy to a strategically significant energy producer. This has attracted growing attention from both the United States and China, both seeking to secure economic, political and strategic influence in the world’s newest petro state. The manner in which Georgetown navigates and hedges against great-power competition over its resources shall determine whether its oil wealth translates into prosperity or succumbs to the familiar resource curse.

    The Energy Architecture

    Guyana’s transition has been remarkably rapid, with commercial oil production commencing in December 2019, within five years after ExxonMobil’s discovery in 2015. The Stabroek consortium, comprising ExxonMobil (45 per cent), Chevron (30 per cent) and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) (25 per cent), has invested billions in developing Guyana’s offshore resources. CNOOC alone has committed approximately $17.7 billion across six projects, making Guyana the company’s largest overseas investment. ExxonMobil projects production to reach 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030, placing Guyana among the world’s major non-OPEC producers.

     

    Guyana’s energy strategy also goes beyond crude extraction. The Guyanese government is pursuing downstream industrialisation through the $2 billion Gas-to-Energy project, which will transport offshore natural gas to a 300-megawatt power plant at Wales. Supported by a $526 million loan from the US Export-Import Bank, it aims to reduce electricity costs and support the development of a domestic manufacturing base. The participation of companies such as TotalEnergies, QatarEnergy and Petronas indicates efforts to broaden the investor base beyond the Stabroek consortium. At the same time, the continued political consensus around the original Stabroek production-sharing agreement between the Guyanese government and the Stabroek consortium has provided a degree of policy predictability through the 2030s.

    Washington’s Role

    The United States has moved quickly to leverage Guyana’s newfound energy boom into a broader strategic partnership. In March 2026, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright met President Irfaan Ali ahead of the inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit, describing Guyana as “a huge part of this strategy, a very well-governed country with great energy resources”. The summit established the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition, including Georgetown among a select group of participating Caribbean states. While it has been officially framed as a counter-transnational crime initiative, the initiative reflects broader US efforts to strengthen its security presence in the Caribbean and refocus attention on the Western hemisphere.

    US engagement has also deepened militarily, with the USS Normandy and USS Mahan conducting exercises with the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) in 2025, while US Army Security Force Assistance Brigades have trained GDF units in jungle warfare and engineering since 2022. Washington has also supported the development of coast guard facilities and communications infrastructure, aiming to strengthen Guyana’s security amid continuing tensions over the Essequibo dispute with neighbouring Venezuela. The growing American footprint in Guyana is visible in the consolidation of Washington’s economic and strategic presence across Guyana’s energy, infrastructure and security sectors. Guyana’s strategic value to Washington also lies in its geography, where a sustained American presence in Georgetown helps shape the trajectory of a post-Maduro Venezuela, particularly as the question of whether Caracas drifts back into Beijing’s or Moscow’s orbit remains unresolved through the medium term.

    Beijing’s Parallel Track

    China’s presence in Guyana differs in scope and character. CNOOC is a passive financial partner in the Stabroek block, earning returns from a basin operated primarily by US energy companies. However, CNOOC has leveraged this expertise, earning secure production-sharing contracts for two offshore blocks in Trinidad and Tobago, citing its experience in Guyana.

    For Georgetown, Beijing has emerged as a significant infrastructure and development partner. Guyana signed a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) memorandum in 2018 and is negotiating a Joint Action Plan. Chinese state entities have financed or constructed major projects, including the expansion of the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, the $260 million Demerara River Bridge, East Coast road upgrades, and the $184 million East Coast rail-highway project. Beyond existing ones, Chinese developmental financing has been associated with prospective projects, including a deep-water harbour and the Amaila Falls hydropower project. Beijing has also provided approximately $36.6 million in debt relief, helping it earn political goodwill without generating the levels of debt distress seen elsewhere in the Caribbean. At the same time, Guyana’s trade asymmetry is visible, with its non-oil exports to China at $17 million in 2022, while imports from China are multiple times higher at $372 million. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei has emerged as a major player in Guyana’s telecommunications sector, drawing scrutiny from Washington on data governance and cybersecurity, amplified by cybersecurity researchers and Guyanese civil society.

    Venezuela’s Shadow

    For Guyana’s rise, the unresolved Essequibo dispute continues to cast a long shadow, with Caracas having escalated its rhetoric under former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. With Maduro’s removal, the risk of military escalation over the Essequibo has diminished, and the transition government in Caracas is likely to prioritise political stabilisation and economic recovery. However, the medium to long-term challenge for Georgetown remains economic, as Venezuela, which is gradually integrating into global energy markets, will compete with Guyana for the same Gulf Coast refining demand. Guyana’s growth opportunity remains intact, provided that the Caribbean remains within the US security umbrella and the Venezuelan energy sector’s recovery remains gradual.

    Guyana’s Balancing

    Amid intensifying great power competition, Guyana has sought to pursue multi-alignment. President Irfaan Ali’s re-election in September 2025 has ensured continuity in economic and foreign policy at a critical moment in the country’s growth story. Alongside the expansion of hydrocarbon production, Georgetown has pursued a dual-track approach to balance its oil-led growth by advancing its Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030 using its extensive forest cover to generate revenue through carbon credit mechanisms, including a $750 million agreement with Hess Corporation. At the same time, Georgetown has maintained close security and economic cooperation with the United States, retaining Chinese participation in the energy and infrastructure sectors, and continuing its adherence to Beijing’s One China policy. These policies reflect Guyana’s attempt to advance its economic and strategic objectives pragmatically, while seemingly preserving strategic autonomy by leveraging external partnerships.

    The Outlook

    By 2030, Guyana’s oil production could reach 1.7 million barrels per day. As the country’s energy sector grows, competition between the United States and China is likely to intensify in areas such as infrastructure and digital connectivity. While souring relations between Guyana and Venezuela increases Georgetown’s security dependence on Washington, a stable regional environment would allow Guyana to pursue a balanced foreign policy and more diversified external partnerships. Ultimately, Guyana is better positioned than other petrostates to convert its hydrocarbon wealth into prosperity, with the Natural Resource Fund Act of 2019 and the Stabroek production-sharing structure indicating a stable economic and institutional architecture that was absent in Venezuela. Georgetown’s deliberate policy of balancing American security cooperation with Chinese infrastructure financing is indicative of a conscious strategy of multi-alignment, rather than succumbing to great power competition that has polarised other petrostates.

     

    Feature Image Credit: panamericanworld.com

    Guyana map Credit: cfr.org

  • The Evolving Situation in Myanmar and it’s Impact on India-Myanmar Relations

    The Evolving Situation in Myanmar and it’s Impact on India-Myanmar Relations

    For Indians researching security issues in the Northeast, three recent developments in Myanmar have once again put the spotlight on the situation there. The first is a May 2026 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) that pieces together eyewitness accounts of the killing of at least 170 Rohingya men, women, and children, with many others likely injured, in Hoyyar Siri village in Buthidaung township in Northern Rakhine on 02 May 2024[i]. The second is an account of another influx of Chin refugees into Mizoram in May 2026, following the Tatmadaw’s capture of Falam town in Chin state (adjoining Mizoram and Manipur).[ii] The third is the recently concluded visit of Myanmar President (formerly General) U Min Aung Hlaing to India from May 30 to June 03, 2026. According to the initial press release of the Ministry of External Affairs, ‘…he will be accompanied by a high-level delegation comprising several Cabinet Ministers, senior officials and business leaders. This will be the first visit of President U Min Aung Hlaing to India in his current capacity.’ The three events encompass a spectrum of issues that impact India’s relations with Myanmar, broader regional security, and India’s Act East Policy.

     

    Map: Courtesy – Nations online Project

    Myanmar is the bridge connecting Northeast India to Southeast Asia. If geographically included in Southeast Asia, it would be the region’s largest country, with 135 officially recognised ethnicities and a population of over 52 million (2003 census)[iii]. Myanmar is more than four and a half times larger in area than its Western neighbour, Bangladesh, yet has roughly one third of its population. Myanmar is a vital component of India’s Act East policy

    Outline Economic Situation

    Myanmar’s parliamentary elections were held from Dec 25 to Jan 26, with the Junta-supported Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) winning an overwhelming majority, further consolidating the military’s hold over the state apparatus. As a result of the USDP being perceived as a proxy for the military regime, the continuing clampdowns on civil liberties at home and the visibly close ties with Russia, most sanctions imposed earlier by the West on the military government remain in place. The nexus between Myanmar’s military and Iran, which is rumoured to be supplying drone parts to the Tatmadaw, has also reinforced the West’s perception of the Junta[iv].

    The pressure of sanctions was intensified by the impact of the war in Ukraine and compounded by energy shocks from the current West Asian crisis.  According to the Lowy Institute, ‘Myanmar has probably been affected more than any other country in Southeast Asia — both in terms of the lack of access to fuel, and also the rising prices… Myanmar is the only country in Southeast Asia whose economy has not recovered to its 2019 pre-COVID levels[v]. With fuel prices having increased more than threefold and deepening scarcity in rural areas, the economy is in a downward spiral, accelerated by power outages, a shortage of essentials such as fertiliser (due to cutbacks by exporters like China), and an overall lack of investment. As per figures of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), ‘…GDP has declined by a cumulative 16 per cent since 2020, with growth falling 2.2 per cent in fiscal year 2025 alone. Inflation has been consistently high, reaching 29 per cent in 2024 and 25 per cent in 2025.[vi] Today, Myanmar has the highest inflation rate in the whole of Southeast Asia[vii].

    Currency:  One of the most significant issues for the economy is the agreement between the Central Bank of Myanmar and the People’s Bank of China to link the Kyat and Renminbi digitally[viii]. This would bypass the international SWIFT banking system and convert Kyats directly to Renminbi, reducing dependence on the dollar. This move effectively ties Myanmar’s economy to China’s, with attendant consequences, especially regarding sovereignty.

    The Security Situation

    The civil war between the Tatmadaw and ethnic armies continues unabated in a see-saw fashion. It is taking a toll on the military, which is in the process of updating its conscription lists. According to a May 2026 report, around 13 million citizens have been found fit for conscription, and about 120,000 individuals have been recruited since the Conscription Law was enacted in February 2024[ix].

    Since its reverses after the launch of ‘Operation 1027’ on 27 October 2023 (an offensive by the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BTA), composed of three Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) in Shan state bordering China, with tacit Chinese approval for rooting out the scam centres there, the Junta has managed to claw back territory. After 15 months, it is in full control of an important central artery, the Mandalay Myitkyina Road and the connected towns in the Sagaing region[x] (see map on first page). With the capture of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin state, the Junta is inducting fresh troops and equipment into Kachin. Seeing this, the regional EAO, the Kachin Independent Army (KIA), is reported to have gone on the defensive[xi]. The Junta also continues to hold the important ports of Kyaukphyu (the mouth of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor) and Sittwe (the gateway of the India-built Kaladan Multimodal Port Project), both in Rakhine, though Sittwe is blockaded on land by the AA and is being supplied by air and sea.

    Elsewhere, too, the Tatmadaw has gone on the offensive. It has launched an offensive on multiple fronts to retake the trading hub of Maw Taung, which borders Thailand in the Thantharyi region (see map below) and has been under the control of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) since November 2025.

     

    Note: Location of Maw Taung is approximate and not to scale. Map: Courtesy – Nations online Project.

    As mentioned earlier, Falam, where Chin state’s only airport is located, was captured by the Tatmadaw in April 2026. With the Tatmadaw aiming to reestablish control over the Myanmar-Mizoram border crossings, the Myanmar border town of Rikhawdar would be the next objective (see map). This could spark another influx of refugees into India’s Zokhawthar. Even today, after the May 2026 influx of Chins into Zokhawthar, residents claim that refugees now outnumber the local residents there[xii].

     

    Visual of Zokhawthar border gate. Map: Courtesy – Nations Online Project.

    Overall, the Tatmadaw has enhanced its capabilities with assistance from its main benefactors, China and Russia, enabling it to conduct offensive operations across the country. In the short- to medium-term, any overthrow of the regime by EAOs aligned with the opposition National Unity Government (NUG) appears unlikely, despite the EAOs still controlling substantial portions of territory in various regions.

    Interestingly, the NUG continues to retain Myanmar’s seat in the UN. It has recently cleared pending UN membership dues of around one million dollars using existing funds and public contributions[xiii], a symbol of the support they still generate.

    Outside Influences

    Myanmar is one state in the Bay of Bengal where Russia, China and the USA have specific, sometimes overlapping and frequently competing interests. Gen (now President) Hlaing has visited Russia seven times to date. Russia is a major supplier of weapons to Myanmar and is rumoured to have shared intelligence with the Tatmadaw, even as it continues cooperation in the energy sphere, including nuclear energy. In February 2026, it signed a five-year military cooperation agreement with Myanmar to protect its territorial integrity and strengthen national sovereignty and security, as per Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu during his visit to Naypyidaw[xiv], further consolidating ties with the Junta. Russia, therefore, has no interest in regime change.

     China continues with its on-off strategy of support to the Tatmadaw and the rebels, stopping aid when its own interests, especially along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), are threatened. China supported the EAOs in cleaning up the scam centres on the border when the Tatmadaw was unable to do so. Its role in subordinating Myanmar’s economy has already been mentioned. The release of Aung San Suu Kyi from prison to house arrest days after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit in the last week of April is being interpreted as another sign of Chinese influence over the Junta[xv]. Also, between 2021 and 2023, it has supplied around $ 267 million worth of weapons to the Junta[xvi]. Thus far, it has shown no interest in engineering regime change. China appears to be working towards better border security, securing Myanmar’s rare earth supply chains to Yunnan, and making economic investments in that country. Its other objective is access to the Bay of Bengal. Towards this end, it practices ‘selective intervention through multi-actor engagement, ceasefire management, security outsourcing and border pressure. Though it speaks the language of non-interference, China is actively shaping developments in its neighbour to advance its strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific...’[xvii]

    The USA has drastically reduced assistance by nearly $1.1 billion since 2025[xviii], but lifted some sanctions on Myanmar companies. The Junta is interested in repairing relations with the US and has hired a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm for around $3 million per year to that end[xix]. The US has shown interest in the rare earth deposits in Kachin state, which are currently being mined by China and, in value terms, account for 60% of Chinese imports – though the process for moving the minerals out of Myanmar remains unclear, as do the prospects for future cooperation. However, it is apparent that the US, like China, increasingly views Myanmar (and Bangladesh) through the Indo-Pacific lens and would endeavour to expand its influence in myriad ways, including using aid as a lever to consolidate further in the Bay of Bengal region and limit Chinese influence.

    The Rohingya Factor

    There is increasingly palpable discontent among the Rohingya. Many still attempt to enter Malaysia (which is reported to hold over 200,000 Rohingya) by sea. Inside refugee camps in Bangladesh, cuts in food rations, overall shortages and depredations by militias /criminal gangs, including killings, torture and abductions, have worsened the law-and-order situation[xx]. Hierarchies, some of them criminal, run daily lives here through enforced diktats. Recently, triggered by the death of a youth, the Rohingya Gen Z organised themselves in protest by carrying out a coordinated online campaign in the camp, challenging self-styled community leaders. As observed by a journalist,’…for the first time in years, a segment of the Rohingya community is not just reacting to events, it is attempting to shape them’[xxi]

    Rohingya militancy is getting increasingly better organised. Four known groups operate across the Myanmar-Bangladesh border and in settlements – the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), Arakan Rohingya Army (ARA), and Rohingya Islami Mahaz (RIM)[xxii]. The Junta frequently employs ARSA to fight the Arakan Army (AA), which ARSA regards as its main enemy. The AA’s self-propagated doctrine, ‘The Way of Rakhita’[xxiii] with its four pillars- Nationalism, Militarism, Historical Criticism and Pragmatism, has varying interpretations. It could denote inclusiveness and a broader national identity, safeguarding the nation, revisiting past errors, and preparing for the future in a practical way – which might include reconciliation with the Rohingya. Equally, it might indicate a narrow focus on an exclusive Arakan identity, backed by military force and a willingness to deal with anyone supporting such goals, which bodes ill for future prospects for the Rohingya and Myanmar-Bangladesh ties. With relief aid for Rohingyas progressively reducing and unrest in the camps barely contained, Bangladesh’s social fabric is coming under increasing strain. This is fuelled by the spillover of activities of such terrorist groups into Bangladesh, which finds its policy options in Myanmar increasingly restricted as outside powers come to terms with the Junta. The fallout of the Rohingya and Chin refugee crisis remains of prime concern for India, which shares borders with both countries, warranting greater vigilance by Indian border guarding forces and dynamic updation of internal security schemes, co-opting the latest technologies.

    Views of the NUG: The NUG, Myanmar’s shadow government, recently announced a new council in a statement titled ‘Announcement by the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF) ‘ on its website.  A line on ‘inclusiveness’ states ‘…Furthermore, we are committed to protecting and promoting the diverse identities of all ethnic nationalities residing within member states and units of the Union, and to firmly building a new Federal Democratic Union composed of states that fully guarantee equality among nationalities and the right to self-determination. However, as mentioned earlier, the question of the NUG coming to power remains moot, as does the issue of implementing such a contentious agenda in a nation with a well-documented history of ethnic violence and discrimination.

    India and Myanmar

    Indian President, Draupadi Murmu, with the President of Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing

    Despite the 2021 coup and the overthrow of Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, India has continued to adhere to its principle of non-interference in the affairs of neighbouring states. Accordingly, it has maintained bilateral relations with the Junta. Following February 2021, as a large number of Myanmarese Chins sought refuge with their kin in Mizoram (and some in Manipur, where ethnic strife between Meiteis and other tribal groups continues), India had to formulate a uniform policy to address this issue, incorporating humanitarian aspects, local sensitivities and security concerns. This has since been done.

    To ensure peace at the local level and prevent disruption to work on its two-decade-old Kaladan Multimodal Port Project (KMMPP), which links Kolkata to Mizoram (via Sittwe onto Paletwa on the Kaladan River and thence onward to Zorinpui in Mizoram by road, bypassing Bangladesh), India resorted to a tactical outreach that included an unofficial meeting between an Indian Member of Parliament and Myanmar rebel groups[xxiv]. This was further expanded by opening a dialogue in Delhi in late 2024 with the concerned EAOs in Chin and Rakhine, as well as representatives of the NUG and the Junta. Ultimately, separate meetings were held with each group; India advocated for a ‘Myanmar-led, and Myanmar-owned’ solution, thereby reiterating its policy of non-interference.

    President Hlaing’s visit to Delhi in June 2026 may have been partly inspired by an appreciation of India’s articulation of the above (non-threatening) policy. Some opine that the primary objective of this visit was to bolster the regime[xxv]‘s legitimacy. That said, the briefing by the Foreign Secretary after President Hlaing’s meeting with Prime Minister Modi indicates that Myanmar has broadly agreed to accommodate India’s major security concerns, notably an ‘assurance that Myanmar’s territory would not be permitted to be used against India’s security interests’[xxvi]. India further emphasised the importance of stability and peace in Myanmar for the security of its Northeast along the 1,643-km-long border. Discussions on cooperation in defence and security, critical minerals and rare earth and connectivity projects were also held. It is hoped that these interactions will lead to visible improvements in border security.

    India’s contribution to various facets of Myanmar’s development (as with its other neighbours in South Asia) is vividly illustrated in the note on bilateral relations posted on the website of the Indian Embassy in Yangon.  While discussion on defence cooperation during the recent visit was limited to aspects of training, capacity building, institution building, and UN peacekeeping, the larger issue of cooperation in the Bay of Bengal and the Indo-Pacific was addressed during the visit of India’s naval Chief, Admiral DK Tripathi, to Yangon in May 2026. This included strengthening existing arrangements for joint exercises, patrolling, hydrographic surveys, training exchanges, and staff talks. With increasing Chinese naval activity in the Bay of Bengal, India-Myanmar naval cooperation is likely to become increasingly important for India, especially given China’s majority shareholding in Kyaukphyu port at the mouth of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) and the rumoured infrastructure build-up in the Coco Islands[xxvii].

    Conclusion

    Internally in turmoil, Myanmar, as a neighbour, is becoming increasingly important to India. Great power competition, increasing Chinese inroads into that country and its impact on India’s security remain prime concerns. This necessitates realistic, sustained engagement with the ruling regime. Another factor is the future of India’s substantial investments in infrastructure projects in Myanmar, such as the Trans-Asian Highway and the KMMPP. Of these, the KMMPP, which was initiated in 2007-2008, was estimated to cost around Rs 3,200 crore four years ago [xxviii]. Yet even now, the Paletwa port on the Kaladan river remains in the hands of the AA. This also requires India to maintain engagement with rebel groups.

    Overall, India needs to retain leverage with all parties in Myanmar without being perceived as an inimical neighbour. Only then will its border be secured and the vision of Act East, which includes developing the Northeast as a springboard towards Southeast Asia, be actualised.

     

    References:

    [i] ‘Skeletons and Skulls Scattered Everywhere’ Arakan Army Massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Hoyyar Siri, Myanmar 18 May 2026.

    [ii] ‘Over 800 Myanmar refugees enter Mizoram amid Fears of fresh Junta offensive’ The Assam Tribune  17 May 2026.

    [iii] Website of the Embassy of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, New Delhi.

    [iv] ‘New resistance alliance built to win Myanmar’s civil war’  Dan Swift and Sean Turnell  Asia Times 15 April 2026.

    [v] Podcast ‘Myanmar at a crossroads: Five years after the coup’ by Hunter Marston, Sean Turnell  The Lowy Institute 22 May 2026.

    [vi] Myanmar’s Economy Faces Grim Outlook Under New Government ‘ Ambassador Scot Marciel  Bower Group Asia  23 April 2026.

    [vii] Inflation Forecast 2026 South East Asia (from TheGlobalEconomy.com)

    [viii] ‘Myanmar at a crossroads: Five years after the coup’ Podcast by Hunter Marston and Sean Turnell , Lowy Institute  22 May 2026.

    [ix] ‘New Myanmar Regime Tightens Forcible Conscription Covering 13 Million Citizens’  Myo Pyae The Irrawady 18 May 2026.

    [x] ‘Myanmar Regime Takes Full Control of Mandalay–Myitkina Road to Kachin’ The Irrawady 08 May 2026.

    [xi] ‘KIA Announces Shift to Defensive Strategy as Regime Troops Pour into Kachin State’  The Irrawaddy

    May 19, 2026.

    [xii] ‘‘Over 800 Myanmar refugees enter Mizoram amid Fears of fresh Junta offensive’ The Assam Tribune  17 May 2026.

    [xiii] ‘NUG-funded payments secure Myanmar’s UN voting rights through 2026’ Mizzima News 11 February 2026.

    [xiv] ‘Russia and Myanmar Sign Military Cooperation Agreement’  AFP  03 Feb 2026.

    [xv] ‘Optics Over Outcomes: Myanmar’s Diplomatic Rehabilitation and India’s Tightrope’  Sreeparna Benerjee Observer Research Forum 13 May 2026.

    [xvi] ‘Tatmadaw Moves to Re-Establish Control Over The India-Myanmar Border’ Afiya Ibnath Ayshi  Bangladesh Defence Journal  14 May 2026.

    [xvii] ‘

    [xviii] ‘The Cut of USAID Programs in Burma’ Gemma Nailer  The Borgen Project   17 January 2026.

    [xix] ‘Myanmar’s military rulers hire Trump ally for US$50,000 a month to lobby Washington’ Maria Siow South China Morning Post 07 May 2026.

    [xx] On Myanmar (Substack) 11 May 2026

    [xxi] ‘Rohingya Gen-Z breaks the silence’ Shafiur Rehman  Dhaka Tribune  13 May 2026.

    [xxii] ‘Southeast Asia and the Rohingya Militant Threat ‘  Jasminder Singh The Diplomat  19 February 2026.

    [xxiii] ‘Understanding the Philosophy of the Way of Rakhita’   Rhee Rakha   Global Arakan Network  22 August 2025.

    [xxiv] ‘Mizoram MP meets Myanmar militants in push to speed up work on key connectivity project’. Isaac Zoramsanga,  The Print   01 March 2024.

    [xxv] ‘What the Myanmar President’s visit means for New Delhi’  Takhellambam Jagjit Singh  The Statesman  01 June 2026.

    [xxvi] ‘Won’t allow our territory to be used against India’s interests: Myanmar’ Shubhajit Roy  Indian Express  02 June 2026.

    [xxvii] Operationalising the East: India’s Naval Engagement with Myanmar’s Sreeparna Banerjee  ORF 20 May 2026.

    [xxviii] ‘India-Myanmar Kaladan project’s completion hangs in limbo’ Yeshi Seli  The New Indian Express 05 June 2022.

     

    Feature Image Credit: ddindia.co.in

  • Sustainability and Climate Change: Part of the Environment Complex Challenge

    Sustainability and Climate Change: Part of the Environment Complex Challenge

    Sustainability can be addressed through an independent inquiry into the fundamental issues at hand; at the same time, its interconnection with climate change cannot be ignored. What is more, both sustainability and climate change are part of a wider, existential challenge humanity faces, which I prefer to describe as the Environment Complex Challenge, encompassing biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and air, water, and soil pollution. While I would prefer to use the fitting term Anthropocene – as the concept offers a comprehensive description of human impact on Earth and is clearly a primary concern in any debate on sustainability and climate change – it is too closely associated with the failed attempt to name a geological epoch in Earth’s history.[1] Though I was never much of a supporter of that undertaking, I always appreciated the comprehensiveness of its focus. Indeed, in the words of Delanty and Mota (2017), the Anthropocene approach highlights the co-existence of natural and social worlds and the deep intertwining of human and other planetary life. After all, sustainability is about the enduring relationship among society, the economy, and the environment, including how society organises its impact on resources and the critical issue of how to organise economic development and growth.

    With regard to sustainability, it is worth recalling its basic definition as stated in the Brundtland Report: meeting the development needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Our Common Future, 1987). The core argument is that we should be mindful of resource use and not consume more of existing resources than can be replaced, so that future generations will have the same opportunity for development. It is also worth recognising that reducing resource use will help mitigate climate change. While the definition in the Brundtland Report represents a general call for conscious behaviour, several more specific ‘calls to action’ can be identified. One with overriding importance is the increasing global water scarcity, a global challenge but with region-specific impacts. A recent United Nations report (Global Water Bankruptcy, 2026) highlights the seriousness of the water shortage that humanity is facing, assessing that humanity is living beyond water sustainability, as most water-related resources (rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, and glaciers) are beyond full recovery; consequently, water-related risks have become systemic. It added that billions of people face water insecurity, and almost three-quarters of the global population live in countries classified as ‘water insecure’. Another serious topic is food security, and, equally worrying, food waste. A recent UN report states that in 2022, 1.05 billion tonnes, close to one-fifth of the available food, was wasted (UNEP Food Waste Index Report, 2024). With it, a considerable amount of resources is lost in growing and transporting the food in the first place, thereby having a strong negative impact on resource sustainability and on the dynamics of climate change. Land use offers another important focus, not least in connection with biodiversity loss.

    When we consider these aspects, the inherent interlinkage between sustainability (the misuse and overuse of resources) and the dynamics of climate change needs to be acknowledged. Yet sustainability is also closely aligned with the broader human environmental imprint, which, in turn, links it to core aspects of the Anthropocene discourse (setting aside the earlier call to describe a geological epoch). As such, resource extraction and resource (mis)use are critical aspects that link sustainability to the Anthropocene concept. Such a perception is also supported by a critical discussion within the Anthropocene movements: when exactly humanity started to generate a fundamental and recognisable impact on the earth. Ruddiman et al. (2015) focus far back in human history on the beginning of the agricultural era, while Delanty and Mota (2017) identify the 18th-century Industrial Revolution as the beginning of the Anthropocene. While the selection of each date can be well supported by different perceptions and interpretations, one could still argue that, from the perspective of resource use, the Industrial Revolution may be the more impactful and lasting event. After all, it can also be interpreted as the starting point of capitalism and as a never-ending demand for resources, pursued through a continuous economic growth strategy at all costs. Indeed, it is capitalism, with its relentless push for relentless economic growth and resource overuse, which undermines any long-term sustainable prospect for humanity. This unyielding pressure for continued economic growth also underlies the dynamics of climate change and thus fundamentally contributes to what I describe as the Environmental Complex Challenge.

    Returning to the Brundtland definition of sustainability, the primary demand is that humanity, indeed, every individual, must reconsider their use of resources to reduce the individual’s and, in extension, humanity’s environmental impact as much as possible. One may argue this is not only with a view towards future generations, but also with a view to the present. After all, reducing resource overuse will reduce air, water, and soil pollution, contributing to a healthy environment and a healthy life for everyone. It will also be an integral part of mitigating the climate change dynamic and, thus, climate change-related risks. However, one can argue that the list of public-professional references to sustainability exists longer than the list of references to the climate change dynamic, with a line of connected concepts and programs identifiable from the Brundtland Report (1987) to the Rio Declaration and its Agenda 21 (1992) to the Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030). In addition, we could observe influential regional concepts related to sustainability, such as the Factor 4 approach, developed by von Weizsaecker, Lovins, and Lovins (1997), which advocates increasing resource productivity to achieve sustainable development. They emphasise that improving resource efficiency would not only enhance sustainable development by reducing resource overuse but also generate additional wealth. This concept reminds us again of the interlinkage between the environment, the economy, and society. This triangular relationship is a defining one for thinking about sustainability.

    Take, for example, climate change as part of the Environment Complex Challenge, of which sustainability is an inherent aspect. While it represents a global challenge, its impact is always local or regional, thereby affecting the individuals living in those areas. Examples include urban heat waves in Europe and South Asia, and widespread changes in rainfall patterns across Asia, which generate extensive negative impacts on vast rural communities that can last for years. Indeed, extreme weather events are becoming increasingly the norm and increasingly impactful. An estimation of the increasing costs associated with extreme weather events is provided by the World Economic Forum. While during the 1970-1979 decade, associated costs were USD 183.9 billion, they rose to USD 906.4 billion in the 1990-1999 decade, and to USD 1.5 trillion during the 2010-2019 decade (Charlton, 2023). Certainly, responding to extreme weather events by rebuilding and protecting is resource-intensive and therefore a challenge to sustainability in the long run or short run, depending on local circumstances. The threat of sea-level rise, again a global challenge with different local and regional implications, provides another good example. One just has to think about the various Asian megacities, from India to China, that are exposed to sea level rise. Or the threat of sea level rise to food security, when considering the potential devastating impact on the Mekong Delta, the ‘rice bowl’ of Vietnam. While localities and communities around the world are affected by climate change, some face a more severe challenge. We may take the case of Bangladesh, where rising sea levels may submerge wide parts of the country. Where will the people go? They will not stay to drown. As a consequence, tens of millions of climate refugees may move towards West Bengal, in India, and will not be stopped by security measures, when the alternative is drowning. Reducing resource use or increasing the productivity of its use will provide strong support for mitigating climate change by slowing the rate of CO2 increase. Once again, these factors highlight the linkages within the Environmental Complex Challenge and the role of sustainability within it.

     

    At the same time, humanity still faces a fundamental challenge: widespread underdevelopment. One approach to addressing this challenge was the establishment of Agenda 2030, with the aim of ending poverty and hunger in all their forms and dimensions. The sustainable use of resources and protection from environmental degradation are two of the stated goals. Acknowledging the challenges facing the majority of the human population, 17 goals with 169 associated targets were identified (UN Resolution, 2015). What is more, the 2030 Agenda also underscores the interlinkages between development and the climate change challenge. Not only can climate change undermine some of the success already achieved in addressing underdevelopment, but it also increases the challenge of achieving some of the 2030 Agenda goals. Fuso Nerini et al. (2019) assert that 16 of the 17 SDGs and 40 per cent of all targets are impacted by climate change. The climate change challenge to sustainable development is increasing, since we are failing to arrest the climate change dynamic. A recent assessment indicates that we can no longer remain below a 2°C increase, let alone the 1.5°C enhanced climate target agreed in the Paris Agreement. Instead, the predictions made in the last couple of years state that we will be reaching 2.7°C warming by the end of the century (Climate Action Tracker, 2024: 1).

    The Environment Complex Challenge highlights and supports another discussion, one related to reconsidering the object of security. While this topic is linked with the late-1980s to mid-1990s debate on the meaning and interpretation of security, by replacing the state as the object of security with a focus on the individual, the relevance of these challenges is as powerful as it was back then, considering the fundamental challenges humanity is facing; unsustainable use of resources, climate change dynamic, biodiversity loss, widespread pollution issues, and environmental destruction. Lipschutz (1995) states that individual security offers a broader recognition of the insecurity people face by including human welfare issues and underdevelopment. Similarly, Smith (2005) argues that security should focus on the real conditions of insecurity that people and collectives are facing. Such a strong focus on the individual, while the role of neither central nor regional governments should be ignored when addressing the sustainability and climate change challenge, is further justified because sustainable development and addressing climate change require a change of behaviour at the individual level. Otherwise, change will not happen. Indeed, it is our responsibility to bring about change and address the fundamental challenge to our future.

    Bibliography

    Brundtland Report (1987) World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press. https://www.brundtland.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brundtland-Report-1987-Our-Common-Future.pdf

    Charlton, E. (2023). This is what the climate crisis is costing economies around the world. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/11/climate-crisis-cost-global-economies/

     Climate Action Tracker (2024) Warming Projections Global Update. Climate Action Tracker.https://climateactiontracker.org/documents/1277/CAT_2024-11-14_GlobalUpdate_COP29.pdf

    Delanty, G., & Mota, A. (2017). Governing the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance, Knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 9-38.

    GLOBAL WATER BANKRUPTCY Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era

    The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH)

    https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Bankruptcy_Report__2026_.pdf

    Nerini, F., F., Sovacool, B., Hughes, N., Cozzi, L., Cosgrave, E., Howells, M., Tavoni, M., Tomei, J., Zerriffi, H., & Milligan, B. (2019). Connecting climate action with other Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability, 2(8), 674–680.

    Lipschutz, R. D. (1995). On Security. In R. D. Lipschutz (Ed.), On Security (pp. 1-23). Columbia University Press.

    Ruddiman, W. F., Ellis, E. C., Kaplan, J. O., Dorian Q., & Fuller, D. O. (2015). Defining the Epoch We Live In. Science, 348(6230), 348-389.

    Smith, S. (2005). The Contested Concept of Security. In K. Booth (Ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (pp. 27-62). Lynne Rienner Publisher.

    United Nations Environment Programme (2024). Food Waste Index Report 2024. Nairobi.
    UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024
    https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstreams/5c6e505d-e1d3-4731-b5b8-4ecb9693a056/download

    UN Resolution (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015 70/1. 31, https:// digitallibrary.un.org/record/3923923?v=pdf.

    von Weizsäcker, E. U., Lovins, A. B., & L. H.(1997). Factor Four – Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource. Use Earthscan.

    [1] In early March 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences confirmed the dismissal of recognition of the Anthropocene as a description of a new geological time.

  • The West Will Fall; Fall It Must: A Moral and Civilisational Analysis of Hegemonic Decline and the Imperative of Justice

    The West Will Fall; Fall It Must: A Moral and Civilisational Analysis of Hegemonic Decline and the Imperative of Justice

    Colonial and Imperial culture of greed for wealth, manifested in exploitative and extractive strategies, and an attitude of racial supremacy-endorsed by the Church,  is so deeply entrenched in the West that it has never gone away but has continued in different forms and structures. It is this culture that needs to fall, to truly lead to a world of equality, values and ethics – reflected by the 2000-year old declaration –

    “Yaadhum Oorey, Yavarum Kelir”  – meaning “To us the world is one, All people are Kin”.

    To say the West will fall is neither prophecy nor vindictiveness but the recognition of a historical necessity. Western global dominance — built across six centuries of slavery, colonial extraction, and neocolonial control — rested on the systematic violation of ethical principles that every major civilisation has independently affirmed. Systems founded on extraction and racial hierarchy carry the mechanisms of their own collapse. The decline now visible across economic, diplomatic, and moral indicators is not an accident of geopolitics but a consequence.

    The Peninsula Foundation reads this moment through humanity’s deepest ethical traditions: Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural, Kaniyan Poongundranar’s declaration that all places are one and all people kin, Confucian governance by virtue, Platonic justice as harmony, and African Ubuntu — a person is a person through other people, in other words – I am because We are. Arising independently across continents and millennia, they converge on the very principles imperialism negates: universal human dignity, compassionate restraint, justice as social order, and communal interdependence.

    By 2026, even Western institutions will concede the turn. The UN Secretary-General calls for accelerating an inclusive multipolarity; the JPMorgan Centre for Geopolitics describes a multi-speed order in which universal rules no longer bind; at Davos, middle powers spoke of permanent rupture rather than transition. Against this backdrop, the United States Secretary of State stood before the world’s premier security forum and called for the restoration of five centuries of colonial empires.

    The Rubio Confession

    On 14 February 2026, at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered what critics across the spectrum called the most openly pro-colonial address by a senior Western official this century. He mourned the loss of five centuries of Western imperial expansion; named anti-colonial uprisings as a cause of Western decline; urged European allies to shed their guilt and shame over colonialism; and summoned the West to a new Western century by competing for market share in the economies of the Global South — framing that South not as sovereign nations but as an economic space to be recaptured, that precise colonial and predatory framing.

    This is not merely reprehensible; it is a confession. Facing structural decline, the imperial culture has abandoned even the pretence of moral authority and reverted openly to the logic of domination. Harvard’s Mathias Risse called the speech civilisational panic dressed as statecraft. The Global South’s response was swift: Indian commentary asked whether an American East India Company was coming; Brahma Chellaney saw the restoration of an exclusionary hierarchy; Sanjaya Baru urged India, as the beacon of anti-colonialism, to condemn it with the contempt it deserves.

    The Architecture of Extraction

    Rubio’s call to shed guilt is not only obscene; it is historically false. Utsa Patnaik’s study for Columbia University Press establishes that Britain drained £9.2 trillion — some $45 trillion — from India between 1765 and 1938, seventeen times Britain’s current annual GDP, by compounding India’s intercepted export-surplus earnings at the ordinary rate of opportunity cost.

    India’s gold and foreign-exchange earnings — among the largest in the world — were permanently diverted to London, funding Britain’s industrial revolution, its wars, and its administration, and consuming between a quarter and a third of the central budget.

    The mechanism was an elegant deception. After 1765, the East India Company taxed Indian producers, then used roughly a third of that revenue to buy their goods for export — paying them with their own taxes while acquiring their produce for nothing. The Council Bills system of 1861 industrialised this: foreign buyers paid London in gold and sterling for bills cashable only in rupees, which the colonial government paid out of its own budget. India’s gold and foreign-exchange earnings — among the largest in the world — were permanently diverted to London, funding Britain’s industrial revolution, its wars, and its administration, and consuming between a quarter and a third of the central budget.

    Jason Hickel calculates that rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960 alone. There is no Western century to restore that was not built on the theft of other civilisations’ wealth — legitimised for six centuries by the Three Cs of civilisation, Christianity, and commerce, and continued after independence through structural-adjustment programmes, an African external debt of $824 billion, and more than 13,000 active US sanctions.

    The result was stark. India held the world’s second-largest export surplus for three decades before 1929, yet per capita income barely moved between 1900 and 1946, because the surplus was siphoned abroad rather than invested at home. Its share of global industrial output collapsed from 25 per cent in 1750 to 2 per cent in 1900. Japan, which kept its earnings, industrialised; India, whose earnings were confiscated, could not. The same logic ran through slavery, which research now confirms accelerated Britain’s industrial revolution — vindicating Marx’s image of capital arriving dripping with blood and dirt. Jason Hickel calculates that rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960 alone. There is no Western century to restore that was not built on the theft of other civilisations’ wealth — legitimised for six centuries by the Three Cs of civilisation, Christianity, and commerce, and continued after independence through structural-adjustment programmes, an African external debt of $824 billion, and more than 13,000 active US sanctions.

    The sanctifying licence was issued long before the Council Bills, in Rome. A sequence of papal bulls — Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera (1493), proclaimed the year after Columbus reached the Americas — granted Catholic monarchs the asserted right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue” non-Christian peoples, reduce them to perpetual slavery, seize their lands, and partition the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. From these decrees grew the Doctrine of Discovery: the claim that lands not inhabited by Christians were free to be “discovered” and their peoples’ sovereignty void. It furnished the racial and civilisational hierarchy — Christian over heathen, European over all others — on which five centuries of conquest were built, dressing the pursuit of gold, land, and labour in the vestments of salvation. The piety was the facade; extraction was the motive. Nor is the point contested by Rome: in 2023 the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine, conceding the bulls were “linked to political questions” and never expressions of the faith — an admission, five centuries late, that the licence to colonise was always politics wearing the mask of God.

    The Civilisational Verdict

    Every tradition the Foundation invokes condemns this architecture. Thiruvalluvar’s Kural 113 warns that gain wrongly acquired must not be retained even for a day — the exact verdict on a Council Bills system that gave Indians rupees while stealing their gold; his Kural 551 holds a ruler who works injustice crueller than a murderer. Kaniyan Poongundranar’s Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Kelir dissolves, at its root, the civilisational tribalism Rubio attempts to revive, for exploitation requires first believing that the exploited are not our kin. Confucius taught that legitimacy flows from virtue, not force; Plato named the tyrant as one who turns governance to private enrichment — the shape of a state that declares it will run another nation and seize its oil; and Ubuntu’s relational personhood is negated wherever a system is built to take from people, unawares, what they have earned.

    Risse’s verdict is sharper still: Rubio’s West has no Indigenous peoples, no colonised subjects, no enslaved Africans, no Buchenwald near Weimar — only heroes and temporary setbacks. Such a West has never existed, and cannot be reinvigorated in 2026.

    The New Theatre of Predation

    The doctrine is not rhetorical. In January 2026, the United States bombed Venezuela, abducted its elected president, and announced that US companies would seize its oil while Washington “ran the country” — a clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the International Commission of Jurists held. The same month, it cut off Cuba’s main oil supplier and, through Executive Order 14380, threatened any country that resupplied it, until the UN warned of humanitarian collapse — collective punishment of a civilian population. And in February 2026, the US and Israel launched a full-scale attack on Iran, killing its Supreme Leader, striking over 42,000 civilian sites, and — at a girls’ school in Minab — at least 167 children; the American Society of International Law named it a crime of aggression, and the UN Secretary-General confirmed it contravened international law. As Britain once dressed theft as commerce, the US now dresses resource seizure as law enforcement — the structural logic is identical.

    The Measured Decline

    The economic premise of the Rubio doctrine is fiction. Asia’s share of global GDP reached 55 per cent in 2024, years ahead of projection, and BRICS economies now exceed the G7 at purchasing-power parity. The Global South’s ascent is no Western beneficence but a return to the norm colonialism interrupted — China and India together held half of world income in 1700 before colonialism drove their share below a tenth. A declining West, in truth, needs the Global South to survive.

    Moral authority has collapsed in tandem. Only 39 per cent of Americans now believe the United States is the world’s moral leader, down from 60 per cent in 2017; across Europe, support for Israel has fallen to between 13 and 21 per cent. Above all, Gaza has erased Western moral pretension: independent research estimates roughly 75,200 violent deaths and the displacement of about 90 per cent of the population, as governments that once lectured the world on human rights moved to justify mass killing — not an aberration, as one analysis put it, but an unveiling.

    The Oligarchy Behind the Flag

    Analysing nearly 1,800 US policy decisions, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business groups exert substantial independent influence on policy while ordinary citizens have little or none — a pattern they termed economic-elite domination rather than democracy.

    There is a sharper way to name what must fall. “The West” is not its peoples; it is a structure of concentrated power that governs in their name while serving far narrower interests. Analysing nearly 1,800 US policy decisions, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business groups exert substantial independent influence on policy while ordinary citizens have little or none — a pattern they termed economic-elite domination rather than democracy. Their method has been contested, but elite-skewed influence is widely corroborated.

    The architecture is visible and legal. Since Citizens United (2010), outside US election spending has risen more than twenty-eight-fold — from $144 million in 2008 to over $4.2 billion in 2024 — roughly $1.9 billion of it untraceable “dark money,” a few hundred mega-donors providing the bulk. Oxfam records billionaire wealth at a record $18.3 trillion in 2026, up 81 per cent since 2020; the twelve richest now hold more than the poorest four billion people, and billionaires are four thousand times likelier than ordinary citizens to hold office. Across 66 countries, nearly half of those surveyed say the rich simply buy elections.

    The same convergence runs through the war and information economies. Some $191 million was spent lobbying the US defence sector in 2025, and more than 315 senior officers passed through the revolving door into the top weapons firms between 1995 and 2021 — Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” at industrial scale. At the 2025 presidential inauguration, the heads of Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Tesla stood arrayed behind the president — a tableau of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, in which control over information becomes a lever over democracy itself, as a Stanford working group chaired by Francis Fukuyama warned.

    None of this requires a secret cabal — only aligned interests, legalised influence, and a public whose consent is manufactured rather than freely given. The decisive point is this: the structure that drains the Global South is the same one that hollows out wages, democracy, and dignity within the West. The dividing line is not West against the rest but concentrated extractive power against the world’s peoples — the Western working majority among them, conscripted to fight its wars and absorb its costs. When we say the West must fall, it is this structure that must fall, and democratic power that must be restored, at home as much as abroad. That is not the elimination of a people; it is the end of their domination by an oligarchy that has long claimed to speak in their name.

    The Self-Defeating Logic of Overreach

    Like the Council Bills before it, the Rubio doctrine carries the mechanism of its own defeat, for each intervention rebounds structurally. The seizure of Russian assets accelerated de-dollarisation; the bombing of Iran united a region against the US–Israel alliance; the abduction of Venezuela’s president hastened Latin America’s diversification away from Washington; the oil siege of Cuba drew unprecedented condemnation. An order that must abduct, blockade, and bomb to assert itself is not ascendant — it is exhausting the legitimacy on which power finally depends.

    The Imperative of Justice

    The fall of Western hegemony opens the possibility of justice but does not guarantee it; the outcome depends on whether rising powers build the multipolar order on genuine ethical foundations rather than replicating what they inherit. That demands sovereign equality without exception — Article 2(4) applied universally, and a Security Council reformed so that no state acts as judge, party, and executor at once. It demands historical accountability: reparative justice through climate finance, debt cancellation, technology transfer, and restitution is not charity but the minimum acknowledgement of documented theft. It demands that the ICJ, ICC, and UN human-rights bodies function without great-power interference; civilisational pluralism against civilisational supremacism; and, finally, democratic renewal within the Western societies themselves, whose peoples are not the authors of empire but among its subjects.

    India is uniquely placed to articulate that alternative. Its inheritance — Thiruvalluvar’s justice, Kaniyan Poongundranar’s universal kinship, and the Gandhian tradition of non-violent resistance to precisely the domination Rubio seeks to revive — is the moral tradition colonialism suppressed but could never extinguish. Against a new Western century of restored hierarchy, the Peninsula Foundation offers the Tamil poet’s ancient answer, as relevant in Munich today as on the banks of the Kaveri two millennia ago:

    Yaadhum Oore, Yaavarum Kelir — to us all towns are one, all people are our kin.

    The West will fall. Fall it must. From its ruins, may justice arise.

    Sources

    THE MULTIPOLAR TRANSITION

    • JPMorgan Centre for Geopolitics — World Rewired: Navigating a Multi-Speed, Multipolar Order
    • United Nations — Secretary-General’s press conference on his 2026 priorities
    • World Economic Forum — Davos 2026: How middle powers are reading the global moment

    THE RUBIO MUNICH SPEECH AND RESPONSES

    • US Department of State — Secretary Rubio at the Munich Security Conference (14 February 2026)
    • The New York Times — In Munich, Rubio Stresses Shared History to Europeans
    • Mathias Risse, Harvard Kennedy School (Carr Center) — A Human-Rights-Based Reply to Marco Rubio’s Munich Speech
    • China-US Focus — American Neo-Colonialism and the Confessional State
    • Chatham House — The West vs the West at the Munich Security Conference
    • India Today — Rubio’s Munich speech signals US colonial competition for the Global South
    • The Wire — Marco Rubio’s Defence of Colonialism Demands a Response from India
    • Firstpost — Rubio’s claim of a Western century is a myth

    COLONIAL EXTRACTION: THE DRAIN AND THE COUNCIL BILLS

    • Utsa Patnaik (Columbia University Press), via Al Jazeera — How Britain stole $45 trillion from India
    • NDTV — How the British Empire robbed India of $45 trillion
    • self_study_history — Drain of Wealth: the Council Bills mechanism
    • COLLECTIVE India — ‘Drain of Wealth’, today
    • Wikipedia — Economy of India under the British Raj (global GDP share)
    • CEPR / VoxEU — Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution
    • Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
    • Jason Hickel, via Al Jazeera — Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

    THE LICENCE TO COLONISE: PAPAL BULLS, CHRISTIANITY, AND NEOCOLONIALISM

    • Vatican News (2023) — Church defends Indigenous peoples: ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ was never Catholic — the formal repudiation
    • Canadian Museum for Human Rights — The Doctrine of Discovery (papal bulls and their language)
    • Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame — Papal Condemnation of the Doctrine of Discovery
    • Emory University — The Philosophy of Colonialism: Civilization, Christianity and Commerce
    • Church Mission Society — Mission after George Floyd: on white supremacy, colonialism and world Christianity
    • Catalyst (McGill) — The IMF and World Bank: Neocolonial Domination, Debt Trap and Resistance

    THE CIVILISATIONAL FRAMEWORK

    • Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural (G.U. Pope translation) — Project Madurai
    • Kaniyan Poongundranar, Purananuru 192 — Kaniyan Pungundranar
    • Confucius, The Analects — LibreTexts, Compact Anthology of World Literature
    • Plato, Republic — Plato’s Theory of Justice
    • Mogobe B. Ramose — African Philosophy Through Ubuntu

    THE OLIGARCHY BEHIND THE FLAG: CONCENTRATED POWER IN THE WEST

    • Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page — Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)
    • Omar S. Bashir (Research & Politics, 2015) — A Review of the ‘Oligarchy’ Result — methodological critique
    • Oxfam International (January 2026) — Resisting the Rule of the Rich: billionaire wealth and political inequality
    • Brennan Center for Justice — Dark Money Hit a Record High of $1.9 Billion in 2024 Federal Races
    • Center for American Progress — Undoing Citizens United and Reining In Super PACs (28-fold rise in outside spending)
    • OpenSecrets — Defense Lobbying Profile ($191m in 2025)
    • Quincy Institute, via Jacobin — The Publicly Funded Defense Contractor Revolving Door (315+ officers)
    • ProMarket (Stigler Center) — The Trends That Defined US Antitrust in 2025 (platform power and modern oligarchy)
    • Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019)

    VENEZUELA

    • International Commission of Jurists — Territorial sovereignty, the rule of law and human rights must be respected
    • Le Monde — The US intervention in Venezuela violates foundational principles of international law
    • UN Security Council — US action in Venezuela puts sovereignty of states, international law at stake

    CUBA

    • Al Jazeera — US sanctions reshaping life in Cuba: UN rapporteur
    • Baker McKenzie — US declares national emergency on Cuba; Executive Order 14380
    • UN News — Cuba: UN warns of possible humanitarian ‘collapse’ as oil supplies cut

    IRAN

    • American Society of International Law — Statement Regarding the Use of Force Against Iran (2 March 2026)
    • Reuters — Iran’s UN envoy says 1,332 civilians killed in the war
    • Al Jazeera — Iranian government reveals scale of civilian casualties (42,000+ sites damaged)
    • Associated Press — International legal order tested by war in Iran (‘crime of aggression’)

    DECLINE METRICS AND MORAL AUTHORITY

    • Atlantic Council — Piece by piece, the BRICS really are building a multipolar world
    • Mastercard — Welcome to the nuanced reality of the Asian Century
    • Forbes — Americans think the US is losing its moral authority, new poll shows
    • The New Humanitarian — The end of Western values

    GAZA

    • Al Jazeera — Gaza death toll exceeds 75,000 as independent data verify loss
    • OHCHR — End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts
  • The Costs of Strategic Silence: An Analysis of India’s Stance during the 2026 Iran War

    The Costs of Strategic Silence: An Analysis of India’s Stance during the 2026 Iran War

    As West Asia’s geopolitical flashpoints grew more volatile, most notably with direct confrontation between the U.S., Iran and Israel, and the broader regional escalation, New Delhi’s diplomatic posture has come under intense scrutiny. India’s response is not a sign of diplomatic paralysis, nor a passive withdrawal from the global stage, but a calculated, measured quietude – an active realisation of its “calibrated multi-alignment” strategy.
    This analysis decodes the rationale behind India’s silence through the lens of deep economic vulnerabilities, critical infrastructure dilemmas and multilateral frictions that New Delhi must navigate in order to preserve its foundational doctrine of strategic autonomy.

    Juggling Act of Multi-Alignment

    India’s diplomatic manoeuvring is taking place in a highly fractured West Asian landscape. Crucial regional partners are pulling New Delhi in opposite directions, and the government has to use precise verbiage and a highly restrained tone.

    Two conflicting diplomatic realities illuminate the complexity of this tightrope. One is New Delhi’s Gulf alignment. India signed landmark defence and energy pacts during a high-profile state visit by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the UAE, standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Abu Dhabi after drone and missile strikes by Iran hit Emirati soil.

    Second is Tehran’s direct engagement with New Delhi, assuring the security of Indian commercial ships in the key Strait of Hormuz, and proposing a long-term constructive role for India in the region.

    At the same time India was hard at work, striving to ensure some degree of balancing vis-à-vis the warring parties that include negotiating for U.S.  strategic partnership and Israeli technology and weapons (The West and Israel Axis); UAE energy and defence cooperation and Saudi capital flows (The Gulf Cooperation Council – GCC); and striving to retain its stakes in the Iran and Eurasian corridor via the Chabahar port and INSTC (International North–South Transport Corridor) trade route.

    Now that these bedrock bilateral partnerships are in direct conflict, it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain tight strategic autonomy.

    Costs of Silence

    Diplomatically, India’s external attitude is restrained, but the internal home reality is one of high-stakes management of acute energy and trade vulnerabilities. The ongoing conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran has created immediate economic headwinds to New Delhi’s neutrality, threatening its viability.

    Economic Vulnerability

    For New Delhi, the most immediate casualty is energy supply security with long-term impacts.  Retaliatory disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have forced India to draw down its national petroleum inventories by 15%. Rising domestic fuel prices and supply chain shocks present a risk to broader inflationary pressures. These are evident in high-level political appeals to citizens to conserve fuel and undertake temporary demand reduction, and in suggestions of structural changes, including working from home and limiting gold imports, to stabilise the current account deficit.

    Unfortunately, the public at large interpreted these as signs of impending doom rather than the precautionary measures, which were the intent. Thus, people rushed in to stock up on cooking gas, vehicle fuels, and even groceries, with many hoteliers reducing their menu offerings and food aggregators that service home delivery charging additional amounts in the guise of “packing charges,” etc., pushing up retail prices for unfounded reasons.

    The most chaotic but strategic impact is expatriate safety. The transport disruptions, especially air transport to and from the Middle East, heightened fears of the potential displacement of the large Indian workforce in the region (approximately 8.5 to 10 million Indians reside and work across West Asia, primarily in the GCC countries). This prompted transactional diplomacy over “prestige politics,” focusing on localised maritime safe-passages and repatriation readiness.

    Chabahar Port Puzzle & Infrastructure Stakes

    India’s Eurasian connectivity plan is based on two big projects, the Chabahar Port in Iran and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). New Delhi’s investments are designed to bypass overland blockades and build a direct trade route to Central Asia and Russia. However, the recent surge of regional hostilities has put these strategic transit corridors in temporary jeopardy.
    India can cede operational stakes to an indigenous Iranian operator to avoid secondary sanctions, or retain direct control and risk an instant diplomatic confrontation with Washington.
    The impasse starkly illustrates the tension between India’s desire for sovereign regional connectivity and the hard realities of international secondary sanctions regimes.

    Strategic Silence: Neutrality and Autonomy
    India’s quiet reactions and generic pleas for “dialogue and restraint” are often seen by detractors as diplomatically problematic – the reluctance of a rising power to take a stand. But this could also be interpreted as a deliberate tactic for survival.

    For decades, India has been decoupling its bilateral ties under its multi-alignment framework: procuring oil from Iran and the Gulf; sourcing weapons and defence technology from Israel; securing advanced technology and strategic backing from the U.S.; and taking sovereign wealth and capital out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

    Both the Russian and Iranian leaderships have publicly called upon India to use its unique position to be a long-term mediator, but New Delhi has deliberately refrained from doing so.

    India has thus been consciously avoiding “prestige politics” by not taking on high-risk mediation initiatives beyond its immediate regional mandate. This stance replaces grandstanding with pragmatic, transactional arrangements, such as securing localised maritime safe passages for its commercial ships, rather than seeking to resolve deep-seated ideological wars.

    Process Diplomacy: Handling Multilateral Frictions

    The West Asia skirmishes have also tested India’s aspirations to lead the Global South, particularly in larger international platforms such as BRICS. The June 2026 BRICS foreign ministers meeting held in India exposed the limitations of consensus-based diplomacy.


    Iran and the UAE, the new members, joined the forum in the midst of a heated deadlock; Tehran insisted on a direct and explicit condemnation of the U.S. and Israel, while Abu Dhabi countered with a call for a formal condemnation of Iranian actions in the region.

    India used procedural diplomacy to recognise internal rifts without sweeping them away, avoiding the fracturing of the broader multilateral partnership over regional disputes, and thereby preserving its bilateral capital with both capitals- Abu Dhabi and Tehran.

    Conclusion: Is Calibrated Silence Sustainable?

    India’s strategic quiet is not an abnegation of responsibility. It is a conscious effort to protect its national interests from a volatile external crisis. In a remarkable blend of procedural diplomacy at forums like BRICS, refusal to be sucked into risky regional mediation, and pragmatic bilateral hedging, New Delhi has managed to avoid burning its bridges with either Tehran or the US-Israel-Gulf axis.

    At the same time, this crisis is a crucial test of New Delhi’s professed policy of strategic autonomy. As the country’s domestic oil reserves dwindle and external sanctions squeeze key assets such as the Chabahar Port, the economic repercussions may ultimately outweigh the benefits of diplomatic quietude. India’s challenge going forward will be to ensure that its calculated neutrality is flexible enough to change if the regional balance tips into an outright breakdown of the regional order from a managed crisis.

    Feature Image Credit: https://thewire.in

  • Clausewitz’s War Within the Chains of Reason versus Girard, the Apocalypse, and the Far-Right Christian Movement in the U.S.

    Clausewitz’s War Within the Chains of Reason versus Girard, the Apocalypse, and the Far-Right Christian Movement in the U.S.

    To lend greater legitimacy to his controversial position, Girard explicitly cites the foremost theorist of warfare, Carl von Clausewitz. In his three treatises on the escalation of war, Clausewitz had indeed argued that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation were it not for the scapegoat mechanism.

    Girard’s tendency toward absolute peacefulness is unrealistic, whereas the religiously legitimised far right seeks to wage the final battle internally and externally. Yet, both refer to the assumption of an impending apocalypse. This is the core of the problem, which leads, on one side, to absolute pacifism and, on the other, to a similarly absolute “battling to the end”.

    The media’s focus on the current U.S. president’s personality can easily lead us to overlook deeper, underlying changes. It is well known that French sociologist René Girard plays a significant role in shaping the self-image of Silicon Valley tech billionaires. In particular, his disciple Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, is advancing this agenda and strongly influencing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, whom Thiel financially supported during his campaign. This connection leads to a billionaire-backed far-right movement that sees its legitimacy in a fundamentalistic interpretation of Christianity. This has already been amply documented in numerous U.S. discussions. The rather helpless counterreaction attempts to prove that Girard is merely being exploited and misunderstood. He certainly is—but the central problem is that in his book Battling to the End, Girard describes the approaching apocalypse. To escape it, Girard recommends absolute nonviolence, which he sees as realised in Christianity. Peter Thiel and the other tech billionaires, however, believe that in this approaching apocalypse, one must fight to the bitter end to survive. It is no coincidence that the latest book by the U.S. “Minister of War,” Pete Hegseth, is titled American Crusade. Hegseth compared the rescue of the American pilot at Easter to the resurrection of Christ. Girard is indeed being instrumentalised by Thiel and others. However, the problem is that Girard adopts an apocalyptic approach and appears to justify it scientifically by referring to a reductionist interpretation of Clausewitz, arguably the most significant theorist of war. Only through reference to Clausewitz does Girard’s theory of imitation (mimesis) gain the political explosiveness that would otherwise remain confined to academia.

    René Girard’s theories on mimesis, mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and the role of myth and religion in the emergence of culture provide profound insights into human history and behaviour. So, what is mimetic desire?

     Mimetic desire begins with human needs and desires. While needs are biologically rooted, desires are strongly influenced by others. Girard’s identification of the basis of the human problem is simple: most of the things we desire—be they a person, a relationship, an object, an experience, or a feeling—are based on imitation. We develop a desire for these things through our observation of others who desire or possess them, whether consciously or not. This explains the power of advertising—when we see enough people using something, we want it too—as well as the power of celebrity. We want the kind of house, car, clothes, or wife that the rich, famous, and powerful man has.

    Children learn through imitation, acquiring language and other skills necessary for social success. By learning the ethos of their culture, they become part of the community and eventually pass it on to the next generation. In this respect, mimesis is unproblematic. However, for Girard, mimesis is also the primary cause of social unrest and violence because mimesis leads to rivalry when people compete for scarce resources. Sometimes, class differences separate the object of rival desire, such as when one harbours a mimetic desire for what the rich possess. In this situation, which Girard calls “external mediation,” violent conflict arising from mimetic rivalry is unlikely. However, in situations of internal mediation, where individuals or groups desire the same thing and are close to one another, the possibility of violence is real.

    Girard asserts that this mimetic rivalry is the primary cause of human violence: tribes fight over resources, men for power and wealth, and the contest for power escalates into violence. Examples include tribes fighting over resources, two men desiring the same woman, and envy of another’s wealth, fame, honour, or power escalating into violence.

    Girard argues that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation, were it not for the scapegoat mechanism. By creating a scapegoat, one can blame all of one’s problems on that person and cast them out or sacrifice them, thereby stabilising one’s identity and community. Determining who belongs to a community and who does not reunites it. A famous example is Kaiser Wilhelm II before World War I, who declared, “I no longer know of any parties; I know only Germans.” Anti-Semitism, too, was based on this combination of exclusion and the sacrifice of others; in essence, it is elevated to what appears to be a sacred act.

    Girard argues that Jesus’s voluntary sacrificial death broke this scapegoat mechanism once and for all because he took on the sins of the world. However, regardless of any theological assessment, this interpretation clearly does not apply to the Crusades, religious wars of the Middle Ages, colonisation, the two world wars, or the Holocaust. In fact, one could view these events as repetitions of the scapegoat mechanism, where unity is created through the “sacrifice” of others. This raises the fundamental question of whether Christianity is characterised by a particular form of nonviolence, as devout Christians would argue, or by a particular escalation of violence aimed at establishing “eternal peace” on earth, as its universal claim suggests. Historically speaking, societies that saw themselves as Christian have a distinct history of violence (as does Islam, which likewise views itself as fundamentally peaceful). Of course, Christians will say that their religion is fundamentally peaceful and has merely been misunderstood. The victims of colonisation and the Holocaust would disagree. To lend greater legitimacy to his controversial position, Girard explicitly cites the foremost theorist of warfare, Carl von Clausewitz. In his three treatises on the escalation of war, Clausewitz had indeed argued that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation were it not for the scapegoat mechanism. By constructing a scapegoat, one is made responsible for all one’s own problems and cast out or sacrificed, thereby stabilising one’s own identity and community.

    Clausewitz had, in fact, advocated a nearly mimetic position in his three principles regarding the escalation of war. He accompanies the mutual escalation to the extreme at the beginning of his book with the words “the enemy does the same.” He justifies this, on the one hand, by arguing that whoever escalates the spiral of violence gains the upper hand and wins the war. Furthermore, he argues that as long as I have not subdued the enemy, I must fear that he will subdue and defeat me—thus, it is the fear and dread of defeat that compels both adversaries to escalate further and further. Ultimately, it is the mutual striving for power on both sides that leads to this escalation. Furthermore, in parts of his book, Clausewitz regards the absolute and the extreme as the ideal of warfare. To this extent, one could certainly understand Girard.

    However, Girard overlooks significant differences. For example, Clausewitz’s three dynamics leading to escalation are followed by three dynamics aimed at moderating war. These dynamics occur on both sides. The crucial point is that the desired post-war political state—and thus peace—already exerts a retroactive influence on the conduct of war.

    However, Girard overlooks significant differences. For example, Clausewitz’s three dynamics leading to escalation are followed by three dynamics aimed at moderating war. These dynamics occur on both sides. The crucial point is that the desired post-war political state—and thus peace—already exerts a retroactive influence on the conduct of war. At the end of the first chapter, Clausewitz emphasises that war consists of inherent violence, the interplay of probabilities and chance, and the subordinate nature of war as a political tool. He attributes war to pure reason. Thus, the tendency toward extremes, as interpreted by Girard, is indeed present in Clausewitz; however, it is limited and contained by “pure reason,” with which Clausewitz associates politics. Whether monotheistic religions, which see themselves as peace-loving, harbour a core of violence is a matter of debate. This could be the case when they became state religions, because at that point, they had to legitimise war as an exception. However, religiously motivated war has always brought with it a particular escalation, whether internally or externally. Girard’s tendency toward absolute peacefulness is unrealistic, whereas the religiously legitimised far right seeks to wage the final battle internally and externally. Yet, both refer to the assumption of an impending apocalypse. This is the core of the problem, which leads, on one side, to absolute pacifism and, on the other, to a similarly absolute “battling to the end”.

    Rene Girard Image Credit: From the article ” Peter Thiel, René Girard, and Vance’s Moral Conundrum by Jesse Callahan Bryant

    Vice President Vance misinterpreted a social scientist and, as a result, converted to Catholicism. If you read JD Vance’s 2020 essay (“How I Joined the Resistance”) about his conversion to Catholicism, you’ll learn that his real moment of spiritual transition from atheist to Catholic oddly came during a 2011 talk that Peter Thiel gave at Yale Law School.

    Crucifixion Panel Credit: The Crucifixion, centre panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece (closed view), by Matthias Grünewald, c. 1512–15; in the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France. www.britannica.com

  • A Paradigm Shift in Rural Governance

    A Paradigm Shift in Rural Governance

    Critics and welfare economists argue that the new Act fundamentally alters the risk-sharing mechanism for rural employment.

    In December 2025, India’s employment guarantee scheme underwent a monumental shift when the Union Government repealed the nearly two-decade-old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), replacing it with the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025 (VB-G-RAM-G Act). This transition, marked by Presidential assent on 21st December, 2025, signals a shift from a right-based, demand-driven welfare model towards a centrally sponsored, infrastructure-focused mission aligned with the “Viksit Bharat 2047 Vision”. While the new Act ostensibly increases the statutory number of workdays from 100 to 125 per household, it has sparked serious national and international debate over its potential to dismantle the safety net for India’s rural poor and erode the states’ federal powers to address such matters.

    The Government Rational

    The primary justification for this comprehensive legislative overhaul is set out in the Economic Survey 2025-26, which argues that India’s rural economy has matured beyond the need for a survival-oriented safety net. The Survey points to a 53% decline in MGREGA work demand from its pandemic peak, with demand falling by approximately 1837 million person-days in the 2025-26 financial year. Currently, rural unemployment reportedly decreased from 3.3% in 2020-21 to 2.5% in 2023-24, suggesting that the rural workforce is penetrating into non-farm employment. According to findings from NABARD, rural economic fundamentals, including formal credit access and consumption, have strengthened significantly, rendering the MGREGA model obsolete. The government also identifies “persistent structural weaknesses” in the old system, such as monitoring gaps, fake muster rolls, and the unauthorised use of machinery. The new Act intends to address these problems through advanced technological oversight.

    Structural Sabotage

    Jean Dreze, a key architect of the original MGREGA, warns that these normative allocations will function as de facto budget ceilings, effectively transforming a legal right into a rationing system and making it a supply-driven employment scheme. 

    Critics and welfare economists argue that the new Act fundamentally alters the risk-sharing mechanism for rural employment. Under the previous Act, the Central Government provided 100% of unskilled manual wages, with a demand-driven budget. The new Act reclassifies the programme as a Central Sponsored Scheme (CSS), introducing a 60:40 funding-sharing ratio for general states and a 90:10 ratio for the Himalayan and North Eastern states. Most contentious is the provision allowing the Centre to determine “normative state-wise allocations” based on parameters it prescribes. Any expenditure incurred by a state beyond this central cap must be borne entirely by the state. Jean Dreze, a key architect of the original MGREGA, warns that these normative allocations will function as de facto budget ceilings, effectively transforming a legal right into a rationing system and making it a supply-driven employment scheme.

    The Switch-off Clause and Labour Market Vulnerability

    Section 6 of the new Act introduces a “switch-off” clause, allowing states to suspend the employment guarantee for up to 60 days during peak agricultural seasons like sowing and harvesting. The government frames this as a “calibrated balance” to ensure the availability of agricultural labour and prevent wage inflation. However, this provision has been heavily criticised for institutionalising inequality. Dreze points out that this is an unnecessary complication, as rural labourers naturally seek higher-paying private-market work during peak seasons, and any additional layer of government discretion risks diluting the fundamental right to work.

    Technological Barriers and Risk of Exclusion

    To address leakages, the new Act mandates an extensive technological ecosystem, including biometric authentication, AI-based fraud detection, GPS monitoring and e-measurement books. While the government promotes this as a move toward transparency and accountability, experts warn of a “discouraged worker effect”. Rajendran Narayanan of Azim Premji University suggests that digital layers often act as structural barriers for workers trying to access jobs and payments. There is a growing concern that removing individuals from welfare rolls due to data mismatches and branding them as ‘fake’ normalises the denial of genuine entitlements. Furthermore, while the government highlights the increase in the administrative expenditure ceiling from 6% to 9% to support this digital transition, critics argue that these resources should instead be directed toward ensuring timely wage payments, which have historically been plagued by delays.

    Federalism and Future Social Protection

    The Act’s transition to a CSS has significant implications on fiscal federalism for Indian states. Development economist Jayati Ghosh warns that the Centre’s increased power to determine normative allocations could be “weaponised” against opposition-ruled states. The case of West Bengal, where central funding was suspended for three years, is a classic precedent to political misuse of such a scheme. By placing the legal responsibility for employment on states while simultaneously withdrawing central funding, the Act creates what critics term as “unfunded mandate”. This has already led to regional resistance, with Gram Sabhas across states like Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand adopting a resolution rejecting the new Act and demanding the restoration of the old one.

    Infrastructure over Individuals

    Under the new Act, wage employment is tied to the creation of durable public assets through the Viksit Bharat National Rural Infrastructure Stack. Works are confined to four priority verticals: water security, core rural infrastructure, livelihood-related infrastructure and extreme weather mitigation. These plans are digitally integrated with national platforms like PM Gati Shakti to ensure whole-of-government convergence. While the government argues that this ensures every person contributes to national development, critics fear that shifting from small-scale, community-led projects to large-scale infrastructure projects prioritises macroeconomic metrics over local livelihood security, which MGNREGA prioritised.

    The dismantling of a Global Benchmark:

    The repeal of MGNREGA has drawn sharp condemnation from the global academic community. A collective letter signedby leading economists, including Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and Mariana Mazzucato, urged the Indian government not to dismantle the program that was once a global benchmark for rights-based social security employment. The signatories argue that ending MGNREGA is a “historic mistake” that eliminates a proven instrument for poverty reduction and social justice.

    Transition Realities

    As the new Act is implemented in the 2026-27 financial year, millions of rural households face an uncertain transition. To mitigate immediate disruption, the Ministry of Rural Development has indicated that verified MGNREGA job cards- those that have completed Aadhar-based e-KYC will likely remain valid during the initial transition phase. Currently, approximately 75% of existing job cards meet these criteria. States have been given a six-month window to formulate their own schemes consistent with the new Act. However, for the millions whose cards remain unverified, the shift to a digital-first, AI-monitored mission risks creating a period of significant instability in livelihoods.

    Conclusion

    The replacement of MGREGA with the VB-G-RAM-G Act represents one of the most significant pivots in the Indian social policy on rural employment since independence. It reflects a fundamental ideological shift from a right-based moral obligation of the state toward a technocratic mission focused on data, efficiency and infrastructure. The government’s gamble rests on the belief that the rural economy is now robust enough to ensure the withdrawal of its primary safety net. However, if the transition results in the suppression of work demand due to fiscal pressures or the exclusion of the most vulnerable due to digital barriers, the cost to India’s rural poor would be tragic.

    As the original architect, Jean Dreze, notes, if social legislation is to succeed, it must be heavily favouring a rights-based framework, for governments naturally seek to wriggle out of their obligations. By granting the Central government maximum powers and minimum obligations, the VB-G-RAM-G Act may have secured the vision of “Viksit Bharat” at the potential expense of the very people it was originally intended to serve and protect.

    Feature Image Credit: https://countercurrents.org

  • The Cockroach and the Firewall

    The Cockroach and the Firewall

    India banned a joke on national security grounds. The joke went to court, found a cause, and began to splinter — all in a single week. None of it is a revolution yet. All of it is worth watching.

    When the Chief Justice of India reportedly likened unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites, he was not making policy. He was making a mistake. The clarification came within a day — he meant only holders of fake degrees; the youth are “the pillars of a developed India.” But the insult had escaped. Within a week, a satirical “Cockroach Janta Party,” its name a mocking echo of the ruling party, had drawn more than twenty-two million Instagram followers — more than double the BJP’s, well past the Congress’s — along with a million sign-ups and a petition. Then the government did the most revealing thing it could have done. It treated the joke as a threat to India’s sovereignty.

    On the twenty-first of May, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered the party’s account to be blocked under Section 69A of the IT Act, acting on Intelligence Bureau inputs alleging it endangered national security. No public order was published; the directive remains secret under the blocking rules. The website went dark, the founder’s personal pages were hacked, and — by his account — the death threats arrived, one reportedly promising he could be “murdered even in America.” Sit with the official rationale, because it collapses under its own weight. A state cannot, in one breath, tell its citizens that something is a frivolous meme and that it imperils the nation. By reaching for the sovereignty of India against an Instagram page, the government made a public confession about which of the two it believes. A confident order ignores satire. It does not invoke the Intelligence Bureau against it.

    That is the first thing worth noticing, and it is not the follower count. It is the asymmetry. A throwaway courtroom remark, instantly retracted, produced a movement; a movement of memes produced a national-security order. When effects keep dwarfing their causes like this, the cause is never really the cause. The Chief Justice did not create the anger he released, and the censor did not create the defiance he provoked. Both struck matches beside a fuse that has lain there, dry, for more than a decade.

    The fuse is not mysterious. India’s inequality is the highest in its recorded history — the top one per cent holds about forty per cent of the nation’s wealth, a concentration the economists who measured it called hard to sustain “without major social and political upheaval.” The country graduates more than eight million young people a year into a graduate unemployment rate near thirty per cent. A quarter of Indians belong to a generation promised development and handed a culture war. For ten years, the noise of majoritarian politics kept that fuse damp. The cockroach remark landed because it told an entire generation, in one word, what the system thought of them. The ban landed because it proved the system was afraid of what they might do about it.

    And yet — to say this plainly, because the temptation to romance the moment is strong — this is not a revolution, and a ban will not make it one. Not because Indians are docile; that old slander is simply false. This is the country of the JP Movement, of the 2011 anti-corruption surge, of the farmers who made a government blink. It is because the things that actually topple regimes are absent here, and the thing that is present is the thing that stops them.

    Revolutions do not run on anger. If they did, half the world would be in flames. They run on state collapse. France in 1789 was bankrupt; Russia in 1917 was losing a war; the regimes that fell in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal these past three years were small, centralised, and hollow, where seizing one square in the capital was the same as seizing the country. None of that describes India. Its treasury is solvent, its army intact, its agencies obedient. There is also an exit the burning countries lacked: a ballot that still works — in 2024 the ruling party lost its majority and now governs on sufferance, its worst losses where the jobs ran out. And there is the deepest barrier of all: India is too many things at once. The countries that fell had a single national crowd. India has a hundred separate angers that flare in the same season without ever becoming the same fire. A movement can own the internet in Delhi and remain a rumour in Chennai. India’s diversity, so often praised as its glory, is also its great circuit-breaker. It does not extinguish anger. It prevents anger from adding up.

    Watch, then, what the past week has actually done to the joke — because the most interesting news is not the ban but everything that has happened since, and almost all of it cuts both ways. The movement went to the Delhi High Court, challenging the block as unconstitutional. That is the system working as designed: anger flowing into an institutional channel rather than onto the street, the very pressure valve a revolution requires to be sealed shut. At the same moment, the energy found something a meme had lacked — a concrete cause. The party has fused itself to the NEET examination scandal, the leaked medical entrance test that was cancelled in May, that upended the futures of twenty-two lakh students, and that has been linked to at least fourteen student suicides. Its demand is now specific and nameable: the resignation of the education minister. A grievance with a face and a number is a different creature from a grievance with only a punchline.

    And then, almost on cue, the splintering began. A lawyer in Haryana, declaring himself the movement’s “national convener,” filed to register the party with the Election Commission in his own name — with a softened, sanded-down list of aims — against the wishes of its founder. Opposition figures rushed to amplify the memes; Congress and Left accounts adopted the cockroach as their own. This is the oldest story in Indian protest, and it is happening in fast-forward: the instant a movement matters, the formal players move to capture, fork or absorb it. India did this to the 2011 anti-corruption wave, which it turned into a party and then ground down — and the cockroach’s own founder comes from precisely that lineage. The system’s reflex is not to crush such energy. It is to digest it. A week in, the digestion has already started.

    So why does a confident state still swat so frantically at a cartoon insect? Because it has read the same history I have, and read it badly. It remembers that Nepal’s collapse last year was triggered not by hunger but by a clumsy social-media ban — and it has just repeated the act it should most have feared. Suppression does not delete a grievance; it dramatises it. The party was back within hours under a new handle, Cockroach is Back — “You thought you can get rid of us? Lol” — and a resurrection travels further than a meme. Every citizen who watches the government panic over a joke quietly revises upward the number of people who must, like them, be unhappy. That is the real engine here: not the followers, but what the followers learn about one another when the state overreacts. Denying a permit for a human chain in Bengaluru, or floating a criminal probe, only widens the audience for the next post.

    Here is the part the censors have not thought through. The one grievance that could cross India’s linguistic borders — the borders that have always kept its angers apart — is an attack on the internet itself, because the net is the country’s only truly national commons. A Tamil student and a graduate in the Hindi belt do not share a language, a politics, or a hero. They share a feed, and now they share a banned one, and a ruined exam that was sat in five hundred cities at once. In choosing to censor the single medium that ignores the firewalls — over a scandal that respects no region — the government may have picked the rare battlefield where India’s diversity does not protect it. That is why this is a blunder, not merely a heavy hand.

    India now carries nearly every structural precondition for upheaval — the inequality, the idle graduates, the curdled consent, a dead exam with a body count, and a state frightened enough to show its hand — and is held back by exactly one thing. Its anger has not yet become a single anger.

    Even so, resist both the fantasy and the complacency. The fantasy is that twenty-two million followers, a viral ban, or a court date are a barricade. They are not; the Indian state has blocked 1,400 accounts in a single protest before and absorbed the consequences, and a movement already fighting over its own name before the Election Commission is not yet a threat to anyone’s power. The complacency is the old lie that Indians never revolt. The truth is more demanding than either: India now carries nearly every structural precondition for upheaval — the inequality, the idle graduates, the curdled consent, a dead exam with a body count, and a state frightened enough to show its hand — and is held back by exactly one thing. Its anger has not yet become a single anger.

    Watch for the day it does. Not the follower counts, not the unemployment graphs — those are already maxed out. Watch whether the High Court lets the block stand or strikes it down; watch whether the NEET families in one state find the banned feed in another and recognise their grief in it; watch whether the movement survives its own capture. The government has handed that convergence its best possible candidate — not a judge’s insult, not joblessness in the abstract, but a censored network and a wrecked examination, two things that look identical in every language. The cockroach did not break the firewall. The question this week left open is whether the people swinging at it have just found the one crack that runs all the way through.

    Feature Image Credit: dw.com

    Text Image Credit: pratidintime.com

    This article has used AI assistance.