Iraq’s Reverberations in India

Indian Shias worried

With
holy Najaf and Karbala now in ISIS crosshairs, Indian Shias are an anxious lot.
Some 
protested against Shia persecution at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar  and about
3000 have volunteered  to go to help Iraq
. In Jammu and Kashmir, Kargil is
strongly backing Iraqi Nation.

In
Lucknow, Shia groups (alongwith many non-Shias) have also
appealed to people
of all religions to lend their moral support to people
being massacred by ISIS. 
Interestingly,
Shias found an unlikely ally in BJP’s outspoken Hindutva activist,  Subramanian Swamy who urged Indian
Government to offer military and economic support to Iraq and “stand with Shias
in the emerging Shia-Sunni attrition war.” because as per him, within
India the Hindu-Shia amity had been cordial for decades and non-alignment was
not an option here.

However,
Given India’s limited capacity (couldn’t handle even Afghan and Sri lankan mess in
her own backyard); heavy economic reliance on Gulf (Iran, Levant and Arabian
Peninsula ) for jobs, remittance and Oil; and the likely domestic terror
backlash; Is it really advisable for India to pick a side in what is now a full
blown regional Proxy cum Civil war?  I doubt.

 

Closer Economic Ties
with Iran

While
any militaristic siding with Iran in Gulf region may be beyond India’s capacity,
the thaw in Iran-US relations (due to rise of ISIS), has meant India
now able to pay some of pending oil payments.
In past, US has been a big hurdle
in India’s economic ties with Iran. Perhaps one can look forward to closer
Iran-India economic cooperation in future.

 

Stuck Nurses to Stay
Put

After
being promised wages by the rebels, the Indian Nurses stuck in Tikrit, have
decided to stay back.
 Some nurses
who returned from Iraq also want to go back
so that they can repay the loans. This does not come as a surprise to me-Indian
workers in Gulf and East Europe (unlike US) are by and large, a poor lot,
always ready to risk their lives for some quick cash.
Meanwhile, Twitter
Jihadis are claiming some Kashmiris and mainland Indians are fighting for ISIS

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.

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