Tag: geopolitics

Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Since Sbarrkum (Sereno), RIP, had such passionate views about the post-colonial setup, I thought the first post after his obituary would be on this topic. In Memoriam to all the victims of 9/11 and its aftermath. May they all rest in Peace.

Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

Continue reading Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Open Thread: Nepal Floods + 20 months since Assad

It seems to be a new and very pragmatic Middle East. In a way the hybrid regimes, who don’t necessarily have democratic mandates, are able to be wily and nimble actors, who can balance the Great Powers.

So they need to integrate their economies into the Global, not antagonise either China or the US, and somehow weave in traditionalism.

Israel, India, which have very long democratic traditions and also see themselves as “Great Powers” seem to have a more grandiose foreign policy. Israel seems to have swung, reputation wise, in a single generation.

I’m just spitballing here. Of course India is on the scale of the EU, US, China & Russia in terms of geopolitical heft but as girmits says, India also *sees* itself that way.

The comment thread went bezerk after last night’s post but I guess the Commentariat enjoyed themselves?

Continue reading Open Thread: Nepal Floods + 20 months since Assad

India vs. Pakistan in one graph

However, total GDP isn’t the right comparison. More populous economies will usually produce more output. GDP per capita is the correct metric to consider. Until 2009, India was poorer than Pakistan on a per capita basis. India truly became richer than Pakistan after 2009 and since then it hasn’t looked back. If trends continue for a decade, India will be more than twice as rich as Pakistan soon.

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Pakistan’s GDP is about $400 billion while India’s is around $4 trillion. Since the ratio of their economies has stayed roughly constant for decades, their nominal growth rates should be similar from the 1960s onwards.

So why has India pulled ahead in GDP per capita? The reason is simple. Pakistan’s high fertility has driven population growth faster than India’s. In 1952 Pakistan had about one-tenth of India’s population; by 2025 it had grown to nearly one-seventh.

 

The other explanation why Pakistan finds it easier to maintain the status quo is that it is located in a geopolitically sweet spot. It can extract geopolitical rents from the US. It’s location close to Afghanistan is strategically important and the US has used many Pakistani airbase.

 

Thanks 0M for the article.

Bangladesh-India Open Thread

Bangladesh has lashed out at India for allowing the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina to address journalists in New Delhi, plunging already strained bilateral relations to a fresh low.

Dhaka accused India of giving a platform to a fugitive it labelled a “convicted genocider” and of undermining efforts to repair ties, after Hasina vowed to return to Bangladesh in December despite facing a death sentence on charges of “crimes against humanity”.

The angry response late on Wednesday came hours after Hasina, speaking on the second anniversary of the massive student-led uprising that led to her flight to India, declared: “Whatever fate awaits me, I will return to my people.”

India-Bangladesh relations hit new low over exiled PM’s speech to press in Delhi

Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

(h/t Archer, who called for this thread in the comments on “Erm”.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

Continue reading Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

Did Modi Make India Great Again?

Seven to One

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will be sworn in as Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. Keir Starmer resigned ten years, almost to the week, after the Brexit referendum. The CNN piece I read over breakfast had all but reconciled Britain to middle power status, and nobody in London seems to find the phrase strange anymore. Britain will have had seven prime ministers this decade. India has had one since 2014.

Everything I have been thinking about this week turns out to be the same question at different scales. The state of India. The state of Britain. The state of my own small republic of letters. What does continuity buy, and what does churn cost? Delhi will not let me put the question down.

Oh, could I have one more? Yes, please. Thank you. My fourth cup of sambar. Right now, it is sublime.

South Indian meals are, I always say, like Arabic food: a very good balance of taste and health, neither sacrificed to the other.

Ghalib at the Airport Continue reading Did Modi Make India Great Again?

Why Sri Lanka keeps missing its maritime moment

COLOMBO: Situated at the cusp of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, barely a degree north of the equator, Sri Lanka has a geographical location that port planners pay fortunes for. 

Yet for all the strategic plans drawn up over the past three decades, the island has progressed little beyond its role as a transshipment port –more than 80% of the cargo on ships docked in Sri Lanka is never unloaded here, but transshipped onward. 

Most of this cargo is bound for Indian ports, through terminals run by Sri Lanka’s state-owned Ports Authority, the China Merchants-backed Colombo International Container Terminals, and India’s Adani Group-linked Colombo West International Terminal.

Why Sri Lanka keeps missing its maritime moment

Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

Continue reading Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

India’s Wealth will not turn Pakistan into East Germany

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The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.

First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.

Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.

In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.

Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.

BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.

Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.

What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?

Brown Pundits