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 Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world.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

On 28 February the United States and Israel struck Iran. Regime change was the stated aim. Ali Khamenei died in the strikes. In January, protests had spread across the country with Washington’s open encouragement. By every Western model the Islamic Republic should have fallen by March. It did not. Mojtaba Khamenei is Supreme Leader. Pezeshkian is in Delhi.

Iranians are suffering greatly. The rial was in free fall before the first bomb. But the state survived a killed leader, an uprising and a naval blockade. The Islamic Republic was never plugged into the global economy the way Dubai or Riyadh is. Sanctions since 1979 had already cut most of what could be cut. Iran came into this war poorer for it, and harder to shock. The sanctions built a fortress by accident, and in 2026 the fortress seems to have held.

The failed ceasefire that was made in Islamabad

Pakistan brokered the first pause on 8 April. JD Vance and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf then sat across a table in Islamabad, the highest direct contact between the two states since 1979. The talks failed, the blockade came, and the talking carried on. On 12 June Shehbaz Sharif announced the final text. On 14 June Vance and Ghalibaf signed it electronically. On 17 June Donald Trump signed it at dinner with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles, Pezeshkian signed in Tehran, and Sharif’s name went on it as well. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt helped in the wings. The document has fourteen points, runs to a page and a half by Vance’s own description, and is called the Islamabad Memorandum. A billboard in Islamabad showed Sharif and Asim Munir under the words “the nation is grateful“. Now Asim Munir wants to spend that dividend on a 28th Amendment that redraws the provinces of Pakistan.

Trump declared it over on 8 July after Iran fired on ships in Hormuz. It lapsed in August. On 3 September Iranian missiles hit bases in Kuwait and the UAE, and Vance told reporters he would not call it a war.

Twenty-five years ago this week Pakistan was told it was with the United States or against it, and it chose the only option on offer. In 2026 the same state wrote the ceasefire between the United States and Iran and signed it as a party. Pakistan was one of the five governments that convened Bandung in 1955. It took seventy-one years to act like one.

On the eve of 9/11 the United States stood at the height of its prestige and its power. Twenty-five years on, misadventures in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) have cost it both.

The Ummah’s quarrels are its own

The UAE has severed Iran. Iranian missiles have hit Riyadh and the Ras Tanura refinery, and Saudi jets have quietly struck launch sites inside Iran and militias in Iraq. On 8 September the Houthis hit oil facilities in the Saudi south and wounded 73 people.

Hormuz is near shut, so Saudi crude had been leaving through Yanbu on the Red Sea, about five million barrels a day. On Thursday drones launched from Iraq hit the pipeline that feeds Yanbu, and on Friday Riyadh shut it. Regional officials say the Houthis helped plan the strike. The Houthis now hold Yemen’s whole western coast and Mayun island in Bab al-Mandeb, the exit for whatever Yanbu still ships (Asir, Jizan and Najran were Yemen until the Treaty of Taif in 1934).

Pakistan, bound to Riyadh by the defence pact the two signed last September, stands with the Saudis on paper and hosts Tehran’s negotiators in person.

This is what post-coloniality looks like from inside. The old order gave Muslim states two roles, client and target. In 2026 they are choosing their own enemies. The right to fight each other without permission is a poor kind of freedom, and it is the only kind any post-colonial state has ever started with. India and Pakistan can confirm.

The West’s favourite non-Western power

On 17 June, the day Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles, Modi was at the G7 in Evian shaking his hand. India can do that. India can dissent from the West and stay inside the system. Iran cannot. Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador, described Delhi’s BRICS posture this week as non-Western rather than anti-Western, and the phrase is exact. India chairs BRICS, thanks Xi for his support, buys Russian oil and stays welcome in the G7. Chietigj Bajpaee at Chatham House reads the last year as Delhi reinvesting in other relationships after strains with Trump. Reinvesting is a banker’s word.

India’s post-coloniality is licensed. It was earned at Bandung. The Ummah’s version is unlicensed, and it is paid for in a Hormuz that nobody controls. The rivalry in that hall was between two kinds of post-colonial, the approved and the unapproved.

Taste follows power

Post-coloniality arrives in stages: foreign policy first, then war, then aspiration, then taste. The elites of the Muslim world remain, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s word from 1962, gharbzadeh, westoxicated. I use the Persian because English has nothing as precise. The condition now lives in wardrobes and holiday plans rather than in parliaments. Modernity was sold to the global South as a lifestyle, and the lifestyle was measured by the ability to spend August in Paris.

The condition is most acute in the small Gulflet states the Great Powers dreamt up. The Arab states, which could have been one nation, were splintered instead and taught to take their taste from Western high culture. This may change.

A Saudi family that spends €15,000 in Paris can spend €5,000 in Istanbul and may have a better holiday culturally. Istanbul and Sarajevo already fill with Gulf families every summer. When enough of the South reroutes its August, the West stops being the place you arrive at once you have made it. London luxury houses already depend on Chinese, Gulf and Indian buyers. The hall in Delhi this morning was the political half of that switch. The shopping bag half is coming. Gharbzadegi ends at a till in Istanbul.

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

Every durable country is governed by a sediment. India’s old elite predates the Raj: strata deposited through the Sultanates and the Mughal centuries (the Rajputs kept rank by cavalry and accommodation), compacted under the Company, glazed by the ICS, lacquered by the licence Raj. Let’s call the true elite a basis point of its society, one in ten thousand, and give each member a network of a hundred: that is how a rounding error becomes a ruling class. The visible one per cent is essentially the network of the one-in-ten-thousand.

And that old Left-Liberal Nehruvian elite is post-caste in a very particular sense. It behaves like Bollywood: class first, everything else negotiable. It will happily admit the educated aspirant, Shudra, Muslim, anyone, who marries in and learns the table manners; long before it seats the pious, industrious twice-born up from the provinces, whom it privately files under country buffoon and hem them in with Reservations.

The Reservation Cleft

The snub is the point, and the snub is the recruiting sergeant. Reservations don’t block the children of the Old Elite, who anyway train in the West, but blocks their parvenu cousins. For the rural Uppers, the shakha supplies what the drawing room withholds: fraternity, status, vocabulary and eventually power. Hindutva is best read not as the lower orders storming the gates but as an upper-caste revolt of the provinces against a post-caste metropolis; a metropolis whose own bone structure is nonetheless upper-caste.

The Old Left-Liberal Elite looks on their rural Upper-Caste kin in a way a WASP may despise a Southerner but would never daresay to a minority for performing the exact same action.

Rahul Gandhi, a Brahmin whatever the exotic ancestry, personifies the drawing room; Modi, an OBC, commands a movement built and propelled by upper-caste cadre. The founders, cadre and intellectual infrastructure are provincial upper-caste, while the electoral coalition the movement later assembled reaches deep into OBC and Dalit India. Brahmins man both barricades. Hence the title of this piece.

The Elite Civil war

Nations inherit the pathologies of their founding elites, and the civil wars attending them. English liberty was less a gift from below than the residue of prolonged civil war within the ruling class; America is still litigating the quarrels of its founding stock. India’s peculiarity is the refusal to name its Left-Liberal elite at all. There is a half-serious case for titles: an aristocracy with letterhead can be balanced, taxed, mocked. It is the unnamed aristocracy that proves immortal.

(A Pakistan aside, since Kabir’s linked piece on provinces is still ringing in my ears. The provinces were not drawn for the parties, but they function as if they had been; redoubts where a movement beaten in Islamabad can govern, recruit and wait: the PPP in Sindh, the Sharifs in Punjab, PTI in KP. PTI are the proto-Pakistanis: the first cohort to buy the middle-class Pakistani identity whole – consolidation, not secession; the new Medina on layaway. Their war is generational: children formed by Pakistaniat against elders steeped in a shrine Islam that spent centuries absorbing local idiom alongside Hindu devotion.)

Which brings us to who actually needs religion. At the summit, tradition tends to ossify into heritage. No elite lives the orthodoxy: the Khans of Bombay are half-Hindu by blood or marriage, marinated in a Hindu environment whatever the surname. Tamil Nadu, Dravidianism’s own fortress, is so Hindu that the state emblem carries a temple gopuram even Periyar never troubled to contest; T.M. Krishna’s We, the People of India (a very good book and he is the Carnatic Singer of last night’s excellent performance) sits with that fact at length.

The Middle

Orthodoxy turns out to be a middle-class necessity: religion as portable code, standardised, legible, compatible with school, office and the nuclear family, lived exam to exam and paycheck to paycheck. The poor drift to the shrine and the syncretic edge because they have nothing to lose; the elite drift there because they have nothing to prove. The middle holds the line because the line is all it holds.

So yes: Nagpur’s bowl may well be filling in Ahmedabad. But look closer at the temple queue. The priesthood is not merely in service; it is in schism; metropolis against province, drawing room against shakha, cousin against cousin. Pattanaik sees a Brahmin who rented out his voice. I see two Brahmins fighting over what the voice should say. Civil wars are hardest to see when both sides wear the same thread.

The deeper point is that the cartoon assumes India should negotiate with America as a peer. Ten years ago the same artists would have mocked the premise itself, the militarism, the chest-thumping, the great-power posture. They would have drawn Modi as too assertive, not too pliant. The cartoon’s anger only makes sense if you have already accepted that India belongs at the table. The argument is no longer whether India should rise. It is over who should manage the rise, and for whose benefit?

Once you see that, the hypocrisy follows. A section of India’s liberal commentariat treats Modi’s growth model as a moral failure but discovers its nationalism when Trump tweets. They want Indian dignity in the abstract and Indian poverty in practice. Mocking Modi is the only nationalism they have left.

The second observation is structural. Modi has no children. Yogi has no children. Ascetic leaders lack the direct hereditary incentive structure that has powered South Asian corruption for seventy years. They can still build patronage systems and ideological courts. They cannot build dynasties.

The cartoon mocks Modi for a transactional posture with Trump. Transaction is not corruption. The cheque, if it exists, flows to the United States Treasury, not to a son in London or a son-in-law in Dubai. That is the unglamorous structural improvement of the last decade, but it does not draw well.

The real gripe is distributional. The headline rate is strong. The spread across castes, states, and sectors is not. Bihar is not Gujarat. If penpencildraw wanted to draw something true, they could draw the Gini curve, or the state-level dispersion of per-capita income, or the wage share of GDP. They drew Modi giving Trump a cheque instead, because that is the cartoon the audience already wanted.

It tells us that even Modi’s critics now expect India to act like a great power, in no small thanks to him, and have nothing to say about the country that actually exists underneath.

Look at the scoreboard.

Op Sindoor. India’s post-operation strategic environment does not favour India. Whatever the tactical ledger reads, the diplomatic map around South Asia has tightened against Delhi, not loosened. Delhi has learned. The region has taken notes.

Pakistan. The surprise winner of Op Sindoor is not India. Rawalpindi has played the post-operation hand better than anyone expected and is now cashing cheques in Washington, the Persian Gulf and Beijing in the same quarter. On the current scoreboard, Pakistan is the diplomatic champion of the world.

Iran.* Tehran has pushed back harder than the MAGA-Likud axis priced in. Hormuz did not close on Washington’s schedule. The Islamic Republic has not folded on Washington’s terms. The deterrence calculus is running the wrong way.

Lebanon. Netanyahu was ordered to stop. Not persuaded, not incentivised. Ordered. That is a tell about who holds the leash, and it is not Jerusalem.

Hungary. Orbán conceded on 12 April 2026. Sixteen years, gone in a single parliamentary cycle, to Péter Magyar’s Tisza on a two-thirds supermajority. Some say it was thanks to JD’s Kiss of Death. The flagship of illiberal democracy in Europe was voted out by the electorate it was supposed to have captured.

The structural point is harder than any single theatre. Xi and Putin operate without the constraint of competitive elections, independent courts or coalition arithmetic. The far-right quintet operates inside all three and is trying to match authoritarian tempo from within liberal scaffolding. It does not work. The flexibility differential is not a skill gap. It is a regime-type gap. You cannot out-Putin Putin with a cabinet that has to stand for re-election, a judiciary that can still strike your orders down, and allies that can still walk.

Worse, the bloc has drifted into an Israel-centred alignment as its organising axis. Milei has called himself the “most Zionist president in the world.” That is a narrow base on which to hang a civilisational project. It collapses the quintet’s foreign policy into one theatre, one survival question, and one ally’s political clock.

What looks from inside the movement like civilisational restoration looks from outside like the accelerated stripping of American hegemony. Every arena in which the quintet has tried to project force in the last six months has reverted, stalled or reversed. The chess masters are losing pieces, and the board is being rearranged by others.

Read our comments. Every thread runs the same circuit. Trump does X and a chorus explains why X was the deep play. Modi does Y and the same chorus decodes Y as civilisational mastery. Netanyahu does Z, and Z becomes, retroactively, the only move available.

Demonetisation: the canonical case.

8 November 2016. Five hundred and one thousand rupee notes voided overnight. Stated targets: black money, counterfeiting, terror financing. The RBI’s own data later confirmed that over 99% of demonetised notes returned to the banking system. The policy cost roughly ₹1.28 lakh crore in the first three months alone. Around a hundred deaths attributable. The unorganised sector, the MSME economy, the daily-wage poor and the rural cash economy were eviscerated, because for them cash is not a convenience but the circulatory system of economic life. Every stated target missed. Every unstated cost borne by the poorest.

A decade later, a Ranveer Singh blockbuster, Dhurandhar 2, is enlisted as post-hoc exegesis. A fictional RAW operative named Hamza infiltrates an ISI-Dawood counterfeit pipeline, a fictional ₹60,000 crore note-flood is foiled, and Notebandi is retconned from economic catastrophe into civilisational masterstroke. The chorus cites the film. The film cites nothing.

Cinema is the Evidence by which Theology can justify the Corpses

Men are not gods. Political projects are not revelations. Every serious civilisational tradition has warned against the sanctifying of temporal rulers, and it warned for a reason. This is what the worship of earthly gods produces, not analysis, but hagiography with a box-office gross, making a habit of which rots the capacity to see.

The question BP should sit with is not whether this is happening. It is who picks up what Washington is dropping. Beijing and Moscow, on current form, are not building an order. They are waiting out one. The multipolar settlement that emerges may be something neither the liberal order nor the authoritarian one has a template for.

PS. Power, Constituency, and the News Cycle

One extension to the argument above.

Start with the realist premise. All leaders in power are pragmatic in at least one dimension: they want to remain in power. The interesting variable is not whether they are strategic but whom they are strategic against. The critical constraint is the constituency they have to pacify to keep their seats.

Pakistan is the clean case. The military is the de facto sovereign and its civilian population is an audience, not a veto. Rawalpindi can absorb domestic pain, shift its foreign posture and reorder its alliance map without clearing it with the electorate. Modi cannot. Trump cannot. Netanyahu, increasingly, cannot.

So the real question on Op Sindoor is not whether it was a strategic move against Pakistan. It is whether it was a strategic move at all, or a populist move dressed as one. The two are often indistinguishable at the moment of launch and cleanly distinguishable in the wreckage six months later.

Apply the same test to Trump. The Epstein files are no longer dominating the news cycle. They have been displaced, and the displacement is not accidental. A war on Iran that has not advanced Washington’s agenda, not advanced Jerusalem’s agenda, not advanced any discernible strategic agenda whatsoever, has nonetheless advanced one thing: the news cycle has moved. That is not strategy. That is domestic political hygiene projected outward through airpower.

This is the quiet update to the grand-strategist mythos. The quintet is not playing three moves ahead on a global chessboard. Most of the time it is playing one move ahead on a domestic one, and calling the move a strategy because the word sounds better than the truth.

* Standing Note on Iran

BP Precedent · 19 April 2026

For this post and every future BP post that touches Iran, one thing on the record.

We hold no brief for the Iranian regime. Our argument that Washington and Jerusalem have miscalculated on Tehran is a strategic observation, not a moral endorsement. The two are different categories and BP should not let commenters collapse them.

To our mind, the Iranian government is genuinely evil in what it does to the Bahá’ís. Iran’s roughly 300,000-strong Bahá’í community, the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, has faced 47 years of systematic state persecution: exclusion from education and employment, confiscation of property, demolition of graves, mock executions, the 1991 government memorandum that formalised the policy of blocking Bahá’í development, and a sustained propaganda apparatus that brands Bahá’ís as Israeli spies. See ThePrint’s 12 April 2026 report: Iran is oppressing its biggest non-Muslim minority. Baha’i are labelled as Israeli spies.

And not only Bahá’ís. The Iranian revolution has been an unmitigated disaster for every Iranian citizen: Muslim, minority, secular, religious. Women. Dissenters. Journalists. Ethnic minorities. Economic migrants. An entire generation has been immiserated by a theocratic ruling class that has fused state power, religious authority and organised violence.

The strategic point stands independently of all this. Tehran can be a monstrous government and still be winning the board against Trump and Netanyahu. Recognising the second does not dilute the first.

Analysis of regime behaviour is not endorsement of the regime. Any future BP post on Iran should be read with this note in mind.

Nobody seems to be interested in Pakistan’s diplomatic resurrection. What does it mean that a country written off as failed just a year ago is now the hinge of a regional peace settlement and averting World War Three on the double. This is the actual story of 2026 and it is not on our comment boards.

Pakistan: From Failed State to Diplomatic Champion

A year ago, before Operation Sindor, Pakistan was being written off in every serious strategic publication in the English language. The IMF was reluctant. Every mainstream Indian and Western analyst agreed. Pakistan was finished as a regional actor of any significance.

Today Pakistan is mediating, leading, the Iran crisis. The Hormuz situation, which could have escalated into a catastrophic closure of the world’s most important oil chokepoint, is moving toward resolution largely because Pakistan has positioned itself as the only party credible with Tehran, Riyadh, and Washington simultaneously.

The war that looked civilisational is now looking more like a pivot point. Pakistan is not a failed state. India is not uniquely ascendant under PM Modi. The question of whether the BJP holds power post-Modi is now a live one, not a theoretical one. Iran is not isolated. Israel is not unbreakable. The realignment is happening now, in real time, and almost nobody seems to be writing about it.

Iran Stood Up

The other half of the story is Iran. Iran stood up to the United States and survived it. That is a sentence that sounds unremarkable until you remember how few states have done it in the last forty years and what happened to most of the ones that tried. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. The list is short and the endings are grim.

Tehran has not only survived. It has emerged with its leverage intact, its regional network bruised but functioning, and its diplomatic position stronger than it was before the confrontation began. The mobile phone and the internet did more damage to the regime’s domestic legitimacy in a decade than American sanctions did in forty years. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi forced real concessions. The women of Tehran do not wear the hijab in the way they were required to a few years ago. And yet the state itself is now a global player in a way it was not in 2024. Both things are true at once. That is the interesting part.

Pakistan and Iran together are now running a diplomatic corridor that the great powers, distracted by Ukraine and then by Hormuz, have effectively conceded to them. Neither country should, on paper, be able to do this. Both of them are doing it.

The Far Right in Dissent

The other signal worth reading is the state of the global far right, which looked ascendant eighteen months ago and looks, right now, quietly unwell.

PM Modi is still there but the aura seems thinner? The question of BJP succession is open in a way it was not before. Netanyahu is politically cornered at home and strategically overextended abroad. Orbán is out of power after 16 years on top. Even Trump, who has managed to stay on and who is not going anywhere, is governing a country where his coalition is visibly fraying and where the economic story is no longer the one he ran on.

Four leaders who looked, a year ago, like the vanguard of a durable global realignment. Four leaders who look, this week, like figures who peaked earlier than their supporters expected. The pattern is not universal and we are not predicting their imminent removal (Orbán has conceded). But the civilisational confidence has gone out of the movement. What is left is the machinery, and the machinery without the confidence is a different thing.

The BP Pivot

Instead we are arguing about Aurangzeb. The most commented thread on Brown Pundits this week is about whether Hindus are required to love the Mughals. The second most commented thread is about the TCS Nashik conversion case (which as an aside is an excellent piece by co-editor Gaurav Lele). These are real questions. They are not the question.

The question is what happens when the post-Ukraine pre-Hormuz paradigm breaks and a new one has not yet formed. Four heterodox states, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, now sit at the front rank of strategic relevance. The great powers, China and the United States above all, are not setting the agenda in this corridor right now. The middle powers are. That is a historical inflection and it is not a small one.

The World At Large

Pakistan has transformed into a global player. Iran has transformed into a global player by refusing to be broken. The far right is in dissent across four continents. The realignment that looked settled in the spring of 2025 is no longer settled. The story of 2026 is not the story of 2025 with slightly different casualty figures. It is a different story.

We are going to write that story on this blog, whether the commentariat follows us into it or not. The Aurangzeb thread will keep running. The Aryan Migration Precedent Post will get written. But the centre of gravity is moving, and BP has to move with it.

The Crimea-Hormuz paradigm is over. Something else is beginning. We would rather be wrong about what is beginning than correct about what has already ended.

Writing this review now as I came home at 5 am and slept the whole day.

Will keep it spoiler-free as much as possible.

First of all, if some people had issues with the politics of the first movie, they are going to hate this one as it takes it way way beyond, shifting the overton window so far to the right.

The movie is great, super fun and keeps you engaged throughout. It is a bit looser than the first one, not having the razor sharp focus of the espionage drama that it was, instead transforming into more of an action movie.

The action setpieces are way more brutal and better choreographed and more in number compared to the first one.

The movie starts with one of the setpieces barely a few minutes in and then keeps going for a while before slowing down a bit leading to the interval (which is the best part of the movie) before building up steam and not letting go till the end.

Music, as always is a banger with a variety of remixes of old songs and some interesting needledrops.

Already on it’s way to be the highest grossing Indian movie of all time with massive crowds even in South India.

Anyways, highly highly recommended.

Ya naya Hindustan ka naya cinema hai.

A tweet reposted by Azad Essa, attacking Priyanka Chopra as “Hindutva-fascist”, asserting that she is somehow ‘uncomfortable’ standing next to Javier Bardem while he delivered remarks in support of Palestine. This, in spite of the fact that Priyanka Chopra has publicly supported Palestine – signing letters demanding ceasefires, tweeting on Rafah and so on.

Azad Essa, is an author that was recently spotlighted on Brown Pundits itself, via his propaganda work on comparing Palestine to the Kashmir valley. This is a particular echo chamber driven by a very explicit agenda, that seeks to weaponize and co-opt the language of the left, in pursuit of demonizing India and Hindus. Facts do not matter, its Priyanka’s ethnicity that matters, and the fact that she dares to be publicly proud of her heritage, her religion and her nationality.

This is but an anecdotal example, but one that quite neatly spotlights the suspect credibility of aspiring ‘academics’ like Mr Essa. The question is how does the ecosystem of academia defend itself against such explicit bad actors that misuse concepts of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘journalism’ to peddle insidious agendas.

Modi’s strong support for Israel – and refusal to condemn the Israel-U.S. strikes on Iran, a long-time friend of India’s – have “diminished India’s stature in the eyes of the world.”

Journalist Bharat Bhushan wrote in Deccan Herald that with the recent visit, Modi has put India “firmly in the U.S.-Israeli camp.”

That is not a space that India should be in if it is hoping to lead the Global South, especially in the context of Israel’s continuing war on Gaza and the latest Israel-U.S. military strikes on Iran.

Simple question. Hard answer.

Make the case. What criteria matters most to you?

• Economic stewardship
• Institutional integrity
• Foreign policy judgment
• Social cohesion
• Crisis management

No slogans. No party loyalty. Just reasoning.

Moderated for substance. Indian-centred perspectives prioritised.