Author: Praveen Swami

How map-making helped spark off the China-India war on the world’s roof

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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From the black gravel pass—Karakoram, in the Turkic dialects of the traders who traversed the Himal—Frank Ludlow descended into the Chip-Chap, the silent river, headed to Daulat Beg Oldi, the place where a rich noble had died. From there, the route led to an open plain, Depsang, and then Haji Langar, where a pilgrims to Mecca were fed. Following that was the camp-ground at Burtsé, named for a medicinal shrub. There was one last obstacle before the Galwan river, which climbed through the mountains into the Aksai Chin plateau: Murgo, the gate to hell.

Ludlow’s map, he wrote in his memoirs of his 1928 expedition, showed the location of a safe campsite: “a pile of stones and mud had been erected against the face of a cliff to form a shelter from the wind. I looked inside this shelter and found it contained three skulls and other gruesome human remains”.

A hundred years on, almost, those names mark the frontlines the of still-unfolding confrontation between China and India on the world’s roof. In both countries’ nationalist discourse, each centimetre of this savage mountain terrain is seen as sacred ground—sanctified, as it were, by the blood shed in the 1962 war.

There’s another story to be told, though, about how this conflict came about, and why: a story about how boundaries, and myths, were etched on to maps of lands which had none, as the two great Asian nation-states born in the last century struggled to imagine—and will into being—their borders.

“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth”, observes the novel Journey to the West, counted as one of the four keystones of classical Chinese literature. Nine centuries after the monk Xuanzang journeyed to India and Central Asia to collect the great sutras of Buddhist cannon, his incredible, seventeen-year journey became the foundation of the novel, attributed to Wu Cheng’en. In 1762, a map compiled on the orders of the great Emperor Qianlong was appended to the book, to illustrate the magnificent scale of Xuanzang’s journeys.

The map showed Hindustan lay somewhere south of the Kuen Lun range. The word had been given life: This map would, centuries later, come to form the foundation of India’s claims to Aksai Chin.

From soon after independence, Indian diplomats had become concerned over the slow, westward drift of borders in Chinese maps—a process that had begun long before the communist revolution. Beginning in the 1920s, the Ministry of External Affairs noted in a 1960 document “Chinese maps have departed from the traditional boundary, and included large areas of Indian territory”.

The idea of a traditional boundary, though, wasn’t as uncomplicated as it seems. From the 1850s on imperial British maps had begun to mark the borders of their colony with Tibet, sometimes expanding east and north, as explorers penetrated ever-deeper into the Himalaya. Indian spies like Sarat Chandra Das, Ghulam Muhammad Galwan and Mohan Lal Kashmiri played a key role in this endeavour, posing as mendicants and traders to gather intelligence for the empire.

Few of these regions generated any worthwhile revenue, though. Empire had little interest in asserting territorial control of these lands, leaving their policing to local vassals of regional rulers. For the most part, trade and access to pastures were established by convention, not law, and were—at best—loosely enforced.

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard’s path-breaking scholarship on state-formation in the Himalayas teaches us, moreover, that the populations caught up in these cartographic processes often had no sense of being subjects of either the British or Qing empires—nor involvement in the nationalist projects that would replace them.

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The process of imperial map-making, though, was to have real-world consequences. In 1914, British administrator Henry MacMahon negotiated the borders between India’s north-east and Tibet in Shimla. The border he arrived at—long rejected by China, which argued it had been enforced under duress— drew on the cartographical work of Christian missionaries operating in Tibet in the 1870s.

Kuomintang maps made in the 1930s and 1940s—so worrying to Indian diplomats—were efforts to push back against this imperial cartography, with Chinese nationalist fictions of their own.

Put another way, map-making wasn’t just a reflection of politics or geography: in some key ways, it had begun to shape reality.

Late in 1950, the People’s Liberation Army’s Eighteenth Army marched into Lhasa: a savage crime, in the eyes of some, against small, independent mountain kingdom; a restoration, to others, of land that had been rightfully ruled by China from 1720 to 1911, and lost by a civilisation enfeebled through the Western colonial onslaught. New Delhi, it isn’t widely known, did consider its options: The Foreign Secretary, Director of the Intelligence Bureau and Army chief met amidst calls for Indian military assistance to Tibet.

“The consensus that emerged from that meeting”, India’s war history records, “was that India was in no position whatsoever at that time to intervene militarily”.

Even as New Delhi went along with China’s claims on Tibet, China began survey-work for a road through Aksai Chin in 1951 and announced its completion in six years. The road through the uninhabited plateau was of critical strategic importance to Beijing, allowing to maintain logistics for its garrisons in Tibet through Xinjiang.

“The Indian government”, India’s official history of the war of 1962 admits, “did not come to know of the building of this road as Indian forward posts in this inhospitable and uninhabited region were far behind the map-marked boundary”. Put another way, India believed Aksai Chin to be its own—but had never staked its claim.

In the summer of 1958, Deputy Superintendent of Police Karam Singh and Lieutenant Ram ‘Tiny’ Iyengar headed out into the Aksai Chin, to determine just where the highway ran. Lieutenant Iyengar’s patrol was detected and detained, but Karam Singh’s reconnaissance established the road ran from Haji Langar in the north to Amtogar in the south, cutting some 160 kilometres through Aksai Chin.

Even before these events, there were signs that Beijing wasn’t content with the borders as India understood them. Inside weeks of Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s 1954 visit to India—where he made no suggestion China contested India’s understanding of the border—Beijing protested the presence of the Indian Army on the Barahoti Pass in Uttar Pradesh.

From 1955 on, there was a succession of military intrusions: at Barahoti, the Hipki La in Himachal Pradesh, Kaurik and Hipsang Khud. In each case, China insisted the PLA was on its own territory. Khurnak Fort, in Ladakh, was occupied—and used as a base to supply outposts in Spanggur and Digra.

Then, in 1958, came the map that made those claims explicit: China Pictorial, an official map, asserted claims over the whole of what was then India’s North-East Frontier Agency, with the exception of Tirap, as well as parts of Ladakh, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. Chou En-Lai responded to Indian protests by repeating that the maps were based on old Kuomintang cartography—but added that China hadn’t surveyed its boundaries, nor consulted with other countries on the issue.

Chou En-Lai was to offer a joint survey to delineate the border—but Prime Minister Nehru shot down the proposal outright. “There can be no question about these large parts of India being anything but India”, he wrote on December 14, 1958. “I do not know what kind of surveys can affect these well-known and fixed boundaries”.

The next year, Chou En-Lai offered another deal, proposing both sides withdraw 20 kilometres behind the MacMahon Line in the eastern sector, and a similar distance from their actual ground positions in Ladakh. Feeling this arrangement would cede China control of areas in Ladakh it had occupied, Prime Minister Nehru again rejected the offer.

From June to December 1960, Chinese and Indian officials met in Beijing, New Delhi and Yangon, in a last-ditch effort to hammer out their differences. This time, the Chinese came armed with a Ladakh claim line—or border—running from east of Daulat Beg Oldi, cutting across the Galwan river near its confluence with the Shyok, then to where the Pangong Lake turns north-west, and ending south-west of Demchok. The map was even more expansive than one issued in 1956 and pushed by Chou En-Lai in the 1959 discussions.

Then, in 1959, bloody clashes broke out between the Indian Army and the PLA in the Galwan valley. New Delhi threw its weight behind the so-called Forward Policy: Thinly-held pickets of Indian troops were to assert India’s claims as far ahead as possible, gambling China would not evict them by force. In 1962, that decision backfired.

From Chinese maps issued to the Non-Aligned States in 1962—New Delhi has not issued an official cartographical representation of the war—it’s clear the PLA pushed past the Indian forward posts to its 1960 claim line. Later, it withdrew some 20 kilometres behind that claim line, creating a kind of de-facto no-man’s land.

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The rearmament of the Indian Army begun by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri—and then pushed forward by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—allowed the Indian Army to begin patrolling the lost territories again. In 1967, a reinvigorated Indian Army beat back Chinese attacks on Nathu La and Cho La, at the gates of the Chumbi Valley—the strategically vital corridor between Bhutan and Sikkim.

Ever since then, an unquiet truce has prevailed along the China-India border. However, since 2013—as India’s road network, logistical infrastructure and defensive fortifications have been enhanced—new pressures have begun to mount.

Fearful that India’s new resources could let it assert—and hold—claims across the 1960 line, the PLA has begun to push back harder. In nine key sectors, Indian patrols have routinely been confronted, leading to a succession of face-offs. This summer’s crisis is the largest seen, in the number of troops it involves, since 1967.

Like in the past, maps have not a little to do with the story: Bar the fact that the Line of Actual Control begins at the Karakoram pass, the two countries agree on few of its details. New Delhi argues—correctly—that the Chinese troops in Pangong or Galwan are on the Indian side of the LAC, which approximates the lines to which the PLA withdrew in 1962. Beijing argues—also correctly—that Indian troops are on its side of the LAC, which approximates its 1960 claim line.

Leaders in both Beijing and New Delhi seem to have concluded, from the successful containment of the multiple crisis since 2013—in which not one shot has been fired—that these are low-risk events. Fuelled by the rising tide of nationalism in both countries, and anger generated by social media images of the clashes, each crisis is placing ever-greater pressures on national leadership—and ever less room for manoeuvre.

“Five kilometres more land we have or five kilometres less—this is not important”, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev admonished Mao Zedong after the 1959 clashes in India. “I take Lenin’s example, and he gave to Turkey Kars, Ardahan and Ararat. And until today area a part of the population in the Caucasus are displeased by these measures by Lenin. But I believe that his actions were correct”.

That wise counsel wasn’t heard in either New Delhi or Beijing, prisoners of their own maps. Now, the time’s come to start listening.

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What India’s China strategy can learn from a herd of burning, squealing pigs

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Facing the city of Megara stood the mighty army of Antigonus II, his elephants lined up for the final, crushing assault on its walls. Then, the historian Polyaenus recorded in 161CE, “the Megarians daubed some swine with pitch, set fire to it, and let them loose among the elephants. The pigs grunted and shrieked under the torture of the fire, and sprang forwards as hard as they could among the elephants, who broke their ranks in confusion and fright, and ran off in different directions”.

Three thousand People’s Liberation Army—perhaps more—are now facing off against similar numbers of Indian soldiers along the Galwan River valley in Ladakh, in the largest crisis along the Line of Actual Control since the Doklam crisis of 2017. The story of the burning pigs tells us this: in war the smart often triumph over the strong.

For years now, Beijing has been pursuing a strategy of intimidation along its entire periphery. It has coerced the Philippines, threatened Taiwan, clashed with Vietnam and forced Japan to scramble combat jets more often than at the height of the Cold War. The strategy has allowed China’s political leadership to harvest ultranationalism to buttress its legitimacy—at little real military cost.

New Delhi has responded to the pressure on the LAC by pushing back—hard. The Galwan River crisis makes it vital, though, to consider the risks that both sides could end up in a war neither wants.

First up, it’s important to understand just how the tensions we’re now seeing were born. Following the 1999 Kargil war, India became increasingly concerned about its vulnerabilities in the east. Border road development was accelerated, and military capabilities enhanced. Then, in 2008, Defence Minister AK Antony issued a classified directive ordering the military to prepare for a two-front war—a decision that was to lead to the raising of two new mountain divisions.

Even as New Delhi was seeing a fire-breathing dragon emerging from the global financial crisis of 2008, though, Beijing was focussed on the lances and arrows of the hunters it believed had surrounded it.

Fear shaped Beijing’s thinking. Thinking—wrongly—that the Soviet Union was planning to invade China by 1985, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had led his country into a strategic relationship with the United States. The relationship laid the foundations for Chinese prosperity and power.

But, as the world began to change from 2008, and the United States began to see China as a genuine strategic competitor, a new period of isolation seemed to be looming.

Persuaded India was working in concert with Western powers to contain its rise, Beijing began responding more aggressively to India’s build-up in Ladakh. Everything from minor road-construction work in Chumar to irrigation works in Demchok drew pushback from the PLA. The PLA also upgraded its military infrastructure in Tibet. Transgressions along the LAC, particularly in Ladakh, saw a marked uptick.

Then came the crisis: in the Chip-Chap River near Daulat Beg Oldi in 2013, at Chumar in 2014, at Doklam in 2017.

In Galwan, the crisis began with assertive Indian patrolling on territory China claims lies on its side of the LAC. In 1962, China had annihilated Indian forward positions in the Galwan valley, with an entire PLA battalion overrunning heroic resistance from tiny, under-equipped pickets of the Jat Regiment. Later that year, China published maps claiming that the Indian positions had been built on its side of the border.

Last year, though, India completed a new road from the key forward airfield of Daulat Beg Oldi to the mouth of the Galwan river and begun to patrol the territory it had lost in 1962 more aggressively.

The unfolding crisis began when Indian and Chinese patrols brushed up against each other in the valley earlier this month, and began brawling—leading, first, to intervention by a larger PLA patrol, and then to reinforcement by the Indian Army.

In part, China’s response is simply pushback against Indian resolve. Tempting as it is to read geostrategic motives into the confrontation in Galwan, there is little evidence to suggest the face-off came about by design.

Figures show PLA transgressions have, for the most part, been dynamic—enmeshed, as it were, with the intensity of the Indian Army’s summer posture. In 2016, for example, transgressions fell sharply relative to 2015; there was a smaller dip in 2017, relative to 2016. Last year, there was a sharp rise—as India pushed forward on border works in the shadow of the 2017 crisis in Doklam.

These transgressions have no little to do with the fact that the two sides agree on little about the LAC, other than the fact that it ends at the Karakoram pass. Zorawar Daulet Singh, an expert on the China-India military relationship, has noted that both sides have long engaged in “probing up to their preferred Lines of Actual Control”.

In essence, both armies are making their red lines known to the other—and hoping good management, along with good luck, ensure the conflict stays limited to pushing-and-shoving.

For all the aggression, there’s little evidence either side is willing to go to war to change the status quo. The PLA Air Force’s forward airfields in Tibet, the Indian Air Force says, show none of the signs of hardening and expansion preparation for conflict would entail. Though the PLA Army has upgraded its capabilities in Tibet, moving in new armour and artillery, its troop numbers remain modest. India, moreover, has also expanded its military capabilities in Ladakh, pumping in armour and artillery, and building new roads.

There’s a good reason for the PLA to be war-averse. In 1984-1985, when China fought its last real war, with Vietnam, it ended up with an exceptionally bloody nose. President Deng Xiaoping ordered his armies to “touch the buttocks of a tiger”, hoping to demonstrate “our military is still good enough”. Instead, the PLA ended up 12,192 dead—and none of its objectives in Vietnam secured.

The 1984-1985 war, moreover, demonstrated an army rotten to the core. Elements of the 67th Army, on their way out of Laoshan, Xiaoming Zhang’s magisterial history of the war records, demanded $1,500 from their 47th Army replacements for all intelligence on enemy positions and firepower. In another case, an armoured unit which did not receive care packages despatched its tanks to surround an infantry division headquarters and extorted its share.

In the decades since, China’s military dragged itself into the 21st century, but the dragon is still missing claws and teeth. Paul Dibbs, an Australian defence expert, points out the country’s state-of-the-art Type 95 submarines will only be as stealthy as the 1980s Soviet titanium-hulled Akula-class. Large parts of the Air Force and Navy are still made up of obsolescent equipment.

For all the technological gloss, the ghost of 1984-1985 still hangs over future wars. The combat qualities of the new cohort of PLA officers—products of China’s one-child policy, which spawned a generation derisively referred to as “Little Emperors”—are unclear. PLA newspapers are replete with stories of new recruits using boarding-school tricks like spitting out red ink to avoid training.

Liu Mingfu, a scholar at China’s National Defence University, estimated in a 2012 report that 70 percent of the PLA’s troops were only sons—a number rising to 80 percent among combat troops. In a country with a growing cohort of aged people, with ancient cultural norms against sending only sons to war, the consequences could be significant.

These stark realities, and a clear-eyed understanding that large-scale war would come with crippling costs, restrain China from military action. Even hawks in China’s strategic establishment, like Major-General Qiao Liang, have been cautioning against the costs of a full-blown war, arguing it would inflict economic desolation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has since 2015, repeatedly tried to nudge China towards a rapid agreement on the border dispute. Beijing, however, seems to believe the concessions that would involve would have a negative impact on more important territorial disputes it has elsewhere in east Asia. Even more important, some in Beijing think the border issue will give China leverage should politics in Tibet become unsettled after the passing of the 84-year-old Dalai Lama, Lhamo Thondup.

The lesson India should be drawing is simple: a border settlement is profoundly unlikely any time soon.

New Delhi knows there’s no easy path forward. Though the idea of allying more closely with the United States might seem seductive, President Donald Trump has shown himself a fickle friend—even to long-standing partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and South Korea. And though countries like Japan or Vietnam might have concerns about Chinese aggression, neither is looking for a rupture with China.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, India is going to have to find ways to push back against the PLA on the LAC—while at once avoiding crisis that serves no clear ends. New Delhi needs to beware of the seduction of becoming mired in stand-offs of little or no strategic value, only because domestic political opinion makes retreat difficult.

Leaders in both countries believe their success in managing past crises gives reason for confidence that the next one will also contained. Each crisis, though, brings with it the prospect of misjudgment and missteps that could lead both countries into a war neither wants, nor can afford.

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In Kashmir, New Delhi needs to look beyond its nose

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Tens of thousands of people marched, one grey spring morning in 1990, to the Eidgah in Srinagar to bury Ashfaq Majeed Wani, then the icon of the Kashmir insurgency. Wani’s claims to this honour were dubious: He’d kidnapped former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s sister, and menaced the Pandit minority, before ending his career by accidentally blowing himself up with a grenade in a botched ambush near Srinagar’s Firdaus Cinema—the only actual military operation he participated in.

In 1990, even a second-rate martyr sufficed. “Mothers would put mehendi on their sons going to Pakistan”, recorded the scholar Navnita Behera. “Children carried placards saying ‘Indian dogs go home’ or ‘Mujahideen qaum zindabad’”.

This week, following the killing of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen Kashmir division chief Riyaz Naikoo, it’s become the rage that drives this impulse are still alive. The gaggles of young people who turned out throw stones at police after his killing were small—faux editions, as it were, of the huge crowds that turned out for Wani, or in 2016, for that other jihadist icon, Burhan Wani—but there’s no mistaking their significance.

Labouring under the delusion that the termination of Kashmir’s special status would annihilate the ethnic-religious nationalism that has long driven the jihad, New Delhi’s reverie is now being rudely interrupted by reality.

The de-operationalisation of Article 370 in August had its genesis in 2016, when the killing of Burhan Wani unleashed a great tide of Islamist-led protest swept aside the Indian state, and established something resembling de-facto independence. Chief Minister Mufti’s government proved unable to reestablish order—eventually leading New Delhi to impose central rule, and then, on the back of the most severe political restrictions seen in India since the Emergency, restructure Kashmir’s constitutional relationship with India.

Now, as New Delhi cautiously eases the lockdown imposed in August, and moves towards normalisation, it’s clear little has changed: local recruitment of jihadists has resumed, street violence has reappeared, and levels of terrorist violence have slowly begun to climb. Large Islamist-led gatherings at the funerals of jihadists have even forced the government to take the extraordinary step of ceasing to hand over their dead bodies to their families.

Levels of violence aren’t anywhere near high enough to provoke panic. But New Delhi needs to be asking itself if the time hasn’t come to look beyond purely coercive tools, like internet shutdowns and restrictions on political activity. The status quo, New Delhi understands, is unsustainable—but to move forward, the government needs to start looking beyond its nose.

To begin with, some introspection on how the crisis of 2016 was engendered is critical. From 2006 to 2013, government data shows, recruitment of ethnic Kashmiris into jihadist groups fell to near-zero levels—this despite the murderous, communally-charged street violence of 2008 and 2010, which claimed the lives of hundreds of young men who battled police.

From 2014 on, though, the numbers began to rise—the consequence, it’s likely, of mounting fears over the power of Hindu nationalism in India. Paranoia about evil Hindu-nationalist plots to displace Islam from Kashmir has a long and sordid history in the state’s politics.

Kashmir’s Muslims had watched the Partition massacres in Jammu—and looked at India with fear. “There isn’t a single Muslim in Kapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur”, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah said. Kashmiris, he recorded, “fear the same fate lies ahead for them”. Abdullah worried that the Hindu right-wing would one convert India “into a religious state wherein the interests of Muslims will be jeopardised”.

Through the 1970s, amidst periodic explosion of violence, the Jamaat-e-Islami even claimed the government had set up a team “to investigate how Islam was driven out of Spain and to suggest measures as to how the Spanish experiment could be repeated in Kashmir”, scholar Yoginder Sikand has recorded.

And, at a March 1987 rally in Srinagar, Muslim United Front candidates, clad in the white robes of the pious, declared that Islam could not survive under the authority of a secular State.

Faced with the rise of prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, the National Conference government tried to cash in. Political Islamists were given space; aggressive counter-terrorism action reined in. In 2015, tens of thousands were allowed to assemble for the funeral of Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadist Abu Qasim—the first such display of support for a Pakistani jihadist, and a turning point in Kashmir’s history.

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s PDP government also sought to accommodate this ethnic-religious paranoia, rather than confronting it. The government allowed New Islamist youth leaders grouped around secessionist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani—notably Masrat Alam Bhat and Asiya Andrabi—free reign, and reined-in police action against ground-level organisers of the religious right. The party hoped that by doing so, it would deflect criticism from Islamists that its alliance with the BJP had opened the door for ethnocide.

Legitimised heroic defenders of Kashmiri Islam against a predatory Hindu nationalism, a new generation of jihadists began to join the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba—leading up to the crisis of 2016. Few of these young recruits, unlike their predecessors of the 1990s, had any form of military training; as fighters, they were largely ineffectual. But Burhan Wani or Riyaz Naikoo were significant not for what they did, but as an aesthetic.

Kashmir’s historically-unprecedented youth male cohort has found a new vocabulary, in neo-fundamentalist Islam drawn off the internet. Islamist currents have long existed in Kashmir. The Jama’at Ahl-e-Hadis, established in Kashmir in 1925, and the Jama’at-e-Islami, wielded great influence over the jihadist movement. The new youth cohort, though, has borrowed the aesthetics of neo-fundamentalism without the rigours of membership of these parties. Internet Islamism appears to offer a kind of moral liberation, free from the taint of compromise.

Ever since 2006, thus, young people have found agency around aesthetic questions: Faith, religious identity, issues of honour, particularly the protection of women’s chastity. This is the classic material of ethnic-religious nationalist movements, Islamic, Hindu or otherwise. Young people attacking the police find a sense of agency, even heroism, in giving their blood to guard Kashmir’s cultural and religious identity against what they imagine to be predatory Hinduism.

Like elsewhere in India, the tide of religious fundamentalism in Kashmir has flourished in a landscape characterised by high levels of youth unemployment and lack of economic opportunity.

Politicians have betrayed this generation more than once “Give me five years of peace”, CM Mehbooba Mufti said at a rally in Udhampur in April, “and I will give you development”. Her predecessor, Omar Abdullah, often said much the same thing. “People have to decide how long they will wait for peace and prosperity”, he proclaimed in Sopore in 2013, at a rally in the Islamist heartland.

In 2006, an expert task force appointed by then PM Manmohan Singh made several recommendations to address the firmament on which Kashmir’s youth crisis rests, proposing radical initiatives to develop linkages between agriculture and industry, train young people for opportunities in the services sector, offer land to business, and build a new satellite city for Srinagar.

Barely a single recommendation has been implemented—so it’s no surprise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promises of building a new Kashmir have been greeted with scepticism. The state’s moribund bureaucracy, whose incompetence has survived changes to its constitutional status unscathed, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has New Delhi’s vacillation over protections of state residents’ land-rights and employment prospects.

For Pakistan, this has meant opportunity. Conventional wisdom has it that Pakistan Army firing across the Line of Control is intended to facilitate infiltration, since it compels India’s troops to take cover. The proposition is borne out by the government’s data for 2014-2017, which shows infiltration marching in lock step with the level of fire exchanges between Indian and Pakistani soldiers stationed on the Line of Control.

In 2018, though—the year Imran Khan became prime minister of Pakistan—something odd happened. Even though cross-border fire escalated to the highest levels since India and Pakistan entered into an—unsigned—ceasefire, infiltration began to decline, and has continued to diminish.

The likely explanation is that the Pakistan Government wants to avoid risking war by significantly raising support for Kashmiri jihadists—a risk hammered home by the Pulwama crisis in 2019.

Little imagination is needed to see that the status quo serves Pakistan’s interests. Enhanced local recruitment of jihadists, and the rising tempo of street protest, might serve little military purpose—but they serve to discredit India’s claims that Kashmir is limping back to normalisation. They also complicate India’s efforts to initiate a political process in the state.

Prime Minister Imran Khan and the country’s all-powerful army, meanwhile, are able to use the continued tensions along the Line of Control to advertise their commitment to Kashmir to a domestic audience—without actually taking the risks that would come with significantly escalating support for jihadists.

For New Delhi, therefore, the grim impasse in Kashmir is the worst of all possible worlds. The Union government would do well to begin a serious dialogue with political forces in and outside the state on what a meaningful way forward might be.

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India’s shooting its new opportunities in West Asia through the back of the head

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Last year, the promised land began rising on 25,000 square kilometres sprawled Saudi Arabia’s northwest Red Sea coast, reaching into Jordan, and joined to Egypt by a great bridge. Larger than 30 New Yorks, Neom—from the Latin Neo, or “new”—and “m” for the first letter in mustaqbal, the Arabic word for “future”—will be a hub for renewable energy, biotechnology, media, and entertainment, filled with smart buildings and robots: A new kind of Saudi Arabia no longer dependent on oil.

Prince Mohammad ibn Salman ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Saud’s city is the most ambitious civilizational project since the emperor Marcus Traianus seized Arabia to safeguard Rome’s trade with India and laid the ground for great cities like Petra, Hejra and Mada’in Saleh.

Earlier this month, though, gunshots rang over in this utopia, fired amidst tribal protests against the project—among a slew of signs that the future that’s being built might be less than roseate. Plunging oil prices, and the prospect of long-term disruptions to global energy markets, are opening up fractures in West Asia’ polities, raising the spectre of a coming wave of geo-political crisis.

This ought to have been an opportunity for India to project itself as a reliable strategic partner, by participating in mitigation and positioning itself to assist with post-crisis reconstruction. Instead, India seems grimly determined to shoot its new opportunities in the back of the head.

Modi govt and the Persian Gulf

From 2016 on, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has steadily enhanced India’s relationship with the Persian Gulf monarchies. Saudi Arabia and India have expanded their relationship across the board, from trade to counter-terrorism. The prime minister also invested in personal relationships with Gulf rulers: last month, a court in the United Kingdom even charged India with violating international law by capturing and rendering the runaway daughter of Dubai’s ruler, Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

The gains have been manifest: on issues like Kashmir, Saudi Arabia has maintained a stoic silence, breaking ranks with long-standing ally Pakistan. Last year, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference even invited India to attend, for the first time since 1969.

But the toxic anti-Muslim hate-speech unleashed online—often by the Prime Minister’s supporters, in the course of the coronavirus is undoing those hard-won diplomatic gains. The backlash has been sharp: from UAE royal Hend al-Qassimi to Saudi cleric Abdurrahman al-Nassar and scholar Abidi Zahrani, influential commentators across West Asia have called for action against communalism in India.

Put simply, anti-Muslim propagandists have given a handle to those in West Asia who have long argued that religious solidarity should guide their relationship with India, not geopolitical interests.

Even though the prime minister and Indian diplomats have stepped in to cool tempers, the damage is likely to persist. True, the more offensive tweets posted by some Indians in the UAE have been deleted. But there’s nothing to suggest the volume of communal invective online has diminished—and that means continuing damage to India’s reputation.

For India, statistics demonstrate, the potential costs of such a breakdown won’t be trivial. Eight and a half million Indians—over a fourth of all NRIs—live in the six Gulf states, sending home the biggest share of the $79 billion in remittances India receives. Fifty-three percent of those migrants come from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan alone, states with flailing economies and poor employment prospects.

Saudi Arabia, at $34.03 billion in 2018-2019, and the United Arab Emirates, at $60 billion, are India’s fourth and the third-largest trading partners. India hopes to attract some $75 billion in infrastructure investments from the UAE alone. Indian companies, moreover, have deep interests in West Asia: Larsen and Tubro, for example, has a key role in the high-speed rail project linking Mecca and Medina, while Tata, Wipro, TCS and Shapoorji & Pallonji all have a region-wide presence.

Even though leaders in West Asia might not wish for the relationship to be derailed because of issues like hate-speech, the pandemic has weakened the political legitimacy of the fragile regimes which govern the region.

Saudi Arabia’s Vulnerabilities

The killing, this month, of anti-Neom tribal land rights protestor Rahim al-Howeiti illustrates the slew of social strains that Saudi oil wealth has historically papered over. Now, with oil prices collapsing, the regime vulnerabilities have sharpened. In 2015, when Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud rose to the throne, the country’s foreign exchange reserves were $732 billion; inside four years, they lost $233 billion. GDP has also declined, from $25,243 in 2012 to $23,338 in 2018, according to the World Bank.

International Monetary Fund estimates suggest net debt will hit 19 percent of GDP this year and 27 percent next year, while the pandemic and the oil crisis it has sparked off and the oil crisis could push borrowing to 50 percent of GDP by 2012.

Sixty percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP comes directly from oil revenues, and oil-sector earnings account for almost two-thirds of the government’s budget. Iran, Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait are even more dependent on oil revenues.

“The collapse of Saudi Arabia’s economy”, analyst David Hearst has noted, “which for decades has been the engine room of the economy of the whole region, would quickly be felt in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia – all of which send millions of their workers and professionals to the kingdom and whose economies have grown to depend on their remittances”.

India is among the countries that would be hard-hit as scholar Karen Young has pointed out, warning sirens have been blaring across West Asia ever since 2014 when the oil market downturn began. Natives-First employment policies have come online across the Gulf monarchies, and large numbers of low-wage jobs have been purged from a stalling construction sector.

The Ministry of External Affairs’ data shows that the flow of migrant workers from India to the Persian Gulf states has been in steady fall since 2015, from a peak of over 600,000 that year to just over 300,000 in 2019.

Faced with shrinking economic opportunities, West Asia is likely to see the same kinds of nativist and xenophobic tendencies that other regions of the world have experienced in similar circumstances. India’s new reputation as a region hostile to Muslims could make it a target.

In some countries, like Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon, experts also fear that the pandemic—which has mercilessly exposed anaemic state capacity—could lead to renewed influence for millenarian groups like the Islamic State. Iraq has had a transitional government since 2019, crippling its ability to organize a coherent response to the pandemic—especially since its healthcare infrastructure has been devastated by decades of invasion and civil war. Now, to top it all off, Iraq’s main revenue source, oil, is drying out.

As James Dorsey has pointed out, the empowerment of militant groups, “particularly where they fill a gap without coordinating with government, potentially raises security issues as militants capitalise on their ability to show up the state’s lack of capability”. Fighting against religious militants who challenge their legitimacy, Persian Gulf regimes will have to be sensitive to charges they’re siding with countries hostile to Islam, or Muslims.

The worst-case scenarios aren’t hard to imagine: a West Asia where India is unpopular and Indians unwelcome; a long-drawn recession which deprives India of key markets; geopolitical strains which engender chaos and imperil India’s sources of energy. In such a scenario, the sustained diplomatic effort made over a decade to cast India as a key strategic partner for West Asia would be undone, leaving the field open to China.

Even if reality doesn’t turn out to be quite so bleak, there’s a lesson New Delhi needs to learn: In a globalized world, foreign-policy objectives can’t be insulated from domestic politics. Like so many countries before it, India will have to realize that what it does at home has impacts, for better or worse, on its ambitions and aims on the global stage.

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The pandemic is witnessing the death-throes of global American Leadership. India should worry

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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“Fire and fury”, President Donald Trump thundered in 2017, as North Korea tested its new nuclear weapons: “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”. His words invoked, in the minds of many, the spectre of General Douglas MacArthur, among Trump’s gallery of true American heroes. Faced with the prospect of defeat during the Korean war in 1951, MacArthur advocated targeting Chinese bases with “30 to 50 atomic bombs”, thus sealing the border with “a belt of radioactive cobalt”.

Trump has been assailing China again, claiming, last week, that coronavirus pandemic “could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it”. “If they were knowingly responsible”, he went on, “yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences”.

For influential sections of India’s foreign policy establishment, Trump’s new-found hawkishness on China has been a kind of ecstatic experience—the kind of rapture some might have when told the second coming of the Messiah is imminent. The pandemic, many believe, has crystallised that strategic rupture between Beijing and the West that an entire generation of Indian diplomats has long believed was inevitable. India, the theory goes, is now poised to cash in on the perks that would come with being a frontline state in a New Cold War.

To harbour such expectations is to fundamentally misread both Trump and the course of history. As the pandemic ends, India should instead be preparing for a world where it will be more alone than at any time in the recent past.

Polemic vs Praxis

Reading Trump’s mind is, at the best of times, a perilous business: In the weeks before his attack on China’s handling of the pandemic, he showered lavish praise on the country’s management of the crisis at least fifteen times. “They have everything under control”, the President asserted. From his handling of the 2017 crisis, and many since it, this much is, however clear: there’s usually a semantic space between his polemic and his praxis.

This much is clear: This grim summer, as the greatest pandemic in a century has unfolded across the world, a phrase beloved of the United States politicians has been missing from President Donald Trump’s vocabulary: American Leadership.

Even as the United States government has stood on the sidelines of the global struggle against the pandemic, teams of medical experts and boxes of made-in-China medical supplies have been landing everywhere from the Pacific’s island republics to the Middle-East, Europe and Latin America. Beijing has been speaking of a Health Silk Road, placing China at the centre of a new order of production, logistics and research.

“European solidarity does not exist”, proclaimed Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić, as supplies from Beijing arrived in his country, a candidate for eventual European Union membership. “It was a fairy tale. I have sent a special letter to the only ones who can help. That is China”.

Beijing’s efforts might be opportunistic, even vulgar—witness the epidemic of crude propaganda from its diplomats blaming the pandemic on the United States—but it’s clearly playing to win in the global influence game.

Long before the pandemic broke out, Trump had made clear his intention to narrow the United States’ expansive global aid commitments. In February, he proposed cutting foreign aid for 2021 by a stinging 21 percent. The cuts proposed a 30 percent reduction in the United States’ funding for global health.

The $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package passed by Trump at the end of March allocates just $1.5 billion—one-tenth of one percent of the total—to support international activities of the United States State Department, the Agency for International Development, and the Centers for Disease Control.

Even at the G7, the United States has been loath to play a leadership role. Last month, G7 leaders failed to lay out a unified path for action after the United States insisted the pandemic be called the “Wuhan virus”—a relatively inconsequential issue. Ecuador, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, and Singapore have now proposed setting up an alternate global alliance to fight the pandemic, in an effort to fill the vacuum.

America First

“From this day forward”, Trump proclaimed in his 2017 inauguration speech, “a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.” He paused, and repeated the phrase: “America First”. From the 1950s, putting America First had meant expensive global commitments. Europe’s post-war reconstruction, fighting diseases from malaria to HIV, sharing technology, committing troops, fighting wars: These were means to ensuring that the world’s greatest power also wrote the rules that governed how the world was run.

Powered by a growing consensus among ordinary Americans that globalisation has hurt their material and cultural interests, Trump has upended that consensus—and there’s no sign a future administration will change course, except in matters of nuance.

For the Trump administration, disinterest in the global management of the pandemic is part of a larger retreat from the world stage. Funding has been slashed by $1 billion for Afghanistan’s aid-dependent government this year; another $1 billion in cuts proposed for next year.

Humanitarian, development and public health assistance for the Palestinian Authority has been terminated. In Iran, harsh sanctions remain in place. For a growing number of governments, there’s no road to take except the one to Beijing.

The slogan “American First” was first conceived of by the charismatic aviation legend and millionaire Charles Lindbergh, as a tool to keep the United States out of the Second World War.

In 1938, the Lindberghs moved to the tiny Breton island of Illiec. Their neighbour, French scientist Alexis Carrel, became his ideological mentor. In his 1935 book, Man, the Unknown, Carrel had claimed the West was a “crumbling civilisation”, and called on science to prevent “the degeneration of [white] race”. To Lindbergh, the Second World War was no heroic struggle against Fascism: Instead, it was a catastrophic, self-destructive bloodbath amongst the white nations of the world.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the America First impulse resurfaced periodically. Democratic senator Mike Mansfield pushed for drastic cuts in United States forces in Europe, arguing nuclear weapons made the large overseas troop presence unnecessary. Though a Democrat, Mansfield backed President Richard Nixon’s so-called Guam Doctrine: That the United States ought not “undertake all the defence of the free nations of the world”.

Trump’s retreat from global wars against jihadism; his disdain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; his complaints about the spending of “tremendous amount of money in defending Saudi Arabia”, his hints that the United States might abandon its base in Qatar: These, together, are born from the conviction America can prosper alone.

Post-coronavirus world

Xi Jinping, China’s President, has ambitions that are radically different in character. Through the last decade, he has sought to build a new global order with China at its centre, challenging the West’s post-1945 dominance. The Belt and Road Initiative, a massive $200 billion network of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in more than 60 countries, is at the core of this effort to reorder the world. Even though the rise of China was built on the back of a United States-governed world, Beijing now needs to rewrite the rules to enable it to emerge as a true superpower.

Trump, his conduct during the pandemic has shown, is content to allow Xi to act as he wishes: America is simply too big and too rich, the President evidently believes, to have to care who runs the world.

Limits exist, of course, to what Beijing can do. As the analyst Eliot Wilson has pointed out, Beijing is going to face real problems re-energising its own economy after the pandemic: The country’s bad debt is spiralling, the debt-to-GDP ratio rising, unemployment at record levels, and growth spluttering; Beijing can’t spend its way out of trouble, as it did in 2008.

In months to come, China is predicted to face an unprecedented demand shock, as markets across the world scale back orders for goods produced in its factories. Large Western corporations are seeking to diversify their supply chains to be less dependent on China; in the longer term, industrial automation could see even more production head back to the United States and Germany.

But in the post-pandemic world, it should be clear, China will be a more influential actor than ever. Faced with the gargantuan bill for economic reconstruction after the pandemic, the United States will look inward. Trump’s hawkish language on China might well become more familiar—but his country won’t be looking towards expansive strategies to contain the rise of its principal geopolitical adversary.

Like other states in the region concerned with the growth of Chinese power—among them Australia and Japan—India has real reason to worry about the post-Pandemic world might look like. This much is clear: New Delhi wouldn’t be wise to look to Washington for reassurance.

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The growing attack on the WHO’s coronavirus leadership is driven by politics, not principles

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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“Eradicate malaria”, read the posters that sprang up across rural India in the late 1950s, showing a monster-sized mosquito being fought by peasants armed with pesticide. In an act of subversiveness, or perhaps resignation, the unknown artist who designed the poster for the Ministry of Health clad his distinctly under-muscled malaria heroes only in kacchas: there was no point pretending the warrior for Indian socialist progress was the bicep-bound superman of Soviet propaganda.

The author RK Narayanan recorded the malaria campaign didn’t exactly fire the minds of the millions. “No wonder the people get malaria in those countries”, he has one peasant say in Malgudi Days of the gargantuan propaganda mosquitos. “ ‘Our own mosquitoes are so tiny that they are harmless’, which depressed the lecturer on malaria so much that he remained silent for ten minutes”.

Now, as the Wuhan virus rages across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) has come under the most sustained assault it has faced since the collapse of its founding project, that great war against the mosquito. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, is accused of having covered up the seriousness of the epidemic at China’s urging—in essence, placing the superpower’s concerns over those of the world.

There’s no doubt some in the WHO have demonstrated an almost bizarre Beijing-philia: Ghebreyesus’ advisor, Bruce Aylward, evidently panicked and hung up on an interviewer who asked about Taiwan, a country China has successfully excluded from the global health body.

An easy target

Like with most things to do with nation-states, though, the real battle is about geopolitical influence and power—not the ethics of the WHO’s conduct. Faced with criticism of their governance skills from their publics, leaders in Beijing and Washington are scrambling to find scapegoats. The WHO’s leadership is an easy target.

In spite of its profile, the WHO is something of a bit-part in global health. The reason why isn’t a mystery. “The WHO’s budget for the biennium 2018–2019”, scholars Srikanth Reddy, Sumaira Mazhar and Raphael Lencucha have noted, “hovered around $4.421 billion, while the annual healthcare and social services budget of Quebec, a Canadian province in which we live is approximately $33 billion”. Indeed, the WHO had less funding “than the budget of many major hospitals in the United States”.

This year, the WHO’s budget is about $4.5 billion; the United Kingdom’s National Health Service alone has budgeted to spend some $133 billion. For the developing world, most dependent on the WHO, this has significant consequences.

Faced with the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the WHO was criticised for a slow, inept response. That was true—but the fact was the organisation’s outbreak and response budget, the allocations needed in the crisis, had dropped from $469 million in 2012-2013, to $228 million in 2014-2015.

Each of the WHO’s 194 members are meant to pay an assessed contribution, based on their income. In addition, both member-states and private-sector trusts pay voluntary donations, either for specific projects or emergencies. But as major governments began slashing funding after the Cold War, the WHO survival became increasingly tenuous.

Led by the United States, international institutions were seen, after World War II, as a means to consolidate liberal capitalism across the world—using progress as a tool. In 1948, the WHO came into existence, and soon found itself at the frontlines of a gargantuan global effort to eradicate malaria across the world. Based on the United States armed forces’ experiences in east Asia with the new pesticide, DDT.

From the outset, in 1955, some were sceptical about the campaign. No-one, they argued, knew how to effectively administer such a programme in the more under-administered regions of the world. The sceptics were proved right: As malaria resurged, in the 1960s, in areas it was claimed to have been eradicated, the campaign was terminated.

The Soviet Union, supported by many developing countries, now campaigned for universal primary healthcare, scholar Indira Chakravarthi has recorded. Halfdan Mahler, the WHO’s then-Director, saw the Soviet medical-driven system as useless for the developing world, and instead pushed for an alternate primary health system centred around the provision of food, drinking water and immunisation.

Donor pressure

From the 1990s, the WHO became increasingly dependent on voluntary contributions—often from private donors with their own agenda. In developing countries, criticism soon began to mount against what were seen as West-driven policies, which critics argued were inappropriate to regional and local needs. In India, for example, the WHO was charged with promoting excessive focus on polio immunisation, over the demands of other epidemic diseases. Elsewhere, there was concern over the WHO’s retreat from non-communicable diseases, and global rules to curb harmful foods.

Tedros’ unprecedented 133-50 triumph in the first WHO election where all members had an equal vote was, in key senses, a rebellion against this order of things. The developing world wanted a say in how the WHO was run, and what it ought do.

Last year, Tedros placed universal healthcare back at the centre of the WHO’s agenda, and outlined plans to have voluntary funds placed in a central pool, not donor-driven programmes. “I do not believe in perpetual reform”, the WHO director-general said, pushing back against further funding cuts. “I think WHO staff are reformed out.”

Looking out at the more bizarre assertions of his critics, it’s hard to miss the sense that at least some in the West are looking to settle the score: Tedros, some tellings of the story have it, is tainted by a Marxist past, ideologically beholden to Beijing. Foreign minister of Ethiopia from 2012-16, and Health Minister from 2012, Tedros’ was part of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, and at one point, a Marxist group with close links to the Soviet Union. The story’s thrilling—but also pure fiction.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EPRDF reinvented itself. In the wake of 9/11, it led Ethiopia into a strategic partner of the United States’ Global War on Terrorism. As a member of prime minister Meles Zenawi and Hailemariam Desalegn’s cabinets, there’s little doubt Tedros would have known of Ethiopia’s provision of military bases to the USA, and even Central Intelligence Agency-run secret prisons, to combat jihadists in the Horn of Africa.

China’s investments in Ethiopia have indeed boomed, with the country building highways, ports, telecommunications infrastructure, railways and dams. But since 9/11, those investments have been dwarfed by assistance from the United States, which has consistently been the largest donor to the country. Ethiopia under Tedros’ foreign policy stewardship played all sides—just like all developing countries must.

Downplaying Wuhan virus

Beijing and Tedros weren’t, moreover, the only one downplaying the Wuhan virus threat. President Donald Trump ignored specific warnings from his own intelligence community in January and February—warnings that came in on the back of epidemic threat assessments delivered to him in 2017, 2018 and 2019, calling for more infrastructure to be built. There’s a long list of European countries, from the United Kingdom to Italy, which behaved in much the same manner.

Lawrence Gostin, among the experts who wanted a public health emergency declared earlier, told the BBC that “it was only a short delay and I don’t think the timing had any impact on the trajectory of Covid-19”.

There’s no great mystery to why bureaucrats stalled: the economic consequences of the drastic action a pandemic would have required were gigantic, and few wanted to be responsible for the fallout. Notably, Tedros’ predecessor, Margret Chan, was slammed for declaring an emergency when confronted with Swine Flu in 2010—leading countries to stock up on supplies and medication they did not eventually need.

Tedros’ experience in Ethiopia likely serves as a model for his conduct. The United States, not Beijing, is the WHO’s largest single national financier—but its support is, at best, uncertain. Even as the pandemic raged across the world, President Trump proposed slashing $3 billion from the United States’ international health aid, and having its $50 million contribution to the WHO. Beijing is the next largest donor, paying $25 million—and the WHO director-general knows his words of support are likely to be repaid with interest, in cash.

For besieged leaders in Beijing and Washington, there’s good reason to turn attention from their failures in battling the pandemic on to nationalism. Tedros and the WHO are scapegoats for far larger failings in global health infrastructure and preparedness.

For India, it is critical to avoid getting trapped in a New Cold War, and instead focus on building a blueprint for the credible global health system the developing world desperately needs.

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Enforcing coronavirus lockdowns will test the India’s police to the limit

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Early in March, 1898, plague inspectors moved into the Muslim weavers’ quarter in Mumbai’s Byculla, lining up suspected patients for examination—at gunpoint. Like had occurred so often, the father of a young girl refused to allow the male doctors to search his child for signs of infection. Faced with a growing, angry mob, the police opened fire; many local residents were killed. Europeans across the area came under attack, and soldiers, armed with cannon, had to be called out to seal the streets.

Even as India’s police leadership sifts through the lessons of Sunday’s Janata Curfew, there are disturbing signs securing public compliance coronavirus lockdowns won’t be easy. Large crowds gathered in cities from Indore to Ahmedabad and Chennai, some even dancing in the streets, evidently confusing the coronavirus shutdown with an unscheduled festival holiday.

Police forces across India have a—regrettably—rich body of experience in enforcing curfews, but there’s simply no template for an orderly nationwide lockdown. The management of the great plague of 1896-1921, during which over ten million Indians died, helps understand the gargantuan challenge ahead.

Acacio Gabriel Viegas’ first house call on the morning of September 18, 1896, had been to a middle-aged woman in Mumbai’s Vor Gaddi, running a fever. The woman, the Goa-born, Mumbai-educated doctor recorded, was delirious; a lymph node in her groin was enlarged. Later that day, he visiting a boy with similar symptoms, Viegas then learned that more than 50 South Mumbai residents had been claimed by the strange illness over the past month. In the godowns of Mandovi, rats were crawling out—and dying.

That evening, under the microscope in his laboratory, Viegas saw evidence that left no doubt about the killer: the bipolar stain identifying the bacillus as yersinia pestis. A long, grim battle with the plague had begun.

Policing also faced its first test. Tens of thousands of Mumbai workers claimed their back-pay, and headed home. Large numbers of merchants left, too, travelling by sea or rail. Inside three months, the plague had hit Karachi and Pune—carried by the refugees. Indeed, historian Aditya Sarkar has recorded, half the city emptied in the wak of the plague. Early in 1897, the whole of the Konkan, Kathiwar and Kutch in Gujarat and urban centres in Sindh were recording fatalities. The disease soon spread north, ravaging Punjab.

To make things worse, a drought hit southern Maharashtra in late 1896, leading to a flood of agricultural workers back into Mumbai. Health authorities estimated that between 250,000-300,000 immigrants came to the city in April, May and June, 1897, alone.

Authorities responded by screening travellers—causing, historian Natasha Sarkar’s magisterial work shows, sharp tensions with the community. In 1898, inspections of train passengers for plague became a fraught racial issue. Indian women were forced to lift their saris off their upper bodies on railway platforms, to check for plague buboes; Europeans were not. Indians wearing dhotis, in particular, were singled out for inspections.

“Plague germs can penetrate the celestial dress”, one Indian writer sardonically observed in 1899, “but the plague measures cannot. When you travel, do not fail to put on pantaloons, a short coat, and a hat or a night cap; have a cheroot in your mouth and a copy of the Bombay Times or the Lahore Gazette in your hand”.

Even Indian elites, though, suffered: coming home from a vacation in Matheran, Justice Badruddin Tyabji was held at Mumbai for examination, but his European subordinate was allowed to go home. Tyabji even complained about the treatment of his daughters by plague on a Baroda-Mumbai train.

The great plague of 1896-1921

Like in 1896, containing large-scale population flows will prove a real challenge: Even though the government has moved to restrict trains, millions of rural workers now trapped in cities will seek alternate routes home, especially in the case incomes are severely hit by prolonged lockdowns. Emiserated peasants, in turn, are likely to throng cities, hoping for livelihoods and access to basic medical services.

Today, as then, law-enforcement needs plans to deal with this crisis—and this is just a small part of the problem.

Large-scale isolation of the ill, and the sealing off of badly-affected areas, precipitated some of the sharpest conflicts of 1896 onwards. In August 1897, the Plague Committee began removing entire neighbourhoods from their homes. Their homes were then disinfected, in military-style operations: “We treated houses practically as if they were on fire”, one official recorded, “discharging into them from steam engines and flushing pumps quantities of water charged with disinfectants”.

Plague-infested villages were also cordoned off or evacuated, and the entire site disinfected. Local residents were given just forty-eight hours to evacuate their homes, and allowed to carry food for two months.

Inside the segregation camps, inmates were provided rations; one member of each family was allowed to go out and work, on condition they returned by nightfall. The camps sought to respect existing caste and religious distinctions: in Punjab’s Khattar Kalan, Brahmins, Jats and Darzis occupied one camp; Dalits a second; Muslims a third.

The segregation camps solved one plan administrators will face should the pandemic drag out: securing incomes for affected communities. But segregation only succeeded because of the large-scale use of coercive power, and engendered hatred of the State.

From the outset, the segregation of patients into hospitals was also contested by communities. Part of the reason was caste: hospitals, historian David Hardiman has noted, were to many Indians, “places of pollution, contaminated by blood and faeces, inimical to caste, religion and purdah”. Even though caste-specific hospitals soon sprang up, complaints were rife: the Kesari of April 6, 1897, told the story of a Brahmin patient who lived on milk in hospital, because his food had been polluted by a Shudra’s touch.

There were other problems, too, however: families were unused to long periods of separation from their loved ones in isolation wards, and high rates of death in hospitals sparked off rumours patients were being deliberately killed. In February, 1987, the Poona Vaibhar reported rumours that the “Sarkar, finding its subjects unmanageable, is devising ways to reduce their number”. Local residents, it claimed, think “hospitals are under the management of new doctors who put poison in medicine”.

In one 1987 episode, medical staff at Mumbai’s Arthur Road Hospital were attacked to free patients held in plague wards—though, oddly, the violence terminated when factory sirens sounded to signal the end of lunch hour, and workers went back to their jobs at the mills.

Through the plague years, though, such violence became commonplace. In 1896, Mumbai mill-workers rioted after Plague Committee staff sought to move a local women to hospital. Five years later, in April, 1901, riots broke out in Sialkot’s Shahzada village, forcing authorities to use force. In Shahjahanpur, near Lucknow, a local official shot a doctor, his assistant, police officials and then himself—killing twelve to protest the shame of purdah being violated.

Like in other times of catastrophic upheaval, endemic social conflict eventually emerged as a threat to political order itself. In Gujarat’s Khera district, wandering religious preachers even proclaimed that the British empire had collapsed south of the Mahi river—the plague line. Locals rose up in revolt, to chose a new ruler, leading to bloodshed when police intervened.

Plague riots broke out in the Punjab, Mysore and Calcutta; the colonial officials WC Rand and CE Ayerst were assassinated in Mumbai by early Hindu nationalists.

Understaffed police force

For anyone familiar with the state of the Indian police, there’s little reason to be sanguine about the prospects of India’s law enforcement containing large-scale tensions, of the kind engendered in 1896. India should have 192 police officers per 100,000 population—well below the United Nations-mandated norm of 250:100,000. But Bureau of Police Research and Development statistics India actually has 150.80 police officers per 100,000 population, below the sanctioned level even for 2007.

The implosion of the Haryana Police along caste lines in 2016, searingly documented in former Director-General of Police Prakash Singh’s official investigation; the failure of intelligence services and police to contain violence after the arrest of Ram Rahim Singh; the near-collapse of the state across southern Kashmir in 2018: together, they show the law-enforcement system on which the Indian Republic rests is at breaking point.

Even though the central police forces and Indian Army can provide backup to police forces, experience in communal and caste riots has taught administrators that they lack the granular local knowledge needed to contain complex social tensions.

To do this effectively, police leaders need to begin granular planning for the worst case: to anticipate exactly how neighbourhoods and entire cities will be locked down; population movements restricted; hospitals and medical staff protected; provision of supplies and food conducted in an orderly manner.

For most citizens, the frontlines of the war against the coronavirus are manned by medical personnel, public health workers and sanitation services are on the front. That frontline could crumble, though, unless it has a robust backbone.

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Coronavirus and the moral calculus of mass death

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another”, recorded a shoemaker and tax-collector, as the plague tore through the great city of Sienna in the autumn of 1348, “for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight”. “None”, he continued, “could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship”. “I, Agnolo di Tura, also called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city”.

“All believed it was the end of the world”.

The apocalyptic impact of past pandemics, from the Black Death to the tens of millions who died in the Great Influenza of 1918-1919, hang over the responses of governments to the unfolding coronavirus threat. Irrespective of whether mass death is delivered by guns or disease, history teaches us it can lead civilisation to implode.

Even as lockdowns and social distancing suffuse our lives, though, some have begun to ask if the costs of the pandemic response justify its ends. In one article, author Sandipan Deb noted that the United States managed to live with large numbers of season flu deaths.  An extreme form of this argument is that that the current fatality rates in the pandemic—some 3.5 percent of those infected—can easily be sustained in an overpopulated country.

The suggestion, in essence, is that accepting some level of human suffering might serve the greater common good better than the economic dislocation now being caused. As the pandemic unfolds, these questions will become more agonising: who should get care, and how much, at whose cost?

Like everything else, mass death has a moral calculus—and it’s important for Indians to begin reflecting on it now.

Humans’ exquisite limbic systems, evolved over millennia to constantly scan the environment for threats and opportunities, are excellent at seeking to minimise pain, and maximise reward. The limbic system isn’t at its best, though, when confronted with ambiguity, or at discerning complex risks that do not appear to pose an immediate threat. Faced with even small odds that predators might presently eat it, the human brain, wisely, reacts with flight. There is no evolutionary wiring, though, that lets us deal with—say—global warming or pandemics.

Terrorism’s impact on our public imagination illustrates why our choices aren’t always carefully reasoned. In 2019, the most recent year for which estimates are available, all of India’s insurgencies and terrorist groups claimed 621 lives, 330 of those terrorists themselves. That figure dramatically contrasts with the 147,915 people killed in traffic accidents in 2017, the last year for which data is available—a staggering 17 people every single hour.

Indeed, terrorism doesn’t even figure among the ten top causes of premature death in India for 2007-2017: everything from diarrhoea to self-harm claimed orders of magnitude more lives. Yet, the central government spends considerably more on internal security than diarrhoea.

“Even applying a high estimate for the value of human life and a low one for United States counter-terrorism expenditures”. the scholars John Mueller and Mark Stewart concluded in a 2018 paper, “the expenditures would have had to save 11,797 lives per year to be justified”. The actual number killed: an average of six per year, since 2001.

It’s impossible, of course, to judge what might have happened if this money was not spent: it’s conceivable that the United States would then have suffered two 9/11s every year, or India a 26/11 every month. Yet, funding choices were not driven by calm, rational discussion of these prospects. Instead, fear drove our minds.

Lots of similar cases litter our public policy debates. There’s compelling evidence, for example, that the risks to public health from fossil fuels is considerably higher than those from nuclear power plants. The Paul Scherrer Institute and the European Union have estimated  that, coal, lignite, and oil claim more than one life per GigaWatt-year of energy; nuclear just 0.2 lives per GWy.

Few people, though, have found these statistics to be persuasive in the face of the images from catastrophic accidents like Fukushima: across the world, public has become ever-more hostile to nuclear energy.

The bottom line is this: our instinctive judgments about risk aren’t particularly rational in the face of a crisis like coronavirus that poses enormous challenges for public-policy decision-making. To make good choices, we have to unpack the moral calculus that underlies our decision-making.

Even though those who could flee the city ran, half of Sienna’s population died during the epidemic of 1348. Faced with certain death, and disintegrating social relations, manufacturing continued; taxes were raised; laws were passed and enforced. Local residents, bar widows, were even forbidden from donning the robes of mourning. Four members of The IX—the oligarchy which ruled Sienna—died in office. The size of the city council and popular council had to be reduced by a third, and the quorum by half, a rough index of the death toll among the élite. The clergy halved in number.

But by 1353, historian William Bowsky has shown, Sienna had succeeded in restoring its finances, and balanced its budget. The church actually benefitted, in the long term, from the acquisition of lands willed by the dead.

This is precisely the moral calculus some are now advocating: societies should sacrifice those most vulnerable to the epidemic—the elderly and the infirm—rather than impact the prosperity and everyday lives of all. The costs of saving some, the argument goes, are simply too high for the many.

Philosophy students encounter this debate as undergraduates, when they study the difference between utilitarianism and deontology. In one popular thought experiment, students are asked whether it is ethical to slaughter a prisoner to donate organs to five people in need of transplants. As the discussion proceeds, students are asked if they would reconsider their answer knowing that the five would go on to make discoveries that would save humanity—or, alternately, spark off world wars.

In essence, utilitarians claim that actions ought serve a greater common good; deontologists respond that there is no certain way to either ascertain what the common good is, or the consequences of sacrificing the rights of an individual for it. For centuries, these issues have been debated; passionate as the arguments have been, there has been no universal, final answer.

Across western Europe’s post-religious societies, various forms of social-democratic liberalism—the idea that each individual human being has inherent rights, and that the state has the duty of defending them—have served to bind together societies. Fighting a pandemic, or poverty, is thus a collective obligation, irrespective of the strains it may impose on the interests of the majority.

In societies like India or the United States, where religion remains important, human suffering is often attributed to divine will. Pain is, simply, the fate of those who are subjected to it, brought about either because of their own moral failings, or a higher cosmic power.

Even in deeply religious societies like these, though, the idea that we have obligations to other human beings—obligations which fell apart in 1348, and so often since—have blossomed. India’s commitments to vaccinating children, ensuring their nutrition and educating them, has steadily grown; these are entitlements, most people would agree, that come with the mere fact of their existence. Families’ claims to have the right to marry off underage daughters, or burn daughter-in-laws, are no longer uncontested.

Put simply, the idea that there is such a thing as a human right—and that society is obligated to defend it—has been nurtured, and grown. This is not an unchallenged idea, though—and as the pressures on the public health system and the economy mount in coming weeks, it will come under even greater strain. How much funding should there be for healthcare? Who should get it, and who should not? How long should schools remain closed? What kinds of economic and social activity restricted, and for how long?

How much are we willing to sacrifice; how many do we choose should live?

Like so often in the past, we can choose to have our decisions guided by our emotions; on judgments made by limbic systems not designed for the challenge they are confronted with. Alternately, as we withdraw a little from the world around us, we can treat this as an opportunity for reflection, on who we are, and what we, as a people, wish to be.

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Business leadership, not police or politicians, holds key to fixing India’s communal crisis

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Fired by the spirit of Holi, one night in 1713, the banker Hariram lit a great bonfire on the street in front of his home. His neighbour, a Muslim, complained; the bonfire, he argued, was a dangerous nuisance. The local governor, also Muslim, sided with the banker.

The next day, irate Muslims slaughtered a cow on the same street. Fighting followed, and a young Muslim was killed. Backed by the governor’s Afghan mercenaries, mobs pillaged Hindu neighbourhoods, killing as they went.

This week, as India counts the costs of last week’s savage communal violence in its capital—estimated at a staggering Rs 25,000 crore by the Delhi Chamber of Commerce—it’s easy to see how little some things have changed little in three centuries.  From India’s medieval past, though, it’s also clear there are other kinds of models of communal relationships. Even as Ahmedabad exploded in 1713, the port cities of Surat, Somnath-Veraval and Porbandar remained peaceful.

The authorities of the Somnath Temple—demolished by the Afghan warlord Mahmud of Ghazi in 1026, an act that still scars the imagination of many Hindus—actually leased out lands, two centuries later, to the trans-oceanic trader Nuruddin Firuz of Hormuz.

This communal peace wasn’t built on appeals to shared culture, or human values. Instead, it rested on joint assets, shared opportunities—and cold cash. Business leaders—not politicians or police—might hold the keys to building a durable foundation for secularism in India.

From the stellar work of social scientists like Stanford business school’s Saumitra Jha, we know the sinews of cities—the complex economic and social relations that tie massive populations together—have a critical bearing on communal violence.

Jha studied medieval Indian ports like Surat and Porbandar where, for hundreds of years before the arrival of Portuguese colonialism in 1498, Muslim traders had given Indian manufactures access to global markets. Hindus and Muslims, in these medieval ports, were locked into relationships of mutual inter-dependence.

Even though medieval port cities were characterised by both mixed religious populations and poverty—conditions typically associated with communal violence—Jha found they, on average, experienced “around five times fewer communal riots, on average”. From 1850 to 1950, 10 percent of medieval port cities had at least one outbreak of communal violence; for other cities, the figure was 40 percent.

The intensity of communal violence in medieval port cities was also lower“Five medieval ports”, Jha writes, “together experienced a single death due to religious violence, but in other towns, religious violence claimed an average of 23 lives per town”.

In essence, the social and economic structures of these medieval port cities had engendered cultures where violence was successfully contained.

Ahmedabad, where segregated guilds and gated pol neighbourhoods divided textile producers by religion and caste, saw repeated communal violence from 1646 onwards. The medieval port of Surat, by contrast, was largely peaceful. The Ismaili Bohra community’s access to Indian Ocean trading networks made them invaluable to the wider community.

For enlightened medieval rulers, the gains from religious tolerance were obvious. In a 1583 treatise, the scholar Zainuddin Makhdum noted that the Kerala Zamorin’s policy of tolerance towards Muslim traders saw Kozhikode grow “into a big city, where with prospering trade and economic opportunities, various kinds of people, Muslims as well as unbelievers, collected”.  “The Zamorin”, Makhdum observed, “thus became more powerful and influential than the rest of the rulers”.

Ashutosh Varshney path-breaking work on communal violence has also underlined the importance of consociational relations to the making of a robust communal fabric.

In peaceful Kozhikode, Varshney found that the business community was linked through a wide range of professional associations, clubs and even institutions like reading rooms. These interactions had created

But in Aligarh—slowly ghettoised by violence since the 1930s—there were no similar relationships. Although there were successful Hindu-owned and Muslim-owned businesses, there was little social contact between the two groups—and, more important, “virtually no inter-communal dependence”. Even traders’ bodies and credit sources had polarised on communal lines.

Little difference exists between this landscape and that of north-east Delhi. In one government survey of the garment trade in Seelampur, the bulk of workers and contractors were found to be Muslim; the majority of wholesale traders caste Hindus.

Nine out of ten Kozhikode’s Hindus and Muslims reported that their children played together, Varshney recorded;, but “ in Aligarh a mere 42 percent report that to be the case”.

In Seelampur, scholar Kartik Sivaram and co-authors have found, even Hindu and Muslim school children, inhabiting the same classrooms through the day, rarely visited each others’ homes.

Even as ethnic-religious strains are mounting, the Indian state’s ability to manage them isn’t. The abject failure of the Delhi Police last week isn’t, sadly, exceptional. Former Director-General of Police Prakash Singh’s official inquiry into the 2016 violence in Haryana showed the administration had, simply, imploded in the face of caste strains. In 2017, police proved unable to contain Dalit violence, unleashed by the arrest of the religious leader Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh.

In north-east Delhi, the majority of victims were killed with small arms at point blank rage, a warning-sign of the growing weaponisation of criminal groups even within the capital. The consequences of communal violence are not trivial: from Lebanon to Nigeria and Iraq, there’s a long list of nation-states which have imploded because of chronic inter-religious violence.

The toxic landscape of north-east Delhi is a microcosm of India’s prospect-less, frustrated youth cohort. Forty-three percent of north-east Delhi’s population is between 20 and 40 years old; just 11% of residents of Hindu majority areas, and less than 10% of residents of Muslim-majority areas, had graduated from high school, one study found.

For all practical purposes, this youth cohort is unemployable. As small manufacturing operations have contracted over the last two years, finding work is becoming ever-harder—a key enabling condition for the communal rage seen in north-east Delhi.

Torn apart by ethnic riots in 1965, Singapore faced similar dilemmas: economic progress, its leaders knew, simply could not come about in a society torn by primal violence. Large-scale public housing projects, scholar Beatrice di Mauro has recorded, were used as tools enforce residential integration of income classes and ethnicities.

Ethnic Chinese, Malays and Indians found themselves compelled to live next door to each other: would-be rioters wanting to burn the homes of one group would have to also be willing to destroy their own.

In 1947, a survey had recorded that Singapore remained “one of the world’s worst slums” and a “disgrace to a civilised community”; inside three decades, the city-state stood transformed.

Though racial tensions remain an ugly fact of life in the United States, census data makes clear the country’s cities are more integrated than at any time since 1890—and that the “all-white” urban neighbourhood is almost extinct.

Though progress has been slow, public policy interventions have brought real gains for social integration.

From experience, it’s clear that the challenge can be overcome in India, too—though not by politicians, who have perverse electoral incentives to accentuate ethic-religious violence. In the wake of the 1993 riots, civil society organisations successfully united communities around diverse struggles for women’s empowerment, resources and civic rights. Those struggles are an important reason why Mumbai has not had a major communal riot since then.

Enlightened self-interest suggests India’s business leaders need to invest in social stability: to encourage the formation of business relationships and credit networks cutting across communal lines; recruit diverse workforces that unite castes and religious groups; push government to invest in the creation of community infrastructure and resources.

The option is a nation at perpetual war with itself—a nation which may not endure.

Praveen Swami is Group Consulting Editor, Network18

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Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban is exceedingly bad news for India

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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In the summer of 1999, a young United States diplomat found himself inside a safe-house in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, face-to-face with the patriarch of Afghanistan’s Islamic jihad. The Taliban’s minister for borders, Sirajuddin Haqqani turned out to have a well-developed sense of irony: it was, he said, “good to meet someone from the country which had destroyed my base, my madrassa, and killed 25 of my mujahideen”. “Haqqani’s assistants glared sullenly”, diplomatic cable records.

Less than a year earlier, al-Qaida had bombed the United States’ embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200. The United States responded by firing cruise missiles at jihadist camps in eastern Afghanistan. The diplomat warned that more strikes could follow unless the Taliban expelled al-Qaeda’s chief, Osama bin Laden.

Even though the Taliban would not expel Bin Laden, Haqqani responded, they had him under control. William Milam, the United States Ambassador in Islamabad, exulted: his country’s threats of violence, and moves to isolate the regime, were “indeed pinching the Taliban”.

Lethal as missiles are, self-delusion is even more dangerous: In the months before that meeting took place, we now know, Bin Laden had summoned the head of al-Qaeda’s military committee, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to Kandahar, and green-lighted the 9/11 plot.

Ahead of his visit to India, President Donald Trump signed off on a Reduction in Violence agreement with the Taliban—the first in a series of steps meant to prepare the way for the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan. For India, the deal is exceedingly bad news. The Taliban’s second sunrise will energise jihadist movements in Kashmir, and across the region, just as the Afghan mujahideen’s defeat of the Soviet Union did in 1989.

There’s little New Delhi can do but prepare for the rising storm. India has neither the military capacities nor diplomatic heft needed to influence the course events will take in Kabul. History, though, leaves no room for illusions about what lies ahead.

In 1992, almost a decade before 9/11, the Pakistani Islamist politician Fazlur Rahman laid out a road map for the global jihadist magazine. “The Afghan jihad,” he told the Pashto language Manba al-Jihad magazine, “which was spearheaded by Maulana Haqqani and other truthful leaders, defeated the Soviet empire. But now there is another enemy to this jihad. That is America, and its conspiratorial policies that are intended to bring Afghanistan, the centre of jihad, under American attack.”

Fazlur Rahman concluded: “We are sure that people like Haqqani will fuel the flames of jihad worldwide.”

Kashmir was one of the new theatres. “A small nation with a small population, with limited resources and weapons, rose in revolt against the Soviet onslaught,” the jihadist-turned-politician Altaf Khan, also known as ‘Azam Inquilabi’ recalled, “to the extent that the Soviet Union ultimately disintegrated into fragments”. “So we got inspired,” he proceeded, “if they could offer tough resistance to a super-power in the east, we too could fight India.”

Faced with these threats, though, the United States sought accommodation, In 1994, President Bill Clinton’s administration began working to facilitate energy giant Unocal’s plans to build an ambitious pipeline linking Central Asia’s vast energy fields with the Indian Ocean.

Muhammad Ghaus, the Taliban’s foreign minister, led an expenses-paid delegation to Unocal’s headquarters in Sugarland, Texas, at the end of 1997. The clerics, housed at a five-star hotel, were taken to see the NASA museum, several supermarkets and the local zoo.

In April 1996, Robin Raphel—then-Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, and later Barack Obama’s ambassador for non-military aid to Pakistan—visited Kabul to lobby for the project. Later that year, she was again in Kabul, this time calling on the international community to “engage the Taliban”. “The Taliban does not seek to export Islam, only to liberate Afghanistan,” she said.

Even as the State Department report described Bin Laden as one of the “most significant sponsors of terrorism today”, the regime which sheltered him has never declared a state sponsor of terrorism.

“The truth,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright later wrote, “was that those (attacks before 9/11) were happening overseas and while there were Americans who died, they were not thousands and it did not happen on US soil.”

For Prime Minister Imran Khan, and General Qamar Bajwa, the army chief who underpins his authority, President Trump’s Afghan deal will prove a gift—just as 9/11 was for General Pervez Musharraf, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate will have to guarantee sure the Taliban does not attempt to seize Afghan cities like Kunduz before the United States Presidential elections are complete—and for that, there will be a price.

New Delhi can, thus, expect greater United States pressure to negotiate with Pakistan over Kashmir—and to temper its reactions to acts of terrorism. Already, Jaish-e-Muhammad training camps, shut down after last year’s Balakote air-strike, have reopened.

From the Doha Accord—the roadmap for the Afghan peace talks signed last year—it’s clear Afghanistan is headed towards a dismantling of its fledgeling, post-9/11 republican order. The parties agreed to “institutionalise (an) Islamic system in the country for the implementation of comprehensive peace”; clearly, the Afghan constitution itself is an inadequate framework for the Taliban.

Last year, Taliban delegates at a dialogue in Moscow described the current Afghan constitution as “un-Islamic”, and labelled women’s rights “immoral”. And Taliban chief Haibatullah Akhundzada vowed in an Eid message to continue fighting until “ending the occupation and establishment of an Islamic system”.

From President Trump’s optic, the case for withdrawal is simple: the payoff from the expensive, murderous war of attrition in Afghanistan, just doesn’t justify its costs. Even if jihadists seize power in Afghanistan, the argument goes, the United States’ massive counter-terrorism capacities give it a formidable shield—and Pakistan can be paid to play policeman.

Plenty of President Trump aides, well-aware of how the road to 9/11 was paved disagreed with this line of argument—among them, former secretary of defence Jim Mattis and national security advisors HR McMaster and John Bolton. They found their boss was determined to fulfil his election promise to pull out of foreign wars.

Back in 1989, as the Kashmir jihad rose, New Delhi was caught unawares: the state’s political system was in disarray, the consequence of elections rigged by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; its administrative structure in ruins; it’s economy incapable of accommodating the aspirations of young people. Islamists were able to fill these voids—with devastating consequences.

Ever since 1999, Indian policies in Kashmir have been predicated on the assumption that New Delhi and Washington’s regional interests converge: reining-in Pakistan’s jihadist proxies, it seemed, was a common interest. President Trump’s Afghan deal makes that’s not necessarily true.

Time no longer on its side, New Delhi needs to act now to reestablish not just its authority, but India’s legitimacy, in Kashmir.

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow