(Worth reading article in NYT. Pakistan is paying a heavy price for its religious extremism, which is not easy to reverse. Unfortunately, India is heading in the same direction of religious extremism and abandoning its secularism. f.sheikh)

The sleepy pilgrimage city of Ayodhya in northern India was once home to a grand 16th-century mosque, until it was illegally demolished by a howling mob of Hindu militants in 1992. The site has since been reinvented as the centerpiece of the Hindu-chauvinist “new India” promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism has fed distrust and hostility toward anything foreign, and the receptionists at my hotel were sullenly suspicious of outsiders. There was no hotel bar — a sign of Hindu virtue — and the food served was pure vegetarian, a phrase implying both Hindu caste purity and anti-Muslim prejudice.

In education, government institutions are run by ignorant functionaries of the ruling party, and from school textbooks to scientific research papers, the Hindu nationalist version of India is pushed forward, myth morphing into history. In the private universities that have begun to crop up in India, Mr. Modi’s government keeps a close eye on classes, panels or research that might be construed as criticizing his government or its idea of a Hindu India.

This is not sustainable, even if it seems likely that Mr. Modi will ride to a third victory in national parliamentary elections that begin Friday and conclude June 1. Mr. Modi’s India is marked by rampant inequality, lack of job prospects, abysmal public health and the increasing ravages of climate change. These crises cannot be addressed by turning one of the world’s most diverse countries into a claustrophobic Hindu nation.

Perhaps even the prime minister and his party can sense this. Their crackdowns on opposition political leaders, manipulation of electoral rolls and voting machines and freezing of campaign funds for opposition parties are not the actions of a confident group.

But the truth is harder to hide than ever. Mr. Modi and his party are giving India the Hindu utopia they promised, and in the clear light of day, it amounts to little more than a shiny, garish temple that is a monument to majoritarian violence, surrounded by waterlogged streets, emaciated cattle and a people impoverished in every way.

One comment by a reader in NYT;

Navdeep

Dayton OH5m ago

The facts don’t match the bluster of the BJP. Most of their achievements were initiated by their predecessor: Congress. The VAT and liberalization of the economy were under Manmohan Singh of Congress, an Oxford educated Economist. Unlike the uneducated and ultra orthodox BJP government that believes in Hindu astronauts 4,000 years ago and cow waste curing every human malady. Instead of moving to enlightenment, India is heading back to the Dark Ages of superstition and disbelief of science. India deserves what it gets with the population voting for Modi. It’s all fine and good when they demolish someone else’s house, wait till they come to demolish yours.

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Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday.

Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday. “I think we miscalculated,” said Sima Shine, a former head of research for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. “The accumulated experience of Israel is that Iran doesn’t have good means to retaliate,” Ms. Shine added. “There was a strong feeling that they don’t want to be involved in the war.”

Instead, Iran has created “a completely new paradigm,” Ms. Shine said.

Iran’s response ultimately caused little damage in Israel, in large part because Iran had telegraphed its intentions well in advance, giving Israel and its allies several days to prepare a strong defense. Iran also released a statement, even before the attack was over, that it had no further plans to strike Israel.

Iran has demonstrated that it has considerable firepower that can only be rebuffed with intensive support from Israel’s allies, like the United States, underscoring how much damage it could potentially inflict without such protection.

Iran also needed to show proxies like Hezbollah that it could stand up for itself, Mr. Vaez added. “To demonstrate that Iran is too afraid to retaliate against such a brazen attack on its own diplomatic facility in Damascus would have been very damaging for Iran’s relations and the credibility of the Iranians in the eyes of their regional partners,” he said.

 Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based research group, said that Israel had now made two major strategic errors in less than a year: Before Oct. 7, Israeli officials had publicly — and wrongly — concluded that Hamas had been deterred from attacking Israel.

Then Hamas launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.

“When it comes to conceptions, Israel is batting 0 for 2,” said Mr. Miller. “They failed to read Hamas’s capacity and motivation correctly on Oct. 7 and they clearly misjudged how Iran would respond to the April 1 hit.”

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posted by f.sheikh

NYT; China v India; India sees an opportunity as the United States and Europe look for alternatives to China as a place to make their products. One early success has been sharply increased production of iPhones in India.

But even with these openings, China continues to expose Indian insecurities. The Chinese economy is about five times the size of India’s, and China remains India’s second-biggest trade partner (after the United States), exporting about six times as much to India as it imports. China spends more than three times what India does on its military, giving its forces a significant advantage across land, sea and air.

The Indian military, which has long struggled to modernize, is now forced to be conflict-ready on two fronts, with China to India’s east and archrival Pakistan to its west.

Tens of thousands of troops from both India and China remain on a war footing high in the Himalayas four years after the deadly skirmishes broke out in the disputed Eastern Ladakh region, where both countries have been building up their military presence. Nearly two dozen rounds of negotiations have failed to bring disengagement.

In a book published in 2020, just as he had taken over as Mr. Modi’s trusted foreign policy architect, Mr. Jaishankar wrote that the tensions between the United States and China set “the global backdrop” for India’s choices in a “world of all against all.” India’s ambitions as a major power, he wrote, would require a juggling act: “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.”

While India remains wary of becoming a pawn in the West’s fight with Beijing, and has not forgotten its frosty history with the United States, China has become an unavoidable focus after being a secondary threat for much of modern Indian history.

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posted by F. Sheikh

“Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel.

This thesis has been starkly confirmed by the events that followed 7 October, with the imbalance of power evident in the disproportionate levels of death, destruction and displacement: the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed so far is about 25-1. It is further reinforced by the overwhelming level of US political, diplomatic and military support for Israel, combined with that of the UK and other western countries, in contrast with the relatively limited military and financial backing for the Palestinians by Iran and several non-state actors.”

“In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.

I call this a temporary collapse of the doctrine, because while the events of 7 October exposed the bankruptcy of a force-based approach to an essentially political problem, the Israeli leadership has clearly learned nothing. Instead, it has doubled down on previous practices, in keeping with the Israeli adage: “If force does not work, use more force.” Israeli leaders seem to have forgotten Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.”

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posted by f.sheikh