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The Hindu
4 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
Russia is not Iran, India can't cancel oil imports on U.S. demand: experts
India cannot cancel oil imports from Russia as it did six years ago with Iran and Venezuela, given the difference in the scale and importance of the relationship, said experts, warning that the U.S.'s actions against India were damaging the relationship built over decades. In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump had in his first term, demanded that India 'zero out' its oil imports from Iran and Venezuela. India had eventually complied with the demand before the deadline in May 2019. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump signed an executive order levying a 25% penalty on top of 25% tariffs on Indian goods, unless India cut energy purchases from Russia, which currently make up more than 35% of its oil imports. The penalty would kick in by August 27 unless Russia stops the war in Ukraine. The threat is expected to add pressure on both India and Russia ahead of a meeting between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir Putin next week, and the upcoming visit by Mr. Putin to India for the annual summit with Mr. Modi. 'At the global level, Russia is not Iran,' former Indian Ambassador to the U.S. Arun Singh told The Hindu in an interview. 'We want Russia, as one of the major powers in the international context, to be an important partner of India, and there's a memory in India of Russia in the past having provided political support [and] ...defence technology that nobody else was willing to provide,' he added, also warning that if India were to cave in to Mr. Trump's demands, this would only increase the U.S.'s appetite to demand more concessions from India. According to scholar Brahma Chellaney, the U.S. move on Russian oil is a cover to strong-arm India into accepting trading terms the U.S. wants, including market access for agricultural products. '[Mr.] Trump is weaponising Russian oil purchases to force a largely one-sided trade deal on India,' said Mr. Chellaney, who is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. He pointed out that technically, the U.S. has not sanctioned Russian oil, nor has it subscribed to the European Union's latest price cap on it. Mr. Trump had also not penalised China, which is the world's largest importer of Russian oil. 'Cutting Indian purchases of Russian oil is unlikely to make him back off. He wants a trade deal on his terms,' Mr. Chellaney added. Until recently, India imported about 2 million barrels a day, and is the second largest importer of Russian oil. Mr. Singh pointed to the past 25 years as a period of building trust between the two countries, and a steady improvement in relations after the previous era, where India had seen the U.S. as a 'coercive and an unreliable partner' for its backing of Pakistan, the 1971 Bangladesh War intervention, and the 1998 sanctions on India for its nuclear tests. Since 2008, after the U.S. helped India win exemptions at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group for doing nuclear trade, he said this perception seriously changed. He also said that the U.S. had supplied drones and winter clothing to support Indian forces during the India-China stand-off at the Line of Actual Control at 'short notice'. 'But because of what President Trump has done in India, there's a resurrection of the old and bitter memories of the U.S.,' Mr. Singh who is a Senior Fellow at Delhi-based Carnegie India and a Professor at Ashoka University. 'So President Trump and the U.S. may feel that they are putting some penalties on India, high tariffs, I would say that they are putting high tariffs and penalties, less on India, and more on the U.S.-India relationship. It will take some time for the relationship to come out from this shock that has been generated', he added.
Indian Express
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Suhas Palshikar writes on 50 years since Emergency: When we remember 1975
Besides political repression, the Emergency of 1975-77 was characterised by comical news bulletins reporting how everything was in good shape. Today, as the Emergency is being remembered, the name and image of the Leader are as ubiquitous as 50 years ago. From vikas to the well-being of cheetahs, everything happens thanks to the Leader. This similarity should make us sombre about commemorating the 50th anniversary of that moment. Indira Gandhi's Emergency was, in most part, for the sake of her personal authority. However, as we remember that episode — and we should indeed remember it — stopping at the personal level would be a mistake. Democracies often operate within the dialectic of the personal (political leadership) and the institutional, hanging perilously between an expression of popularity and that abstract thing called the rule of law. Therefore, the act of 'remembering the Emergency' should go beyond criticism of the past to introspection about the present. For one, we should ask what made the Emergency possible — how was it possible to persecute citizens? We should also ponder over the possibility of democracy being suspended again: Has the experience made our democracy more sabotage-proof? Or does the memory help us make sense of the politics of undermining democracy — a more contemporary purpose? Any analysis of the Emergency must begin with 1971. Election outcomes in a democracy are often enigmatic. The voter and the victor diverge in the meanings they attach to the outcomes. In 1971, Mrs Gandhi won a handsome victory. The slogan Garibi Hatao caught the imagination of a country whose economic growth had stagnated and failed to deliver. But following that victory and more so after the Bangladesh War, Mrs Gandhi must have concluded that the voters looked upon her as a benefactor, a saviour and, more particularly, as indispensable. This feeling was at odds with the protests that erupted in Bihar and Gujarat. The overall gloom that took over the country post-1973 was also in stark contrast to Mrs Gandhi's idea of her destined role. The vagueness of the constitutional provision made it possible to formally declare an 'emergency'. The organisational weakness of her 'new' Congress and the concentration of power in the office of the Prime Minister also facilitated the declaration. While the media's timidity has been commented on, we do not give adequate attention to the swiftness with which the civil and police bureaucracies succumbed to the logic of authoritarianism, rejecting the rule of law in favour of rule by diktat of the popular leader. That's not to mention the Supreme Court, which acquiesced to the interpretation of the Constitution dished out by the political executive. Here was a template for a diversion away from democracy. Mrs Gandhi's defeat and the subsequent amendment to the emergency provision created an impression that 'democracy' had won — or, less poetically, that possible sabotage in the future was now averted. And true enough, India has not seen another such amateur attempt to divert the political process away from democracy. In other words, the Emergency template has been discarded — but has it really? Conflating partisan interests with the national interest, pushing the judiciary to fall in line and above all, converting the police and the bureaucracy into weapons against citizens are the core pathways copied from the 1975-77 template. There are striking similarities between then and now. The over-reading of election outcomes — not just in 2014 but subsequently, too — is one. There is no doubt the outcome was a clear rejection of Congress. No doubt each election since 2014, but 2014 in particular, was a spectacular victory for Narendra Modi. But these facts are understood and presented as a second Independence and are being etched into history as the dawn of Amrit Kaal. Megalomania apart, the texture of politics and public contestations has altered dramatically since 2014 — all protests are labelled anti-national or urban naxal, and like the foreign hand of the Emergency, the hand of Soros has become the pretext to attack any difference of opinion. These labels are used to liberally invoke draconian laws, particularly the UAPA. As they did during the Emergency, the bureaucracy and the police have happily joined the battle on behalf of the political executive. Above all, more than during the Emergency, the judiciary has submerged itself in the logic of the political executive. In conceptual terms, the short moment of 1975-77 and the current long moment manifest similarities in the downgrading of rights, a contempt for federal polity, disdain for protest movements and the mutilation of institutions. Together, they amount to reducing democracy to an anti-people instrument of power. The Constitution and its core principles are the main casualty. No wonder we hear today echoes of 'parliamentary sovereignty', which made much noise 50 years ago. But India today is marked by one grotesque and one deeply troubling distinction from the Emergency. The grotesque is the politics of vigilantism. Anyone who can lay claim to some elements of the establishment's pet ideas has the licence to punish. A parallel system of identifying and cleansing 'wrongdoers' seems to be almost institutionalised. Personalised authority, a vengeful state and vigilantes overlap in today's politics and governance. More worryingly, unlike the Emergency, the present moment is guided by a larger purpose: Of undermining the national movement's legacy and rejecting the constitutional imagination. Operational wrongs can be corrected through institutional efforts but normative or ideological departures are not easy to stall once they are imposed on a society and crowned as the true ideas the nation should uphold. When a gigantic media machine joins the ruling party in legitimising Hindutva and when mobs are unleashed to delegitimise difference and opposition, you have a thoroughly new template of controlling government, politics and popular sentiment. From Mrs Gandhi's somewhat ad-hoc attempts to divert democracy in order to retain power, India seems to be moving into a very different terrain of using formal democratic mechanisms to undermine both democracy and Indianness. If the Emergency was a dark moment when democracy was suspended, the essence of that Emergency is being normalised in India's current moment. The writer, based in Pune, taught political science
Indian Express
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Durga, dictator, democrat. How the 3 veins ran parallel in Indira Gandhi
Fifty years after the Emergency, as fresh material and new books throw more light on a dark chapter in India's history, it is still tantalising how Indira Gandhi, the central character around whom the events of the 1970s revolved, could be a 'Durga' in 1971, a dictator in 1975 – and even as a dictator, call for elections in 1977, displaying a democratic streak in her — all within a timespan of five-six years. Mrs Gandhi's opponent Atal Bihari Vajpayee had hailed her as 'Durga' after she helped split Pakistan to create Bangladesh, changing geo-political realities. In a preemptive move, she signed a Treaty of Friendship with the then Soviet Union (now Russia), to counter the new Pakistan-China-America axis that was being formed. Displaying her steely side, she did not wilt when then US President Richard Nixon sent the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal in a show of strength. Early on in life, Indira Gandhi had learnt not to panic in a crisis. There is a story about a trip to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with her parents, when the jeep in which they were travelling skidded. The 14-year-old Indira, who was sitting in the front, jumped out. The driver prevented the vehicle from going over the precipice, but Jawaharlal Nehru was furious with his daughter and admonished her for what she had done. After that she rarely lost her cool in a crisis, which came in handy in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Actually, even before the opposition to her began internally, Mrs Gandhi's woes started, with the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war in the Middle East in 1972 – rather like the crisis in West Asia today. It led to spiralling inflation in India, creating a fertile ground for the rise of the Navnirman Movement in Gujarat, followed by the Jayaprakash Narayan-led movement against corruption and rising prices in 1973-74. The two agitations brought Opposition forces together to demand Mrs Gandhi's resignation. But, even as she kept her cool, her instinct was to 'choose order above democracy' when faced with situations that spelt conflict or instability. According to her biographer Katherine Frank, she did not share 'Nehru's faith that democratic institutions would survive unstable circumstances'. (In 1959, as the Congress president, she had prevailed on a reluctant Nehru to dismiss the Communist government in Kerala when there was unrest in the state.) In 1975 again, Mrs Gandhi chose so-called 'order' over democracy in imposing the Emergency on the night of June 25-26. This was 13 days after Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court unseated her as MP, holding her guilty of electoral malpractices. She toyed briefly with the idea of resigning while hoping for reprieve from the Supreme Court, and appointing someone of her choice as PM. But very quickly she abandoned the idea – it was too risky and might jeopardise her kursi. Ultimately, Mrs Gandhi imposed the Emergency even without calling a meeting of the Union Cabinet (which was informed at 6.30 the next morning – and not consulted). A compliant President, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, just signed on the dotted line. The Congress government then went about arresting leading Opposition figures – including JP, Vajpayee, L K Advani, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar – as well as thousands others opposed to her politics. The families of many did not know for three-four months where they had been taken. There were allegations of torture in prison. What followed is now well-known – the suspension of fundamental rights, press censorship, amendments to the Constitution, the strengthening of the Executive's powers, the weakening of the Judiciary. Besides, the forcible sterilisation of thousands, in one of the worst exhibitions of Sanjay Gandhi's 'extra-constitutional authority' in his mother's government. In 1976, I worked with the news magazine Himmat in Mumbai, which resisted Mrs Gandhi's authoritarian rule. (Many small papers similarly put up a valiant fight.) Himmat was first required to submit to 'self-censorship', then to pre-censorship when the authorities claimed 'violations', and finally pressure was mounted on the printing press, till it succumbed and refused to print Himmat. Chief Editor Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, put out an appeal for funds to buy a small printing press so that Himmat could continue publication. It was so exciting to see the money orders – worth Rs 10, Rs 5, even Re 1 – come in, demonstrating a will to freedom. Finally, with around Rs 60,000 in, Himmat could buy its own press. Not long after that, Mrs Gandhi announced elections, to be held in March 1977. It is one of those supreme ironies of politics that 'dictator' Indira announced polls when she need not have done it. There were no external pressures like sanctions (though there were critical voices in the West). Most importantly, the elections held were free and fair – or the Congress would not have been routed all over North India. Later she also admitted to 'excesses' during the regime. Mrs Gandhi pressed ahead with polls even in the face of Sanjay's opposition. Then Haryana Chief Minister Bansi Lal, a member of Sanjay's core team, had stated publicly: 'Get rid of this election nonsense. Just make our sister (Mrs Gandhi) President for life, and there is no need to do anything else.' The debate continues to this day as to why Mrs Gandhi called for elections (which finally led to the lifting of the Emergency)? Was it because she was more democrat Nehru's daughter than Sanjay Gandhi's mother, as some would like to believe? Had Nehru and the freedom movement profoundly influenced her thinking in the early years? Or did she want to win back the approval of her friends in the Western world whom she had antagonised? Or was it a 'spiritual' impulse which goaded her, given J Krishnamurti's influence on her? Or, and this is more likely, did she hope to legitimise, nationally and internationally, Sanjay as her successor through elections, allowing him more time to work under her – and build a new team around him? Mrs Gandhi may have also calculated that elections would restore her weakening grip over the government. She was worried about the power Sanjay had come to wield, often going above her head and taking decisions on his own. He and his coterie wanted to move towards a Presidential form of government – and had even got four state Assemblies to pass resolutions to set up a new Constituent Assembly. As for Opposition leaders, she had managed to soften some of them in 1976 – and thought she would win. The balance of advantage, she would have calculated, lay in going for elections in early 1977. She had not foreseen Opposition leaders getting together to form a unified Janata Party within a few days of being released. Or on Babu Jagjivan Ram quitting the Congress soon thereafter, which hampered her efforts to induct new faces. Whether as Durga, dictator, or displayer of democratic sensibilities, Indira Gandhi understood the nature of power – and how to capture it at any cost. Successive generations of politicians across party lines studied and emulated her model of saam, daam, dand, bhed (using any means necessary to meet one's goals) – which de-institutionalised politics as also de-ideoligised it. Indira Gandhi (and Narendra Modi) have shown that the more powerful and popular a prime minister, the greater the likelihood of power getting concentrated in his or her hands and of democratic institutions coming under stress. The weaker the leader – as seen in coalition governments – the more the chances of safeguards against excesses of power. Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide
News18
09-06-2025
- Politics
- News18
Operation Sindoor Proves Dharmic Wars Can Be Fought Even In Our Times
Last Updated: India, through Operation Sindoor, has taught the world how to conduct a 'limited military operation' without unjustifiable collateral casualties and extended warfare It is anybody's guess why Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen Anil Chauhan chose an overseas venue, Singapore, and two foreign journalists/news agencies, Reuters and Bloomberg, to reiterate his earlier acknowledgement of possible losses of air assets in Operation Sindoor. Of course, he had said almost as much at Savitribai Phule University in Pune earlier. Yet, the question remains why the CDS, or a political administrator, say, Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Defence Minister Rajnath Singh could not have said the same things, that too at a news conference in the national capital. After all, these preferred foreign news sources would have been represented by their Delhi-based correspondents, and others, mainly our own journalists, too would have benefited from an open interaction of the kind. The question however is where from here, how and for what. Yes, India set a kind of precedent on neutralising an adversary militarily without having to violate international borders directly. We also did it within a matter of days, which is not the case even with Israel's bombing out of a small parcel of land in Gaza, continually for months and months now. India showed to the world how to fight a modern war and win. During the Bangladesh War, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave Army chief Gen Sam Manekshaw three weeks to conclude the mission before international pressure caused a ceasefire. This time, too, the political leadership seemed to have taken into account the time-lines before a ceasefire became unavoidable. It's thus not about whether US President Donald Trump caused the ceasefire, as he only claimed. Instead, it is as much about the clear-cut political instructions that seem to have gone down the line, on the modalities and methodologies of warfare as it was about how and how fast our armed forces achieved the set goals and objectives. This aspect of Operation Sindoor has not been adequately acknowledged. What more, it is becoming increasingly clear that the operation would not have crossed into the second day after the Indian forces had neutralised terror sites in Pakistan and PoK. It is not unlikely that after the previous Surgical Strikes, a one-dayer of the kind would not have been appreciated as much by the public in this country as they did after the four-day military engagement. What has stood out since is that Operation Sindoor was as much a surgical strike as the previous ones. Only selected targets were bombed. Even Pakistan has not claimed collateral damage, especially in the form of loss of human lives from around the targeted sites. To that extent, too, India has proved that we were waging a 'dharmic war' with minimum war and maximum loss to the adversary's military capabilities—and nothing else. Compare it to the US war on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Ukraine War and Israel's Gaza strikes, and the picture will be complete. All these wars are in the post-Cold War. In the pre-Cold War period, you had the Vietnam War, which was a standing proof of how wars should not be fought—but ended up being fought, when Big Powers engaged in muscle-flexing at the expense of their poor cousins, far away from their borders. In a way, Operation Sindoor might have ended on day one had Pakistan not escalated the military engagement, to target Indian military targets and civilian settlements, too. It was unwanted and unwarranted, if and only if their command and political leadership had assessed the damage and accepted that the Indian shelling had stopped with terror targets. Suffice to point out that to this day, Islamabad or Rawalpindi, respectively the seat of political and military power, has not claimed that any or all of the day one targets of Operation Sindoor were not terror bases but were civilian habitations. By extending and expanding the scope of their adversary's operations, Pakistani military command commenced a war of attrition, which it lost out conclusively. In cross-border military strikes without IAF fighters crossing the International Border (IB) into Pakistan, India taught a lesson that will be remembered in post-Cold War global history of warfare. In doing so, the world may not want to classify Operation Sindoor as a 'classic war'. It would then be only to India's political advantage on the global theatre. What more, such constructs do not alter the ground reality one wee bit: Pakistan involved India in a military engagement, and lost squarely. Now, one needs to look at the truthfulness or otherwise of India's early claims that it was only a limited operation, confined to neutralising Pakistani terror-sites, and nothing more. Imagine a situation if Pakistan had not attacked India militarily from day two on. India would not have had a justifiable political reason to neutralise Pakistan's radar stations and air defences, without actually causing loss of their fighter aircraft. Given the way India chose the targets, both for day one and later on, and the way Indian forces carried out their assigned mission, it is becoming increasingly convincing that if they had taken aim at Pakistani air bases and their fighter aircraft in numbers, they would have also gone up, 'boom'. This would also go to prove the Indian claim of a limited, targeted operation, and not a full-fledged war (unless imposed on it by the other side). Nuclear bogey It is also now clear from the Kargil War on, how India has been able to keep military operations against Pakistan at the conventional level. Western governments and media hype up every India-Pakistan military operation to a nuclear war, making it as if the two South Asian adversarial neighbours are incapable of fighting a 'responsible war'. Operation Sindoor has proved India's proven path of peaceful coexistence and limited adversity in times of pressing needs. After all, this is one country in the world that at one point of time was a big power—and aspires to be one, again, any time soon—and still did not capture or retail territories. If there were limited engagements, there were justifiable reasons. The government also thought on its feet, and sending out political delegations the world over for briefing local governments about the compulsions that caused Operation Sindoor, and the conclusions that justified the same post facto, was also a top scorer like the political messaging and military operations. To have Opposition parliamentarians like Shashi Tharoor and Assadudin Owaisi to lead some of those teams clearly showed how united India was in times of war as much in times of peace. India, through Operation Sindoor, has taught the world how to conduct a 'limited military operation' without unjustifiable collateral casualties and extended warfare that anyway are destructive—as the world has seen in the post-Cold War era. But then wars are big business, and who else wants a short war! The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: June 09, 2025, 17:55 IST News opinion Opinion | Operation Sindoor Proves Dharmic Wars Can Be Fought Even In Our Times
Deccan Herald
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Deccan Herald
Opposition welcomes India-Pak ceasefire, but questions US making 'unprecedented announcement'
Congress was quick to recall Indira Gandhi's leadership during the Bangladesh War with its leaders highlighting how she withstood the US pressure during the Bangladesh Liberation War and demanded an all-party meeting followed by a special session of Parliament. Shemin Joy
