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11-05-2025
- Politics
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What does Trump's ceasefire announcement mean for Modi's strongman image?
Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics. As always, if you've been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on ' follow '). At 5.25 pm on Saturday, the President of the United States posted a message on social media that brought relief to nearly two billion people. 'After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE,' he said (caps are Trump's, not mine). It was only half an hour later that the government of India actually announced a ceasefire. 'Both sides would stop all firing and military action on land, air and sea at 5 pm,' said Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in a press briefing that lasted less than a minute. Why did another country announce that India's armed forces are going to stop hostilities with Pakistan in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack? And what does that politically mean for Modi's strongman image? Made in America The answer to the first question is simple: the US is claiming credit for brokering peace between the subcontinental twins. In fact, the US state department has put out a statement calling this a 'US-Brokered Ceasefire between India and Pakistan'. CNN has reported that the US received 'alarming intelligence' on Friday that could lead to a 'dramatic escalation'. The US Vice President then called Modi urging him to talk to Pakistan and 'to consider options for de-escalation'. This was the 'critical moment' that got India and Pakistan moving towards a ceasefire, according to CNN. India's long-held position has always been that its conflict with Pakistan is a bilateral matter and it does not want any mediation. Unsurprisingly, the Modi government has rushed to firefight these US statements, putting a flurry of anonymous quotes in the media denying that the US had any role to play. No 3rd party was involved in India, Pakistan understanding, say sources — Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) May 10, 2025 A journalist tweets out a statement from an anonymous source denying US mediation. Even worse, the US' statements seem to suggest that it thinks Kashmir is back as an issue internationally. On Sunday, Trump put out another statement offering to mediate so that a 'solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir'. Before that Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that India and Pakistan had agreed to 'start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site,' contradicting Delhi's position that it will not talk till Islamabad abjures terror. Trump has posted again about India and Pakistan—and this time he says he will work with them to seek a 'solution' on Kashmir. Wow. This goes further than his earlier offers, during his first term, of mediation on Kashmir if both sides want it. — Michael Kugelman (@MichaelKugelman) May 11, 2025 Strong, man? India's ideal war aim, as it bombed Pakistan on May 7, was to make the country bend completely. 'India seeks for Pakistan to have an embarrassing defeat,' said Christopher Clary, a US academic and an expert on South Asia's security politics. However, rather than a Pakistani military surrender as India achieved in 1971 when Indira Gandhi was prime minister, what Modi has managed to pull off is a ceasefire. The absence of a surrender is risky for Modi's strongman image. That the US is now claiming that it brokered the ceasefire is doubly so. Notably, Modi has long attacked the Congress as being weak for reaching out to the US. 'Our minister went to America and started crying 'Obama, Obama',' Modi had said in a viral interview from when he was Gujarat chief minister, making mock actions of tears. Will the Congress now be able to politicise this in the same way, attacking Modi's as being weak for Trump's claims of mediation? Don't understand the logic behind the sudden #ceasefire TBH, it feels like a bit anticlimactic to quit when you are clearly ahead, but I trust the leadership of my country to take the best decision under the circumstances. Experts will continue to analyse this decision over the… — Shefali Vaidya. 🇮🇳 (@ShefVaidya) May 10, 2025 A prominent social media influencer and Modi supporter announces disappointment with the ceasefire What happens now? The other risk for Modi is if Pakistan decides to continue its policy of supporting terror. Like the ceasefire after India's and Pakistan's tit-for-tat airstrikes in 2019, the current detente is premised on allowing both sides to go to their people and claim a Potemkin victory. However, 2019 is a poor template for Delhi: if India hoped that airstrikes would dissuade Pakistan from backing terror, that is clearly not the case, given the horror in Pahalgam. Will the 2025 hostilities persuade Pakistan to end its support to terror if 2019 didn't? There are already prominent voices of scepticism asking what India achieved by Operation Sindoor, given the ceasefire only three days later. 'We have left India's future history to ask what politico-strategic advantages, if any, were gained after its kinetic and non-kinetic actions post Pakistani horrific terror strike in Pahalgam on 22 April,' former Indian Army chief Ved Malik posted on social media. Even as journalists and analysts unpack the political losses and gains for individual players and states, one thing is certain: the people of South Asia simply cannot afford conflict. Both India and Pakistan are poor countries with large populations and nuclear weapons. War is simply not an option. A ceasefire is great news. Now we only need to hope that it sticks.
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04-05-2025
- Politics
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Caste census: Will the 50% reservation cap soon be history?
Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics (though this week, it intersects quite a bit with global politics). As always, if you've been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on ' follow '). After the Pahalgam terror attack, much of India was expecting a retaliatory attack against Pakistan. Instead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a surgical strike of a political kind. On Wednesday, the Union cabinet decided that caste would be counted as part of the upcoming census. This is a major U-turn by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Modi. Just a year ago, Modi had denounced those lobbying for a caste census as 'urban naxals'. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath, arguably the second-most popular BJP leader after Modi, set the line for opposition to the caste census with the slogan 'batenge to katenge' – divided we will get slaughtered. The graphic imagery refers to a long-held Hindutva belief that demands for caste equity will only end up fracturing Hindu society. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh backed Adityanath on his call for purported Hindu unity. Soon Modi echoed Adityanath's line with his own 'ek hai to safe hai' – there is safety in unity. Clearly, the BJP was going hammer and tongs against the Congress party, which has pressed hard for a caste census as part of its social equity focus under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi. An about turn That the saffron party has turned on a dime and now sought to take credit for the caste census is a good indicator of just how popular the policy plank is. Clearly the BJP hopes to blunt some of the Dalit and Other Backward Class anger that led to it losing the support of these groups in the last Lok Sabha elections. But even as the BJP is trying to run off with the Congress' agenda, the main Opposition party has stepped up its game: it says it will now concentrate on getting the government to remove the 50% cap that has been set on reservations for seats in educational institutions and government jobs. If it happens, it would cause a political earthquake that could be bigger than even the anti-Mandal agitation of the early 1990s. In 1990, the VP Singh government implemented the Mandal Commission's recommendations, providing reservations to Other Backward Classes – a vast, varied collection of agricultural and artisanal castes that fall between upper castes and Dalits in the social ladder. This doubled caste quotas to nearly 50%, drastically shrinking the general category dominated by upper castes. Angry at this, members of the upper castes launched an agitation with a young brahmin student, Rajiv Goswami, even setting himself on fire in Delhi. This agitation was mirrored by a new politics of OBC assertion, especially in the Hindi belt. Parties such as the Samajwadi and the Rashtriya Janata Dal drew OBC votes away from the upper caste-led Congress with the claim that OBC interests would be better protected by OBC leadership. Judicial award Eventually, a political compromise was hammered out – not by politicians but by the Supreme Court of India. In the landmark 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment, the court upheld OBC reservations but also put in place significant caps. Reservations could not extend beyond 50% and the 'creamy layer' or well-off OBCs would be excluded from availing of the quota. Notably, the court did not really explain why it chose the 50% figure. It said that the power of reservations should be 'exercised in a fair manner and within reasonable limits' and hence 'reservation under Clause (4) shall not exceed 50% of the appointments or posts, barring certain extraordinary situations as explained hereinafter'. But why was 50% a 'reasonable limit' given that Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs constitute around 80% of the Indian population? Even more confusingly, in 2022 the court allowed this 50% limit to be breached for the Economically Weaker Section quota for poor members of the upper castes. The Indra Sawhney cap was only applicable to caste quotas, it held. That such a major policy decision was taken by the court and not backed up in the political sphere meant the 50% cap was always on weak ground. The court in fact struck a blow of its own by upholding the Economically Weaker Section quota. Caste society India is the only country in the world where affirmative action quotas extend to the majority of the population. With the Economically Weaker Section quota in place, it now stands at almost 60%. Part of this flows from just how unique Indian society is. For example, the endogamy that underpins it, with the idea that marriages must only take place within a caste or even a subcaste, has shocked geneticists. Famously, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, quipped that while the Chinese are a truly large population, Indians are actually a 'large number of small populations'. Given this hermetically sealed social structure, the vast majority of Indian castes do not feel they can ever compete with the savarna castes that have dominated the social system for the past two millennia. Add to this is the fact that the Indian economy has been terrible at creating employment. In fact, studies show that there is little relationship at all between economic growth and employment growth in India. 'What this means is that far from employment growing faster when GDP grows faster, years of fast GDP growth have, on the contrary, tended to be years of slow employment growth,' the State of Working India report 2023 said. Both these factors mean that almost everyone in India thinks they need state-backed quotas to access wealth and education. Hence, the massive support for removing the quota cap.
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26-04-2025
- Politics
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Interview: ‘Pahalgam shows Balakot did not create deterrence'
Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal, a newsletter on Indian politics. As always, if you've been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on ' follow '). A horrific attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in which 26 people were killed, has left South Asia on edge as India has blamed Pakistan and its support for cross-border terrorism. Delhi has said that it would hold the Indus Waters Treaty 'in abeyance' and Modi promised that India would soon 'raze whatever is left of the terror haven', a thinly-veiled reference to Pakistan. To understand Delhi's military options at this time, how the Modi government overstated its claims that 'normalcy' has returned to Kashmir and the risky business of de-escalating conflict between two nuclear powers, I spoke to former military officer Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and one of India's foremost security experts. Do you think India can do another Balakot [striking across the border as it did in the wake of the Pulwama attack of 2019]? It depends on what you mean by Balakot. The question is what did Balakot achieve? As this particular incident has shown, Balakot did not create deterrence which stopped militants or Pakistan from undertaking another terror attack in Kashmir. That's one thing. Secondly, Balakot, as I wrote in The Caravan, was not a military success. It was a political success because it happened just before elections, and it worked for them [the Bharatiya Janata Party]. Thirdly, Balakot did escalate up to a point. As you know, [Mike] Pompeo, who was [United States] Secretary of State at that time, in his memo mentioned the nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan. So, I really don't know what we mean by another Balakot. If the idea is that India would do a kinetic operation against Pakistan, yes, that possibility definitely exists, particularly going by the rhetoric we're seeing from the government. I want to go to your reporting on Balakot, especially your piece in The Caravan. You've taken a view which is at variance with much of the Indian mainstream media. You say Balakot was actually not a military success. Do you think that will inform what is happening now? Will it reduce India's options? Let me put it this way. The political leadership in India would want to do something that would assuage the heightened emotions of their supporters at least, if not the Indian people. They have already set a bar because of what they claim to have done in 2016 with the surgical strikes across the LoC [Line of Control] and then in 2019 with Balakot. Once you've done that, you can't do anything lesser than that. If you claim that you achieved so much, then you need to do something bigger. That's one big constraint. The second constraint, of course, is the military failure of doing Balakot and the escalation that happened. Balakot is not just about what the Indian Air Force tried to do in Balakot; it's also what happened thereafter – when [Indian Air Force pilot] Abhinandan [Varthaman] was captured, when the Indian MiG-21 was brought down, the threat of missile launches from both sides. That, too, is part of the Balakot episode. The question isn't what India can do, it's how do you de-escalate from there. Anyone can order a ground-based missile, an airborne strike or a drone swarm attack. The point is, will Pakistan retaliate? Yes. After Pakistan retaliates, what do you do? Do you take it lying down? Do you say, 'thank you, 1-1' and go back home? Or do you escalate further? How do you de-escalate? The political leadership has to answer how it intends to prevent serious escalation between two nuclear weapon states and how to de-escalate after you have taken the first step. The military leadership must answer what their constraints are, whether they can honestly tell the political leadership that they are operating within limitations: shortage of soldiers, deployment at the China border, modern equipment shortages and so on. These two considerations – political of de-escalation and military – will come into play. I want to go back to the horrific terrorist attack in Pahalgam. Do you think there was a security lapse there? Definitely. There were two CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force] battalions until a year or two ago. One of them was moved out. Armed men fired for more than 20-30 minutes, and no security forces came. The family of one of the dead naval officers said no help came for 90 minutes and her husband died. Clearly, there was a security lapse. There was also an intelligence failure. You have militants in the area, roaming around with weapons, clearly embedded in the area with local support. It's not like the militant came that morning itself and suddenly did this. The intelligence failure is that you didn't have any idea of all this happening. Security failed on two levels. First, you left the place completely unguarded – probably believing that tourists wouldn't like to see soldiers and that would belie claims of normalcy. There was also the belief that militants wouldn't do anything to attack tourism, which is the lifeline of the Kashmiri economy – so therefore we can leave it unguarded. Second, the response during the attack was very poor. Unless you are buying your own Kool Aid of normalcy having returned, there was no reason to have no forces present in that spot. There were three failures: intelligence, and two levels of security – before and during the incident. Let's dig a bit deeper on your Kool Aid point. What does this incident say about the Modi government's claim that Kashmir is now normal and militancy has ended after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019? This incident shows that these claims are untrue. In fact, even earlier, incidents in Poonch and Rajouri already disproved that claim. Let's be clear: the violence isn't at the level of the early '90s or just after Kargil. But violence had already come down when Omar Abdullah was chief minister [2009-2015]. In 2011-2012, there were a lot of street protests, a lot of stone pelting, but militancy was already down. Then PDP [People's Democratic Party] formed the government with BJP [in 2016], and young Kashmiri men began joining the militancy. Violence was artificially suppressed, but the anger against the Indian state and the lack of political redress remains, creating fertile ground for militancy – even if you take Pakistan away from the equation. One of the claims for abrogating Article 370 was better security, which you're saying has not come through. Do you think India's security apparatus is actually now weaker because local Kashmiri parties have been destroyed and Kashmir is now ruled directly from Delhi? Absolutely. Remember, during demonetisation [in 2016], it was claimed that the terrorism's back has been broken in Kashmir. The same was said after surgical strikes and after abrogating Article 370. In all cases, security has not improved. We've lost even the limited support we had among Kashmiris. You could generate local intelligence, you had sympathisers. All that has been broken down by the kind of politics pursued in the rest of India and by Delhi in Kashmir: hardcore Hindutva politics, demonising Muslims and Kashmiris, TV debates running horribly anti-Kashmir content nightly. You can't expect sympathy when you've done what was done after August 2019: shutting everything down, taking away the internet. It is a very oppressive environment in Kashmir. Even tourism, though economically vital, has become a tool of humiliation and oppression. Could you expand on that? What do you mean by tourism being a tool of humiliation? Many tourists from the mainland, influenced by the current Islamophobic political climate, behave in obnoxious ways – sometimes unknowingly, sometimes knowingly – acting as if they sustain Kashmir. Even non-Kashmiri friends have observed this when they travel to Kashmir and have felt embarrassed. The way tourism is conducted doesn't foster healthy ties between Kashmir and the rest of India. It's often perceived as an extension of the politics India has seen since 2014. Let's zoom out to geopolitical security. If India launches any kinetic operation now, what are Pakistan's options? It depends on whether India launches a covert or overt operation. A covert operation can be denied by Pakistan, and meanwhile India, using its godi media channels, can run a propaganda campaign. That's easier – since there is no escalation. If India does something visible that Pakistan cannot deny, Pakistan will have to retaliate. General Khalid Kidwai, a key figure in Pakistan's nuclear policy, lays out a very clear line: QPQ+. If India does something, Pakistan will have to do quid pro quo plus. Something additional will have to be done when Pakistan retaliates. Because the Pakistan military can't afford to lose face. If they acknowledge India's action, they must retaliate. Then the question becomes, what does India do? Retaliate again? Escalate? Step back? Does a third party – Americans, Saudis, UAE, China – intervene and say, 'guys, this is enough'? Or do intelligence agencies start talking like after Balakot and find a way to de-escalate? The political leadership in India must think through this before taking any step. You said the Pakistani army must retaliate. Last week, Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir gave a provocative speech saying Kashmir is Pakistan's jugular vein. Do you think there's any connection between that and what happened in Pahalgam? It's hard to say. Asim Munir is not the first to use such rhetoric. Ayub, Zia, Kayani – many have said similar is a long-standing belief in a large section of the Pakistani military. There is nothing new in this. Whether there's a direct link between Munir's speech and Pahalgam is hard to say. My sense, not based on any input, is that it was a soft target which was left unprotected. The attackers saw it as easy to hit and escape. Militants, unless they're fidayeen, want to hit and get out. They don't want to be caught up in a pitched battle. My gut feeling is that it doesn't seem directly connected to Munir's speech, but it's hard to say for sure. Your own writing has shown that Modi actually managed domestic perception really well after Balakot, no matter the military assessment. Do you think something similar will happen or do you think that there will be some hard questions asked of the security lapses in Pahalgam? I don't think that India's corporate-owned media, the television channels, and newspapers, where a lot of our friends work, are going to ask any tough questions whatsoever of Mr Modi or Mr Shah. They didn't ask those questions after Manipur. They didn't even ask those questions even when the then governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Satyapal Malik, went public about everything that happened in Pulwama during the suicide bombing of the CRPF convoy. Those questions were not asked then. I doubt that the people who call themselves journalists and editors have the courage or even the capability to ask those questions. It will be incumbent upon some analysts, some commentators, and independent platforms like Scroll, Caravan, Wire, Newsminute, Newslaundry to ask those questions. Yes, and I think that really leaves the country weaker as these incidents show. If you do not ask questions of the government, then the government performs worse. Absolutely. I'll say only one more thing before I end. Demanding accountability is extremely important if you want to fix things for the future. If you don't demand accountability in a democratic setup, then you are sowing seeds for future disasters.
