Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-air-india-crash-how-to-spin-doctor-and-peddle-narratives-the-western-way-13912025.html

There has been a virtual masterclass lately in the creation and dissemination of biased narratives. Not only in the case of the ill-fated Air India 171 (Boeing 787, June 12, 2025) that crashed, but also in some other, unrelated instances. The age-old practices of "truth by repeated assertion" and "dubious circular references" as well as "strategic silence" have all been deployed in full force.

The bottom line with the Air India flight: there is reasonable doubt about whether there was mechanical/software failure and/or sabotage or possible pilot error. Any or all these caused both engines to turn off in flight. But the way the spin-doctors have spun it, it is now "official" that the commanding pilot was suicidal and turned off the fuel switch. Boeing, the plane maker, and General Electric, the engine maker, are blameless.

This is, alas, not surprising. It is in the interests of western MNCs to limit reputational damage and monetary loss related to their products. They do massive marketing by unleashing their PR agencies. We also saw how they protect themselves in other instances. A leaked Pfizer contract for their Covid vaccine insisted that if anything happened, it was the user's problem, not Pfizer's: there was no indemnity.

Incidentally, a report on July 19th said that the Pfizer COVID vaccine can lead to severe vision problems. Oh, sorry, no indemnity.

What is deplorable in the Air India case is that the AAIB, the Indian entity investigating the disaster, chose to release a half-baked preliminary report with enough ambiguity that a case could be (and definitely was) built up against the poor dead pilots. Any marketing person could have read the report and told them that it would be used to blame the pilots and absolve the manufacturers.

Besides, the AAIB report was released late night on a Friday India time, which meant that the western media had all of one working day to do the spin-doctoring, which they did with remarkable gusto. Meanwhile the Indian media slept. Whose decision was this? Clearly, Indian babus need a remedial course in public relations if this was mere incompetence. Of course, if it was intentional, that would be even worse.

There is a pattern. In earlier air accidents, such as the Jeju Air crash involving a Boeing 737-800 in South Korea in December, the pilots were blamed. In accidents involving Lion Air (Boeing 737 Max 8, 2018), China Airlines (737 200, 1989), Flydubai (737 800, 2016), ditto. I am beginning to believe that a lot of Asian pilots are poorly trained and/or suicidal. Ditto with the F-35 that fell into the ocean off Japan.

Truth by repeated assertion is a powerful force for gaslighting the gullible

I wonder what excuses we’ll hear about the Delta Airlines Boeing 767 whose engine caught fire in the air after take-off from LAX on July 20th. The pilots didn't die so they will speak up. Besides, they were westerners. I am eagerly awaiting the spin on this.

I also noticed with grim amusement how the BBC, WSJ, Bloomberg and Reuters and so on were busy quoting each other to validate their assertions. This is a standard tactic that India's distorians (see Utpal Kumar's powerful book 'Eminent Distorians') have perfected: B will quote third-hand hearsay from A, then C will quote B, D will quote C, and before you know it, the hearsay has become The TRUTH. But if you wind it back from D to C to B to A it becomes, "I hear someone told someone that xyz happened". Out of thin air, then.

There is also the lovely tactic of strategic silence. It has been used to un-person people who ask inconvenient questions. It has also been used to defenestrate inconvenient news. Just days ago, under the Deepstate-installed new regime in Syria, hundreds of minority Druze were brutally massacred. There was video on X of armed men in uniform forcing Druze men to jump off tall buildings, and desecrating their shrines.

Similary, there is a brutal reign of terror, rape, murder and thuggery against Hindus, Buddhists and others under the Deepstate-blessed regime of Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh: a clear genocide. Neither Syria nor Bangladesh gets any headlines. There are no loud human-rights protests as in the case of Gaza. This is not news. It is un-news.

"Manufacturing Consent" all the way.

India is particularly vulnerable to this gaslighting because Indians consume a lot of English-language 'news'. Scholars have long noted how the US public has been maintained in a state of ignorance so they could be easily manipulated. The same is true of the Indian middle class. So there is yet another reason to do less in English. Fooling, say, the Chinese or Japanese public is a lot more difficult.

The fact is that even though Indians may be literate in English, they do not understand the context and the subtext of what is fed to them by the likes of The Economist, NPR, The Financial Times, the New York Times, etc. The best way I can explain this is the 100+5 analogy in the Mahabharata: they may fight with each other on domestic matters, but Anglosphere and Deepstate are in cahoots when it comes to international matters.

Things are both getting better and getting worse. On the one hand, social media and its imprint on generative AI mean that it is ever easier to propagate fake news (in addition to deepfake audio and video, of course). On the other hand, despite the problem of charlatans and paid agents provocateurs getting lots of eyeballs, the large number of Indians on social media may push back against the worst kinds of blood libel against India and Indians, of which there's plenty these days often created by bots from 'friendly' neighbors.

This is a serious matter indeed. One solution is to do a version of the Great Chinese Firewall and ban wholesale the worst offenders. Indeed, a few of the vilest handles have been ejected from X. However, the pusillanimity with which notorious Pakistani handles were unbanned, then re-banned after outrage, shows there's something rotten in the Information Ministry. Almost exactly the same as the unbanning of Pakistani cricketers, then rebanning after outrage. Is there anybody in charge?

Information warfare is insidious. Going back to the Air India case, I think the families of the maligned pilots should sue for gigantic sums for libel and defamation. The sad state of the Indian judiciary may mean that, unfortunately, this will not go far. However, there is precedent: Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore used to terrorize villainous western media by suing them in his courts. They learned to toe the line.

If this tactic does not work, India should eject the hostile media. The Indian market is increasingly important to western media (not vice versa) because soon there will be more English-reading consumers in India than in the Five Eyes Anglosphere. I should say that in quotes because as I said above, most Indians are blissfully unaware of the hidden agendas, and naively believe them. But "Judeo-Christian" culture is very different from Dharmic.

I keep getting emails from the New York Times with tempting offers to subscribe to them for something really cheap like Rs. 25 a month. They need Indian readers. I have been shouting from the rooftops for years that one of these charlatan media houses needs to be kicked out, harshly, with 24 hours notice to wind up and leave. As in the Asian proverb, "kill the chicken to scare the monkeys". The monkeys will notice, and behave. Otherwise the information warfare is just going to get worse.

1290 words, Jul 22, 2025

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-zohran-mamdani-and-the-coming-crisis-for-hindus-in-america-13908482.html

I have long felt the Deep State works on a single playbook in its foreign policy: regime-change, or what is colloquially called ‘Color Revolutions’. It is a simple routine: in some remote country, declare the ruling dispensation to be mad dogs, and shoot them, metaphorically if not in reality. Anoint a ‘friend’ as the new chief. All hail to him/her! The pliant media goes along.

There have been innumerable such plays all over the world, and most of the time, the results have been bad to disastrous for the country in question. Just look at Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, and Syria for recent examples. Iran, too, when Mossadegh was toppled because of, what else, oil: BP was annoyed at him for nationalizing Iranian oil.

As an aside, I have wondered why Deep State did not orchestrate a color revolution against the Nehru Dynasty. On the face of it, there were plenty of reasons to do so: Jawaharlal’s embrace of the Soviet Union, Indira’s defiance regarding East Pakistan, and so on. So why didn’t they topple the Dynasty and install a puppet, as they did with Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh?

Maybe India was just too unimportant. Or maybe, just maybe, the Nehru Dynasty was in fact the Deep State puppet already in place. Was Jawaharlal hand-picked, and didn’t even know?

So is Zohran Mamdani’s rise the first Color Revolution in the US? A friend claimed that it wasn’t, and that Barack Obama was the first. That is a debatable point, but one could argue that Obama 1 & 2, and Obama 3 (Biden’s term) were the worst presidencies in US history.

While there have been many good opinion pieces written about Mamdani’s rise and rise, for instance by Jaggi and Avatans Kumar, I would like to focus on the broader implications of what Deep State might achieve by rolling out a Color Revolution in its own backyard. It’s one thing to mess up a far-off country, and entirely a different thing to screw up your own premier city. This is a high-risk (and presumably high-return) strategy for Deep State.

Of course, the UK Deep State (aka Whitehall) may well be leading the US Deep State by the nose. I called it a “master-blaster” relationship, hat tip to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

This color revolution possibility is not something I invented out of thin air, I give due credit to, among others, San for noting this possibility, along with many other unusual things about the Mamdani campaign, including its connection to Soros, as well as the uncompromising religious bigotry and use of dog-whistles against, for instance, Jews and Hindus.

So Zohran Mamdani is worth watching, and so is his father, Columbia Professor Mamdani, who wrote something alarming in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror: see an excerpt below that seems to justify suicide bombing as a tactic. Of course, he may just have been doing an academic analysis, and surely, what the father said cannot be attributed to the son, but we can wonder about early influences on Zohran.

Beyond the personal proclivities of the man and family, there is a mixture of Islamist radicalism and extreme-left radicalism in Zohran Mamdani’s background. Some have called his rise a victory for the Red-Green Alliance, which is of significance to India, because here too we have often seen such a combination in play.

Besides, it’s notable that Mamdani has never said a word about atrocities committed on Hindus in Pakistan/Bangladesh or even in India, though he’s quick to make up atrocity literature alleging “Gujarati Muslims have been wiped out” in India. About 10 million Gujarati Muslims may like to differ.

Amazingly, the very people whom Mamdani is supposed to be emancipating, the underclass blacks and other low-income residents of NYC, did not vote for him. His victory in the Democratic primary came from young, well-off whites and “Asians” (the same Asians as in the UK?), and unions. That itself is telling.

The bigger question, though, is how this relates to the eclipse of the West. I take the UK as Exhibit A. There was a recent article in the Economist magazine about how Britain is now a cheap country. In other words, the per capita income has fallen, and British assets are valued low, because there is a general perception of malaise, partly because manufacturing has collapsed.

The headline is precious. It reminds me of the subtitle to Stanley Kubrik’s “Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. Right on, cheers, tally-ho!

It was hugely entertaining to also listen to an Economist podcast which suggested that a “services-led economy” would be the UK’s savior. Raghuram Rajan, take a bow. Necessity being the mother of invention, I suppose. There is not a single product of British manufacturing that anybody wants (with the possible exception of Rolls-Royce aircraft engines). They were able to dump their inferior goods on defenseless colonies (read: India) but those days are over.

They are now apparently depending on services (e.g., their journalism, which, with its clipped accents, impresses Americans, but is available to the highest bidder. The word “Presstitutes” leaps to mind). In addition, IT services, it seems, given their convenient time zone. And cheap IT labor. Yes, direct threat to India. Wipro, Infosys, TCS, I am sure are paralyzed with fear.

The UK is, in many ways, the canary in the coalmine. Its precipitous decline is related to the fact that it is a small island off northwest Asia, whereas of course the US is a continent-sized country with massive resources. But the other factors: the previous holder of the global reserve currency, the previous dominant superpower, etc., are relevant to the US.

To be honest, I have no idea what the UK’s elites are thinking, because their current trajectory is going to end in disaster. As I have said before, they have fancied themselves as dealmakers extraordinaire, with Whitehall leading the world in mischief. But they were too clever by half: their homeland is collapsing. I don’t mind, it’s schadenfreude time, but I wonder what 3-d chess they are playing. I wonder if the US Deep State has a clue that the US could end up like the UK.

The one thing that has sustained the UK in the last few decades is their financial services. But with the LIBOR scandal and Brexit, that game is also moving on: to Frankfurt, Singapore, Dubai (and eventually I guess GIFT City, India). The City of London, the name of the financial district, has been decimated. This is a warning to Wall Street in New York City.

Another warning comes from California in general, and San Francisco in particular. Once the most appealing of American cities, it has been turned into a fetid, dangerous place full of yes, “street-shitters” and fentanyl addicts. The main culprit has been rule by left-wing extremists who put in place the ingredients for terminal decline: for instance, a moratorium on prosecuting any property crimes worth less than $950, which led to the hollowing out of retail downtown.

I am not saying New York City is a pleasant place especially compared to what San Francisco was (I lived for a long time in the suburbs of both, so I have personal experience) but there is surely a lot that can go wrong with socialism of the Mamdani variety. Exhibits A, B, C: Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

What is of more immediate concern to Hindus is that the US will become more dangerous for them. As it is, the amount of racial hatred and animosity towards brown Hindus has grown perceptibly, aided by social media ‘influencers’ who are likely paid by ISI/CCP/Deep State. There is also the element of envy, as Hindus have risen to high positions, mostly by way of hard work and smarts. In analogy with Jews, this envy can turn into poisonous bigotry. We have seen how Kristallnachts develop. And then Final Solutions.

The UK has seen, along with the growth of its Muslim population (“demography is destiny”) a concomitant level of animosity and violence against Hindus: see Leicester; and the British establishment is so afraid of Muslims that they will not take any steps to curb their acts. This is leading to clear and present danger for Hindus. We have seen this movie before.

In addition to the increasing animosity towards H1-B holding Indians, who are predominantly Hindus, a victory for Zohran Mamdani will basically make it clear to US Hindus that their days are numbered, and that the US may rapidly follow the UK into societal and economic collapse. It’s a sobering thought. Do we have a Plan B?

1330 words, 15 Jul 2025

A version of this essay was published by first post on Jul 14 at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-whats-driving-trumps-u-turns-13906527.html

There were two good reasons to support Donald Trump for President of the US: one, that he did not go to war in his first term, and two, that he was the very antithesis of the Deep State-controlled former President Biden.

Alas, just less than six months into his re-incarnation as the 47th President, there is reason to wonder if the first claim is no longer accurate: the Ukraine war is dragging on, and so is the Gaza war; Trump’s role in the India-Pak skirmish was murky; and he got the US into the Iran-Israel war as a belligerent; so it’s hard to portray him as anti-war any more.

On the other hand, almost all the initiatives Trump came up with (although in characteristic bull-in-the-china-shop fashion) that could have potentially damaged the Deep State are now being rolled back. It appears the Deep State is back in charge.

Consider the much-ballyhooed trade war with China. Personally, I thought the goal of bringing manufacturing back to the US was laudable, although difficult. We saw a whole lot of saber-rattling. But after all the smoke settled, it appears that China, the purported target of the tariff wars, is now sitting pretty with a trade deal that sets 55% tariffs (including a universal 10%, 20% because of fentanyl, and 25% left over from Trump’s first term, according to grok).

In other words, Trump folded because the Chinese were holding his feet to the fire over rare-earths etc, where they have a quasi-monopoly. The rude meme TACO (I will not spell it out here, but you can look it up) was current for a while.

There has been a series of little things that together show that Trump, despite all the bluster, is not that much in control. It is likely that the Deep State has co-opted him, on what grounds we will have to wait and see. The Deep State is nothing if not resourceful. It may be blackmailing him, or it may be dangling crypto profits, or a Nobel Peace Prize in front of Trump. Who knows what other carrots and sticks it wields.

The abrupt departure of Elon Musk, and the equally abrupt demise of DOGE was a clue that something was going on. What started with a lot of public support has been quietly trashed. It is obvious to anyone that the Deep State has entrenched itself through sweetheart deals and indirection (eg. USAID as a mechanism for distributing goodies to pals) to the extent that official US foreign policy is merely an inconvenience for the Deep State’s actual policies.

So now the Deep State is rampaging again, and it has defeated Musk. We saw disturbing signs over the last few weeks, pretty much ever since Musk was defenestrated. There was the tilt towards Pakistan during the 4-day skirmish, followed by the embrace of Field Marshall Munir. Yes, it is true that this can be explained away with the idea that American nuclear material is being held by US troops on Pakistani soil.

Those who are worried about India’s long-term interests were naturally shocked by this volte-face, but it just goes to show that everybody pursues their national interest, friendships be damned. India is beginning to learn that truism, and not getting involved in everybody’s problems, as it were clutching its pearls, clucking and lecturing as in the old Nehruvian days. This is definite progress. India no longer looks like a laughing stock (despite the “pajeet” “smelly” type propaganda unleashed against it, presumably by the CCP and Deep State.)

Then came the humiliation of Tulsi Gabbard, the handpicked Director of National Intelligence, whom Trump contradicted directly in regards to intelligence about the Iranian nukes. After that, there was the Iran-Israel 12-day war; India consoled itself that the Trump embrace of Munir was because the US needed to have Pakistan available for US sorties into Iran.

After the Iran Israel war, there has been the curious spectacle of the Epstein Files that disappeared. Attorney General Pam Bondi who had earlier said she had the files on her desk is now forced to eat her words. FBI Director Kash Patel is made to look silly. Exactly why would that be? There are dark rumors about who’s on the Epstein list, but, ok, they’re just rumors.

This reminds me of the incredible circus over Hunter Biden’s laptop. Everybody knew it was highly compromised, but the FBI stonewalled all investigations. Instead, it peddled the prurient fiction of the Steele dossier. Diversionary tactics, I suppose.

And oh, by the way, how come the FBI has not breathed a word about Thomas Matthew Crooks who shot Trump on the campaign trail exactly a year ago on July 13th, and whose assassin bullet missed Trump’s cranium by millimeters? It’s hard to believe that he was an innocent lone wolf. Who was funding him? I contend it was the Deep State. John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby all come to mind. So do Robert Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan.

The sad fact of the matter is that, despite a promising start, Trump now appears to be bogged down in distractions like the Nobel Peace Prize (dear Norwegians, just give it to him and let’s just move on. After all, you gave it to warmongers Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Theodore Roosevelt, Barack Obama. Trump is almost in the same illustrious club.)

The U-turns on tariffs and trade show that Trump is beginning to see the reality that he cannot wish away de-industrialization, as King Canute memorably learned when he ordered the waves to cease and desist. His goal of bringing back manufacturing to the US is laudable, but it is not clear if that will happen in more than a token manner. The reality of being held hostage by China’s supply chain is also dawning on him. 30 years of fecklessness in allowing China to run riot are now coming home to roost.

Dedollarization is happening as well. While I don’t believe certain doomsday scenarios about precipitate American decline, recession and collapse, it is possible the US will become less of a solitary colossus throwing its weight around. It is this prospect of multi polarity, and the determined pursuit of national interests that India should focus on. The Deep State is inscrutable, and it apparently now has Donald Trump in thrall to itself.

1050 words, 8 Jul 2025

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-west-asia-hostilities-will-resume-again-only-question-is-when-13903341.html

West Asia is again on the boil. Well, to be precise, it has been on the boil for a very long time, but we have the additional spectacle of the Iran-Israel war. Despite the ceasefire, which I hope does hold, there is a lot here that should concern all of us based on the geopolitical and geo-economic fallout.

There are at least three issues of interest: the geopolitics, the war tactics, and the impact on the rest of the world.

Geopolitics

It would be fair to say that much of the turmoil in the region dates back to British (and to a lesser extent French) meddling in the 20th century, for instance the Sykes-Picot Act, or the antics of TE Lawrence. Britain’s broader actions—contradictory promises (Balfour), repressive mandates, oil-driven interference, and botched withdrawals—sowed division, resentment, and conflict that shaped the region’s 20th-century chaos. Many of these issues, like sectarianism in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, persist today.

The nations Britain created with arbitrary lines marked on a map made no sense because they ignored ethnic, tribal, and religious realities, sowing seeds for future conflicts. Indians know all about this: the same sort of random map-making in the Indian subcontinent led to extraordinary misery (the Radcliffe Line, created in just five weeks, created East and West Pakistan with little attention paid to ground realities, using outdated maps and census data).

The British Deep State (let us call it Whitehall for short) has lost much of its clout, but it has been leading the American Deep State by the nose in what I referred to as a “master-blaster” relationship. And the latter has a rather clear SoP: there needs to be constant wars to feed the Military Industrial Complex, and so they will arrange for wars, which will lead to a complex money-laundering operation, with petrodollars being whitewashed through the IMF etc and ending up in the coffers of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and friends.

It is notable that one of President Trump’s main claims to fame in his first Presidency was that he scrupulously avoided going to war, in sharp contrast with his predecessors over the last several decades, all of whom had started or indulged in one war or the other. It appears that this time, though, the US Deep State has managed to co-opt Trump into its warmaking agenda, which, incidentally does not disqualify him for a Nobel Peace Prize: see Kissinger or Obama.

What has happened in this 12-day war is that it became a stalemate, for all practical purposes. Neither Israel nor Iran can fully defeat the other, as neither has the resources to continue. A good metaphor is a boxing match, where evenly matched pugilists are both exhausted, covered and blinded with blood, and can hardly stand on their feet. The referee calling a halt is a blessing for both of them.

Iran has, for years, shouted hair-raising slogans about obliterating Israel, although it is not clear how much of this was rhetoric, considering Uncle Sam’s support for the latter makes the latter quite powerful. This sloganeering was supplemented by proxy allies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, all of whom have been capable of mischief. Plus there is the nuclear bomb.

Israel set out to tame Iran on all these fronts. Their goals were to deprecate, if not destroy, Iran’s nuclear capability, defang the proxies, and impose a regime-change on the country. Let us remember the Stuxnet incident of 2010 when a computer virus was introduced into the Iranian centrifuges that are used for uranium enrichment, causing many of them to disintegrate. The assaults on Nataz, Fordow and Ispahan (much like Israel’s raid on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor long ago) were intended to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program altogether.

With the US’ help, it appears as though there has been serious damage to Iran’s weapons capabilities, although there are rumors that 400 kg of highly enriched uranium was smuggled out just before the bunker-buster strikes via B-2 bombers on the fortified, underground sites.

Among Iranian proxies or force-multipliers, its so-called Axis of Resistance, Hamas has been severely degraded, with top commanders eliminated (notably Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh) and its tunnel network in Gaza largely inoperable. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nazrallah and several key aides have been targeted and killed. The Houthis have escaped relatively unscathed, although the Americans were bombing them.

On the other hand, it may not be possible to effect regime change in Iran. There seems to be a standard playbook of so-called ‘Color Revolutions’, wherein a ruler is replaced by someone close to the West through what is portrayed as a “popular uprising”. The Ukraine Maidan Revolution that placed Zelenksy in power, the Bangladeshi coup that brought Yunus to power, and the “Velvet Revolution” are examples.

But one of the earliest examples was the CIA/MI6 coup in Iran that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back to monarchical power. And the reason: Mossadegh had nationalized the Iranian oil industry, and freed it from the clutches of British Petroleum. The 1979 coup by the mullahs succeeded because the Shah was unpopular by then. Iranians, despite widespread opposition to Khameini, probably don’t want the Shah dynasty back, or for that matter someone else chosen to rule them by outsiders.

There was also a fairly strange set of events: just as it is said the Iranians were allowed to spirit their uranium away, the Iranians seem to have given notice of their attacks on US bases in Qatar etc. (allowing the US to move their aircraft and personnel), and, strangest of all, a social media post by Trump that appeared to approve sanctions-free Iranian supply of oil to China!

Thus there are some pantomime/shadow-boxing elements to the war as well, and some choreography that is baffling to the impartial observer. Geopolitics is a complex dance.

War tactics

The Israeli assault on Iran started with shock and awe. In the first phase, There was a massive aerial bombing campaign, including on Natanz. But more interestingly, there was a Mossad operation that had smuggled kamikaze drones into a covert base near Teheran, and they, as well as anti-tank missiles degraded Iranian air defenses. Mossad also enabled successful decapitation strikes, with several top commanders and nuclear scientists assassinated.

This phase was a big win for Israel, and reminded one of the continuing importance of human intelligence in a technological age. Patiently locating and mapping enemy commanders’ movements, managing supply chains and using psychological tactics were reminiscent of how Mossad was able to introduce the Stuxnet worm, and use pagers as remote explosive devices.

In the second phase, the two were more evenly matched. Israel’s Iron Dome was unable to deal with sustained barrages of Iranian missiles, as no anti-missile system can be more than 90% effective. Both began to suffer from depleted stocks of arms and ammunition. Thus the metaphor of two grievously wounded boxers struggling to stay on their feet in the ring. It took the bunker-busting US B-2 bombers in the third phase to penetrate deep underground to the centrifuges, but there is still the possibility that Iran managed to ship out its fissile material.

We are now in a fourth phase: both parties are preparing for the next round of kinetic warfare.

The lessons here were once again the remarkable rise of UCAVs or drones as weapons of war, and the continued usage of high-quality human intelligence. It is rumored that Israeli agents had penetrated to high levels in the Iranian military hierarchy, and there was allegedly a high-level mole who was spirited away safely out of Iran.

Both of these are important takeaways for India. The success of India’s decoy drones in the suppression of Pakistani air defenses will be hard to repeat; the Ukrainian drone strike against Russia’s strategic TU-44 and other strategic bombers, which were sitting ducks on the ground, shows us what drones can do: India has to substantially advance its drone capability.

India’s counterintelligence and human intelligence suffered grievous blows when various personalities, including a Prime Minister, a Vice President, and the head of RA&W all turned hostile, with the result that India’s covert presence in Pakistan will have to painfully recreated again. Perhaps India also does not have a policy of decapitation strikes. Should it?

Impact on the rest of the world, especially India

In general terms, it’s hard to declare an outright non-loser in this war, except possibly China, because it is the one player that seems to be quite unaffected: its saber-rattling on Taiwan continues unabated. Russia lost, because it had been viewed as being an ally of Iran; it was unable to do much, enmeshed as it is in the Ukraine mess. Israel and Iran both came out, in the end, looking weakened, as neither could deliver a fatal blow.

The US got kudos for the B-2 bombers and the bunker-busters, but it is not entirely clear if there was some kind of ‘understanding’ which meant that Iran is still not that far away from being able to build its nuclear bomb. Indians will remember how President Reagan winked at Pakistan’s efforts to nuclearize with Chinese help, and issued certificates of innocence.

Pakistan in particular, and the Islamic Ummah in general, took a beating. Instead of expressing Islamic solidarity with Iran, it turns out Pakistan was quite likely opening up its air bases for possible US strikes on Iran. That would explain why Indian strikes on Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base alarmed the Americans, who may have been bulking up their presence there partly as a way of opening a new front against Iran.

None of the other Islamic powers, with the possible exception of Turkey, paid more than lip service to Iran’s troubles, which was interesting to note. The Sunni-Shia schism holds.

The worst outcomes were averted: the nightmare scenarios, in order of seriousness, would have been a) World War 3, b) nuclear bombs being dropped on one or more of the belligerents, c) a broad war in West Asia, c) the closing of the Straits of Hormuz and a serious spike in energy prices.

From the point of view of a nation like India, it demonstrated, yet again, that superpowers have their own rationale of amoral transactional relationships with other countries. India, as an aspiring superpower needs to internalize the fact that foreign policy is the pursuit of war by other means, and there are only permanent interests, not permanent friends. Instead of the highfalutin’ moralizing of the Krishna Menon and Jawaharlal Nehru days, what India needs is the pursuit of its own national interests all the time.

In this context, both Israel and Iran are useful to India. There is a billion-dollar arms trade between Israel and India (and Israel long ago offered to destroy Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear reactor with India’s help, but shrinking-violet India refused). Today India is Israel’s biggest arms buyer, with products ranging from Phalcon AWACS to Barak missiles to Harop and other drones, with Hermes 900 drones co-produced in India and exported to Israel.

As for Iran, India’s investment in Chabahar port is a strategic counter to China’s CPEC and Gwadar port in Pakistan. It enables India to avoid Pakistan in its trade to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is also a node on the International North South Transport Corridor, using which India can connect to Russia and Europe. It cuts time and cost of shipping to Europe by 30% as compared to the Suez Canal. India has invested more than a billion dollars in Chabahar.

Besides, India used to be a big customer for Iranian oil, but that has been cut to near-zero from 20+ million tons a year because of US sanctions on Iran. If and when sanctions are lifted, India will have an interest in buying Iranian oil again. India has interests in both Israel and Iran, and it should continue to maintain its good relations with both.

Nevertheless, West Asia remains a tinderbox. Hostilities will resume again, the only question is when. Iran will not give up on its nuclear ambitions, and as with Pakistan, some nuclear power will proliferate to it sooner or later, quite possibly China. The grand ambition to topple Iran’s mullahs is not likely to come to fruition. Israel will continue to be beleaguered. Status quo ante, after the current round of noise dies down.

2075 words, 1 Jul 2025

The AI-generated podcast in Malayalam from notebookLM.google.com

A version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/let-s-make-our-own-planes-3607351

June 23rd was a very sad anniversary: it was exactly 40 years ago that Air India Kanishka, Flight AI 182 (Montreal-London-Delhi), a Boeing 747, was blown up in the sky off Ireland, killing all 329 on board. There has never been closure, because the Canadian government stonewalled the investigation into how alleged Khalistani terrorists on their soil perpetrated one of the worst airline disasters in history.

The black box and cockpit voice recorder were recovered, and confirmed a loud explosion and sudden loss of communications and an explosive decompression, consistent with a bomb in baggage. Separately, two baggage handlers at Narita were killed when another bomb linked to the same terror group exploded on the ground on flight AI 301 on the Toronto-Tokyo-Bangkok-Delhi route.

On June 12th, 2025, the as-yet unsolved crash-landing of AI 171 (Ahmedabad-London) killed all but one of 242 on board, and at least 35 people on the ground, as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner failed just after take-off. The black box has been recovered, and India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau was able to decode it. The detailed results will take another couple of weeks. Fortunately, the black box didn’t have to be sent to the US because they would have an incentive to exonerate Boeing.

Indeed there is already a media narrative of a) incompetence of the Indian pilots, b) poor maintenance by Air India. While there have been previous complaints about broken seats and entertainment systems, there was a clear objective to limit reputational damage to already beleaguered Boeing. Whistleblower reports have long suggested shoddy manufacturing practices especially on jets earmarked for delivery overseas.

Boeing appears to be an engineering-driven company that was ruined as the focus shifted to bean-counting and finance, ever since they took over McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but paradoxically allowed the latter’s cost-cutting managers to dominate. Instead of innovating, they now tend to recycle old designs. A 2022 Netflix documentary, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”, is scathing in its accusations.

India is building the infrastructure for significant growth in air travel, to the extent that the hostile Financial Times mocked it with a story titled “Air India crash tests Narendra Modi’s ambition to get his country flying”, blaming Air India and the airline regulator (but not Boeing).

All this has implications for India, considering that Air India ordered 220 Boeing aircraft and another 350 from Airbus, while Indigo ordered 500 Airbus planes. That’s many billions of dollars. The obvious question is: why isn’t India making these commercial aircraft? Surely aerospace is a growth sector for India? Yes, there will be offset-based sub-assembly manufacturing, and maintenance operations, but why not India’s own passenger aircraft?

Brazil’s Embraer, Russia’s UAC and China’s COMAC are eyeing the cosy Airbus-Boeing duopoly. Strategic autonomy suggests India should also strive for its own design.

There are military reasons too. Warfare is changing, and drones and missiles are becoming more important, though fighter aircraft remain critical. India is developing the Tejas and the newly-approved AMCA, but there is the salutary tale of the indigenous HF-24 Marut, phased out because of underpowered engines, inadequate infrastructure, and poor coordination between HAL, the IAF, and the government; also no private sector involvement and the lure of imports.

India has to build its own fighter jets, and especially jet engines like Kaveri: India is last in line for foreign engine-makers, and anyway, they keep the kill switches. India may be able to sell fighter jets to many countries, along with the battle-tested BrahMos, Lakshya and Akashteer, so spending on them is an investment with likely returns.

There is still the siren-song of the US F-35, the Russian Su-57, and so on. There is, ironically, a British-owned F-35B sitting, forlorn, in the rain, on the tarmac at Trivandrum airport since June 15th. It has a) fuel issues, b) hydraulic problems with STOL, c) other problems. This $100+-million jet may end up having to be hauled back in a big transport plane, unable to take off on its own. Local trolls advertised it on OLX for a mere $4 million for scrap.

British specialists were flown in, but couldn’t fix it. They await Americans now. Obviously, even the closest allies do not get full technology transfer.

Let us also remember that the first F-35 built under license by Mitsubishi in Japan ended up in the Pacific Ocean. The pilot, who died, was blamed for ‘spatial disorientation’, not Lockheed Martin. The black box was damaged, so the story ends there.

Suffice to say that in both civil and military aircraft it is time for India to get its act together.

775 words, 29 June 2025

The AI-generated podcast based on this essay is here.

The massive attack by Ukrainian forces on very far off Russian airbases using lots of stealth and amazing subterfuge is destined to be a classic military operation. There are good reasons to believe this was not done by Ukraine on its own, and possibly not even by major European powers such as France (via Napoleon) and Germany (via Hitler), both of which have been humbled by Russia in the past, or even Sweden. The needle of suspicion falls on Britain, as well as the US Deep State (as distinct from President Trump, who has been trying to get this war over and done with). Cui bono? It’s only NATO and the MIC that need war and permanent war.

A wounded Russia will react and harshly. What might they use? Surely their hypersonic Oreshnik missiles that basically cannot be defended against. And given this is a Pearl Harbor moment for Russia, they could well argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki set a precedent. We might be in for World War III, just like the previous two were both European wars as well, which entangled the rest of the world

As for India, it is double jeopardy, as World War III is not in India’s interests, nor is the chance that China is the entity that might benefit from an American focus shifting from the Indo-Pacific to the European theater. Besides, it is deeply worrying that an operation of this scale was pulled off in Russia, which has its own internal fifth columns. India has this is spades: those who are in India, and who have a declared attitude of animosity towards the Indian nation. Human intelligence needs to be tightened (remember the large number of spies, honey-trapped soldiers, social media influencers etc. that came out of the woodwork in the wake of Pahalgam and Operation Sindoor).

These are scary questions. Among them is how one can deal with drone swarms, possibly using Electro Magnetic Pulses (though that has secondary problems).

Overall, these are frightening times.

4 June 2025

AI-generated podcast based on this podcast, from notebookLM.google.com:

A version of this essay was published by the Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/op-sindoor-how-we-won-and-lost-3566189

There are no clear wins in wars these days, especially when terrorizing populations, or nuclear blackmail, is the goal. Pakistan’s war manual may well be The Quranic Concept of War (1979) by Brigadier S K Malik, with its pithy statement: “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself… Terror is not a means of imposing a decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him.” Notably, this book has a forward from General Zia-ul-Haq, their then President.

In War From the Ground Up (2012), Emile Simpson, a former British Army officer, argues that modern wars often lack binary outcomes due to their political and informational complexity. Thus you could both win and lose a war, and that’s what Operation Sindoor’s outcome is.

On the plus side, India won a clear military victory. India leveraged its integrated air defense, long-range missiles, global positioning satellites and drone decoy technology to achieve aerial dominance. This enabled India to make pinpoint strikes, unchallenged, first on terrorist enclaves, and then on Pakistani military sites, including, it is said, nuclear storage silos.

India surprised most observers, because it was not only through expensive imported fighter jets that it deprecated Pakistan’s offensive capabilities, but also indigenous drones, loitering munitions and cruise missiles. India needs strategic autonomy, because foreign suppliers, and supply chains, are not dependable. They keep the kill switches, and can turn off the spigot.

India may well have ushered in a step-change in modern warfare itself, an age where drones and missiles tilt the balance rather than fighter jets, although the latter continue to remain key. Maybe it is sufficient to have slightly less advanced jets like the Tejas and the upcoming AMCA rather than procuring top-end F-35s, Su-57s etc. But there is a caveat: fighter jet engines. India must get its Kaveri engine working, for self-reliance.

India also established strategic red lines: terrorist attacks will henceforth invite disproportionate and military retaliation because there is a military-terrorist nexus, with Pakistani soldiers cosplaying as terrorists, exchanging uniforms for long shirts, loose pants and beards, as a way of sub-critical harassment with plausible deniability.

Furthermore, Pakistan’s nuclear threat has been defanged. India’s ability to hit their nuclear command center and two of the entrances to their storage facility in the Kirana Hills, suggest that their nuclear assets, if any, are disabled. Besides, there are rumors that warheads are not in Pakistani hands, but American or Chinese. That stands to reason, because otherwise Pakistan would likely have proliferated them to Iran, Turkey and non-state actors such as Hamas.

So what are the negatives? The biggest is that this skirmish has not put even a dent in Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy. Indeed, the next encounter with terrorists has already taken place in Kishtwar on May 22nd, exactly one month after Pahalgam, with one Indian soldier killed. Terrorism and war with India continue to be the raison d’etre of the Pakistani state.

India comprehensively lost the narrative war. Operation Sindoor is portrayed in the Western media on Pakistan’s terms (including the usual bogey of ‘nuclear war’), and their claims of shooting down 5-6 Indian jets are accepted as the truth. Many Pakistanis are embedded in Western media outlets, and that is not accidental. As they say, you can wake up a sleeping person, but not someone who is pretending to be asleep.

In that sense, the all-party delegation visiting various capitals is an exercise in futility, because the West is not interested in India becoming a peer-level competitor: the G2 with China is bad enough, who wants a G3 with India as well? Also, just as the EAM told Europe that their (Ukraine) problem is a European problem, the West sees India’s problems as not theirs.

Pakistan’s ability to internationalize the issue is a failure for India’s stance that Kashmir is a bilateral issue. Fortunately, nobody actually cares, including the UN or its Security Council.

A major failure for India was that it could have, but did not, capture any territory, which would have been a devastating blow to Pakistan’s amour propre, and would have made “Field Marshal” Munir a laughing stock. India errs on the side of caution, and a large-scale intrusion does have problems with hostile civilians and stretched supply lines.

But surely the Haji Pir Pass could have been recaptured: it was needlessly given away in Tashkent in 1966. It is a major route of infiltration for terrorists, its commanding heights dominate Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and it cuts the Uri-Poonch distance from 282km to 56km.

Alas, a resounding military victory has been morphed into a stalemate.

795 words, May 27, 2025

AI-generated podcast from notebookLM.google.com:

Now AI-generated podcast in Malayalam from the same:

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-india-fights-alone-narrative-wars-western-gaslighting-and-a-missed-opportunity-13891339.html

From the 1st of May until the 20th I was traveling in the US, and thus had to depend on western media (mostly Twitter/X) for news about Operation Sindoor and the aftermath. It was self-evident that there was no point in reading things like the NYTimes, Wapo, the Economist, etc. because one look at their headlines confirmed that they were “manufacturing consent”.

Soft Power

Given the difference in X posts that I read in the US and those in India, I think the algorithms were deprecating posts for me in ways that are hard to detect. In other words, there is a narrative war where India has no say, but lots at stake. India’s soft power is seriously wanting. Joseph Nye, the academic who popularized that phrase, passed away this week: following in his footsteps, it behooves India to make a concerted attempt to improve its story-telling.

It faces an uphill battle, because Western, especially American, media has shown an ability to gaslight at scale in three major stories in the recent past: the COVID panic, the “Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge” meme, and the “Biden is mentally sharp as a tack” story. They are good at it, have no love lost for India, and so India needs a long-term plan to get its own propaganda story out, for instance developing an Al-Jazeera-style global footprint or an X-style social medium.

The entire Western narrative, for self-serving purposes, continues to be against India, for good reason: they do not wish to see India grow into a peer-level competitor at the G3 level. In this, both China and the West are of one mind, and it shows. Besides, the West has every incentive to try to block India from becoming a major arms exporter: they would prefer India to continue to be one of the biggest importers, preferably from them.

Narrative warfare is a Western specialty, as I said in Information Warfare, Narrative-Building: That Kind of Warfare. In addition to kinetic warfare, India needs to up its game here too. Narratives have real-life consequences.

The Pakistanis have been quite successful in their own narratives, riding on Western media: here is an example from the Nikkei (which owns the Financial Times) from a Pakistani journalist. This is typical of the stories created by Pakistanis and amplified by western media: basically that India took a major hit, with five or six high-end aircraft downed by Pakistani/Chinese weaponry. The story was repeated so many times that it essentially became the Truth.

A step change in aerial warfare

My personal belief is that India won a victory on the ground and in the air, humiliating Pakistan, attacking it at will and exposing its Chinese armaments as below-par. Some thoughtful neutral experts support this view: See Calibrated Force and the Future of Indian Deterrence. India also demonstrated surprising competence in the new age of electronics-based warfare. It may no longer be expensive fighter jets (and by extension, aircraft carriers) that tilt the balance, but missiles, drones and integrated air defense.

This must be emphasized. There are periodic step-functions in warfare that render earlier, victorious technologies/processes less valuable: this is similar to disruptive innovation, where the ‘insurgent’ firm nullifies the apparent advantages of the ‘incumbent’ firm. Often that means a point of inflection. An example is the arrival of the longbow in medieval times that made hitherto unstoppable heavy cavalry stumble. Another is the arrival of air power itself.

Today there may be another point of inflection. Experts have suggested that warfare going forward will be software-driven, including drone swarms that can autonomously reshape their formations (reminiscent of the murmurations of flocks of starlings). Presumably, there will be plenty of predictive AI built in as well. Given India’s poor track record in software products, it was generally assumed that India would not do so well in such a new environment.

In reality, there appears to have been a clever integration of indigenous and imported technology to create an “iron dome” of sorts against Pakistan’s Chinese missiles, of which an advanced variant, PL-15, was apparently shot down intact.

More interestingly, it appears that Lakshya and Banshee drones were programmed to masquerade as Rafales, Sukhois, etc. by emitting their radar signals, thus attracting enemy fire towards themselves. This might explain the claims of five or six Indian aircraft shot down by Pakistan, whereas in reality they may have simply shot down the phantom, mimic drones

The implications are large: in effect, India was able to attack Pakistan at will: video evidence shows significant damage to terrorist sites in the first round, and to military sites in the second round, including to key Pakistani air bases, as well as, it is said, the entrance tunnel to the nuclear storage facilities in the Kirana Hills. Indian air dominance appears to have forced the Pakistanis to beg for US support to suggest a cessation of hostilities.

This skirmish was proof in the heat of battle for India’s indigenous weapons, especially the BrahMos (although of course that is a joint venture with Russia). It may result in a number of serious queries from prospective customers especially in Southeast Asia, who will be interested in battlefield performance against Chinese missiles and aircraft. This would be a win for India’s arms industry.

Conversely, there is a singular sore spot: fighter jets. For a variety of reasons, most especially the fact that the Kaveri engine has not been allowed to complete its testing and development phase, India is still dependent on others for advanced fighters. And this is just fine as far as they are concerned, because the Americans want to sell F-35s, the French want to sell more Rafales, and the Russians want to sell Su-57s.

Here’s a twitter comment by a military historian who suggests that India’s fighter jets are inadequate. He deleted his further comment that indigenization is fine as industrial policy, but it doesn’t work for advanced weaponry. This is a typically sniffy attitude towards India, which is grist to the mill for the Chandigarh Lobby’s successful efforts to trash local weapons and gain lucrative middleman deals for foreign weapons.

Strategic Dilemma: To push on or not

There is also a strategic dilemma. India has an unfortunate habit of wasting its soldiers’ hard-won victories at the negotiating table due to bad political calculations. The epitome of this is of course, Indira Gandhi’s 1971 give-away of 93,000 Pakistani PoWs in exchange for essentially… nothing. There is some reason to wonder if something similar happened in 2025 as well. A tactical victory was possibly converted into a stalemate, and the old era of hyphenation and the nuclear bogey has returned.

What we saw in 2025 was that the Pakistanis were taken by surprise, and India had a massive advantage. But now that cat is out of the bag, Pakistanis and Chinese will regroup and figure out corrective tactics. Thus India has, to use an American expression, “shot its wad”, and the element of surprise is gone forever.

The end game for India is the dissolution of Pakistan into four or five statelets, which, one hopes, will then concentrate on Pakistani Punjab as the root of all their troubles. In that case, they will keep each other occupied, and India can live in peace without regular terrorist attacks. Of course, that may be a pipe-dream, given the Ghazwa-e-Hind formula many entertain, but the collapse of the Pakistani state is anyway desirable for India.

Should India have continued its offensive? Forget the murky issue of the nuclear assets in Sargodha. Should India have moved the Line of Control forward into some areas, perhaps into Gilgit-Baltistan (with Sharda Peeth and the Kishenganga) and up to the Jhelum River in Pak-occupied Jammu and Kashmir? The problem though, is that once you start moving past the border posts, you have hostile civilians to contend with, and your supply lines start getting stretched.

Even though it is tragic to let go of an opportunity to thrash an enemy that’s on the back foot, and Pakistan will inevitably use the truce to rearm itself and come back ever stronger (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah is not a meme in the Islamic world for nothing), it is not clear to me what India could have done to militarily make the LOC irrelevant and make Pakistan implode, especially in the context of American pushback.

The role of the US

Why was there pressure from President Trump? One of the things I observed during my US stay is the total absence of DOGE and Elon Musk from the headlines after Trump’s 100 days, very contrary to their ubiquity early on. Similarly, the security implications of Trump’s recent embrace of Syria’s President Al-Sharaa contradicts Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s views on Syria as evidenced by her tweets. Further, there are U-turns on tariffs.

This means Trump is being mercurial as ever. Furthermore, there might be something to the idea that his family’s embrace of crypto may have endeared Pakistan – which is making noises about supporting crypto at scale – to him. All this is red-pilling many about Trump. Indeed, he may be allowing short-term, commercial considerations to drive policy, which may return to haunt the US: that is exactly what Clinton, Bush, Obama et al did with respect to China.

On the other hand, there are longer-term considerations, too. Pakistan is essentially a Potemkin nation, which has no particular reason to exist, other than it is being propped up. Initially, it was a British project for the Russian Great Game; then it was taken over by the US Deep State in order to fend off the Soviet Union. Pakistan was a “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA) according to Obama if I remember right, and earlier it was a member of CENTO and SEATO.

The IMF loan to Pakistan, approved in the middle of the hostilities, is not surprising, either: this has happened before. In a way, it is a complicated money-laundering activity. Funds from somewhere (possibly Qatar) are channeled to Pakistan, which then buys American arms. Thus the Deep State Military Industrial Complex is the winner.

With the end of the Afghanistan wars, Pakistan offers no obvious geographic and strategic value to the US. Unless, of course, the target is no longer Russia, but India. Perhaps in anticipation of its being a check on India, the US had helped Pakistan nuclearize, according to this archived article from the NYTimes: US and China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb, from a time when it was possibly more truthful. I am indebted to Brahma Chellaney for this link.

This may suggest that Pakistan’s nuclear ‘assets’ are not theirs, but are managed by American crew. On the other hand, though, the greater possibility is that such assets are loaned by China. Pakistan is a fantastic force multiplier for China.

Abhimanyu Syndrome

The bottom line, then, is that India is on its own: sort of an Abhimanyu Syndrome, with nobody to help. The most obvious ‘friend’ is Japan (because of the China threat), but it is severely constrained by American red lines: see how there was not a murmur from the Quad after Pahalgam. India’s very possible rise is in fact encouraging other powers to put it down: grow so much, but no farther.

There really is no alternative for India but to industrialize, manufacture everything possible for its large internal market, and increase the level of strategic autonomy in everything it makes: no more dependence on third parties, which may feel free to use kill switches, or deny spares or components at will. In this round, India did surprisingly well with indigenous technology, and it has articulated a strategy of escalating deterrence. To put teeth into this, innovation at home must continue.

Here’s the AI-generated podcast about this episode from notebookLM.google.com:

1975 words, 22 May 2025

Please note: I wrote this on April 28th, and then was traveling abroad for the last few weeks, so I had no opportunity to post this until now, sorry about that: but nothing I have said here has been rendered wrong by Operation Sindoor and the near-war that happened after I wrote this.

Deccan Herald ran a slightly edited version as my regular column on May 4th at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/on-pahalgam-imperial-fortresses-and-kashmir-s-settler-colonialism-3523731

With good reason, India has focused on Pakistan as the culprit behind the Pahalgam atrocity. It is telling that their army chief declared to Pakistanis that Hindus and Muslims are two different nations and that Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein. He implied that Pakistan is the ideal Islamic state as in Venkat Dhulipala’s “Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India”. This could have been a signal to the terrorists to create maximum offence while massacring Hindus.

Given Kargil, IC 814, Bombay 26/11, Uri, Pulwama, and now Pahalgam, India is justified in cutting ties to Pakistan, including trade, sports, the cringe Attari circus, even diplomatic relations. India did once mass its forces at the Line of Control in Operation Parakram, but honoring the Shimla Agreement, did not cross. Now that Pakistan has canceled the Agreement, there is no legal reason for restraint, especially since the nuclear bogey is no longer credible.

But there is more. The Pakistani defense minister said that his country had been doing the dirty work for the US and the West for decades. Maybe he meant the Afghan war against the Soviets and post-9/11 somersaults by Pakistan. But that’s only scratching the surface.

Britain explicitly created Pakistan as a Great Game weapon against Russia/Soviet Union, and when that collapsed, against india. Britain has been using Pakistan as an “imperial fortress”, as I pointed out in “Britain’s outsized, malign role in global chaos”. Whitehall tilts strongly towards Pakistani interests, even in the case of widespread gang-rapes of minor white girls, not to mention their antics against Hindus in Leicester.

Official mouthpiece BBC never speaks of Pakistani terrorists, only ‘gunmen’; it’s always “Indian-controlled Kashmir”; and an extraordinary headline recently said: “Pakistan suspends visas for Indians after deadly Kashmir attack on tourists”. These are not accidents.

Britain and the US Deep State (eg. Madeleine Albright and other Atlanticists) worry about the waning influence of Europe (or “northwest Asia” as I wrote in “The End of the European Century”). Naturally, incumbent powers go to war with a rising power (Thucydides Trap: Graham Allison's thesis). This has been the rationale for containing Russia, now it is being turned to Asia. China is rather inscrutable and impregnable, so they attack India, which is easier prey.

Then there is the Otherization of Hindus and thus Indians. Even as staunch an atheist as Richard Dawkins (“The Blind Watchmaker”) admits Judeo-Christian cultural biases. Only Christopher Hitchens among modern atheists was self-reflective enough to avoid this. Abrahamics would like to make us disappear, and so engendered great famines in India (“Late Victorian Holocausts”). Now this is reprising through climatism (at an Alexandra Ocasio Cortez rally there was a woman earnestly saying “we have to eat babies” to reduce emissions). Covid was possibly another attempt at depopulating ‘deplorables’, that is black and brown people.

Let’s not forget China, also unhappy about India’s possible economic rise; so it dutifully regurgitated “all-weather” support for Pakistan. They have used Pakistan to keep India down, as a force multiplier for violence and trouble. Then China can market itself as a safe investment destination compared to a dangerous India where FDI may be risky. I suspect this is part of their siren-song to big firms (eg. Apple) now.

Finally, and most importantly, there is the settler-colonial complex of Muslim Kashmiris. They trot out South Africa, other European conquests and Gaza as examples of colonialists violating natives’ rights and imply the same in Kashmir. The bitter irony of course is that it is the Muslims who are the colonialists wiping out Kashmir’s indigenous Hindus who have a 5000 year history there. They have turned the logic on its head: see the Harvard Law Review paper “From Domicile to Dominion, India’s Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir”.

There have been seven tragic exoduses of Hindus from Kashmir: 1. 1389–1413 (Sultan Sikandar Shah), 2. 1505–1514 (Fateh Shah II), 3. 16th–17th Century (Timurid Period), 4. 1752–1819 (Durrani Rule), 5. 1931 (Anti-Dogra Riots), 6. 1986 (Anantnag Riots), 7. 1989–1990 (Militancy-Driven Exodus). Most Hindu Kashmiris now rot in refugee camps.

I wrote long ago in “India, the Kashmiri colony” about Muslim Kashmiris extracting tribute from the Indian/Hindu taxpayer. Worse, there is evidence emerging that local overground workers (eg. mule handlers) arranged the logistics for the Pahalgam massacre. Acts of terror need local support, possibly including from local politicians (a former CM referred to terrorists as “the boys with guns from the mountains”).

Yes, it’s good to punish Pakistan (eg. Indus Water Treaty), but terror will persist until Muslim Kashmiris realize their future lies with rising, multi-religious India, not jihadi failed-state Pakistan; and the Deep State desists from further mischief.

798 words, Apr 28, 2025

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/movies/column/what-made-shaji-n-karun-a-master-film-maker/20250429.htm

Just last week, I read in the local Trivandrum papers about Shaji N Karun receiving an award in the name of J C Daniel, an early pioneer in Malayalam films. That’s when I realized that the master film-maker had named his house ‘Piravi’ in memory of his extraordinary directorial debut in 1988. It brought back a flood of memories of that film, whose title means ‘birth’, but whose theme was death and loss.

Now comes the news of his own death, aged 73, from cancer. Om shanti, Godspeed, Shaji, as you join the Great White Whirligig in the Sky!

I met the director twice: once, about fifty years ago, when we both were volunteers for a local science fair, and he was a student at the Film and Television Institute in Pune; and then in 1988 or 1989, when he spoke at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where ‘Piravi’ was featured. The film had won the Cannes Camera d’Or-Mention d’Honneur, among many other prizes, including at Locarno, Edinburgh and so on: possibly more than any other Indian film.

What impressed me about his talk was his humility and reticence: even though he was an acclaimed cinematographer and ‘Piravi’ was received very well, he was quiet, even shy. He explained his use of the blue tints in the film: it is the color of apasmaram, he said, using the Malayalam/Sanskrit word for madness, which the father of the ‘disappeared’ youth in the film falls into.

Even though he made several other films, and he was the cinematographer who shot most of the works of legendary Malayalam film-maker G Aravindan, it is ‘Piravi’ that marked the zenith of his career. I can say without hesitation that it is stunningly powerful; as an art-film fan, I have seen hundreds of superb, even outstanding films, but this one, alone, spoke to me. I wept seeing it, tears streaming down my cheeks. No other film has ever affected me so much.

For a Malayalam speaker and one who had seen the Emergency, it was a viscerally powerful experience, especially because it was based on the real-life story of Rajan, a ‘disappeared’ engineering student. As I wrote some years ago in https://www.rediff.com/news/column/emergency-why-rajans-story-resonates-with-me/20150625.htm I could easily have been another Rajan, another number.

Rajan’s character is never seen in the film, except as a child; his father, played by octogenarian Premji, fills the screen with his presence, his anguish, at the loss of his only son born late in his life. And in real life, the father, Professor Eachara Warrier, who was one of my heroes, https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/24rajeev.htm spent the rest of his life demanding justice from the uncaring State.

The film’s minimalist dialogue and focus on human despair, grief, and the struggle against systemic injustice resonate universally, transcending cultural boundaries. Its subtle yet poignant exploration of loss makes it relatable to global audiences.

Apart from the universal message of grief, there is also the story of the father-son relationship. I was strongly affected by passages from the film where you realize how much the predatory State took from the father, as per the Hindu tradition. I remembered my father 10,000 miles away in India, who too had no son to help him.

The film begins with an invocation from the Kaushitaki Upanishad; a dying man bequeaths his life to his son. The son accepts each of his gifts.

"My speech in you I would place". "Your speech in me I take.""My sight in you I would place." "Your sight in me I take.""My mind in you I would place." "Your mind in me I take.""My deeds in you I would place." "Your deeds in me I take.""My vital breath in you I would place". "Your vital breath in me I take.""May glory, luster and fame delight in you." "Heaven and desires may you obtain."

And from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, "Whatever wrong has been done by him, his son frees him from it all... By his son, a father stands firm in this world."

Personally for me, I think the film was a catalyst in my decision to return to India, specifically back to Kerala. Another Indian friend (I think he was a Telugu) who saw it with me in San Francisco said, “I’m so tempted to chuck it all and go live in a Kerala village”.

Apart from the overwhelming sense of loss, the film is remarkable from two points of view: visual storytelling and innovative techniques.

The muted lighting, traditional architecture, and atmospheric elements like rain mirror the characters’ emotional turmoil. The film’s stillness and sparse dialogue amplifies the actors’ expressive performances, particularly their eyes, conveying deep emotion.

The monsoon rain is a palpable presence with the sense of anticipation as we wait for its arrival, as the father waits for his son every day at the bus-stop till the last bus; heart-breakingly, we in the audience know he will never return. And then later, when the father falls in the rain, the ferryman’s dilemma: if he helps him up, his boat will drift away. The ferryman’s compassion prevails and he rushes to help.

The film’s use of weather, sound (e.g., the bubbling of water evoking anxiety), the simple everyday beauty of Kerala village life, and deliberate pacing created a meditative yet intense atmosphere. The use of color to invoke emotion (as in traditional ragas) is another technical innovation.

With ‘Piravi’, Shaji N Karun joined the select group of great masters of film: film as witness, sakshi, film as literature. Malayalam once upon a time used to produce such films. Today it is only mindless violence, politics, and grotesque humor: the films have no soul, although they are technically quite good. With Shaji’s passing, and earlier with his mentor Aravindan’s untimely death, an era is coming to an end.

976 words, Apr 29, 2025