In an interview to analyse and help the audience understand the two week ceasefire announced by the US and Iran in the Middle East war and the prospects for talks, which are said to start in Islamabad on Friday, India’s former Ambassador to the USA, Navtej Sarna, says Trump has backed off and the truth is this is a military defeat for the USA.

Sarna said: “I don’t think Trump has pulled of anything, as I see it. I think he’s backed off. He’s backed off not only from his hugely exaggerated and bombastic comments of yesterday but he’s actually backed off from this entire conflict that was a war of aggression, a war of choice, launched by the US and Israel.”

Former Chief Election Commissioners S.Y. Quraishi has said that if eligible adults in Bengal are denied the right to vote in the forthcoming elections later this month it would be unconstitutional and deplorable, it would vitiate the elections and be a black mark on our democracy. Dr. Quraishi was referring to newspaper reports that the fate of 23.4 lakh Bengali voters, who have reportedly been deleted from the electoral rolls but have the right to appeal to tribunals, hangs in the balance because the tribunals are yet to start work whilst the last date for inclusion in the electoral rolls for the 152 constituencies voting in the first phase on the 23rd is 3:00 p.m. today. As he put it, this clearly suggests that many – we don’t have the precise number but it could be thousands, tens of thousands or even a few lakh – people won’t be able to vote even though they may be eligible.

The President of the All India Christian Council and Primate of the Good Shepherd Church of India, Archbishop Joseph Dsouza, has called the government’s proposed amendments to the FCRA Act, which was yesterday, at the last moment, deferred to the next session of parliament, “loot and theft of Christian institutions and their property”. He says this is “a Sangh Parivar agenda”. If passed in the next session of parliament, he says it will create an international storm with serious international repercussions for India.

Archbishop Dsouza said: “This is a straight forward loot and theft of the Christian institutions and their properties through a legal amendment of a bill. Just as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said years ago demonetization was organized loot and plunder, I say if this law is passed this will be the legalized loot of the Indian Christian community and the global Christian community.”

In a comprehensive interview which covers many aspects of the Middle East war, India’s former Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, says that the present Middle East war will be remembered as Trump’s big mistake. He called it “a grave grave miscalculation”. He called it “a grievous blow to the United States and it will take a long time for the United States to recover from this.”

n an interview to explain the deep and serious concerns India’s transgender community has with the recently introduced Transgender Persons Amendment Bill, Prof. Aqsa Shaikh, Professor of Community Medicine at Jamia Hamdard University, points out that the key error the government has made in the amendment bill is to assume that gender lies between the legs of an individual whereas, in fact, it lies in the hearts and minds of individuals. As Prof. Shaikh puts it: “Gender cannot be reduced to anatomy or verified through physical examination: it is a deeply felt sense of self.”

Prof. Shaikh points out that the amendment bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha on the 13th of March, is “a fundamental shift that undermines the core of what it means to be a transgender person in law. Under this formulation, tens of thousands of individuals who currently identify, and are legally recognized, as transgender may find themselves excluded. Their identities would not merely be ignored; they would be erased.”

In an interview to The Wire, Prof. Foad Izadi, Associate Professor of American Studies at Tehran University, who spoke from Tehran, says that Iran’s new supreme leader is injured and he cited reports to that effect from within Iran. Prof. Izadi also said it could be the case that BBC reports that the new supreme leader has survived a second attempt by Israel to kill him whilst he was in hospital could be correct. However, Prof. Izadi confirms that the new supreme leader is alive.

In strong and outspoken criticism of Indian foreign policy, a former National Security Advisor, M. K. Narayanan, has said that Indian foreign policy is confused and argues that we are not as influential as we once were. India may be internally and economically a more powerful country than it has ever been but our capacity to influence events around the world and win respect for our views is not as great as it was 20-30 or 40 years ago.

Mr. Narayanan said: “I think we are confused. I think India’s foreign policy has been confused for a very long time. I think this is one more instance of that kind. Somewhere down the line India still believes we are, or we have the ability, the capacity, to sort out the problems of other nations … I think this is part of the Indian belief that we are leaders of the global south, we are in a position to mediate, we have the authority or even the influence or the ability to sort out other people’s problems, etc. I think there is this misplaced understanding of where we stand in the world today … I certainly think that we are poorer in the eyes of the world today than we were when we were economically weaker … I think this is the quandary that we are in. We still stick to the idea that the world looks upon us as an important power broker. I think we need to get out of that comfortable area that we are in and realize that we are probably just one of the other countries in the world and no longer one that other countries look up to … if you really look at it you are not even a power to reckon with even in the region in which you are located. How then can you speak for the rest of the world? So we have problems ... That’s what I am trying to say: what India does does not seem to matter today to the same extent that it did when we were much weaker economically and militarily … At one stage India was the leader of the non-alignment movement. We are now talking of multipolarity, of this and that. Nobody is quite clear where India stands. Nobody is quite clear how India reacts to situations … I think that (once) people saw there was an intrinsic strength that India possessed and they were willing to listen. We still possess that intrinsic strength and probably have much more of it but you are not able to make people see how we stand and where we have the weight to pull … Internally perhaps today we are stronger than we have ever been, economically we are stronger than we have ever been. The question is we have not been able to transmit that to the world at large that we are now in a position to do things elsewhere.”

Israeli professor of history and international relations Avi Shlaim says that Donald Trump is “Netanyahu’s poodle”, adding that Netanyahu “plays him like a fiddle”. Prof. Shlaim says that Donald Trump is the only American President who is gullible enough to become part of Netanyahu’s plan for regime change in Iran. However, Prof. Shlaim believes that regime change is almost impossible to achieve from the air and what is far more likely is that the regime will survive and if Mojtaba Khamenei remains the supreme leader he is likely to be more ruthless and a hardliner. Prof. Shlaim also believes that the regime only needs to survive to, in effect, win, whereas America if it doesn’t win has, in effect, lost.

Kanwal Sibal, a former Foreign Secretary and former Ambassador to Russia and France and now Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Manoj Joshi, a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation and a highly regarded Strategic Affairs Analyst, discuss whether Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have underestimated Iran’s resilience and its capacity to retaliate and fight on. In particular, they analyze President Trump and his behaviour, the things he has said as well as the things he claims have taken him by surprise. For instance, Trump has claimed he didn’t realize Iran would retaliate by hitting American bases in the Gulf nor did he realize Iran would seek to block the Strait of Hormuz. But Iran had made it clear that if attacked it would retaliate on American bases in the Gulf and had been saying so for weeks before the war began. This is also what the Gulf countries feared. Trump’s own former Advisor, Nate Swanson, had written in February that if attacked Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz. So how come Trump didn’t know this? What does it tell us about him? His planning? The advice he gets? And his understanding of the Middle East?

The well-known historian, author and strategic affairs analyst Srinath Raghavan says “India is objectively on the side of the aggressors in this war”. He says what matters is not what India says but what it does and how its actions are perceived by others and, in this instance, India is perceived to be on the side of the aggressors. Speaking of the Prime Minister’s visit to Israel, 36 hours before the war began, Mr. Raghavan says: “The timing … was extraordinary … there was no substantive reason to go to Israel on the eve of the war … and it’s inconceivable that the Indian government was unaware of the impending attack.” This was the first clear sign that India was aligning itself with Israel and against Iran.