When rationalists don’t get Hindu philosophy – David Frawley

August 2, 2026VOI

There is a great mystery of consciousness behind the visible world that is our real duty as human beings to discover and to realise. This mystery cannot be limited to biological patterns or to intellectual theories. We should not be content with mere outer views of life. – Dr. David Frawley

From Freudian academics to the modern media, the main examinations of Hindu deities, particularly of Lord Shiva and his family, usually give their primary attention to sexual implications. But in the process of focusing on this side—often to the exclusion of the rest of the teachings—the deeper meaning of these spiritual traditions easily gets lost.

We can forget yoga’s profound insights into the mind, consciousness and higher human evolution, as well as the subtle meditation practices taught to reveal these.

Tantric Yoga philosophy describes seven chakras from the base of the spine to the top of the head. The purpose of yoga is to raise our awareness from the root chakra below—where we are spiritually asleep in ego consciousness and physical reality—to the thousand-petal lotus at the top of the head where we can experience cosmic consciousness and self-realisation, the state of the Supreme Shiva.

The chakras indicate vibratory levels with the five lower chakras relating to the earth, water, fire, air and ether elements and the two higher chakras to mind and consciousness. The ascent through the chakras involves moving from denser to subtler vibrations, and developing a greater unity consciousness along the way.

We should not stop short at the first and second chakras, which rule over lower energies, but consider all seven chakras and their implications in examining yogic deities and practices, extending to higher realms far beyond physical reality.

We should not only consider the role of physical union but also the role of union with the divine, and with the unitary awareness behind the universe as a whole.

The symbolism of Hindu deities

It is true that Hindu deities provide a wealth of fascinating symbolisms that stretch the boundaries of our imaginations and are not easy to understand for the rational intellect. They are capable of diverse interpretations as they reflect the whole of life and all of nature in its mind-transcending magic and bewildering paradoxes.

But the primary implications of these yogic powers are relative to cosmological principles and higher states of awareness, which constitute the bulk of their traditional interpretations that are quite detailed and extensive. Modern scientists have noted these cosmic connections, with the entire universe as Lord Shiva’s dance of light.

Hindu deities, particularly Shiva and his wife Parvati, reflect the practice of yoga and the energies of all the chakras in their stories and teachings, starting with Shiva as Yogeshwara, the lord of yoga, ruling over asana, prana, mantra and meditation. Parvati is the ideal yogini and manifests the yoga shakti, the inner power of yoga that takes us from darkness to light, from death to immortality.

Recognising the primacy of ananda

It is time to move beyond such circumscribed views to recognising the deeper aspects of science, art and philosophy behind the yoga tradition and its extraordinary images and cosmic depictions. This affords us a greater appreciation of the yogis of India and their intricate teachings, not merely about the body and mind, but relative to the universal consciousness in which is infinite and everlasting bliss!

Bliss or ananda is the origin and goal of all as the ancient Upanishads so eloquently state. If we are sensitive to beauty, love or grace anywhere, it is only because of this divine ananda. May we all discover that ananda within and around us! It is much more than any media sensation and takes us far beyond the biases of the mind to a boundless vision and new creative insight at every moment. This is what higher yoga practices can lead us to. – Daily-O, 23 September 2015

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Sastri) is an American Hindu teacher and author who has written more than thirty books on topics such as the Vedas, Hinduism, Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedic astrology, published both in India by Voice of India and in the United States.

Why the liberal world order, built on science and reason, was doomed to fail – Pranav Sharma

July 22, 2026July 24, 2026VOI

Liberal internationalism, armed with the scientific method, imagined that democracy, free markets, and rational governance could be exported like a validated scientific theory—its value presumed universal, its implementation a technical matter. The spectacular failures of this vision, from the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, are often diagnosed as policy miscalculations or a simple failure to account for the brute realities of nationalism and power politics. – Pranav Sharma

The liberal order did not simply make miscalculations. It rested on a deeper conviction that was flawed from the start: the belief that scientific reason, applied with sufficient rigour to human affairs, would bend history toward peace.

That conviction deserves an autopsy of its own. To understand why the liberal order is unravelling, it helps to understand what its architects thought they were building, and why they trusted science to hold it together.

The myth of the neutral method

There is a general tendency in the story we like to tell ourselves about science. It is set in a pristine, sterile laboratory or a remote observatory somewhere away from human settlements, where a dispassionate mind—devoid of feeble human passions, guided by reason and evidence alone—peels back the layers of illusion to reveal universal truths. We picture the methodical transformation of chaos into coherence, of profound civilisational ignorance into enlightenment. This narrative, as immaculate and compelling as any myth, is perhaps best captured by the iconic photograph from the Apollo 8 mission, Earthrise. Our planet, a delicate swirl of blue and white, hangs in the silent, black expanse. It is an image of sublime objective reality, a portrait of ourselves delivered by the most advanced application of our scientific knowledge.

The Age of Discovery that propelled the scientific revolution, meticulous work of the botanist classifying new species or the cartographer charting an unfamiliar coastline was inseparable from the imperial project it served. The world was mastered not just with guns and ledgers, but with taxonomies and sextants. To imagine science as a dispassionate pursuit of universal truths, observing the political order from a neutral distance, is to indulge a narrative as mythic as any creation story. Science is not outside the ambit of power. It is entangled with the architectures of power, identity, and historical contingency that it purports merely to describe.

Not policy failure, but an epistemic one

However, this critique does not go far enough. The failure was not merely political; it was epistemic. It was a failure born of a worldview that treats complex human societies as if they were variables in a vast geopolitical experiment. The technocratic confidence that a nation’s political and cultural life could be engineered with the same precision as a microchip does not reflect the rigour of science so much as its domestication within the logic of managerialism. In that translation, science stops being a restless mode of inquiry and becomes a fetish, a talisman wielded by a managerial elite to legitimise intervention under the banner of evidence-based policy.

Realism, of course, has always stood as the cynical corrective, reminding us of the tragic chorus of power politics and security dilemmas. The structural realist elegantly models an anarchic world where states, like billiard balls, career across the global baize according to immutable, impersonal laws of power. It is a particularly seductive, clean, and predictive model. Yet it occludes more than it reveals, for states are not inert billiard balls; they are incandescent assemblages of identity, memory, desire, arrogance, and trauma. Their behaviour is shaped not just by rational calculations of interest, but by their ghosts of history and the affective, often irrational, intensities of belonging. A discipline that aspires to the predictive economy of physics keeps discovering that its objects refuse to behave like matter. Here lies the essential tension.

Why nationalism beats the model

Science, in its ideal form, seeks truths that are universal. Nationalism, by contrast, thrives on the singular, the irreducible, and the mythic. A nation, after all, is an imagined community, a social construction whose power lies not in its empirical validity but in its capacity to weave individuals into a narrative far larger than themselves. It is, in this sense, a kind of anti-science—not because it rejects facts, but because it privileges myth over measurement and memory over data. It reveals a profound and uncomfortable truth: science cannot fix the human condition because the human condition is not a technical problem to be solved. It is a predicament to be narrated, endured, and perpetually contested.

This is why the liberal wager keeps losing. The liberals assumed that as societies grew wealthier, better informed, and more rationally governed, the particularist passions would recede. The opposite has occurred. The nationalist turn in the United States, the populist surge across Europe, the authoritarian consolidation from Moscow to Beijing, none of these are deviations from a modernising trend that better data would have predicted and better policy could have averted. They are evidence that the model itself was wrong about what moves people.

The liberal faith ran deeper still. The belief that scientific advancement would lead inexorably to moral and political enlightenment is a secular eschatology, a story of salvation without gods. History mocks such linear narratives. The 20th century stands as a monument to this paradox. The same scientific rationality that allowed us to map the human genome also gave us the bureaucratic precision to engineer genocide. The space race, a triumphant symbol of ideological and scientific supremacy, was haunted by the shadow of mutually assured destruction. It became the epitome of logical insanity, where survival depended on the promise of total annihilation. The nuclear revolution did not make war obsolete; it reconfigured its calculus from a contest of conquest to one of existential deterrence. Progress and catastrophe are not opposites in this story. They are produced by the same machinery.

The 21st-century stress test

We now find ourselves in a new century, facing a fresh wave of disruptions. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and cyber warfare are not merely new tools; they are forces that defy our traditional categories, blurring the lines between civilian and military, public and private, human and machine. The US-China contest over advanced computing is not a conventional arms race that arms-control templates can manage; the technology is dual-use by nature, diffuse in ownership, and faster-moving than any treaty cycle. They reveal, with terrifying clarity, the inadequacy of political frameworks forged in the post-war, post-colonial age to grapple with transnational risks that recognise no borders.

Most humbling of all is the predicament of climate change. Here is the ultimate, planet-sized irony: the most profound existential threat of our time is a direct byproduct of the very industrial rationality that promised to liberate humanity from the fickle tyranny of nature. The Anthropocene is not merely a new geological epoch; it is a testament to the unintended consequences of Enlightenment ambition. The relentless quest to master nature has, in the end, destabilised the planetary systems upon which all human life depends. This is not, to be clear, a failure of the scientific method itself. It is the catastrophic failure of the narrative that framed science as a tool of unambiguous and unending human progress, the same narrative that underwrote the liberal order’s confidence in its own trajectory. The algorithm that optimises a global supply chain can equally be turned to systems of targeted surveillance, reducing individuals to predictable data points in a model of consumption and control.

Living with what science cannot do

What, then, is the proper place of science in the grand drama of nation-state and international relations? It can be neither saviour nor scapegoat. It is a contingent, historically situated practice. Science can explain the world, but it cannot redeem it. Its truths are provisional, its applications ambivalent. To grasp its place in national or global politics is to resist the seduction of both technocratic triumphalism and reactionary scepticism, and to hold instead a critical sensibility that recognises science as at once a form of knowledge and a site of power.

The realist reminders remain true as far as they go: the world is anarchic, power matters, and ideals often shatter against the wall of strategic necessity. But the deeper lesson is that realism, like liberalism, is just another story. It is a framework that imposes a semblance of order on a world that is fundamentally resistant to coherence. Science belongs to the same narrative economy. It offers not only explanations but orientation, a way of locating ourselves in a vast and indifferent universe. That is a real service. It is not the same as a guarantee.

The order now being mourned was built on the opposite assumption: that reason, sufficiently advanced, would deliver a destination. As a lengthening line of former believers concede that the destination was never reached, the temptation will be to locate the policy error that cost us the arrival. There was no such error, because there was no such destination. The question was never whether science could fix the human condition. It was how we live with the knowledge that it cannot. That is the tragic wisdom modernity keeps trying to forget. Our greatest achievements are inseparable from our deepest vulnerabilities. Our task, then, is not to seek salvation in the laboratory, but to bear witness to this paradox—to trace, with unflinching eyes, the fragile and often unsettling threads that bind knowledge to power, hope to despair, and progress to its profound and enduring discontents. – The Print, 14 June 2026

› Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan.

Why India doesn’t fit the Woke script – Yuvraj Pokharna

July 18, 2026VOI

Woke, Woker, Wokest

If you ask five people to define Wokeism, it’s likely that each will provide a unique interpretation based on their personal understanding. In a significant research paper called The Scholarly Definition of Wokeism: Why American Universities Enforce Belief without Clarifying the Doctrine, American military scientist, philosopher, and metaphysical architect Jeffrey Camlin wisely points out that Wokeism is a strict moral belief system that stifles questioning and turns conversations into ways to enforce beliefs through guilt and fear of losing reputation. The definition offered is not based on polemic opposition but on structural necessity.

The word ‘woke’ is a quintessential example of a Western term—a misfit and incongruous in the Bharatiya context and conscience—advertently superimposed and forced into our lexicon just like myriad others. Speaking in brevity, the term ‘woke’ originates in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), meaning to be alert or aware, particularly of social injustices. It first appeared in the 1938 song Scottsboro Boys by Lead Belly, urging Black Americans to stay woke to racial injustices, referencing the wrongful convictions of nine Black teenagers in Alabama. In the 1960s, activists like the Black Panthers used ‘stay woke’ to encourage vigilance against systemic racism. It gained prominence during the mid-2010s in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This phrase was supposedly a call to awareness of social injustices, especially those related to race in the American context.

‘Wokeness’ emerged as a noun in the mid-2010s to describe the state of being woke or the collective ideology of social justice awareness. It was meant to encapsulate progressive values like diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and advocacy for marginalised groups in the US. However, over time, it became distorted and transformed into ‘wokeism’, which is viewed as an ideology opposing merit, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, and even the aboriginals, who are considered the flag-bearers of the indigenous cultural legacy of the native land. President Donald Trump has expressed disdain for the term ‘woke’, arguing it’s vague and overused. In 2023, he stated, “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke’. It’s just a term they use; half the people cant even define it; they don’t know what it is.”

The MO of Wokeism is rather simple—fracture the society into countless isolated blocks and turn them against each other through either exaggerated and outright fictitious claims of oppression or by instilling a sense of perpetual victimhood within some of them. Celebrated American commentator Michelle Malkin has authoritatively commented, “Liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it, and ignore it within their ranks.” The same hypocrisy, if not more, is palpably visible in the context of Indian activists and politicians! The result is an unending and multi-layered chaos that has no certain objective. And by doing so, Wokism protects and empowers those whom it claims to fight—the ultra-rich global elite.

The modus operandi, thus, is simple: divert people’s attention from the real socio-economic issues and turn the masses against themselves to provide a protective cover to the globalist masters who wish to pull the strings of the world from behind the curtains. Wokeism, however, doesn’t stand with every section of society. After fragmenting the people’s collective into numerous pieces, it works to turn some of them against the others. It sides with those whom it sees as more conducive to its agenda in a particular country or region.

There are absolutely no objective morals or convictions behind the way Wokeism operates. While Wokes may claim to side with the minorities or less empowered sections of society, the facts suggest the opposite. If they were truly the champions of minorities, they wouldn’t have opposed the peaceful Hindu minorities in White Christian majority countries while defending the illegal Muslim infiltrators in those same places.

Today’s Woke tyranny has left many scholars in their fields in a precarious situation: a liberal utopia where the mere suggestion of biological sex is met with labelling as a transphobe. J.K. Rowling, world-renowned for the Harry Potter series, received criticism from LGBTQ activists because Dumbledore isn’t openly gay in the new Fantastic Beasts film. Is the movie really the zenith of the gay community’s oppression? The greatest perils to the LGBTQ community, as per the Wokes, appear to be diversity in a fictional film rather than Islamic states targeting gays with brutal public executions and decapitations.

The Woke, more often than not, align themselves with individuals they find convenient. They make viable attempts to weaken, negate, and cancel those who are not deemed worthy enough for their cause by creating further schisms within their ranks through paid narratives and campaigns such as #DismantlingGlobalHindutva. The same Wokes are very eager to dismantle the indigenous way of life in India, which is Hindutva, even as they claim to stand for the rights of the natives in New Zealand.

Apart from tactfully nudging society towards a state of eternal chaos, the Wokes have another agenda—replacing traditional collectives such as the family with politically motivated groups. But why? This, once again, serves the interests of their globalist overlords. How? To put it simply, collective living involves the sharing of resources among individuals. For example, a family of four shares one house.

But if all four individuals were to live separately, that would suddenly increase the demand for houses by three to four times. Then again, the houses don’t come in isolation. Along with them come all the other necessary amenities that an individual requires for proper living. The breakup of the family suddenly expands the market base by many times. That is exactly what the globalists want, and the Wokes are trying to achieve it through their concentrated anti-family propaganda.

After having wreaked havoc in its place of origin—the United States and western Europe—the hydra of Wokism has turned its heads towards a new market: India. However, unlike in the West, the Wokes find it challenging to run their business in Bharat. Why? Unlike the West, the multifaceted and diverse nature of Indian society makes it challenging to make generalisations and, consequently, to promote simplistic narratives. In the West, it is very convenient to brand the family and the church as evil. But in a society like India, which has no organised church in the same sense as the West, defining evil becomes extremely difficult. In a society like ours where homosexuals never face any kind of discrimination based on religious dogma, it becomes a complex task for the Wokes to apply their template. They do try, but the attempts are laughable and clearly hypocritical. While in the West, Wokes may still maintain some pretence of activism or concern for the weak; in the Bhartiya context, this veil comes off the moment they open their mouths. Their failure is primarily due to their cluelessness about how to apply their Woke template, which was perfected for Western society, in the Bharatiya context.

To understand the situation better, let’s take a look at some examples from recent memory to exhibit how, time and again, the Wokes have embarrassingly exposed themselves in India. In 2020, the Indian government implemented new agricultural reforms aimed at transforming Indian agriculture into a competitive industry. However, the movement gained momentum when over 3,00,000 farmers reportedly marched to New Delhi to protest against these reforms. While the farmers may have had legitimate concerns and their grievances needed to be heard, some of the most articulate left-leaning Wokes, such as Greta Thunberg, and even the oblivious artist Rihanna, weighed in on the Indian farm imbroglio, pledging support to the farmer protests.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the alleged climate activist, the flagbearer of the global Woke commune, who’s barely an adult with an IQ understandably equivalent to Delhi’s temperature, Greta Thunberg, was unaware that the reforms help combat the climate apocalypse that she claims to fight by minimising the worst annual carbon emissions across the globe through stubble burning, which also leads to significant health problems like asthma and cancer.

Rihanna, a fully monetised celebrity and a pure product of capitalism, denied the benefits of the same to millions of farmers in India, pushing them to espouse a system of agriculture that was not just mediaeval in method and practice but was first introduced in the mediaeval period itself. The hypocrisy is unreal and uncanny! However, despite strong arguments and enough support from some of the most celebrated economists from around the world, the Indian government later repealed the farm reform laws as a mark of respect for the dissent of the farmers and the people.

Another amusing instance of Woke hypocrisy is the case in 2021 when Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau. Defenders of Woke culture contended that the arrest of the 24-year-old was due to his Muslim identity. So, as per the dimwit Wokes, the son of one of the most influential Indians in the last 150 years was being marginalised. Ironically, these same individuals remained silent over the brutal murder of a Dalit man named Nagaraju, who had married a Muslim woman.

One such example of abject absurdity stems from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s female activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai who herself is an iconic victim of Islamic violence and its forceful nature. In her book I Am Malala, she writes, “Wearing a burqa is like walking inside a big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through, and on hot days it’s like an oven.” However, Malala, acknowledged globally for her intrepidness, reverses her stance by neglecting to acknowledge the real-life struggles faced by Indian Muslim women. She came all in for the Muslim girls in Karnataka, claiming they were denied entry into a government school because they were wearing a hijab, despite it being evident that Islamists were using the students as weapons to disrupt and fuel anarchy in India. Such celebrity activism reeks of hypocrisy, if not inanity. Ironically, she gratefully accepted the Nobel Prize from Norway, which has for many years banned burqas and hijabs in educational institutions.

The Woke community and rent-a-cause activists, who otherwise claim to stand for the rights of underprivileged classes, conveniently specialise in whitewashing realities and downplaying the brutal injustices faced by the Hindu community due to their unapologetic, unabated, and perpetual hate for Hinduism. To summarise, the Woke utopia wilfully ignores the murder of Nagaraju, a Dalit man, out of fear of being labelled as Islamophobic. However, it intimidates people into silence and dismisses anyone who deviates from the narrow Woke path. And this is what identity politics does to you.

Clearly, mediocre minds would rather celebrate the public inanity of the incurable nincompoops than ponder over the nuanced argument of an expert that would go over their heads anyway. The Woke utopia has begun to silence all voices except its own, justifying all evil committed by its members’ clique. It brings people together by segregating them into smaller and smaller groups, where only a handful of privileged, spoilt individuals with no credibility and numbers agree among themselves. The Woke utopia is engaging in a much larger international arena and seeping into the Indian diaspora through foreign media, celebrities, and OTT platforms. We must be careful. – Firstpost, 12 July 2026

› Yuvraj Pokharna is a Surat-based educator, columnist, and social activist who keeps a eye on contemporary issues including Social Media, Education, Politics, Hindutva, Bharat (India) and Government Policies. He is the author of the book Hindutva For Gen Z, from which the above article has been excerpted.

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

July 1, 2026VOI

Trump, Xi, Modi

India with its slow and steady rise, two steps forward, one step back, is the quintessential tortoise to the Chinese and American hares. But both China and America know who won the race – Minhaz Merchant

No nation has risen from an impoverished European colony to a major global power. India’s rise has been as unexpected for China and the West as it is unsettling.

Other global powers rose through either colonialism (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal), invasion (America, Canada, Australia) or communism (China, Soviet Union).

India’s rise—chaotic and incomplete but unstoppable—is different: no colonial conquest, no extraterritorial invasion, no communist dictatorship.

If India can become the world’s third largest economy by 2030 (which it will) and the world’s fourth largest military (which it already is), then the means other major powers adopted in their rise stand thoroughly discredited.

That is why India’s rise will be a “resisted” rise. The rise of other great powers was an “assisted” rise. The British Empire, for example, passed the baton willingly to the United States. The Soviet Union helped China rise.

Washington and Beijing have now arrived at a temporary modus vivendi. They will not let their competition lead to confrontation. On Taiwan it might have but US President Donald Trump has signalled it won’t. He paused $14 billion arms sales to Taiwan days after his summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. In return Xi has pledged an uninterrupted supply of critical minerals to the US.

That doesn’t mean the world’s two largest economies don’t have friction points. Last week, Beijing expelled Vivian Wang, a New York Times correspondent based in China because the newspaper interviewed the President of Taiwan, even though Wang was not involved in the interview. The US instantly reciprocated by expelling a senior Chinese journalist from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

Beijing has placed a limit of 100 on the number of US journalists allowed to report from within China. The US has placed a similar limit on Chinese journalists based in the US. Trade between the two countries continues to fall. It has plunged from $690 billion in 2022 to $414 billion in 2025.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 30, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned: “There is rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup and the expansion of its military activities in the region and beyond. No state, including China, can impose its hegemony and hold the security or prosperity of our nation and our allies in question.”

Hegseth then offered an olive branch to Beijing: “President Trump and this administration seek a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China.”

Hegseth acknowledged India’s growing military power: “A powerful India, acting in its own self-interest, advances our shared goal of maintaining a balance of power across the region. India is modernizing its military to carry its share of the security burden, particularly in the Indian Ocean. It’s building out the heavy industrial and logistics capacity to sustain high-end military operations. We’ve also committed to pursuing co-production with India to advance capabilities like Javelin anti-tank guided munitions, real tangible steps to improve the collective readiness of our forces.”

Decline and fall

Despite their rhetoric, Trump’s America and Xi’s China are both declining superpowers. The US economy grew by a paltry annualised 1.6 per cent in the January-March 2026 quarter. China’s economy is sputtering. Consumption has plummeted. Oversupply of manufactured goods has forced Chinese companies to slash prices. Many have gone bankrupt, including dozens of electric vehicle (EV) makers.

It takes decades for the decline of major powers to manifest itself. For example, the decline of colonial Britain and France was slow at first. But after their failed joint attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, the ability of London and Paris to influence global affairs fell sharply.

Could the Iran war be America’s Suez moment? It is exactly 70 years since Washington prevented Britain and France from seizing the Suez Canal in 1956. US global power has since been unrivalled, with the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. China’s tiny economy was not yet a threat to Washington’s global hegemony.

As Washington and Beijing evaluate the rise and fall of nations across geographies over the next 25 years, they see a toothless Europe, fragmented Asia-Pacific, economically stressed Latin America, and war-torn Middle East.

India stands out in splendid isolation. Third largest economy soon. Fourth largest military already. Stable democracy with a noisy Opposition, an activist media, a strong judiciary and an economy growing at an average annual rate of 6.5 per cent, despite trade and war disruptions.

And yet. India confounds the West and China. Its bureaucracy is opaque. Regulations are onerous. Rote education stifles innovation. Corruption at state and municipal levels is endemic. Poverty is declining but millions of Indians are still destitute.

Can such a country ever rise to the stature of a major global power? Students of history recall the abject poverty of China in the 1980s and the 1990s and the famines of the 1960s and 1970s that killed millions of Chinese during Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. They also recall the Great Depression of 1929-39 in the US when the stock market fell by 75 per cent and several American traders committed suicide by jumping off Wall Street’s skyscrapers.

Much can happen in the next 25 years. What is certain is that Europe will continue to atrophy. America will begin a gentle decline. China will age, shrink and grow old before it grows rich.

› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.

Audrey Truschke: In defence of a clickbait historian – Utpal Kumar

June 2, 2026VOI

From Aurangzeb to the Pashupati seal, Audrey Truschke has inadvertently exposed the intellectual hollowness of Left-‘liberal’ historiography – Utpal Kumar

At the very outset, I must make a confession. I like Audrey Truschke. Not because I agree with her. Quite the opposite. I like her because few ‘historians’ in recent years have done more to expose the intellectual frailties, ideological biases and selective morality of contemporary Left-‘liberal’ historiography than she has.

In her relentless attempts to sanitise Aurangzeb, delegitimise Hindutva and challenge civilisational narratives associated with Bharat, Truschke has inadvertently become the perfect case study of what happens when ideology trumps scholarship. She represents a new clique of historians that is least interested in understanding the past and is determined to weaponise history to win politico-ideological battles.

Take her defence of Aurangzeb, for instance. One of her favourite arguments is that the Mughal emperor employed a large number of Hindus in his administration. And that’s why he was secular. To bolster her position, she claims that Aurangzeb employed more Hindus than Akbar. The implication is obvious: a ruler who employed Hindus could not have been anti-Hindu.

Empires, after all, do not recruit administrators and generals out of affection. They recruit them out of necessity. Aurangzeb employed Hindus such as Raja Jai Singh and Raja Jaswant Singh because they were militarily capable and politically useful. He needed Hindu warriors to fight Hindu adversaries, most notably the Marathas. And when they were not battling Marathas, these Hindu generals were useful in fighting difficult frontier campaigns such as Afghanistan. This was imperial pragmatism, not secular idealism. Even the British did the same to safeguard the Raj. The absurdity of the argument can be gauged from the fact that if the mere employment of members of a community is sufficient proof of affection for that community, then Hitler could be projected as a benefactor of Jews. After all, the Nazis had scores of Jews serving them.

Yet, this kind of reductionism has become a hallmark of Leftist historiography. More so of the Truschke-ian manual of history writing.

She has repeatedly claimed that Hindutva was inspired by Nazism and that its early proponents, especially those from the RSS, admired Hitler. To support this claim, she cites We, Or Our Nationhood Defined. Truschke claims M.S. Golwalkar wrote this book in 1939, even when the second RSS Sarsanghchalak had expressly said in May 1963 that it was an abridged translation of a Marathi text, Rashtra Mimansa, written by Babarao Savarkar.

Here again, the one thing that’s sacrificed is nuanced history. In 1939, when We, Or Our Nationhood Defined was published, the world did not possess the knowledge of Nazi atrocities that later generations would acquire. The Holocaust, as it is understood today, had not yet entered global consciousness. Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked documents how influential Western institutions, including The New York Times, frequently downplayed the sinister nature of the Nazi regime. Holocaust-related stories were marginalised, buried deep within newspapers and denied the prominence their significance demanded.

Rindsberg writes, “In the six years of the war, The New York Times printed Holocaust-related stories on its front page exactly six times. Never once in the more than 18,000 Times issues during the war was a Holocaust story a lead article for the day. And, accordingly, never once has The New York Times officially apologised for the way that it covered—or did not cover—the Holocaust.”

If one is to apply contemporary moral standards retrospectively, then many revered Western institutions would stand equally accused. The very institutions Truschke often seeks legitimacy from. But then, by now we know Truschke’s history is bereft of nuances. It is more tabloid, clickbait history.

This week, one encountered another manifestation of Truschke-ian history when the professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University claimed that the famous Pashupati seal of the Saraswati (Harappa) civilisation has nothing to do with Pashupati (Shiva). Yes, you heard it right.

The controversy began after the Ministry of Culture shared the image of what is commonly believed (even among “eminent historians” led by Romila Thapar and A.L. Basham) to be the Pashupati seal, describing it as evidence of Bharat’s “civilisational continuity” and an early depiction of Shiva worship. Truschke took to social media, her new tool to push historical boundaries, to say that the figure should not be identified as Shiva and may instead reflect a broader “Lord of Animals” motif seen across ancient Eurasian cultures. The image was “more likely adapted from proto-Elamite iconography”, she wrote on X.

Given the ludicrousness of the claim, it does not even make sense to argue with her that recent scientific and archaeological findings mostly vindicate what Bharat’s long literary tradition has always maintained: that if there was ever any migration, it was westward, not otherwise. (Even the Satapatha Brahmana, which our “eminent historians” pompously quote, talks about an eastward journey within Bharat, and not from outside.) Given her preconceived notion of history, it does not make sense to waste time discussing with her how the supposedly illiterate, barbarian Aryans could compose such refined literature as the Vedas. How else can one react when one realises that she and her ilk are talking about Aryans invading (migrating into) the subcontinent and composing Vedic literature on the banks of the mighty Saraswati around 1500 BC when modern scientific and archaeological findings point to the river drying up around 1900 BC?

Given Truschke’s ideology-dictated state of mind, it defies logic to argue to her that most Harappan sites have been unearthed along the dried course of Saraswati. It would be too much to expect from her to appreciate that language is often the stickiest thing to let go of—even for those who have converted to another religion (look at Iran and Bangladesh); yet, the rich, urbane and sophisticated Harappans not only abandoned their own language but also willingly adopted that of their invaders. It would be even more difficult for her to understand that the words found in the 14th-century BC Mittani records (which our “eminent historians” claim were left when Aryans were still in Central Asia had not yet reached the subcontinent) are closer to the language used in later Vedic literature. Had the Mittanis been part of a pre-Rig Vedic phase, they would have shown similarities with that, rather than later Vedic language.

So, how should one react when Truschke comes up with such historical inventions?

First and foremost, it must be realised that she is an integral part of the larger Leftist historiography that innately believes Bharat is a doomed scenario. Any interpretation strengthening civilisational continuity within the Indic ecosystem must be subjected to scrutiny. Every possibility must be questioned. Every claim must be problematised. Every tradition must be treated with suspicion.

Truschke is a pop version of the “eminent historians”, pursuing clickbait historiography. Her difference from, say, Romila Thapar is tactical. The modus operandi is simple: The likes of Romila Thapar would claim that there existed Pashupati seals and connect them with proto-Shiva, and then, strategically, Truschke—and our own Ruchika Sharma—would be let loose to make such wild Eurasian claims. This makes the otherwise ludicrous Leftist claims of the likes of Thapar suddenly appear moderate. What was previously seen as controversial acquires an aura of reasonableness simply because something even more provocative has entered the conversation.

So, next time a Truschke or a Sharma makes an outrageous claim, don’t get outraged. Clickbait historians thrive on outcry. The best way to belittle the Leftist line of historiography is to come up with a new, longer line of nationalist historiography. Individual efforts have been made in that direction. What’s missing is the institutional approach. Till that’s done, keep exposing the likes of Romila Thapar and keep ignoring the pop distorians such as Truschke.

Bharat still awaits the institutionalisation of its history written from its own perspective. This cannot be Left to “eminent historians”. Far less their tabloid, clickbait versions. – Firstpost, 30 May 2026

› Utpal Kumar is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’.

Historian Graffiti Cartoon

Marco Rubio and the Missionaries of Charity – Shravan K. Shukla

May 26, 2026May 26, 2026VOI

The US Secretary of State’s visit to the Missionaries of Charity, an organisation facing serious legal charges in Indian courts for forced conversions, child trafficking, and financial fraud is a flagrant disregard for India’s judicial system and internal security. – Shravan Kumar Shukla

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s four-day visit to India has created a new political stir in the country. This is the first time in 14 years that a US Secretary of State has landed directly in Kolkata instead of the national capital, New Delhi. The last time a US representative landed straight in Kolkata was in 2012, when Hillary Clinton flew down to the city. But Rubio’s visit to Kolkata turned out to be highly controversial.

Upon reaching Kolkata, instead of attending any official or strategic event, he went straight to the headquarters (Mother House) of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa.

Missionaries of Charity has been at the centre of intense Indian government surveillance, foreign funding restrictions, and serious allegations of violations of law over the past few years. Marco Rubio’s first visit to India upon his arrival and his closed-door meeting with the organisation’s officials do not look like mere diplomatic courtesy. In diplomatic circles, it is being seen as a concerted and strategic US effort to challenge India’s sovereignty and strengthen the global standing of the controversial Christian missionaries.

Let’s dive a little deeper to understand the entire incident and analyse the dark chapters and controversies associated with the Missionaries of Charity, which are echoing from the internet to the courts.

The controversy related to the government crackdown on funding, i.e., FCRA

The most significant administrative and financial conflict between the Missionaries of Charity and the Indian government emerged in December 2021. The Union Home Ministry completely halted the renewal of the organisation’s foreign funding license under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). The Ministry had strong input that the large sums of money received by the organisation from abroad in the name of donations were being used for activities that were detrimental to the national interest.

Besides, the organisation failed to furnish the financial documents and account details required for the audit on time, which raised serious questions about its financial transparency. The administrative action sparked a major political storm within the country. The then-Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, and several opposition parties, including the Congress, baselessly accused the central government of targeting minorities.

The government took a firm stance on this matter, clarifying that it had not frozen any accounts, but the institution itself had submitted a request to the State Bank of India to freeze its accounts. Later, in January 2022, after being surrounded from all sides, when the institution submitted the necessary documents and clarifications to the government, its registration was reinstated.

Forced conversions under the guise of service and hurting Hindu sentiments

The organisation has long been accused of cunningly converting poor Hindus under the guise of ‘service’ and ‘help’. The case relating to one of the organisation’s children’s homes (shelter homes) in Vadodara, Gujarat, was the most vivid and horrifying example of its vile activities.

In December 2021, District Social Security Officer Mayank Trivedi and the Child Welfare Committee conducted a surprise inspection of a girls’ home in the Makarpura area. The findings shocked administrative officials as well as the entire Hindu community.

The investigation team found that destitute Hindu girls living in the orphanage were being forced to read Christian religious texts (the Bible). These innocent girls were also forced to participate in Christian prayers and wear crosses around their necks. An FIR was registered at the Makarpura police station under the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003, for hurting Hindu religious sentiments and for allegedly using allurement to convert. This despicable scheme, operating under the guise of service, was exposed when officials discovered that the organisation was bent on eradicating all signs of the original religion of the girls.

The investigation committee’s report made shocking revelations, including an instance when a Hindu girl was given to a Christian family against her will. Furthermore, Hindu girls were forcibly served non-vegetarian food (meat) in an attempt to corrupt their religious beliefs.

While Missionaries of Charity spokespersons, as usual, dismissed all these allegations as baseless and false, a joint investigation team comprising several departments, formed by the police and the district collector, found these allegations to be true, leading to legal action.

The ugly face of human trafficking, involving the buying and selling of newborn babies

Forced religious conversions are not the only illegal activity that the Missionaries of Charity has been accused of; the organisation was also involved in inhumane acts of selling newborn babies for money. The organisation’s ugly face came to light in 2018 at one of its shelter homes in Ranchi, Jharkhand.

In Ranchi, the police arrested two Sisters (nuns) of the Missionaries of Charity red-handed while they were illegally trafficking newborn babies. This incident exposed the horrific network of child trafficking operating under the ‘holy’ and ‘compassionate’ facade of the organisation founded by Mother Teresa.

Considering the grave nature of the activities, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) directly approached the Supreme Court. The Commission urged the country’s highest court to establish a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under Supreme Court supervision to investigate the mysterious disappearances and sale of children from shelter homes run by these Christian missionary organisations.

The Commission alleged that the then government officials of Jharkhand adopted a very lax attitude in such a sensitive matter, and continuous efforts were made to suppress the investigation of this big racket.

The statistics revealed during the Commission’s in-depth investigation were horrifying and shocking. Between 2015 and 2018, approximately 450 destitute and impoverished pregnant women were admitted to this shelter home in Ranchi. However, when the records were examined, only 170 children were legally recorded.

The organisation had no information about the remaining 280 newborns, including where they went or what happened to them. Following this confirmation, the Supreme Court issued notices to the governments of nine states, including Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, and Bihar, and ordered an investigation into this human trafficking ring.

The Dark Truth of Mother Teresa – Deceit, Hypocrisy and the “Ghoul of Kolkata”

The Indian Constitution calls for the development of a scientific temper and a sense of rationality in every citizen. However, the entire process of Mother Teresa’s canonisation by the Vatican was based on blatant superstition, hypocrisy, and a direct insult to medical science.

To canonise Teresa, the Vatican made the ridiculous claim that simply touching her portrait cured people of incurable cancers and tumours overnight. Indian doctors and intellectuals denounced this as sheer sorcery for misleading people and promoting superstition.

Renowned British author Christopher Hitchens, in his acclaimed book The Missionary Position, blasted Mother Teresa’s hypocritical image. He directly referred to her as the “Ghoul of Kolkata”. Hitchens’s compelling argument was that Teresa’s institute was not dedicated to providing modern treatment to the suffering, but instead deprived the sick and the dying of modern medicine, leaving them to suffer. The sick were told that their suffering was divine punishment for their sins, and that they should endure it silently and without complaint.

The research of NRI Dr Arup Chatterjee is considered most significant in exposing the sordid truths of this organisation. He conducted on-ground research on the organisation’s operations for nearly 25 years and exposed all its dark deeds in his authoritative book, Mother Teresa: The Untold Story.

In the book, Dr Chatterjee stated that the organisation received billions and billions of rupees in donations from around the world, yet patients at its Kolkata centres lacked even basic medical facilities, clean needles, and painkillers. The Indian government was never given any account of where this vast sum of money disappeared.

Support from global powers and a controversial political nexus

Mother Teresa’s entire life was filled with controversies, radical statements, and stories of accepting donations from the world’s most notorious criminals and corrupt figures. When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she shocked the world by declaring in her speech that the greatest threat to global peace was not nuclear weapons or war, but abortion. This deeply conservative and anti-women statement was strongly condemned by modern society and women’s rights organisations worldwide, clearly revealing her narrow religious agenda.

In 1984, when the devastating gas tragedy struck Bhopal, India, killing thousands of innocent people, Mother Teresa went there to offer solace. But instead of fighting for justice, she offered the victims the suicidal advice of quietly forgiving the corporate culprit, Union Carbide.

Critics firmly believe that she consistently served as an agent of Western corporate powers and governments, such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Furthermore, she accepted a $1.25 million donation from the notorious American financial fraudster Charles Keating and later defended him in court.

The US effort to provide oxygen to Christian missionaries

Despite all these murky controversies, lawsuits, and serious allegations of human trafficking surrounding the organisation, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to visit the Missionaries of Charity as soon as he arrived in India appears to be a deliberate political plot. International affairs analysts believe that the US has consistently employed a devious policy of exerting strategic pressure on developing countries by using the false facade of “religious freedom” and “human rights.”

Rubio’s visit is actually an open attempt to provide oxygen to these missionaries who have been financially and socially weakened due to the tough stance of the Indian government, and revive them at the global level.

The US Secretary of State’s personal visit to an organisation facing serious legal charges in Indian courts for forced conversions, child trafficking, and financial fraud is tantamount to a flagrant disregard for India’s judicial system and internal security. Washington intends to convey the message through this visit that it stands as a shield for these Christian networks operating in India. – Opindia, 24 May 2026

› Shravan Kumar Shukla is multimedia journalist passionate about digital media. He has been actively engaged in journalism, working across diverse platforms including agencies, news channels, and print publications.

See also

Trump’s endgame is surrender – Robert Kagan

May 24, 2026VOI

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. … The President may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran. – Robert Kagan

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?

Most likely, the new normal in the Persian Gulf will be chronic instability and frequent disruptions in shipping. That’s what happens when the hegemon cedes hegemony. – The Atlantic, 21 May 2026

› Robert Kagan is an author, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

India’s global power status will be decided in the next decade – Minhaz Merchant

May 17, 2026July 27, 2026VOI

India’s transition to a Great Power needs more governance and less bureaucracy, more reforms and less regulation, more assertive engagement with the rest of the world and less passive neutrality. – Minhaz Merchant

India’s geopolitical absence during the Middle East crisis has emboldened critics of India’s global rise. The critics are both indigenous and foreign. The US-led West does not welcome the prospect of India becoming another economic, technological and military powerhouse like China in the next decisive decade.

Christopher Landau, America’s deputy secretary of state, said it explicitly during a recent think tank conference in Delhi: “India should understand that we’re not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago in terms of saying, ‘Oh, you know, we’re going to let you develop all these markets,’ and then the next thing we know, you’re beating us in a lot of commercial things.”

The indigenous criticism of India’s evolving place in the world is harsher as it always is during an election season. Where does the truth lie? Has India’s global advance stalled? Or, is it simply navigating a difficult course in a disorderly world?

Strategic autonomy is India’s guiding geopolitical principle. But stretched too far, it can morph into passive neutrality. That is not how a nation makes the transition from a Middle Power to a Great Power.

Take China’s rise as an example. Till 1980 it was a peripheral power with a GDP of $0.19 trillion and widespread poverty. Its reformist leader Deng Xiaoping began an economic liberalisation process that catapulted China to a Great Power in one generation. By 2010, China’s GDP had grown more than thirty-fold in 30 years from $0.19 trillion to $6.10 trillion.

Much of China’s ascent owed to two factors: Communism and intellectual property theft. Obsessed by the Cold War, the US propped up China as a counter to the Soviet Union. It allowed free access to Chinese scientists and academics to US universities and research laboratories. China reverse-engineered US military and civil technology before Washington realised that it had unwittingly created a superpower rival.

America’s attitude to India is deeply prejudiced by its toxic Chinese experience. In 2005 the US experimented with deploying a still “fragile-five” India as a regional counterweight to China. An India-US civil nuclear deal followed, along with closer economic ties. China remained America’s target.

That policy has been largely abandoned for two reasons. One, China is now too powerful to be countered by a third country. Two, India itself threatens to become too powerful for America’s comfort in the next decisive decade.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its latest World Economic Outlook (April 2026) report places India’s GDP, measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), as the world’s third largest at $18.90 trillion. The US is the world’s second largest economy ($32.38 trillion) below first-placed China ($44.30 trillion).

The combined GDP (PPP) of India and China in 2026 is therefore $63.20 trillion, double US GDP. The two Asian giants are growing at an annual rate of 4.5 per cent (China) and 6.5 per cent (India) compared to annual US growth rate of 2 per cent. The economic gap between the world’s three largest economies is widening with India’s GDP (PPP) now nearly half China’s and two-thirds America’s.

Trump factor

Under President Donald Trump, the US regards India’s ascent with concern. Moreover, Washington believes a thaw between India and China could create a powerful axis against the US-led West. That axis is currently fragmented. One half is centred around China, Russia, North Korea and Iran—all irredeemably hostile to the West.

The other half comprises powers of the Global South led by India, Brazil and others. If these two halves come together on a common platform, the US-led West could for the first time in two centuries face a credible threat to its global hegemony.

The only international platform that can grow into a unified non-Western axis is BRICS. India is currently the group’s annual rotating head. Foreign ministers from BRICS nations are scheduled to meet in Delhi in May. India will host the BRICS heads of government summit in Delhi in October. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to attend.

BRICS has now expanded to 11 member-nations. They include the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran and Egypt, all key players in the unfolding world order.

As a Great Power in transition, India must ignore the advice Deng gave China in 1980: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” For India, the time to hide its strength has long gone. It has historically punched below its geopolitical weight. That era is over.

India must now move from a policy of strategic autonomy to strategic assertiveness. Autonomy is the passive language of non-alignment. It is mistaken by other powers as India’s unwillingness to take sides, take risks, and impose its strategic thinking on others.

For an economy which, as IMF data points out, contributes 17 per cent to annual global growth, second only to China (26.60 per cent) and far more than the US (9.90 per cent), passive neutrality is not the quickest path to Great Power status.

China transitioned from a Middle Power in 2000 to a Great Power in 2020 by being geopolitically assertive. As a noisy, fractious democracy, India’s path is not as smooth as Communist China’s. But in the long run, the advantages of democracy and freedom will always score over communism and dictatorship.

The seeds of China’s demographic downfall were sown in the 1970s when it enforced forcible birth control and a one-child policy. India tried to do the same during the 1975-77 Emergency with forcible sterilisation. Communism allowed China to enforce the policy. India’s democracy did not: forced sterilisation ended with the revocation of the Emergency and the 1977 general election.

The outcome: China’s population is in free fall. Workforce productivity, despite AI automation, is slowing. The UN projects China’s population will halve to 733 million in 2100. India’s population in contrast will plateau at 1.5 billion through to the end of the 21st century, giving it the tools to become the world’s largest economy (PPP) by 2055.

But the transition to a Great Power needs more governance and less bureaucracy, more reforms and less regulation, more assertive engagement with the rest of the world and less passive neutrality.

The tools are in place. Washington and Beijing may feign disinterest but they are watching carefully. Neither welcomes India’s ascent and will do what they can to stall it till, like China, India becomes too big to stall. – Firstpost, 21 April 2026

› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.

Why nations go to war – Acharya Prashant

March 12, 2026March 12, 2026VOI

You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep. – Acharya Prashant

There is a question that goes unasked every time the world erupts in war, and its absence is more revealing than anything the analysts say. The question is not about which side is right, or which grievance is legitimate, or which alliance has been betrayed. Those questions get asked at great length, with great sophistication, by very worldly, credentialed people. The question that does not get asked is simpler and more dangerous: who is the one fighting? Not which nation, not which ideology, not which scripture, but who, actually, is doing this, what does this person want, and why does the wanting never stop?

That question is dangerous because it turns the lens around. All the other questions look outward, at the adversary, at the system, at the historical injustice. This one looks at the looker. And the looker, it turns out, has a very strong interest in not being looked at.

In the recent weeks, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have killed several top military and political figures, including senior leadership; Iran retaliated with strikes on Israeli positions and on American bases and allied targets in parts of the Gulf region; Pakistan launched strikes into Afghanistan; the Ukraine-Russia front continues its grinding attrition; and all this is happening while the devastating war in Gaza is still quite fresh in the collective memory. Across every editorial room and foreign ministry, the same machinery cranks into motion: geopolitical analysis, balance-of-power calculations, resource competition, historical grievance mapping. These explanations are not wrong, exactly. They describe the furniture of the room quite well. But what they do not explain is who is sitting in it, or why that person keeps setting the room on fire and then expressing surprise at the flames.

Nations Don’t Fight

There is no such thing as a nation as a conscious entity. A nation is a principle, and a principle has no agency of its own; it can only express the consciousness, or the unconsciousness, of the people who generate it. When a people is inwardly chaotic, driven by fear and the need for dominance, it produces a nation that is belligerent, exclusive, and always in search of an enemy to confirm its own identity. When a people is inwardly clear, the nation it generates can be genuinely civilising. But we do not speak this way. We say “the US attacked Iran” as though two abstract entities are in principled competition; the label launders the real actor, the human ego, into a flag, and the flag then takes the responsibility while the ego escapes into the applause.

Consider what a single historical fact does to the entire geopolitical narrative of the current US-Iran crisis. Until 1979, Iran and Israel were functional allies. Iran was an important oil supplier to Israel during the Shah’s era; Israeli and Iranian intelligence services collaborated closely; Iran extended de facto recognition to Israel in 1950 and maintained working relations with it throughout the Shah’s rule, at a time when every Arab neighbour had gone to war to prevent exactly that. Two countries that today describe each other in the language of surgical removal and satanic identity, “the cancerous tumour must be excised,” “the Little Satan must perish,” were, within living memory, strategic partners. No territory changed hands between them in 1979; no oil field was found or lost; no ancient wound was reopened. What changed decisively was the 1979 revolution that placed religious identity at the absolute centre of the Iranian state, and the same country that had been a partner became the enemy. The Islamic Republic made opposition to Israel a central ideological position of the new state, not because Israel had done anything new, but because a state founded entirely on theological identity requires its identity to be defined against something. A Jewish state served that purpose with theological precision.

This is not geopolitics wearing a religious costume. This is religion being worn by the ego as its most respectable armour, and it tells us everything we need to know about the nature of the conflict.

Religion exists to civilise the animal. Every great tradition, at its irreducible core, was attempting to do one thing: take the creature that emerges from the womb driven entirely by the biological logic of survival: consume, expand, eliminate the threat, secure the territory, and elevate it into something capable of clarity, compassion, and self-knowledge. That is the whole project. The animal, however, is remarkably resourceful. It can colonise the very force meant to tame it; it can drape itself in scripture, recite the holy verses with genuine feeling, and emerge looking not like a beast at all, but like a soldier of God. When that happens, religion does not merely fail at its purpose; it becomes the most potent accelerant the ego has ever discovered, because now the hunger for dominance carries the blessing of the divine, the violence is sanctified, and the enemy is not merely an adversary to be defeated but a heretic whose destruction is itself an act of devotion.

Look at the region, and the pattern is visible everywhere at once. The Shia-Sunni schism, a theological dispute over succession thirteen centuries old, continues to shape proxy wars across Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; the hatred between those who share the same God, the same Prophet, and nearly the same scripture exceeds in ferocity the hatred between people who share nothing. In the United States, some influential evangelical constituencies hold a literal belief in Biblical prophecy that makes their support for Israeli military policy not a political position but an eschatological one; they believe the Second Coming is contingent on certain territorial arrangements in the Middle East, and no diplomatic argument reaches a conviction rooted in the Book of Revelation. Hamas frames every missile launch in the language of holy liberation. The Israeli state, forged in the trauma of the Holocaust and the genuine existential terror of being a country the size of a few Indian districts surrounded by populations that have repeatedly declared their wish to see it gone, responds with a hardness the world has rarely seen directed so openly at a civilian population, and does so while invoking its own theological entitlement to the land. Every party has its scripture and its God. Every party’s God appears to have personally endorsed that party’s military strategy. One must pause and ask with full seriousness: what kind of God is this, who sides so reliably with whoever happens to be invoking him at the moment of the airstrike?

The answer, of course, is that this God does not exist. What exists is the ego, which has been using the name of God since it first discovered that the name confers immunity from examination.

Not Resources, But Identity.

Strip away the theological dressing and the geopolitical framework, and what remains is something both simpler and more intractable: the ego’s bottomless hunger to feel complete. This is the actual engine beneath every war, and no diplomatic architecture has ever been built to address it, because the architects themselves are running the same engine.

The resource explanation for the US-Iran confrontation is the most persistent alibi and the most easily dismantled. The United States is among the world’s largest energy producers; it has no material need for Iranian oil that could justify the risks of direct military confrontation with a nation of ninety million people in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Iran, for its part, possesses no intercontinental missile capable of reaching American cities, and by several credible accounts a negotiated arrangement, with Omani mediation, was genuinely within reach: Iran would continue enriching fissile material but not stockpile it, making weaponisation impossible without abrupt and easily detectable reversal. None of this fits a resource or security conflict in the conventional sense. What it fits is the logic of an ego that requires dominance not as a strategy but as a psychological condition; an ego that cannot tolerate the existence of an entity that refuses to subordinate itself to the hierarchy. You cannot give it enough. Feed it every oil field in the Gulf and it will discover it needs recognition; give it recognition and it will discover it needs submission; give it submission and it will discover it needs the annihilation of any future possibility of challenge. The hunger has no floor because the hollowness it is trying to fill has no floor either.

This is also why every coercive attempt to prevent Iran’s nuclearisation produces the very outcome it claims to be preventing. The lesson that every capital in the world is drawing from watching a sovereign nation’s senior leadership eliminated by a foreign military strike is not “we should negotiate more sincerely.” It is: “We need a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile, because that is the only thing that makes us genuinely untouchable.” North Korea understood this early and has not been subjected to the same treatment as Iraq, Libya, or now Iran; every government in the world has registered exactly why, and is drawing its own conclusions quietly. Pakistan articulated the logic with unusual candour in the 1990s when it was reported to describe its nuclear programme as the “Islamic bomb”; the theology was decoration, the calculation underneath is now a standard operating assumption in most strategic planning ministries on earth. You can prevent a country from manufacturing a weapon; you cannot prevent it from purchasing one, trading for one, or receiving one through channels that only appear in retrospective intelligence reports five years later. The ego will always find a route around the obstacle, because self-preservation is its oldest and deepest competence, and it will spend every gram of available intelligence in that service. What you cannot route around is the inner condition that makes the weapon feel necessary. Everything else: the sanctions, the strikes, the frameworks, the summits, is rearranging weapons into configurations that feel temporarily safer and calling the rearrangement peace.

The Fire Was Lit In Here

There is a temptation, particularly for citizens of the nations doing the striking, to watch all of this from a position of apparent safety: to feel either pride at a display of power or simple relief that the devastation is happening at a geographical distance comfortable enough to be consumed as news. The objects of the conflict are far away: Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine. The subject, the one who has authorised, funded, and often enough cheered for these operations, remains at home, apparently untouched. This is the ego’s most seductive illusion: that the fire it lights in the world stays in the world, that you can sanction the destruction of other people’s cities and return to your own life carrying none of that destruction inside you.

The fire does not stay outside. It never has.

The inner condition that produces belligerent foreign policy is the same inner condition that produces the epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner purposelessness that has become the defining psychological signature of the most militarily powerful societies on earth. It feels counterintuitive to connect these; it feels like a category error to link America’s mental health catastrophe with decades of American military conduct across the world. And yet this is precisely what honest seeing reveals when it is applied without flinching. The violence directed outward, and the suffering experienced inward, are not two events happening in two different places; they are the same ego operating in two directions, and the ego that lights the fire and the ego that cannot sleep afterward are not two separate entities but a single disturbed centre. The ego believes it can cleanly separate the one who acts from the one who suffers. But the one who lights fires has already become a person who lights fires; the one who sanctions collective punishment has already become a person capable of sanctioning collective punishment; and that becoming does not halt at any border. You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep.

The senses are made to face outward, and therefore the ego, using only the senses, sees only what is outside, never what is within. This is the structural predicament of the geopolitically entranced ego: it looks outward at the adversary, at the threat, at the historical injustice, and it never pauses to notice that what it keeps finding out there, the hunger, the fear, the need for enemies, the certainty of its own righteousness, is a precise mirror of what has never been examined within. Nations go to war for the same reason individuals destroy their own relationships: something hurts, something feels insufficient, and the instinct is to locate the source of that pain outside oneself. The nation blames the enemy state; the individual blames the partner; and in both cases the real author of the suffering, the unexamined centre that requires enemies in order to know what it is, goes untouched, free to generate the next crisis with the same efficient reliability.

Ask yourself what genuinely disturbs you when you read the news from that region. If you find that a missile strike produces something that feels uncomfortably close to satisfaction, a sense that the right people are being punished, that your side is winning, that the world is being corrected, sit with that feeling for a moment before moving to the next headline. Ask what it is fed by. Ask what it would mean for your sense of identity if the world stopped arranging itself into enemies you could feel righteous about. These wars are not aberrations in an otherwise rational world order; they are the outward expression of an inward condition that is universal and ancient, that operates identically in the head of state and in the citizen consuming the coverage, differing only in the scale of damage each has access to.

The ego that requires enemies to sustain its own sense of coherence does not disappear when the missiles stop. It waits until it finds the next available occasion. And the wheel turns again.

The wheel will not be stopped from the outside. There is no treaty elegant enough, no balance of power stable enough, no diplomatic architecture sophisticated enough to address what keeps turning it. The wheel is turned from within, by the unexamined centre that has been given every instrument of analysis and statecraft except the one that could actually change something: the willingness to look at itself with the same ruthlessness it has always reserved for its enemies.

That is the only disarmament that lasts. Not a new agreement, not a new government, not a new ideology dressed in the vocabulary of the old one, but just a human being, finally willing to ask: what in me is producing this world, and what would remain of my sense of who I am if I could no longer find an enemy to confirm it?

That question, honestly pursued, is the beginning of the only peace that has ever been real. It will need to be asked again tomorrow. And the day after. Because the ego that found the question will, by the next headline, have found a new enemy. But each asking weakens the wheel by a fraction, and a fraction, repeated across enough human beings, is the only force that has ever slowed it. – The Pioneer, 7 March 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

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The Iran Paradox: The strange case of Leftists mourning for a despot – Makarand R. Paranjape

March 5, 2026VOI

To eulogise and lament the demise of a barbarous despot and a brutal regime, which trampled on its own citizens and destroyed its own country economically, socially and politically, is sheer folly. – Makarand R. Paranjape

While Iranians all over the world, and to the extent possible within Iran, are celebrating the fall of a horrible despot and his regime of terror, Left-liberals in both the US and India are in mourning over the Ayatollah’s demise. How can one explain this strange and perplexing paradox?

Iranian women are rejoicing over the downfall of one of the most oppressive and misogynistic regimes in the world, yet US and Indian feminists—who, without the enforced hijab in Iran, would have faced certain imprisonment, even torture—are lamenting the fall of Iran’s patriarchal despots.

Iranian women have endured decades of policed veiling, gender segregation, and brutal crackdowns on protests, such as the 2022 uprising following Mahsa Amini’s death in custody for “improper hijab”. The regime’s misogyny was systemic, with laws permitting child marriage, quasi-prostitution disguised as temporary marriage (sigheh or nikah mut‘ah) and stoning for adultery (zina-e-mohsen).

Yet, when news broke of Khamenei’s death and the subsequent collapse of key regime figures, feminists both in the US and India decried the “militaristic patriarchy” of US and Israeli forces. The same feminists, who champion bodily autonomy, aligned with a theocracy that denied it.

Similarly, organised gay and LGBTQ groups, who could have faced execution in the Islamist Republic of Iran, are wailing the end of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. Some on social media even pointed out how one of the greatest postmodernists, Michel Foucault, not only praised the regime in Iran but visited the country. I am not sure they knew he was homosexual—or did they simply choose to ignore it in so famous a foreign supporter?

The irony is stark: those who could be hanged from cranes in Tehran are now indirectly defended by activists enjoying protections in liberal democracies, all in the name of intersectional anti-oppression.

Communists were executed by Islamists not only in Iran, but in many other parts of the world. The Iranian regime’s early years saw the mass execution of Leftists, including members of the Tudeh Party, who were purged in the 1980s for ideological deviations from Khomeini’s Shia Islamism. Globally, Islamists have clashed with Communists, viewing Marxism as atheistic heresy. Yet today, Communist sympathisers in the West echo Iran’s anti-American slogans, seeing the regime as a victim of capitalist encirclement.

American Communists are taking the “Death to America” line right in New York City today, thanks to the patronage of their mayor, misusing the latitude of free speech given to them by the laws of the very country they excoriate. Speaking of the mayor, he promptly issued a statement condemning his own country and president.

I do not recall him shedding a tear for any of the prisoners of conscience tortured and killed in Iranian jails or castigating the horrifying attacks of Iran’s proxies in the region. Oh, I stand corrected; he did condemn Hamas much later, after facing repeated criticism. The day after the raid of 7 October 2023, he actually denounced Israel for its apartheid and occupation, not to mention its declaration of war against Hamas. Now this same mayor questions the legality of US and Israeli actions against Iran.

It is strange, to say the least, that the fallen regime has all kinds of supporters, East and West, many of whom are not even remotely connected to, let alone know much about, Iran. The Shia reaction in the subcontinent, by contrast, is understandable, even if, arguably, irrelevant to international geopolitics.

This global phenomenon of Left-liberal outrage over US-Israeli actions, which we may term the “Iran Paradox”, grows even stranger when we realise how many Muslim, especially Arab, states have actually condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the initial US-Israeli strikes. Even China and Russia, despite whatever verbal or political support they might extend in the totally marginalised and disunited United Nations, did not come to Iran’s aid in its time of dire need. The Ayatollah’s rule of terror, in other words, was left friendless in the end. Such, indeed, is the fate of dictators around the world.

Western liberalism, if we can even call it that, with its fading echoes elsewhere, reveals a profound disconnect with ground realities. Indeed, global political discourse shows that ideological alignments trump human rights or even historical realities.

At its core, the Iran Paradox stems from the frightened prejudice of sore losers, a Left which, some say not without reason, is both intellectually and morally bankrupt. It has nothing to fall back upon except its hatred for the US and Israel.

They are the ultimate villains—imperialist, colonialist and, worst of all, capitalist. Any regime opposing this axis, no matter how repressive, becomes, by default, a symbol of resistance.

Founded in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini, positioned itself as an anti-imperialist bulwark, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. They took their latter responsibility a bit too seriously, exporting death through proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Now, in closing, to India’s weak and splintered opposition—especially the increasingly irrelevant Congress and its differently enabled band of ideological fellow-travellers. Preaching moral lessons to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of the strike on Iran, is one thing.

But to eulogise and lament the demise of a barbarous dictator and a brutal regime, which trampled on its own citizens and destroyed its own country economically, socially and politically, is, as outspoken critics are wont to put it, sheer folly.

Yes, India did business with Iran, but that does not mean we should sing hosannas to its deceased leaders while ignoring their crimes against humanity. Let us not even comment on those virtue-signalling by issuing strong denunciations of the US and Israel. Actions speak louder than words. Besides, who is listening to them? Firstpost, 4 March 2026

› Prof. Makarand R. Paranjape is an author and columnist.

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The Iran Paradox: The strange case of Leftists mourning for a despot – Makarand R. Paranjape

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