AMERIKA
January 23, 2025
DAWN
ON Jan 20, the moment Donald Trump — the geriatric comeback kid — took his oath as the 47th US president, the destiny of the world changed. It was as if he had drawn a Tarot card predicting the future.
Trump sees it as the sun: “positivity, success, and vitality”. To other world leaders, the card is the sinister tower, signifying “upheaval, trauma, sudden change, and chaos”.
Trump does not believe in the occult. He believes in a God who saved him from an assassin’s bullet to return to the White House with a miraculous mandate. As a misogynist, he can sport on his belt the coiffured heads of two female opponents — Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. He has the whole world at his feet. If his provocative utterances are to be believed, he intends to play football with it.
To his fellow Americans, regardless of their genealogy, Trump promises America a greatness beyond the envy of his rivals. To hostile foreigners, he offers ‘peace through strength’. That mantra is not new. It has been around for over millennia, since the time of Roman Emperor Hadrian (Pax per virtutem). It is now Trump’s battle cry.
Postwar American leaders have inverted it into ‘peace through war’, most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Today, we are again caught in the middle.
Since the Russian assault on Ukraine in 2022, the US has committed $175 billion to Ukraine’s defence. Not all of it goes into Volodymyr Zelensky’s pockets. The Council on Foreign Relations has disclosed that much of it finances US activities and defence manufacturers in over 70 US cities. American largesse benefits America first.
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” the press mogul William Hearst once said. Ukraine provides the war; the US military machine and over 40 Nato-connected countries furnish the weapons.
China foresees war of a different sort with the US. One stab in this direction has been announced by Trump on his first day in office. He revoked a presidential order signed by his predecessor Biden in 2021, decreeing that half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030 should be electric.
Trump is adamant: “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.” Yet, despite this bombast, Trump has admitted: “I’m for electric cars,” adding the confessional: “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
Elon Musk — the richest man in the world — has anointed himself as the First Buddy. His proximity to President Trump is undeniably close. The next few years will tell us who is in whose pocket. Meanwhile, Musk is exultant that Trump has endorsed his ambition to land a man on the planet Mars (coincidentally, the planet of war).
Reaching Mars is not such an impossible boast. In the 1960s, America planned to put a man on the moon by end 1969. The Soviet Union dented this ambition in 1961 by launching its cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in a Vostok rocket. The Soviets lost out to the US though, when, in July 1969 within the deadline, two American astronauts stepped onto the moon’s surface.
Will Trump bring peace on earth? Which peace deal (Gaza or Ukraine) will secure him the Nobel Peace Prize? (Obama had been in power for less than eight months when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.)
Many countries must be recalibrating their foreign policies to achieve a resonance with Trump’s foreign policy objectives.
Pakistan will need to, soon. It is not enough for the PTI to claim that Trump wants its leader out of jail. Nor for the PPP to rejoice that its leader had reportedly received an invitation to attend Trump’s inauguration.
Historians may recall that, following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, president Ayub Khan sent Mr Z.A. Bhutto to Washington on a condolence mission. Not satisfied with a perfunctory handshake from the new president Lyndon Johnson, Bhutto asked for a private meeting, claiming he had an important message from Ayub Khan. Johnson, despite his crowded schedule, met Bhutto on Nov 29.
His staff warned him that Bhutto was an “accomplished marathon talker”. Johnson was annoyed that the message Bhutto conveyed was no more than a vapid reiteration of Pakistan’s loyalty to the US. Johnson punished him by castigating Pakistan for its friendship with communist China.
Today, we are again caught in the middle. We were out of favour then and are out of favour now. The Nixon-China romance of the 1970s is a faded Valentine card. We must reconcile ourselves to the new reality. Stronger hands than ours will control our steering wheel.
The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2025
ON Jan 20, the moment Donald Trump — the geriatric comeback kid — took his oath as the 47th US president, the destiny of the world changed. It was as if he had drawn a Tarot card predicting the future.
Trump sees it as the sun: “positivity, success, and vitality”. To other world leaders, the card is the sinister tower, signifying “upheaval, trauma, sudden change, and chaos”.
Trump does not believe in the occult. He believes in a God who saved him from an assassin’s bullet to return to the White House with a miraculous mandate. As a misogynist, he can sport on his belt the coiffured heads of two female opponents — Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. He has the whole world at his feet. If his provocative utterances are to be believed, he intends to play football with it.
To his fellow Americans, regardless of their genealogy, Trump promises America a greatness beyond the envy of his rivals. To hostile foreigners, he offers ‘peace through strength’. That mantra is not new. It has been around for over millennia, since the time of Roman Emperor Hadrian (Pax per virtutem). It is now Trump’s battle cry.
Postwar American leaders have inverted it into ‘peace through war’, most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Today, we are again caught in the middle.
Since the Russian assault on Ukraine in 2022, the US has committed $175 billion to Ukraine’s defence. Not all of it goes into Volodymyr Zelensky’s pockets. The Council on Foreign Relations has disclosed that much of it finances US activities and defence manufacturers in over 70 US cities. American largesse benefits America first.
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” the press mogul William Hearst once said. Ukraine provides the war; the US military machine and over 40 Nato-connected countries furnish the weapons.
China foresees war of a different sort with the US. One stab in this direction has been announced by Trump on his first day in office. He revoked a presidential order signed by his predecessor Biden in 2021, decreeing that half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030 should be electric.
Trump is adamant: “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.” Yet, despite this bombast, Trump has admitted: “I’m for electric cars,” adding the confessional: “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
Elon Musk — the richest man in the world — has anointed himself as the First Buddy. His proximity to President Trump is undeniably close. The next few years will tell us who is in whose pocket. Meanwhile, Musk is exultant that Trump has endorsed his ambition to land a man on the planet Mars (coincidentally, the planet of war).
Reaching Mars is not such an impossible boast. In the 1960s, America planned to put a man on the moon by end 1969. The Soviet Union dented this ambition in 1961 by launching its cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in a Vostok rocket. The Soviets lost out to the US though, when, in July 1969 within the deadline, two American astronauts stepped onto the moon’s surface.
Will Trump bring peace on earth? Which peace deal (Gaza or Ukraine) will secure him the Nobel Peace Prize? (Obama had been in power for less than eight months when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.)
Many countries must be recalibrating their foreign policies to achieve a resonance with Trump’s foreign policy objectives.
Pakistan will need to, soon. It is not enough for the PTI to claim that Trump wants its leader out of jail. Nor for the PPP to rejoice that its leader had reportedly received an invitation to attend Trump’s inauguration.
Historians may recall that, following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, president Ayub Khan sent Mr Z.A. Bhutto to Washington on a condolence mission. Not satisfied with a perfunctory handshake from the new president Lyndon Johnson, Bhutto asked for a private meeting, claiming he had an important message from Ayub Khan. Johnson, despite his crowded schedule, met Bhutto on Nov 29.
His staff warned him that Bhutto was an “accomplished marathon talker”. Johnson was annoyed that the message Bhutto conveyed was no more than a vapid reiteration of Pakistan’s loyalty to the US. Johnson punished him by castigating Pakistan for its friendship with communist China.
Today, we are again caught in the middle. We were out of favour then and are out of favour now. The Nixon-China romance of the 1970s is a faded Valentine card. We must reconcile ourselves to the new reality. Stronger hands than ours will control our steering wheel.
The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2025
Donald 2.0
Mahir Ali
YES, he’s back. And his second inaugural address, uncharacteristically mild in its delivery but predictably vile in much of its content, served as partial reminder of what the next four years portend for the United States and its imperial interests.
Last November, Donald Trump became the first contender since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century to score non-consecutive presidential victories.
Much of the blame for this twin atrocity can be attributed to the Obama and Biden administrations, which respectively facilitated his ascendancy by clinging to neoliberal imperatives in the wake of the global financial crisis, and then failed to learn lessons from their 2016 follies to avert a second coming.
In his farewell speech, Joe Biden sought to echo Dwight Eisenhower’s famous diatribe against the power of the military-industrial complex by verbally targeting the tech oligarchs.
In both cases, however, the question would be: if you were so perturbed by these phenomena, why did you not do anything about them while you held power?
Without directly taking credit, Trump on Monday mentioned in passing the previous day’s ceasefire in Gaza, citing the release of hostages as an achievement. It is widely accepted that pressure from the incoming US administration was crucial to sealing the deal. And anyone with an ounce of humanity can only welcome the halt of daily Israeli military killing sprees and the possible suspension of barriers to aid that are believed to have claimed upwards of 70,000 lives in 15 months, mainly those of women and children.
The ceasefire is to be welcomed, even though Benjamin Netanyahu has pretty much declared that it will only be temporary. The second phase of the truce, scheduled after 40 days, remains a tentative prospect.
Meanwhile, in his guise as a property magnate, Trump sees the rubble in Gaza as a positive prospect. He also remains dedicated to a Saudi-Israeli deal as a key supplement to the Abraham Accords achieved in his previous stint, but he may well be less invested in the token nod to a now passé ‘two-state solution’ that Riyadh might feel obliged to insist upon as a quid pro quo.
Here comes the beginning. And possibly the end.
Trump’s incoming oratory was clearly intended to insult his immediate predecessor, seated nearby (Donald did not bother to turn up when Joe took the oath four years ago), and other ex-presidents present. To her credit, Michelle Obama chose not to accompany her disappointing husband. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to “celebrate a rapist”.
Trump hasn’t been criminally convicted on that particular charge, although his predilections are hardly a secret. Among his claims to fame is the fact that a felon has returned to the White House in a country where many of those convicted on similar charges aren’t allowed to vote even after they have served their prison sentences. Most of the more serious cases against Trump were abandoned after his election, but the charge of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels stuck, and guilt was established even though no penalties were pronounced.
This character is now the chief executive of the most powerful nation the world has ever known, accompanied by a bunch of equally immoral underlings attracted from Fox News or the US Congress.
On the very first day of his inevitably blighted leadership, Trump has cracked down on ‘undocumented’ immigrants (some of whom have been in the US for decades, contributing to its blighted economy). He has declared an emergency on the southern border, as well as an energy emergency that involves drilling for more oil and gas. The associated contributions to the climate catastrophe are both incalculable and unmentioned, even though Los Angeles is still smouldering.
There’s much more, of course — including a pledge to take back the Panama Canal, and to rename the Gulf of Mexico after the biggest bully in the region. Greenland and Canada were not in this instance mentioned as targets of expansion, but Elon Musk erupted in extraterrestrial joy when Trump brought up the idea of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.
It remains to be seen whether that, and several other tall claims by Trump, reach fruition, but presidential pardons have flowed freely from both the outgoing and incoming presidents, focusing on the Biden family and associates in the first case, and Jan 6, 2021 culprits, who sought to thwart democracy, in the second.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity,” William Butler Yeats warned more than a century ago. Like many other alerts, it has gone unheeded.
What Trump failed to fit into scripted speech went into the longer and typically bizarre extempore peroration in the overflow room at the inauguration. He won’t come to his senses because he doesn’t have any. And what tomorrow may bring for the US and the world remains unwritten.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2025
Mahir Ali
January 22, 2025
DAWN
YES, he’s back. And his second inaugural address, uncharacteristically mild in its delivery but predictably vile in much of its content, served as partial reminder of what the next four years portend for the United States and its imperial interests.
Last November, Donald Trump became the first contender since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century to score non-consecutive presidential victories.
Much of the blame for this twin atrocity can be attributed to the Obama and Biden administrations, which respectively facilitated his ascendancy by clinging to neoliberal imperatives in the wake of the global financial crisis, and then failed to learn lessons from their 2016 follies to avert a second coming.
In his farewell speech, Joe Biden sought to echo Dwight Eisenhower’s famous diatribe against the power of the military-industrial complex by verbally targeting the tech oligarchs.
In both cases, however, the question would be: if you were so perturbed by these phenomena, why did you not do anything about them while you held power?
Without directly taking credit, Trump on Monday mentioned in passing the previous day’s ceasefire in Gaza, citing the release of hostages as an achievement. It is widely accepted that pressure from the incoming US administration was crucial to sealing the deal. And anyone with an ounce of humanity can only welcome the halt of daily Israeli military killing sprees and the possible suspension of barriers to aid that are believed to have claimed upwards of 70,000 lives in 15 months, mainly those of women and children.
The ceasefire is to be welcomed, even though Benjamin Netanyahu has pretty much declared that it will only be temporary. The second phase of the truce, scheduled after 40 days, remains a tentative prospect.
Meanwhile, in his guise as a property magnate, Trump sees the rubble in Gaza as a positive prospect. He also remains dedicated to a Saudi-Israeli deal as a key supplement to the Abraham Accords achieved in his previous stint, but he may well be less invested in the token nod to a now passé ‘two-state solution’ that Riyadh might feel obliged to insist upon as a quid pro quo.
Here comes the beginning. And possibly the end.
Trump’s incoming oratory was clearly intended to insult his immediate predecessor, seated nearby (Donald did not bother to turn up when Joe took the oath four years ago), and other ex-presidents present. To her credit, Michelle Obama chose not to accompany her disappointing husband. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to “celebrate a rapist”.
Trump hasn’t been criminally convicted on that particular charge, although his predilections are hardly a secret. Among his claims to fame is the fact that a felon has returned to the White House in a country where many of those convicted on similar charges aren’t allowed to vote even after they have served their prison sentences. Most of the more serious cases against Trump were abandoned after his election, but the charge of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels stuck, and guilt was established even though no penalties were pronounced.
This character is now the chief executive of the most powerful nation the world has ever known, accompanied by a bunch of equally immoral underlings attracted from Fox News or the US Congress.
On the very first day of his inevitably blighted leadership, Trump has cracked down on ‘undocumented’ immigrants (some of whom have been in the US for decades, contributing to its blighted economy). He has declared an emergency on the southern border, as well as an energy emergency that involves drilling for more oil and gas. The associated contributions to the climate catastrophe are both incalculable and unmentioned, even though Los Angeles is still smouldering.
There’s much more, of course — including a pledge to take back the Panama Canal, and to rename the Gulf of Mexico after the biggest bully in the region. Greenland and Canada were not in this instance mentioned as targets of expansion, but Elon Musk erupted in extraterrestrial joy when Trump brought up the idea of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.
It remains to be seen whether that, and several other tall claims by Trump, reach fruition, but presidential pardons have flowed freely from both the outgoing and incoming presidents, focusing on the Biden family and associates in the first case, and Jan 6, 2021 culprits, who sought to thwart democracy, in the second.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity,” William Butler Yeats warned more than a century ago. Like many other alerts, it has gone unheeded.
What Trump failed to fit into scripted speech went into the longer and typically bizarre extempore peroration in the overflow room at the inauguration. He won’t come to his senses because he doesn’t have any. And what tomorrow may bring for the US and the world remains unwritten.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2025
The curious case of Trump invitees
January 21, 2025
DAWN
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
THERE was a time when the British embassy was the most informed diplomatic enclave in Delhi. Then the Soviets usurped the slot, and now the Americans are unbeatable at the game.
India has been both close and aloof with major countries without compromising its principles or seldom losing diplomatic graces. Relations with Pakistan were always difficult but rarely bereft of composure. It’s been embarrassing, therefore, to watch endless discussions about the prime minister of India being keen to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration only to be passed over for the invite.
One hopes for the sake of diplomatic dignity with which one grew up in Nehru’s India that the stories about denied invitations are untrue. The fact that the foreign minister is attending the event instead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi also doesn’t deserve to be played up as a great achievement.
All manner of global supremacists and right-wingers adorning the event was a good enough reason for proud nations rich or poor to shun the melee. Many did. Wide coverage is also being given to tycoon Mukesh Ambani being invited by Trump personally. We should wait for the American readout of the liaison.
The two have met before. Also, Ambani hosted Ivanka Trump at some international event in India. If memory serves, Mukesh and his brother Anil Ambani have been invitees also at the Clinton and Bush inaugurations, respectively.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has danced the bhangra at an Ambani wedding. American politicians are notorious for coveting money and Trump has already raised a few hundred million from the several events leading to Monday’s inauguration. How much useful foreign exchange India spent while being in the economic doldrums to catch Trump’s eye, is worth investigating.
What should not escape being marvelled at is how the fates of two Indian tycoons close to Modi differ in their relations with the US. Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani led the chorus that prompted business captains to back Modi over the Congress as prime minister after Manmohan Singh, and they succeeded. Both were seen as pals of Modi.
Then Adani fell afoul of the American establishment and now cannot visit the country for fear of being arrested in a corruption scandal. Ambani is buying Russian oil in rubles, and still getting invited to Trump’s second coming.
One hopes for the sake of diplomatic dignity with which one grew up in Nehru’s India that the stories about denied invitations are untrue.
When we were in school, the British queen was as dear to everyone as president Kennedy. Then the Soviets went one better and introduced Yuri Gagarin to captivate the world and become another beloved country. Kennedy was admired for saving the world from annihilation with a tricky working relationship he struck up with Nikita Khrushchev. Don’t humiliate your adversary, was Kennedy’s mantra for advancing global peace, now missing in international relations.
Reagan’s invectives on the evil Russian empire and Biden calling Putin names would have incurred Kennedy’s censure. That’s why Indians wept when he was killed. Also, India was too engaged with the newer and poorer democracies around the world to list friends by their economic or military clout.
The closest I have been to an American president was to Jimmy Carter in 1978 when his Air Force One flew yards above our heads at JNU’s open air tea shop called Kamal Complex. Fear of Delhi’s leftist campus has forever haunted the inept and biased Indian establishment.
The short-lived pro-US government of Morarji Desai was no different. Having breached the Congress’s unbroken run at the helm for the first time since independence, Desai wouldn’t take chances. He placed sharpshooters on the terrace of JNU hostels, possibly on prodding by Carter’s Secret Service.
The government had evidently forgotten that the Indian left including JNU students had campaigned for the pro-West Janata Party’s victory against a pro-Moscow Mrs Gandhi in 1977.
Anyway, after the plane roared past the university campus, which falls on the approach to the airport, an incensed student did try to throw a stone as high as he could. Faux dialectical discussion ensued wondering if it could have grazed Carter’s plane. The consensus arrived at was that a catapult occasionally used to scare away crows would have worked better.
A visitor who came close on the heels of Carter needed greater protection. The Shah of Iran had nowhere to go from Tehran for his condition was not any better than Sheikh Hasina’s on the eve of her overthrow by street power in Bangladesh.
Carter advised Desai to make the Shah feel a bit more wanted. The Shah came. Many Indians joined Iranian students in India to line the royal route with black placards. Some JNU protestors were thrashed by Kiran Bedi, then in charge of traffic police. The students were packed off to Tihar jail where for the next few days they performed street plays.
One day, the Shah visited the Mughal-built Red Fort from where the legendary peacock throne was spirited away by a previous Persian ruler. His last international reception at the Mughal monument presaged doom for those he had touched. The Shah was deposed and died disowned by his friends, including India.
Carter lost the election to Reagan. Desai was evicted by his own fractious party, paving the way for Mrs Gandhi’s return. The Soviets had emerged victorious from the turbulence in India but were not as lucky in Afghanistan and Iran where a CIA tip-off led to the mullahs decimating the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party.
The Cold War over, India promptly bartered the Non-Aligned Movement and Saarc for the West’s treasure chest. When George W. Bush was in bad odour throughout the world, including his own country, for invading Iraq, the Congress prime minister in 2006 welcomed him, telling the hugely relieved guest: “We love you in India.”
It inspired a memorable repartee when communist leader Prakash Karat offered a rare quotable quote. “Speak for yourself,” he told Manmohan Singh. Diplomatic flummery didn’t help India. It hasn’t helped Modi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 21st, 2025
THERE was a time when the British embassy was the most informed diplomatic enclave in Delhi. Then the Soviets usurped the slot, and now the Americans are unbeatable at the game.
India has been both close and aloof with major countries without compromising its principles or seldom losing diplomatic graces. Relations with Pakistan were always difficult but rarely bereft of composure. It’s been embarrassing, therefore, to watch endless discussions about the prime minister of India being keen to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration only to be passed over for the invite.
One hopes for the sake of diplomatic dignity with which one grew up in Nehru’s India that the stories about denied invitations are untrue. The fact that the foreign minister is attending the event instead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi also doesn’t deserve to be played up as a great achievement.
All manner of global supremacists and right-wingers adorning the event was a good enough reason for proud nations rich or poor to shun the melee. Many did. Wide coverage is also being given to tycoon Mukesh Ambani being invited by Trump personally. We should wait for the American readout of the liaison.
The two have met before. Also, Ambani hosted Ivanka Trump at some international event in India. If memory serves, Mukesh and his brother Anil Ambani have been invitees also at the Clinton and Bush inaugurations, respectively.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has danced the bhangra at an Ambani wedding. American politicians are notorious for coveting money and Trump has already raised a few hundred million from the several events leading to Monday’s inauguration. How much useful foreign exchange India spent while being in the economic doldrums to catch Trump’s eye, is worth investigating.
What should not escape being marvelled at is how the fates of two Indian tycoons close to Modi differ in their relations with the US. Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani led the chorus that prompted business captains to back Modi over the Congress as prime minister after Manmohan Singh, and they succeeded. Both were seen as pals of Modi.
Then Adani fell afoul of the American establishment and now cannot visit the country for fear of being arrested in a corruption scandal. Ambani is buying Russian oil in rubles, and still getting invited to Trump’s second coming.
One hopes for the sake of diplomatic dignity with which one grew up in Nehru’s India that the stories about denied invitations are untrue.
When we were in school, the British queen was as dear to everyone as president Kennedy. Then the Soviets went one better and introduced Yuri Gagarin to captivate the world and become another beloved country. Kennedy was admired for saving the world from annihilation with a tricky working relationship he struck up with Nikita Khrushchev. Don’t humiliate your adversary, was Kennedy’s mantra for advancing global peace, now missing in international relations.
Reagan’s invectives on the evil Russian empire and Biden calling Putin names would have incurred Kennedy’s censure. That’s why Indians wept when he was killed. Also, India was too engaged with the newer and poorer democracies around the world to list friends by their economic or military clout.
The closest I have been to an American president was to Jimmy Carter in 1978 when his Air Force One flew yards above our heads at JNU’s open air tea shop called Kamal Complex. Fear of Delhi’s leftist campus has forever haunted the inept and biased Indian establishment.
The short-lived pro-US government of Morarji Desai was no different. Having breached the Congress’s unbroken run at the helm for the first time since independence, Desai wouldn’t take chances. He placed sharpshooters on the terrace of JNU hostels, possibly on prodding by Carter’s Secret Service.
The government had evidently forgotten that the Indian left including JNU students had campaigned for the pro-West Janata Party’s victory against a pro-Moscow Mrs Gandhi in 1977.
Anyway, after the plane roared past the university campus, which falls on the approach to the airport, an incensed student did try to throw a stone as high as he could. Faux dialectical discussion ensued wondering if it could have grazed Carter’s plane. The consensus arrived at was that a catapult occasionally used to scare away crows would have worked better.
A visitor who came close on the heels of Carter needed greater protection. The Shah of Iran had nowhere to go from Tehran for his condition was not any better than Sheikh Hasina’s on the eve of her overthrow by street power in Bangladesh.
Carter advised Desai to make the Shah feel a bit more wanted. The Shah came. Many Indians joined Iranian students in India to line the royal route with black placards. Some JNU protestors were thrashed by Kiran Bedi, then in charge of traffic police. The students were packed off to Tihar jail where for the next few days they performed street plays.
One day, the Shah visited the Mughal-built Red Fort from where the legendary peacock throne was spirited away by a previous Persian ruler. His last international reception at the Mughal monument presaged doom for those he had touched. The Shah was deposed and died disowned by his friends, including India.
Carter lost the election to Reagan. Desai was evicted by his own fractious party, paving the way for Mrs Gandhi’s return. The Soviets had emerged victorious from the turbulence in India but were not as lucky in Afghanistan and Iran where a CIA tip-off led to the mullahs decimating the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party.
The Cold War over, India promptly bartered the Non-Aligned Movement and Saarc for the West’s treasure chest. When George W. Bush was in bad odour throughout the world, including his own country, for invading Iraq, the Congress prime minister in 2006 welcomed him, telling the hugely relieved guest: “We love you in India.”
It inspired a memorable repartee when communist leader Prakash Karat offered a rare quotable quote. “Speak for yourself,” he told Manmohan Singh. Diplomatic flummery didn’t help India. It hasn’t helped Modi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 21st, 2025
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