Indian police clash with pro-Khamenei protesters in Kashmir

KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA


By AFP
March 2, 2026


Shia Muslim demonstrators hold a portrait of Iran's late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Srinagar on March 2, 2026 after restrictions were imposed amid protests over his death by US-Israel strikes - Copyright AFP Habib NAQASH

Police in Indian-administered Kashmir fired teargas on Monday during clashes with thousands of demonstrators protesting the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for a second day in a row.

The clashes came a day after tens of thousands of people in the Muslim-majority region joined peaceful street demonstrations against strikes by Israel and the United States that killed the Iranian leader.

On Monday, authorities closed schools and colleges for two days and imposed restrictions on public movement by barricading many arterial roads.

The restrictions were imposed “as a precautionary measure” after a group of Muslim organisations headed by the region’s chief cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq called for a strike, authorities said.

The protesters clashed with security forces when they were stopped from marching to the main square in the main city of Srinagar, which was sealed off.

Demonstrations were also held in other pockets across the Kashmir valley, with protesters displaying portraits of Khamenei, slain Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

They also shouted anti-Israel and anti-US slogans while waving flags associated with Iran and Hezbollah, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

“Minimum teargas shelling was resorted to when they (the demonstrators) did not heed warnings to stop,” a police officer told AFP on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to media.

Kashmir, which has a significant number of Shia Muslims, shares ancient connections with Iran, whose scholars are credited with introducing Islam and many fine handicrafts to the region.

Khamenei was given a momentous welcome during his only visit to the territory in the early 1980s.

On Sunday, the territory’s chief minister Omar Abdullah — who does not control the security forces — said mourners should be “allowed to grieve peacefully” and police should “refrain from using force or restrictive measures”.

Khamenei and top military leaders were killed on Saturday, prompting Iranian authorities to retaliate with strikes on Israel and across the Gulf.

Kashmir: Belonging, Conditional

Zahid Sultan , Anusreeta Dutta | 

17 Feb 2026

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What it means to live as a permanent suspect.

KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA

File Photo

I am a Kashmiri Muslim. That sentence alone now carries a burden that it did not always carry in this country. It no longer simply names a place or a faith; it marks a condition -- one of explanation, suspicion, and permanent audition. Every time I step outside the Valley, I am reminded that my citizenship is not assumed. It is examined. It is tested. It is sometimes demanded in the language of slogans, sometimes in the language of threats, and often in silence that waits for me to falter.

For Kashmiri students, artisans, and those who leave home only to earn a living, this is no longer exceptional. It is routine. You are stopped at stations, questioned about identity documents no one else is asked to show, warned about how you should speak, what you should avoid saying, and increasingly, what you must say. Patriotism is no longer inferred from conduct or civic belonging; it is extracted through performance. Chanting has become a substitute for citizenship. Refusal is treated not as choice, but as provocation.

The demand to chant slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” or “Vande Mataram” is rarely framed as violence by those who impose it. It is presented as something lighter -- a gesture, a courtesy, a harmless affirmation. But anyone who has lived at the receiving end knows better. This is not about affection for the nation. It is about power. It is about who gets to decide the terms on which ‘belonging’ is granted. When refusal is followed by threats, beatings, or public humiliation, the real meaning of the demand becomes unmistakable, which is obedience masquerading as patriotism.

“Vande Mataram” occupies a particular place in this discourse. Its defenders insist that it is merely a national song, emptied of context and history. But history does not empty itself so easily. The song emerges from Anand Math, a novel that does not hide its hostility toward Muslims. The Muslim figure in that novel is not a fellow inhabitant of the land but an obstacle to be overcome, an enemy to be defeated. This is not an incidental detail; it is the moral architecture of the text. To ask Muslims to sing this song without acknowledging that inheritance, is to demand amnesia. To insist upon it as proof of loyalty is to ask for something more disturbing -- consent for one’s own symbolic erasure.

Read Also: Identity Issue to Fore: The Vande Mataram Row

For a Kashmiri Muslim, this demand does not arrive in abstraction. It arrives in railway compartments, on streets, near hostels, in workplaces. It arrives backed by numbers, by menace, by the confidence that nothing will happen to those who enforce it. The violence that follows refusal is not spontaneous. It is enabled. It rests on the knowledge that the system will look away, that complaints may dissolve, that accountability is unlikely. This confidence is itself political. It tells us that some forms of violence are now socially legible as acts of “national discipline”.

We have heard enough stories, and seen enough individually, to know that this is not paranoia. Students are cornered and told to chant or leave. Artisans are abused while carrying their goods. Workers are warned that employment comes with conditions that extend beyond labour. Each incident may look small in isolation, but together, these form a pattern -- one in which Kashmiri Muslims are reminded, repeatedly, that they inhabit public space on sufferance.

What is most corrosive is not only the physical risk, but the moral calculation it forces upon Kashmiris. You begin to ask yourself questions no citizen should have to ask. Is silence safer than refusal? Is compliance temporary protection? Will asserting dignity cost more than it preserves? This is how coercion works: it turns conscience into a liability. It teaches you that integrity is expensive, and that safety is conditional. Over time, this produces not loyalty, but exhaustion.

This is not nationalism as shared political commitment, but as surveillance. It does not ask what you contribute, how you live, or whether you respect the law. It asks whether you can be made to say what you are told to say. Symbols become instruments of discipline, not expressions of belonging. In this arrangement, the Kashmiri Muslim is made to feel not a citizen among others, but a permanent suspect -- tolerated when compliant, punished when resistant.

What this kind of regime ultimately destroys is trust -- between citizens, in institutions, in the idea that law, not sentiment, governs public life. When mobs feel authorised to test loyalty, and institutions fail to intervene, the constitutional promise quietly retreats. Rights remain on paper, but their availability becomes uneven. You learn, quickly, that some grievances travel further than others.

The psychological cost of this is cumulative. You begin to move differently. You lower your voice. You avoid certain conversations. You rehearse answers. Identity becomes something to manage rather than inhabit. For students, this bleeds into classrooms where certain questions feel dangerous. For workers, it enters the workplace where silence becomes a strategy. For families, it becomes a constant worry -- about safety.

And yet, what is often misunderstood is that refusal still happens. Quietly, unevenly, without heroism. Many Kashmiri Muslims continue to refuse these demands not because they seek confrontation, but because something in them resists being rewritten. This refusal is not loud. It does not announce itself. But it carries moral weight precisely because of its cost. It says: I will not celebrate a story that erases me. I will not perform loyalty by denying my own history.

This is where the deeper failure of the current moment lies. A democracy confident in itself does not require ritualised affirmation. It does not fear silence. It does not punish refusal. The insistence on compelled speech signals not unity, but anxiety -- about difference, about memory, about narratives that do not align neatly with power. Nationalism that must be enforced through fear has already confessed its weakness.

For Kashmiri Muslims, the question is no longer abstract: what does it mean to belong to a nation that demands gratitude for humiliation? What does loyalty mean when it requires forgetting? These are not ideological provocations. These are questions that arise naturally when citizenship is experienced as conditional, when dignity must be bargained for, and when history is treated as an inconvenience rather than a shared inheritance.

If the nation insists that patriotism can only be expressed in one voice, through one set of symbols, then it is not building solidarity -- it is narrowing itself. A political community that cannot accommodate refusal will eventually criminalise memory. And when memory becomes suspect, justice follows.

We refuse such demands because we take the idea of citizenship seriously. Because we believe that belonging cannot be coerced, that loyalty cannot be beaten into someone, and that dignity cannot be conditional. To say this as a Kashmiri Muslim today is to accept risk. But it is also to insist that the nation must be larger than its loudest slogans.

Patriotism does not live in chants extracted under threat. It lives in the ordinary, difficult work of living together without forcing each other into moral submission. Until that truth is reclaimed, every forced slogan will speak less about love for the nation and more about fear of those who refuse to disappear.

Zahid Sultan is Kashmir-based independent researcher. Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher. The views are personal.

 KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA

The republic on trial: Militarised sovereignty and accountability in Kashmir

By Sankha Subhra Biswas

Published date 21 February, 2026

On the night of February 23–24, 1991, soldiers of the 4th Rajputana Rifles entered the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district in what was described as a routine cordon-and-search operation. By that point, such operations had become embedded in everyday life across Kashmir. 

Villages were sealed. Men were assembled outdoors for identification. Homes were searched through the night. The stated objective was counterinsurgency. The practical effect was the visible performance of state authority in a territory where sovereignty was under open challenge.

By morning, women in the two villages alleged that soldiers had entered their homes after separating the men and subjected them to sexual assault. The scale of the accusations was significant. The army denied the charges. 

Senior officials characterised the accusations as fabricated, implying that their purpose was to undermine counterinsurgency operations. Local police registered a First Information Report. A medical examination was conducted. 

The case entered the formal register of the criminal justice system. Investigations followed. Reports questioned the credibility of the allegations. A closure report was eventually filed. No full criminal trial ever tested the evidence in open court.

That absence is the defining feature of the case. Not conviction. Not acquittal. Not adversarial adjudication. No criminal courtroom has examined the allegations through cross-examination, evidentiary scrutiny and judicial determination for more than three decades. They have remained administratively contained.

Counterinsurgency as governance

To understand why, the events must be situated in the early 1990s, when armed insurgency in Kashmir escalated sharply, as demands for self-determination moved from protest to armed movements. 

The Indian state responded with a heavy troop deployment and institutionalised counterinsurgency as a governing framework. Emergency powers were not exceptional interventions; they became routine instruments of rule.

Counterinsurgency is often described as a military doctrine. In practice, it is a political order. It regulates mobility, domestic space, speech and suspicion. It redraws the boundary between civilian and suspect. 

Armed personnel physically enact sovereignty when they seal entire villages overnight and search households. Authority does not simply exist; it is staged.

In that setting, claims of sexual abuse have ramifications that extend beyond personal misconduct. They propose that the coercive rationale of counterinsurgency may have infiltrated personal domains. Sexual violence in conflict situations is not just assault; it shows who is in charge.

The state’s immediate response was denial, followed by investigative framing that foregrounded insurgency conditions and questioned credibility. From the outset, the case became entangled in a broader struggle over narrative: was Kashmir a site of necessary security operations, or a site where civilians were exposed to unchecked force?

Survivors and activists pursued reinvestigation through courts and petitions. The matter resurfaced periodically. But it never matured into a decisive judicial reckoning. The unresolved status hardened into a structural outcome. Kunan and Poshpora endure because they reveal the internal tensions of militarised governance.

When emergency powers become the grammar of rule, accountability narrows. The issue extends beyond the events of that night. It concerns how democracies respond when allegations implicate the coercive institutions tasked with defending territorial integrity.

The issue is of serious importance for Indian democracy. Undoubtedly, a democracy that is confident in its institutions is willing to subject them to scrutiny. A democracy that hesitates signals a different priority: preserving the apparatus before testing it.

AFSPA and immunity

The unresolved status of Kunan and Poshpora cannot be understood without examining the legal regime governing Kashmir. At the centre of that regime stands the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA).

AFSPA authorises armed forces operating in “disturbed areas” to arrest without warrant, conduct searches and use force under broad conditions. Most consequentially, it requires prior sanction from the central government before any prosecution of armed forces personnel can proceed in civilian courts. Without that sanction, criminal proceedings cannot begin.

In theory, this provision is presented as protection for soldiers operating in high-risk environments. In practice, it has functioned as a structural bottleneck. Allegations against armed forces personnel remain contingent on executive approval, significantly limiting judicial autonomy in initiating proceedings.

In the wake of the Kunan and Poshpora allegations, investigations were initiated and a closure report generated, although survivors sought further reinvestigation. The legal proceedings encountered obstacles, primarily the sanction requirement, preventing the case from reaching a trial.

AFSPA embeds counterinsurgency logic within statutory law, altering legal priorities in disturbed regions and relaxing operational constraints on security forces. While defenders of the act maintain that such legal protections are essential to prevent debilitating litigation against soldiers, this narrative must not absolve the necessity of accountability.

Allegations of serious crimes should undergo transparent processes, rather than be obstructed by routine sanction clauses, which foster "immunity by design." This procedural impunity, though not formally declared, cultivates perceptions within communities that certain actors operate beyond judicial scrutiny.

The Kunan and Poshpora cases underscore the impact of emergency legislation on democratic accountability, wherein legal structures intended to curb power paradoxically become instruments of shielding it. 

The central issue transcends operational freedom for soldiers; it questions the legitimacy of a democracy that permits executive discretion in determining accountability for its own agents.

Gendered power in a militarised territory

It is easy for the discussion about Kunan and Poshpora to get mired in controversies about facts, figures, accounts and inconsistencies. But the underlying level is just as important: how sexual violence works in a militarised setting to maintain a hierarchy that favours the powerful.

Cordons and searches blur the distinction between public and private. Men are assembled outside; women remain inside; armed forces enter homes under the guise of the law. The home ceases to be a safe haven and becomes a site of surveillance and domination. Power enters the domain of the intimate.

Civil society reports, including documentation by the Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, have identified numerous cases of sexual violence linked to the conflict and have argued that legal immunity structures enable such abuses.

In a patriarchal world, the social implications of sexual violence are exponentially greater. A woman’s body is inextricably bound to her family's honour and the community’s identity. An act of violence has repercussions that reverberate beyond the survivor — shaking kinship, conjugal prospects and social status. Stigma multiplies the pain. Silence can be a shield, even as it conceals the injury.

This narrative plays out in the way charges are treated. Victims are confronted with both state power and social coercion. To speak out is to invite ostracism; to remain silent is to retain social status at the expense of justice. When women in Kunan and Poshpora turned to the law for redress, they challenged both militarised power and the social norms that regulate speech in their society.

The state’s response follows the usual pattern in war zones. Allegations are couched in terms of exaggeration or political motivation. In insurgency situations, allegations of abuse are frequently restated as disinformation. The onus is on the complainant to demonstrate injury and establish noble intentions.

However, emergency governance heightens gendered vulnerability. Armed men possess legal sanction, mobility and impunity; civilian women do not have a comparable level of leverage. Even in the absence of policy, the asymmetry creates risks.

Kunan and Poshpora remain important because they highlight this asymmetry. They expose how counterinsurgency obscures the distinction between security operation and social regulation.

The political question is not confined to the truth of individual allegations. It concerns whether emergency regimes adequately protect bodily autonomy. If domestic space becomes penetrable under state authority and allegations of abuse remain untested in court, then vulnerability is structural, not episodic.

Exceptional law and unequal citizenship

The Indian Constitution officially guarantees the principles of equal treatment before the law, due process, and judicial remedies against state wrongdoing. These principles form the normative foundation of republican legitimacy, under the assumption that independent courts can effectively check abuses of state power, regardless of their magnitude.

In regions governed under prolonged emergency legislation, that equilibrium shifts. The formal architecture of constitutional rights remains intact, but its operational character changes. The requirement of executive sanction before prosecuting armed forces personnel introduces an additional layer between allegation and adjudication. Legal accountability becomes conditional on administrative approval.

Kunan and Poshpora exemplify this structural tension. In ordinary criminal law, the filing of a First Information Report and the collection of evidence can culminate in trial if prosecutorial thresholds are met. In Kashmir, under AFSPA, the path from accusation to courtroom is mediated by executive discretion. The effect is not the suspension of the law but rather its recalibration in favour of operational protection.

This recalibration alters the citizen–state relationship. Constitutional equality presumes that public officials and civilians stand before the same judicial forums when accused of grave crimes. Where prior sanction operates as a gatekeeping device, that presumption weakens. Even when legally authorised, the appearance of differential accountability carries political consequences.

The 2019 reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir into Union Territories intensified this contradiction. The stated objective was integration and normalisation. Yet the legal instruments that institutionalise exceptional security governance remain largely unchanged. Political autonomy contracted while emergency frameworks endured. The assurance of constitutional uniformity exists alongside differentiated layers of accountability.

Legitimacy in a democracy rests not only on territorial control but institutional credibility. Public confidence in procedural equality erodes when serious allegations against state agents fail to reach open judicial examination. The issue extends beyond the reputation of the armed forces. It concerns systemic questions: whether constitutional guarantees operate with the same force in frontier spaces as they do elsewhere.

A republic with strong institutions allows for scrutiny, especially when coercive power is at its highest. Shielding institutions from prosecution may preserve short-term operational strategies, but it carries long-term costs for constitutional trust. The persistence of unresolved cases such as Kunan and Poshpora underscores the tension between emergency governance and equal justice.

The republic on trial

Kunan and Poshpora cannot be treated as an aberration or tragic residue of a turbulent decade. What followed 1991 was not administrative drift; it was the structured outcome of a state that chose insulation over scrutiny. 

The long refusal to subject grave allegations to open trial reflects not institutional weakness but a political priority: preserving the coercive apparatus deemed essential to governing a contested territory.

At stake is not only justice for survivors. It is the character of the Indian state under conditions of internal conflict. Modern states claim a monopoly over legitimate violence. In democratic theory, that monopoly is justified by law, equality and accountability. 

But when the institutions that exercise sovereign force are shielded from ordinary judicial testing, sovereignty begins to detach from democracy. It becomes managerial, securitised and increasingly insulated from popular scrutiny.

AFSPA is not merely an emergency statute. It is an expression of how the state manages peripheral regions, where consent is fragile. In such spaces, coercion is normalised and legal exceptions become routine. 

While executive sanction regimes are defended as operational necessities, in practice, they produce stratified citizenship. One legal order for the core, another for the frontier where sovereignty is enforced through prolonged militarisation.

This hierarchy bears significant political implications. It indicates that the priorities of territorial integrity and strategic control take precedence over equal justice. It implies to citizens residing in militarised zones that constitutional guarantees are conditional and subject to security considerations.

Over time, such behaviour corrodes the ideological claim that the state represents a unified democratic community. Compliance may persist but political legitimacy erodes significantly.

From our perspective, the issue is not simply a question of procedural reform. It exposes the deeper logic of a state that defends property, territory and geopolitical standing with extraordinary powers while narrowing democratic accountability. Legal exceptionalism at the margins reshapes the centre, rarely limiting militarised governance to its original theatre.

Accountability, therefore, is not a liberal luxury. It is a material question of power. Either the armed apparatus of the state remains subject to the same judicial processes as the citizens it governs or a differentiated sovereignty takes root — one that reserves immunity for those who wield force in its name.

What would accountability entail? Enforced limits on executive sanction, independent prosecutorial authority in areas under emergency law, and sustained legislative review of exceptional security regimes are the minimum requirements for accountability.

But more fundamentally, it requires rejecting the premise that security and equality are mutually exclusive. A democratic state confident in its social foundations does not fear judicial scrutiny of its own agents.

Thirty-five years on, the unresolved status of Kunan and Poshpora is not merely a legal anomaly. It is a political marker. It reveals the tension between a constitutional promise of equal citizenship and a governing practice that privileges militarised order.

Until allegations of this magnitude are tested in open court, that contradiction remains active — a reminder that sovereignty without accountability drifts toward domination and that democracy without equality becomes rhetoric.

India’s BoP dilemma

Editorial 

Published January 28, 2026 
DAWN


WHILE the Donald Trump-led Board of Peace is not without controversy, mainly because of the US president’s ambitions to create a body that could rival the UN, India faces a different dilemma where joining the board is concerned. Although Mr Trump has extended an invitation to New Delhi, reports indicate that India is “examining” the proposal. The main reason for New Delhi’s dithering, as per the Indian commentariat, may be that it fears that joining the board could lead to ‘unwanted’ attention towards the Kashmir dispute. The US leader has in the past offered his services to mediate the Kashmir question, while he also claimed to have played an integral part in bringing last year’s Pakistan-India hostilities to an end. India, however, remains allergic to third-party interest in occupied Kashmir.

India-US relations have cooled considerably since the US president’s first term. Therefore, if India stays out of the BoP, it would further invite Mr Trump’s wrath, as the American leader does not like to take no for an answer. If it joins, it may face questions about Kashmir, as Donald Trump has indicated the BoP is not just about ending the Gaza slaughter. But beyond the board’s ambitions, this episode reveals more about India’s anxieties regarding held Kashmir. While it is averse to third-party mediation, it has repeatedly rebuffed Pakistan’s attempts to discuss the matter bilaterally. This situation is unsustainable. If matters are left as they are, not only will the Kashmiri people continue to be denied their fundamental rights, but the occupied region will remain a powder keg that can ignite the entire area. Last year’s post-Pahalgam clash clearly illustrates this. India has long been dodging attempts by friendly states to help mediate the Kashmir issue. Yet it has also closed all doors for a bilateral resolution with Pakistan, as well as the representatives of the Kashmiri people. This has resulted in the permanent shadow of conflict over South Asia, while India’s hardened rhetoric has indicated that it is not interested in peace. The people of South Asia deserve better. A thorough peace process is required that can address all outstanding issues, including Kashmir. But for this, India will have to let go of its shibboleths regarding the disputed territory, stop threatening Pakistan’s security, and come to the negotiating table in a spirit of mutual respect.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026

Left Parties Against India Joining Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’

Abdul Rahman | 22 Jan 2026

Left parties in India warn Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” is an attempt to bypass the UN and its charter, stating that participation would undermine India’s commitments to the Palestinian cause.

Left parties in India called upon the central government not to join the so-called Board of Peace launched by the US as part of President Donald Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza, claiming it would be a betrayal to Palestinians and antithetical to the country’s long-term commitments to the UN. “India’s participation in such a Board, which does not respect Palestinian rights, would constitute a grave betrayal of the Palestinian cause,” the country’s five major left parties claimed in a joint statement issued on Wednesday, January 21.

The signatories of the statement include Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and All India Forward Block (AIFB).

“The Indian government should stay away from such proposals and stand resolutely in defense of Palestine and other countries of the Global South that are threatened by the US imperialist ambitions,” the joint statement says.

The Board of Peace is part of the second phase of Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza. The second phase of the ceasefire deal was announced last week by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. This was done despite the US being unable to make Israel implement the most crucial aspects of the first phase of the ceasefire deal, in force for the last three months. Israel has continued its attacks inside Gaza, killing more Palestinians, while its forces still occupy large parts beyond the so-called yellow line.

Trump will chair the board for life

On Friday, Trump announced Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and former British prime minister Tony Blair would be part of the initiative’s Executive Board under his chairmanship. Trump has declared he would be the chair of the board for life.

The board proposed two kinds of membership based on monetary contribution: countries that pay USD 1 billion would be permanent members, while others would participate for a three year term. The US has sent letters of invitation and a draft charter for the board to around 60 countries, including India, since Friday.

Trump has claimed that the board would oversee “governance capacity building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large scale funding, and capital mobilization” in the territory devastated by Israel for over two years.

As on Wednesday, only a small part of nations invited have confirmed their participation. Those that have include Israel, which has been the main responsible for the genocide and destruction in Gaza. There is no Palestinian representation to the board.

Some countries, including France, have declined Trump’s invitation to join the board, while most of the others have refrained from responding to the invitation publicly, likely due to considerations including the plan’s possible impact on the United Nations.

The board will undermine UN

Claiming that such a proposal “deliberately circumvents the UN and seeks to create a new international structure controlled” by it, left parties in India insisted that this attempt to “override existing international institutions must be firmly opposed” by countries.

Despite the fact that the UN Security Council had approved Trump’s peace plan for three years, confirming the formation of the “Board of Peace” solely for Gaza, documents sent along with the invitation claim that it will not be limited to Gaza, and may also deal with other conflicts across the world, Reuters reported on Monday.

Meanwhile, Trump has been openly claiming that the board might replace the UN which, according to him, has failed to fulfill its primary duty and has been harmful to US interests.

M. A. Baby, general secretary of the CPI (M) has noted that the board is an instrument to exploit “the destruction of Palestinian homeland for profit” by the US and its allies. Trump’s so-called peace plan, he underlined, was vague on the most crucial demand raised by the Palestinians about the end of Israeli occupation of their territories. Baby asked the Indian government to “call out Israel on their genocide and the US of being its accomplice” rather than being a part of their colonial plans.

Left parties have also been critical of the Narendra Modi-led government’s stance on Gaza since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023, accusing it of betraying India’s long-standing position in favor of Palestinian independence and openly siding with the genocidal Zionist regime.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch

Mark Carney, World Hero

Dean Baker

 January 26, 2026

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

I’m not in the habit of touting central bankers as heroes, but Mark Carney definitely hit a home-run in his speech at Davos. He called out Donald Trump’s derangement and outlined the basis for a new structure of international relations that does not rely on the United States to play the leading role.

To his credit, Carney did not glorify the old system, acknowledging that in the “rules-based system” led by the United States, the rules were not always followed when it benefited the United States. He didn’t get into the specifics of the violations, maybe his list wouldn’t be as extensive as some of ours, but at least he acknowledged that all were not equal under the law.

But the key point was the recognition that Trump has destroyed the era of U.S. hegemony, and the rest of the world has to adjust to that fact. Carney called on the “middle powers,” which would include Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Canada, to band together to craft a new system.

Carney has taken big steps in that direction with Canada. He has moved to make new trade deals with Brazil, the European Union, and even Mexico in the event that Trump decides to nix the current tripartite USMCA that is up for renewal this year.

Perhaps most importantly, Carney has moved to strengthen trade ties with China. This both opens up substantial economic benefits and shows the sort of geo-political pragmatism that Canada and other democracies will need in confronting Trump.

On the economic side, China can be a huge market for Canada’s agricultural output, as well as its oil and natural gas, if Trump decides that he no longer wants it. China also can be a major supplier of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles.

On this last issue, Carney struck the perfect compromise. While Canada, like the United States, imposes prohibitive 100% tariffs on most Chinese EVs, it agreed to import 50,000 EVs a year with very low tariffs. This is similar to the voluntary export restraint (VER) agreement the United States had with Japan in the 1980s. At the time, high gas prices were causing a massive shift in demand from big gas guzzling U.S. cars to well-built high mileage Japanese cars.

In order to protect the domestic industry, the Reagan administration agreed to accept a limited number of Japanese cars. This gave the U.S. industry time to adjust and begin building higher quality small cars. The Carney deal with Chinese EVs can have the same effect. It will allow Canadian drivers to recognize the benefits of the low-cost high quality EVs produced by Chinese will at the same time providing breathing space for its domestic auto industry to produce EVs, likely in collaboration with the leading Chinese companies.

This sort of deal can also be a model for Europe, which is also struggling with Chinese competition in its auto industry. Unlike Donald Trump, the rest of the world recognizes the reality of global warming. This means that they have a very real interest in shifting as quickly as possible to EVs, while still preserving jobs in their auto industry. This will also raise living standards, as people can buy cars that cost less to buy and far less to operate.

Carney’s deals seem to already be paying off for the country’s economy. It added254,000 jobs in 2025, growth of 1.4%. This would be equivalent to an increase in jobs of more than 2.2 million in the United States, roughly four times what we generated last year. In spite of the drop in exports with the United States, Canada’s exports were 0.5% higher in 2025 than in 2024.

While it is common for pundits to boast that the United States economy has left other wealthy countries in the dust, measured in purchasing power parity terms, Canada’s economy has actually grown slightly more rapidly than the U.S. economy since the pandemic.

This doesn’t mean everything is great in Canada. At 6.8 percent, its unemployment rate is considerably higher than in the United States. But this was also true before the pandemic. Canada also has a problem of high housing prices, which Carney is attempting to address by promoting new construction. The jury is still out on that one, but it is helpful to have someone in charge who can think about these issues seriously.

The other part of this story is that Europe and other democracies need to approach China with the same sort of pragmatic clarity as Carney. China is not a democracy, and it has a long list of human rights abuses. Nonetheless, it is an essential ally in a world where Donald Trump insists that he can do whatever he wants.

If closer ties with China seems troublesome, people should look back to the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II. No one thought Joseph Stalin was a nice guy, but Roosevelt, Churchill and the rest of the anti-fascist alliance understood the necessity of his role in defeating Hitler. It is unfortunate that we have come to the point where China would be seen as the stable super-power, but we have.

It would be great if Canada and other middle powers, to take Carney’s phrase, can reconstruct a international system of laws, where ideally they will be applied equally regardless of the power of the states in question. Hopefully, they will promote democracy and human rights in practice, not just in rhetoric.

But those are issues that will ultimately be determined down the road. For now, the issue at hand is putting together an alliance of countries that can tell Donald Trump he cannot do whatever he wants around the world. And if he doesn’t like it, maybe he can get his friend at FIFA to give him another peace prize.

This first ran on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

Be at the table, or on the menu

Jawed Naqvi 

Published January 27, 2026 
DAWN

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.


CANADIAN Prime Minister Mark Carney finished two significantly ground-breaking visits to Beijing and Davos last week and they hold a message for nations and leaders feeling the heat from President Donald Trump’s insulting and arrogant behaviour with friend and foe alike.

And while Carney maintained his country’s relations with the US were multifaceted and far-reaching, he was pleased that his rare talks with President Xi Jinping had set up guardrails for greater predictability in bilateral relations and to keep each other’s interests in mind. He also clarified — perhaps to avoid needlessly poking Donald Trump in the eye — that there hadn’t been a free trade agreement with Beijing even if thousands of electric cars from China would be plying Canadian roads in the coming days. And if this riles the US, so be it.

Why is it so difficult for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, representing a no less major power, to speak up like Carney? Holding the BRICS presidency for 2026, Modi is required to host a summit of its increasingly powerful and influential leaders in New Delhi around August. However, when Modi does speak, he usually speaks about a municipal election his party would win or has won, if he is not otherwise threatening to replace this or that opposition government in the coming state polls.

The last time one heard him speak on a foreign policy issue from Indian soil was the threat he made (unusually) in English in Bihar about avenging the death of innocent tourists in a terror attack in Kashmir in April last year. It resulted in Operation Sindoor against Pakistan, which apparently served no purpose other than to reveal India’s shocking diplomatic isolation under Modi’s watch.

Going by the claims of Modi’s own preferred media, he is a great speaker, a charismatic one, in fact. So why does the prime minister of India get tongue-tied facing Trump, whose presidency he canvassed for in 2020, which for likelier other reasons Trump lost.

In Davos, Carney spoke even more boldly about souring ties with the US. He told the ruling elites that the 80-year-old world order under US stewardship had ruptured and that there was a need to rearrange equations. The betterment of humanity and protecting its only known hospitable planet was paramount.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney’s message was blunt. “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”


Why does the prime minister of India get tongue-tied facing Donald Trump?

Carney’s address was backed by the German chancellor and was followed by what seems like a Europe-Canadian pact to shun Donald Trump’s self-promoted Board of Peace for Gaza. Its endorsement by leading Islamic states including Pakistan, Egypt and Turkiye makes it trickier to fathom the true intentions. Imagine the lot working with Benjamin Netanyahu who for his own reasons has enrolled himself aboard. It’s not easy to see how Israel and Pakistan could be in a team that too in the name of alleviating the suffering of Palestinian people! India would have plunged headlong for the plan, but the unstated fear of being seen in the company of Pakistan has perhaps put it in a spot.


Trump’s plan, in any case, is widely seen as a half-baked idea that postures to tend to the humanitarian pleas of the victims of Israeli genocide. It’s also hampered by an even greater worry that Trump may be seeing the body as a substitute for the UN itself.

It’s in this context that Carney’s call for a new game plan for the “middle powers” finds traction, a group to which India presumably belongs as the world’s fourth largest economy. The call was to collectively negotiate the jostling of Big Powers, which impacts everyone, including the Global South. Thus, Carney not only came close to the BRICS ideal of multipolarity, he surpassed it in his zeal to locate a world without nerve-wracking uncertainties or any more inbuilt inequalities with the US.

What did Carney say that melds with the agenda of a multipolar world, which should make India and other BRICS nations take notice? Like them, he spoke of the threat to multilateral institutions, namely the WTO, the UN, COP, the very architecture of collective problem-solving. “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.” In other words, individual deals with the bully are ill-advised.

“Hegemons cannot continually monetise their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure. This room knows this is classic risk management… . … Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.” Carney could be reading from a Xi Jinping script for the coming BRICS summit.

Calling the middle powers in particular to act together, Carney cautioned: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” How could Donald Trump not pace himself in the frame? “China will eat you up,” was his angry response.

There are questions nevertheless that flow from a tartly pinpointed speech. Does Carney’s new order propose to regard Palestine, Venezuela, Congo et al as equally violated by the old order? And what would be the fate of Nato, the Five Eyes and other assorted dubious relics of the US-led West? They can’t logically remain intact, can they, in the event of a genuine rupture with the old order?


Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2026

Great white hopes

Mahir Ali 

Published January 28, 2026 

DAWN

A PAIR of North American leaders delivered remarkably different speeches in Switzerland last week. Donald Trump’s address was a largely predictable, self-aggrandising rant that ranged from justifications for his claim on Greenland (or possibly Iceland) to a racist diatribe against Somalis, interpolated with denunciations of Joe Biden. Mark Carney acknowledged that the rules-based international order was always partially fictitious, and that the rupture cannot be reversed.

The Canadian PM uttered some truths that most of his European counterparts would struggle to enunciate. Carney has, therefore, widely been hailed as a viable anti-Trump by the usual centrists and some progressives. He called upon middle powers to act together in dealing with the foremost hegemon, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. But Denmark has been at the table, yet Greenland is on the menu.

Since last week, Trump has seemingly rescinded his invasion plan and dropped the threat of increased tariffs against European nations that resisted his acquisition of Greenland, citing a ‘framework agreement’ with Nato for establishing military bases (which would anyhow have been possible). Details are still murky, although Guantánamo Bay has been cited as a possible model. The lesson many analysts have drawn is that, like a typical bully, Trump backs down in the face of resolute resistance. If it’s as simple as that, one is forced to wonder why he has not been challenged more frequently.

It is notable, meanwhile, that there wasn’t even a passing mention of Israel or Gaza — under whose rubble the last vestiges of any international order lie buried, alongside the bones of Palestinian children, women and men — in Carney’s oration. Perhaps because Canada has been complicit in the genocide, alongside various other Anglophone or European nations. It is also notable that whereas a bunch of European countries turned down membership of Trump’s ridiculous Board of Peace (BoP) on the basis that an invitation had been extended to Vladimir Putin, none of them cited the inclusion of Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal maniac by any measure, as a sufficient cause for steering clear of the imperial entity.


Neither Trump nor Carney offers a solution.

The BoP charter attested at Davos by Trump with the same flamboyance as his birthday greetings to Jeffrey Epstein was signed with a bunch of supplicants hovering in the background, much like the farce at Sharm el-Sheikh last October. The BoP was stupidly endorsed by the UN Security Council last year, when it was considered purely a Gaza-related initiative. The charter doesn’t mention the Israeli-devastated territory at all, but the draft text of its first resolution, revealed on Monday, offers disturbing details.

Even Israel-approved Palestinians are relegated to the fourth tier of the arbitrary structure with Trump at its helm for as long he wishes (or gets bored with peace), with a broad range of reprobates in the higher echelons of this travesty. Trump’s ghostly son-in-law Jared Kushner laid out a bizarre plan at Davos, reinforcing the impression that Palestinians barely matter (except as a potential labour force) in the reconstruction of Gaza as a tourist resort. The UAE will reportedly bankroll a Potemkin village in Rafah to house 25,000 Palestinians vetted by their overlords, and biometrically scanned each time they move in or out of their abodes. A hi-tech refugee camp, in other words.

The enablers, by and large, are autocratic states eager to participate in a global kakistocracy. The fate of Gaza has been handed over to real-estate agents. More than half of the narrow strip is already under Israeli control, and that’s whe­re any construction activity might take place. The ceasefire that Trump crows about has been followed by almost 500 murders by the Israel Defence Forces, including children and journalists, and the demolition of thousands of buildings. The genocide never ended, and the BoP has a recipe for completing it.

At Davos, the US president trumpeted his stature as the self-ordained saviour of Western civilisation. The Canadian PM took a different tack but cast himself in a similar role. Frankly, neither of them fits the bill as a great white hope, with one proclaiming a new world disorder and the other lamenting a status quo ante that benefited the few and dispossessed the many.

Nor does either of them offer a viable vision for the future. The actor Jackie Chan recently revealed that he broke down while watching a video in which a Palestinian child was asked, “What will you be when you grow up?”, and the boy nonchalantly responded: “Children on our side don’t grow up.”

It’s impossible to hold back the tears, but I doubt it would evoke a similar response in either of the great white hopes. If a better world is possible, neither Trump nor Carney will be part of it.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026