‘Doomsday Clock’ moves closer to midnight, a year into Trump term

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its time to 85 seconds to midnight — four seconds closer than a year ago.

By AFP
January 27, 2026


Released doves fly past the "Peace Statue" in Nagasaki, part of a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary on August 9, 2025 of the world's last nuclear attack - Copyright AFP/File Philip FONG

The “Doomsday Clock” representing how near humanity is to catastrophe on Tuesday moved closer than ever to midnight as concerns grow on nuclear weapons, climate change and disinformation.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which set up the metaphorical clock at the start of the Cold War, moved its time to 85 seconds to midnight — four seconds closer than a year ago.

The announcement comes a year into President Donald Trump’s second term in which he has shattered global norms including by ordering unilateral attacks and withdrawing from a slew of international organizations.

Russia, China the United States and other major countries have “become increasingly aggressive, adversarial and nationalistic,” said a statement announcing the clock shift, determined after consultations with a board that includes eight Nobel laureates.

“Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence and other apocalyptic dangers.”

The Doomsday Clock board warned of heightened risks of a nuclear arms race, with the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia set to expire next week and Trump pushing a costly “Golden Dome” missile defense system that would further militarize space.

It also noted the record emission levels of carbon dioxide, the key driver of the planet’s warming temperatures, after Trump sharply reversed US policy on fighting climate change and a number of other countries also backtracked.

Board members warned of a fracturing of global trust.

“We are living through an information Armageddon — the crisis beneath all crises — driven by extractive and predatory technology that spreads lies faster than facts and profits from our division,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipina investigative journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, founded by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and other nuclear scientists at the University of Chicago, initially placed the clock at seven minutes to midnight in 1947.

It was moved closer last year but by only one second, amid guarded hopes on newly reinaugurated Trump’s promises to pursue peace.

THE REAL POLL

US consumer confidence drops to lowest level since 2014


By AFP
January 27, 2026


The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell 9.7 points in January from December, to 84.5 - Copyright AFP/File CHARLY TRIBALLEAU

Beiyi SEOW

Consumer confidence in the United States plunged in January to its lowest level since 2014, survey data showed Tuesday, as American households continue to fret about inflation and elevated costs of living.

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slumped by 9.7 points from December to 84.5, with consumers growing more cautious about major spending decisions.

A consumption slowdown — if it took hold — would hit at the key driver of the world’s biggest economy, with consumer spending accounting for more than two-thirds of US GDP.

The new data comes as US President Donald Trump struggles to reverse voters’ negative feelings about the economy ahead of the critical midterm elections in November — in which his Republican Party risks losing control of Congress.

“Confidence collapsed in January, as consumer concerns about both the present situation and expectations for the future deepened,” said the research group’s chief economist Dana Peterson.

She added that all five components of the index worsened, driving the overall level to its lowest since May 2014 — “surpassing its Covid-19 pandemic depths.”

While the Conference Board survey data on expectations has diverged from spending patterns in the past, economist Oliver Allen of Pantheon Macroeconomics said: “We’d be surprised if its recent deterioration proves to be an entirely false signal.”

This is “particularly given the recent stagnation in real incomes and the already rock-bottom personal saving rate,” he said in a note.

In January, net views on current business conditions “dwindled to just barely positive,” while perceptions of employment conditions also weakened, The Conference Board said.

Meanwhile, consumers tended to be pessimistic about factors influencing the economy.

“The low hiring rate is a problem,” said Navy Federal Credit Union chief economist Heather Long.

“Layer on top of that a lot of geopolitical uncertainty over Venezuela, Greenland and the Federal Reserve, and Americans continue to be frustrated with the economy,” she added.

Peterson of The Conference Board flagged that “references to prices and inflation, oil and gas prices, and food and grocery prices remained elevated.”

“Mentions of tariffs and trade, politics, and the labor market also rose in January, and references to health/insurance and war edged higher,” she said.

Consumers increasingly indicated that they were not planning on big-ticket purchases in the next six months as well, suggesting that they are becoming more selective in their spending.

“Used cars, furniture, TVs, and smartphones remained the most popular within their categories for future purchases,” according to The Conference Board.

Multilateralism is straining at the seams: Is global cooperation in retreat?

A decade after its zenith, multilateralism stands at a crossroads, tested by crises, politics, and the limits of global will.

Amna Mahmood 

Published January 27, 2026 

PRISM/DAWN

Over a decade ago, in a rare moment of global unity – rather difficult to fathom today – all members of the United Nations (UN) unanimously adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Agenda 2030, at the 70th session of the General Assembly in New York City.

This agreement marked the culmination of decades of global dialogue and ambition, beginning with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, followed by the Millennium Summit in 2000, the Johannesburg Declaration in 2002, and Rio+20 in 2012. Each of these milestones laid the foundation for a shared vision of forging a global partnership to advance peace, prosperity, and sustainable development for both the people and the planet.

Importantly, the SDGs attempted to build on previous global efforts and address their shortcomings. The Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that preceded them and had shaped development priorities for 15 years prior, achieved notable progress but were viewed as being narrowly focused on anti-poverty and public health in developing countries, and driven by a paternalistic top-down approach from external actors (largely UN agencies and donors).

The SDGs broadened the scope to ambitiously include decent work, climate action, affordable clean energy, peace and justice, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, among others. They evolved through a participatory bottom-up process and placed the responsibility for implementation on all countries, not just developing ones.

The year 2015 was marked by two other significant events.

The third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, underscored the importance of ramping up private and blended finance tools to achieve the SDGs. It highlighted that public flows alone would not be enough, popularising the phrase ‘from billions to trillions’. Additionally, donor countries reaffirmed their commitment to allocating 0.7 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance (ODA), an unlikely triumph given preliminary discussions a few years ago at the heels of the financial crisis had not been promising.


The second was the Paris Agreement in December in France, a legally binding international treaty on climate change with an overarching goal to limit the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius. It was understood that the developed world would take the lead on providing financial assistance, technology and capacity building to support the less endowed and more vulnerable countries for emissions mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Fast forward to date, development practitioners reflect on 2015 with somewhat of a nostalgia. What was observed then, some argue, was the peak of multilateralism rather than a take-off for a new era of global cooperation – an apex, not a beginning. It may yet be early to say whether this pessimism is warranted and whether the development agenda has derailed or simply detoured for now. But warning signs are blaring: only 18pc of the SDGs are on track, the financing gap to achieving them has been estimated at a staggering $2.5 to $4.5 trillion annually till 2030, and the latest global warming projections imply that there is a two-third chance that the current mitigation policies will only keep warming below 2.8°C by the end of this century.
How did we get here?

For one, the designers of SDGs crafted a vision of a better world that fell short of the realities of politics, argues Professor Adam Tooze of Columbia University in the September cover essay for the Foreign Policy magazine. They, furthermore, failed to foresee how status quo powers would react when development eventually occurs. What would happen if, for instance, Mexico reached Canadian levels of GDP per capita, or Ethiopia and Nigeria achieved Turkish levels? Look no further than China, Tooze asserts, a remarkable development success story, which fostered neither greater trust nor reinforced the international rules-based order but has rather triggered a new Cold War. Development, he put forth, is fundamentally political and a more developed world is inherently more multipolar.

The rise in public sentiment of inward-looking, nationalist ideologies across rich democracies is maybe then not a coincidence. Instead, it reflects the growing belief that supporting development elsewhere comes at the expense of prosperity at home.

In March 2025, the US formally denounced the SDGs stating that such globalist agendas were incompatible with national sovereignty and had ‘lost at the ballot box’. Instead, the US called for ‘responsible’ development, emphasising that countries should take greater ownership of their national development priorities over compliance with global targets. When the US Agency for International Development became a casualty to this re-positioning, there was expectation that other donors and supporters of multilateralism (especially Europeans) would pick up the tab. Yet, it wasn’t the case. Indeed, aid budgets have been slashed across the board with Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimating global aid to fall by 25pc by 2027.

But politics aside, there are other critical factors that deserve attention. The past decade has been one of unprecedented polycrisis: global pandemic, increasing conflicts, mounting public debt burdens, and rising geo-economic fragmentation.

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major setback to the SDGs, halting progress across multiple fronts. In 2020, an estimated 100 million children and youth slipped below minimum reading proficiency, more than 250 million livelihoods were lost, and over 100 million people had plunged back into poverty, reversing years of hard-won gains. More than 7 million COVID-19 deaths globally have been reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to date.

In retrospect, the pandemic truly put the lofty claims of global cooperation to test, exposing just how fragile that cooperation really was. Higher-income countries rushed to hoard vaccines and personal protective gear and undermined efforts by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to temporarily waive patents for vaccine production. Consequently, many of these countries had administered their third and even fourth vaccine doses before even 20pc of the population in lower-income countries, mostly in Africa, had received a single shot. The head of WHO declaring this situation a ‘vaccine apartheid’.


The last decade has seen the world become increasingly less peaceful. There are 59 active state-based conflicts – the most since World War II. Many of the leading indicators that typically precede major conflicts are at record levels, and this trajectory appears to be getting worse. We have already seen extraordinary escalations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, the regime change in Venezuela with the raid and seizure of President Nicolás Maduro by the US, as well as the US posturing over Greenland that has shaken its European allies and put into question the future of the Western alliance.

At the same time, the ability to resolve conflicts is at its lowest point in five decades. Between 1970s and 2010s, decisive victories fell significantly from 49pc to 9pc and conflict resolution through peace agreement declined from 23pc to only 4pc.

One key reason is the growing internationalisation of conflicts — 78 countries are involved in conflicts beyond their own boundaries. This growing external involvement is fuelled by deepening geopolitical divisions and intensifying competition among major powers, alongside the expanding influence of middle powers that have become increasingly active within their regions.

As a result, by the end of 2024, forced displacement had surged globally to over 123 million — including refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers, and people in need of international protection — nearly double the figure from a decade ago.

Amid these crises, global public debt continues to rise, driven by ongoing shocks and the sluggish, uneven performance of the global economy. By the end of 2024, global public debt had climbed to $102 trillion, equivalent to 93pc of global GDP.

Although, developing countries accounted for only about one-third of this total, their debts have grown twice as fast as developed economies over the past decade. Latest figures show 58 developing countries facing severe debt distress, with debt-to-GDP ratios exceeding 60pc (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) benchmark for elevated debt stress in emerging markets), placing acute strain on already stretched public budgets. Around 3.3 billion people – over 40pc of the world’s population – live in countries that spend more on servicing debt interest than on education and health.

Systemic inequalities in the international financial architecture limit access to affordable finance, forcing developing countries to rely on expensive private sources. In 2023, 60pc of their external public debt was owed to private creditors, at borrowing rates that were two to four times higher than those for the US. This growing dependence on private creditors, combined with elevated global interest rates (since 2022) and low sovereign credit ratings complicates debt restructuring and refinancing, causing delays and driving up resolution costs. At their annual meeting in October last year, IMF warned that the global public debt is forecasted to rise above 100pc of global GDP by 2029, the highest level since 1948.

Importantly, these trends are unfolding under a pervasive shadow of geo-economic fragmentation. The post Cold War era ushered in an unprecedented period of hyper-globalisation in the 1990s and 2000s that plateaued – also described as ‘slowbalisation’ – following the global financial crisis in 2008. Along the way, there has been scepticism and uneven gains, and not everyone has benefitted. But global integration and international cooperation have been instrumental in nearly tripling of the world economy and for lifting roughly 1.5 billion people out of extreme poverty, as a result of trade deepening, increased capital flows, cross-border migration, and technological diffusion.

Keen observers are signalling a Cold War 2.0 between the US (the incumbent hegemon) and China (the ascendant challenger).

Both are consolidating their spheres of influence – the Western Hemisphere dominated by Washington, and Asia by Beijing – as political frictions and security concerns have increasingly disrupted the free flow of capital and goods, especially since 2018. It may be early to accurately estimate the costs of the ongoing fragmentation, but recent modelling efforts and anecdotal evidence suggest that these could be significant because the world today is much more integrated.

The global trade-to-GDP is 60pc – more than twice the Cold War level – and economies are more deeply interdependent in the global marketplace through complex value chains. A scenario of severe fragmentation and high-cost adjustment (i.e. where trade substitution is not easy) is forecasted to cost losses as high as 7pc of global GDP. A 2023 study by the Bank of International Settlements looked at data from 25,000 firms, and found that supply chains had lengthened in the last two years, particularly those that linked Chinese suppliers with US customers. Furthermore, lower-income and emerging market economies are expected to bear the most losses, particularly from diminishing technology spillovers. As always, when giants clash, the minnows suffer.
Where do we go from here?

Earlier this month, the White House ordered US withdrawal from 66 international organisations – including 31 UN entities – arguing that these advanced globalist agendas over US priorities. This is not entirely surprising – the US President Donald Trump had, after all, inquired from a hall full of heads of state and ambassadors at the General Assembly session celebrating 80 years of the UN last year, “What is the purpose of the UN?”


It’s a valid question. The UN, and other multilaterals established after WWII, were created precisely to avert the conditions that confront the world today. Hardly anyone denies the duplication, inefficiencies and bureaucracy in these organisations; it is something that they themselves are acutely aware of and have made attempts to address. But it’s a difficult question to answer because there is no recent counterfactual – we don’t know whether the modern and technologically advanced world that we live in today would have been better or worse in the absence of international organisations.

Yet, logic dictates a pinch of realism about the UN’s capacity to perform the responsibility entrusted to it, and expected of it. Its legitimacy and prestige are derived from the confidence it commands when member states respect and comply with its authority. It provides a platform for member states to voice their grievances, but can as easily become paralysed when Security Council members exercise their veto on nationalist grounds. When member states falter, so does the UN.

There are, however, four important points that continue to make the UN relevant.

One, it is the only global forum where every single country in the world is a member, making it the ultimate convening power, a role unlikely to be easily displaced in the foreseeable future. Even when negotiations occur in separate forums, they often return to the UN for endorsement. Paradoxically, President Trump’s 20-point ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’ that was developed entirely outside of the UN found its way to the Security Council for blessing just a few weeks after his General Assembly speech.

Two, in most of the UN bodies, each member state has one vote: Tuvalu with a population of roughly 11,000 has the same formal voting power as India, with nearly 1.5 billion people. Globally, more than half of UN member states have populations under 10 million, and it is precisely these countries that feel very strongly about the UN for showcasing their voice and giving them visibility. Critics argue that cumulatively these countries represent only a limited share of global power and contribute only marginally to the UN budget, proposing that this structure be replaced by weighted voting. Such proposals, however, have not been adopted, giving smaller players great influence in global decision-making.

Three, many of the world’s most effective international regulatory regimes – notably in postal services, maritime safety, civil aviation, telecommunications, public health – would not exist without the UN’s ability to institutionalise cooperation at the global scale. Proponents argue that this underscores the UN’s relevance even more so today, as the world grapples with a fractured international landscape amidst rapidly evolving technological advances.

Finally, the UN has been instrumental (to some extent) for the provision of global public goods (GPGs) that extend benefits across borders and generations, and which would otherwise not exist or be significantly under-provided if left to market forces and governments. Key GPGs include financial stability, international peace, scientific advancement, disease eradication, and climate mitigation and adaptation.

With multilateralism in trouble, what can the rest of the world do as we observe the US – the champion of international rules-based order – bowing out of the ring?

This is an extreme situation but not a singularly unique one where there’s a gap between global consensus and US participation. Several of the most widely ratified international treaties – including the Convention on the Right of the Child, Convention on the Law of the Seas, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, International Criminal Court, Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty – have not been ratified by the US.

Hence, precedents show that the rest of the world has moved forward where their values converge in the absence of the US. As recently as last year, despite the US pulling out of the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in June in Sevilla, Spain, UN member states came together and adopted Compromiso de Sevilla as the global framework to guide efforts to finance sustainable development over the coming decade.

Similarly, multilateralism has faced significant headwinds before and has evolved by adapting different forms of cooperation within, outside and alongside traditional international organisations.

The oft-repeated ‘coalition of the willing’ describes an approach of pragmatic cooperation between nations with shared interests when multilateral mechanisms stall. The phrase first appeared in a New York Times article in 1971 and was coined by Professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ironically, at that time, he was urging the US to use this approach to rally a group of nations willing to coordinate on peacekeeping, aid, and conflict stabilisation. The phrase later became politicised and (in)famous during the Iraq war in 2003 when it was (mis)used to substitute multilateral authorisation.

Critics argue that this mechanism is oftentimes invoked when policymakers want to take decisions outside of the multilateral system. The model, nonetheless, offers a viable solution for a group of nations to act voluntarily – and one hopes more virtuously – when universal consensus appears unlikely.


Around the same time in the 1970s, ‘plurilateralism’ emerged during the multi-year multilateral trade negotiations in Tokyo. The term was convenient because it could be placed somewhere (or anywhere) in the middle along the spectrum of bilateralism and multilateralism.

It proposed the formal coming together of fewer countries that wanted to do more to neutralise gridlock on global challenges and offer adaptable and efficient solutions. The focus of plurilateral agreements has mostly been on trade and international economic governance. In fact, the IMF First Managing Deputy Director, Gita Gopinath, speaking at the 20th World Congress of the International Economic Association in 2023, suggested adopting a plurilateral strategy as one of her three proposals to minimise fragmentation costs in order to tackle global problems and achieve national objectives at the same time.

Almost four decades later, Moisés Naím, the then Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine introduced the term ‘minilateralism’ in 2009, which abandons the futile task (in his opinion) of trying to bring together all nations to an agreement. He proposed that we should instead concentrate on getting together the smallest denominator of countries needed to generate the greatest possible impact for a particular problem. This extremely effective ‘magic number’ would vary by issue: around 20 countries dominate global trade and climate change, 21 shape nuclear proliferation, 19 are most affected by AIDS-related deaths, and as few as a dozen are pivotal in addressing African poverty.

Furthermore, it does not have to remain exclusionary and membership could be expanded to those countries that agreed with the overall rules set by the original group.

Advocates of multilateralism are rightfully dismayed over these sub-optimal cooperation models, raising concerns that they would lead to further fragmentation and the sidelining of smaller nations. But these models are an attempt to navigate the politico-economic realities of a strongman and transactional world we find ourselves in today, coupled with new challenges – think artificial intelligence and green energy.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist writing at the end of last year, succinctly prophesised: “In global politics, 2025 was the year when an old order ended”. It remains to be seen to what extent this unravelling will unfold.
The human connection of multilateralism

When I interned at the UN Headquarters more than a decade ago, I was deeply aware of the gravity of walking the hallowed corridors of power and prestige that had witnessed countless leaders in the best of times and the worst of times but, regardless, every year since 1945.

During the General Assembly session, I encountered Mark Zuckerberg, (then) CEO of Facebook (now Meta), helped print U2’s lead singer Bono’s speech (because he did not bring his hardcopy), and stared at Jeffery Sachs, the special advisor to UN Secretaries-General, so intently that he felt compelled to introduce himself. I was also able to conclude that the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had the most dapper security detail.

But the person who fascinated me the most during my time there was a reticent elevator operator named Thorin, who had a rather commanding presence that was further magnified by his cramped operating space.


One day, I finally summoned the courage to ask him a question that had been on my mind for a long time: whether he had been named after the dwarf king from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit — a book that rekindles cherished childhood memories of unfiltered imagination to this day (and had convinced me that dragons were real, as were hobbits, goblins and wizards).

I was shattered that he had no knowledge of the book and was christened thus simply because his mother liked the name. He did share, however, that his favourite leader was the US President Barrack Obama, whom he proudly told me he had twice had the honour of accompanying in the elevator.

These experiences, for me, humanised the lofty and abstract concept of multilateralism. Perhaps it is the comfort of the familiar, or the wariness of the unknown, that keeps us clinging on to the ideal of a multi-country collaboration in pursuit of global good (on average) that is representative and willingly embraced (to some extent), however unrealistic and wishful that might now seem.

I, for one, will be sorry to watch it fade into history.

But as the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney eloquently reminded us during his speech a few days ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “Nostalgia is not a strategy”.

Are other world leaders paying attention?

Header image: The image has been generated via Canva AI.


The author is an economist interested in development policy and geopolitics. She can be reached at amna.irfanuddin@gmail.com

At UN, Pakistan vows to prevent desertification of its fertile plains

Anwar Iqbal 

Published January 28, 2026

DAWN

Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad At a high-level open debate in the UN Security Council on January 27. — Photo via X/@PakistanUN_NY


WASHINGTON: Pakistan has vowed not to allow the desertification of its fertile plains, after India used the UN platform to threaten the continued suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT).

At a high-level open debate in the UN Security Council on Monday evening, Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad described India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty as “another blatant breach of international obligations, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions and endangering peace and security”.

He informed the world body that “Pakistan rejects the weaponisation of water and other natural resources. Treaty compliance is a cornerstone of the international legal order”.

Later, Pakistan also used its right of reply to respond to the allegations and claims of the Indian ambassador, Parvathaneni Harish.

Rejects New Delhi’s unilateral suspension of Indus treaty, ‘weaponisation’of water

“By unilaterally and illegally suspending the Indus Waters Treaty, India now seeks to bring about the desertification of Pakistan’s ancient fertile plains,” Pakistan’s representative Zulfiqar Ali said, responding to India’s threat.

“We will counter this latest provocation — this water terrorism — with the same resolve, clarity, and success with which we defended our country against India’s aggression in May last year,” he added.

At the UN Security Council debate, Ambassador Harish reiterated New Delhi’s position that “the treaty will be held in abeyance until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably ends its alleged support for cross-border and all other forms of terrorism”.

Despite multiple independent assessments backing Pakistan’s position, the Indian ambassador also challenged narratives from Washington and Islamabad portraying Pakistan as the victor in the May 10 conflict.

Ambassador Ahmad addressed this issue, recalling that last May, India “carried out an unprovoked military aggression in breach of international law and Pakistan’s sovereignty”.

“Acting in accordance with Article 51 of the (UN) Charter, Pakistan exercised its inherent right of self-defence in a responsible, restrained and proportionate manner,” the Pakistani envoy added. “Our response established that there can be no ‘new normal’ based on coercion or impunity. Respect for international law remains the only legitimate norm governing inter-State conduct.”

The May 10 conflict also underscored that “the root cause of instability in South Asia remains India’s illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, in gross violation of Security Council resolutions,” Ambassador Ahmad said.

Pakistani representative Zulfiqar Ali reminded the Indian envoy that Pakistan not only prevailed in the previous conflict but remains fully capable of thwarting any future attempts.

In his right of reply, Mr Ali described India’s statements as “spurious claims” and part of an “old ploy” to deflect attention from its illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir.

“India’s sermons on law, justice and fairness ring hollow from a country that spreads falsehoods, orchestrates global assassination campaign, and plots terrorism regionally and beyond,” he said, highlighting India’s politicisation of even innocuous fields like sports.

Mr Ali also criticised India’s internal policies, saying the country exemplifies “how tyranny of majoritarianism can disrupt the social fabric of a political entity”.

He pointed to state-sanctioned pogroms against Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other minorities, noting that sham claims of being the world’s largest democracy could not conceal these atrocities.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026

Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the UN

@PakistanUN_NY

Statement by Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, Permanent Representative of Pakistan, At the High-Level Open Debate of UN Security Council on "Reaffirming International Rule of Law: Pathways to Reinvigorating Peace, Justice, and Multilateralism" (26 January 2026) ***** Mr. President, I wish to congratulate Somalia for its successful Presidency this month and for organizing this important debate. We see this as a continuation of series of high-level debates around the UN, multilateralism and international law over the year. 2. I thank Secretary-General Guterres, Chairperson of the AU Commission and Founding President of the African Institute of international law for their insightful remarks. Secretary General described rule of law as the beating heart of UN Charter and Judge Yusuf urged for fully respecting and strengthening it. 3. This debate is timely. The erosion of respect for international law is increasingly translating into conflict, humanitarian crises, and weakened multilateral cooperation. Reaffirming the international rule of law is therefore not an abstract legal exercise; it is a prerequisite for peace, justice, and collective security. 4. The purpose of international law is to inject stability into the international system by making inter-State conduct predictable and subject to agreed rules and boundaries. When that function is compromised, international law risks losing its meaning, and compliance becomes optional. A stable, peaceful, and productive international order can only endure if the rule of law is applied equitably, consistently, boldly and without discrimination. 5. Yet today, respect for international law is being tested as rarely before. Selective application of legal norms, erosion of treaty obligations, and unilateral actions have weakened trust among States and strained the multilateral system anchored in the UN Charter. When law yields to power or expediency, instability deepens, disputes entrench further, and peaceful coexistence jeopardized. 6. The core principles of the Charter — sovereign equality, non-interference, political independence and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the threat or use of force and self-determination — are being increasingly challenged. Attempts to normalize unilateral actions outside the Charter undermine collective security and weaken the credibility of multilateral institutions. 7. Pakistan has itself experienced such violations. Last May, India carried out an unprovoked military aggression in breach of international law and Pakistan’s sovereignty. Acting in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter, Pakistan exercised its inherent right of self-defence in a responsible, restrained, and proportionate manner. Our response established that there can be no “new normal” based on coercion or impunity. Respect for international law remains the only legitimate norm governing inter-State conduct. 8. That conflict also reminded that the root cause of instability in South Asia remains India’s illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, in gross violation of Security Council resolutions. The continued denial of the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people has grave human rights consequences and imperils durable peace. India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty is another blatant breach of international obligations, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions and endangering peace and security. Pakistan rejects the weaponization of water and other natural resources. Treaty compliance is a cornerstone of the international legal order. 9. As a country with unwavering faith in international law and multilateralism, Pakistan is committed to pacific settlement of disputes. This was evident when within weeks of defeating the military aggression Pakistan led the unanimous adoption of Resolution 2788 on Peaceful settlement of disputes by this Council last July, reaffirming the Council’s collective commitment to dialogue, mediation, judicial settlement, and other peaceful means as the first recourse in resolving disputes. Mr. President, 10. While some in the West are saying it now, we know that due to double standards and lack of full compliance, the international system has often fallen short of fully benefiting many countries, particularly in the Global South. Yet, developing nations have continued to place their faith in the UN Charter and in an equitable and just international order. Their aspirations for peace, security, and development must remain central to the evolution of multilateralism and reforms of the UN: a reform towards equality, democracy and accountability, away from power and entitlements; reform for all, privilege for none. Reinvigorating the rule of law is essential to restoring that confidence. 11. Not everything is pessimistic. Despite geopolitical tensions, the international legal framework remains resilient. The entry into force of the BBNJ Agreement and the International Law Commission’s work on sea-level rise demonstrate its capacity to respond to emerging challenges. We also welcome the Advisory Opinions of the International Court of Justice on Palestine and climate change. These opinions must be respected and applied universally; selective acceptance would undermine the authority of the Court and confidence in international adjudication. Mr. President, 12. As the Secretary General also noted, rule of law is foundational to our work in the Council. It requires full compliance with Council’s resolutions on all items of agenda. The situation in Palestine starkly illustrates the consequences of selective adherence to international law. The continued denial of the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination, persistent violations of international humanitarian law, and disregard for relevant UN resolutions erode the credibility of the international system and international legitimacy. A just and lasting peace can only be achieved through full respect for international law and equal application of legal principles to all. 13. Corpus of international law stems, amongst other sources, from the resolutions of this Council. It is imperative that Member States fulfill their obligation, under Article 25 of the Charter, to implement the Council’s decisions. 14. To strengthen compliance and prevent selective application of international law, we would like to make the following suggestions: First, the Security Council should devise effective mechanisms to systematically monitor the implementation of its own resolutions and to take action in cases of persistent non-compliance. Second, the Council should engage the International Court of Justice more systematically where legal disputes on its agenda risk undermining the implementation of its decisions, particularly in situations of prolonged political deadlock. Third, the Council should institutionalize regular legal briefings by the Office of Legal Affairs on situations on its agenda, including on the legal implications of non-compliance with Council resolutions and international treaties, to ensure that its deliberations and decisions remain firmly grounded in international law. Finally, the UN organs and bodies should have easier and more frequent recourse to the ICJ’s Advisory Opinions on specific disputes and on fulfilment of the legal obligations of Member States and international organizations. 15. The international rule of law cannot be sustained by declarations alone, but by consistent conduct and credible accountability. If multilateralism is to endure, law must prevail over force, principles over expediency, and justice over impunity. Pakistan remains committed to a UN Charter-inspired rules-based international order in which disputes are resolved peacefully, obligations are honoured, and the United Nations serves as a true guarantor of peace, justice, and dignity for all. I thank you **********

11:05 AM · Jan 26, 2026

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PAKISTAN

Road to exiting IMF

Nadeem ul Haque | Shahid Kardar 

Published January 28, 2026 

DAWN


EVERY few months, Pakistani officialdom and its associated stakeholders return to a familiar, comforting refrain: how Pakistan must ‘exit the IMF’. The vocabulary is predictable and well-rehearsed: exports, productivity, human capital, technology, governance, national coordination. These concepts are presented as panaceas, as if merely invoking them charts a path to freedom from the Fund. What is almost always missing is the road to get there. The discussion rarely addresses concrete policy actions, operational instruments and institutional changes needed to achieve the objective. Wishes are communicated as targets, outcomes are mistaken for reforms, and reform itself is reduced to rhetoric.

Most ‘exit plans’ suffer from a basic flaw which confuses aspirations with instruments. Saying exports must rise is not a policy. Declaring that human capital must improve is not reform. Calling for better coordination or implementation is not an economic strategy. These are desired results, not mechanisms. The real question is far simpler and far more uncomfortable: what specific changes will alter behaviour tomorrow morning?

This confusion is not accidental. Pakistan does not return to the IMF because it lacks ideas or plans. It returns because the design of its economic system systematically produces balance-of-payments crises. IMF dependence is not a technical failure but the predictable outcome of a political economy that rewards rent-seeking, blocks entry, protects incumbents, misprices energy, taxes exports obliquely, and relies on administrative discretion instead of rules. You do not exit the IMF by declaring independence from it. You exit by dismantling the domestic machinery that repeatedly recreates the financing gaps which invite the Fund back into the parlour.

The IMF appears when three conditions converge. First, foreign exchange earnings fail to grow fast enough to close the external gap. Second, fiscal deficits are financed by printing money or unsustainable borrowing. Third, credibility collapses, shutting the country out of global capital markets. Pakistan finds itself in this position repeatedly not because of bad luck or external shocks alone, but because an extractive state apparatus actively suppresses productivity and growth, particularly through trade, by distorting incentives. The result is a structurally weak economy that periodically runs out of foreign exchange and credibility.


Most ‘exit plans’ suffer from a basic flaw which confuses aspirations with instruments.

The starting point, therefore, is to abandon the illusion of planning.

For decades, Pakistan has treated growth as something that can be engineered through plans, projects, committees and conferences. Strategies are announced, PSDPs approved, monuments built, and targets proclaimed. Meanwhile, the real economy is strangled by a predatory and unfair convoluted tax regime, discretionary permissions, distorted prices, and regulatory sludge, which is manifested in primitive, excessive, opaque regulations applied unevenly, reflecting a deep distrust of markets and an exaggerated belief in the state’s omnipotence.

Growth does not emerge from better plans. It occurs when firms can enter, scale, export, hire, and invest without begging for permissions — within a competitive, predictable and rule-based environment. That is where IMF dependence is born, and that is where it must be defeated.

Reform must begin with energy — electricity and gas — because this is where every IMF programme eventually unravels. Pakistan’s energy crisis today is not a capacity problem. It is a failure of policy, pricing and governance. Consumers and taxpayers are punished for government inefficiencies through unreliable and unpredictable supply and pricing of energy, steadily eroding state credibility. The energy sector is neither competitive nor realistically priced. It is governed by a fragmented institutional structure involving nearly two dozen entities operating without integrated coordination.

Policy incoherence (a mix of guaranteed returns, illogical subsidies, and politicised operational decisions) along with weak management across the supply chain disfigures the tariff structure and shields inefficiency. Distribution companies continue to flounder without accountability for losses, theft, or recoveries. The consequences are entirely predictable: distorted and mispriced consumption, corrupted investment signals, rapid off-grid migration through falling solar costs, and a permanent circular debt that becomes a quasi-fiscal deficit. This eventually resurfaces as inflation, borrowing, or IMF conditionality.

The solution is neither more subsidies nor ad hoc bailouts. It is a rules-based pricing system: transparent, cost-reflective tariffs under a competitive framework, automatic adjustment mechanisms, and enforceable governance contracts that hold utilities accountable. The poor should be protected through direct, targeted cash transfers, not by penalising commercial and industrial activity through pricing distortions that bankrupt the entire system.

Next comes taxation. The structure needs to be fixed, not the rates. Pakistan’s tax system is broken by design. It is fragmented across multiple agencies and jurisdictions, riddled with inconsistent thresholds and legal interpretations, and undermined by weak trust.

The problem is not a shortage of tax policy papers; it is the distortionary structure created by exemptions, lack of equity, discretion and predatory enforcement. Tax authorities aggressively pursue those already in the net while tolerating habitual non-payers. The illusion that high rates, complexity, and coercion can force formalisation must be discarded. Decades of experience demonstrate the opposite. Punitive, tortuous and unpredictable tax regimes entangle the taxpayers’ navigation of a labyrinth of arbitrary changes in laws, rates and procedures, shrinking the formal sector, expanding informality, eroding compliance and discouraging investment.

A growth-oriented tax system must be simple, predictable, low-rate, and broad-based, treating all income streams uniformly. Its purpose should be to attract firms into formality, not to punish them for entering it. Broadening the base means freezing new exemptions, publishing the fiscal cost of existing ones, fully digitising enforcement, and taxing sectors that have permanently learned to live outside the net. Until the state actively penalises non-payment and taxes privilege instead of productivity, deficits will persist and borrowing will continue.

Pakistan must also accept that a large informal economy will persist during the transition. Formalisation follows growth; it does not precede it, making absorption feasible. Criminalising cash or banning transactions in the name of fighting ‘black money’ merely drives activity further underground and slows growth.

Nadeem ul Haque is former VC PIDE and deputy chair of the Planning Commission. He is currently director at the think tank Socioeconomic Insights and Analytics. 

Shahidi Kardar is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026

PAKISTAN

Absent state accountability

A state becomes strong by allowing itself to be held accountable by the people.

Zahid Hussain 

Published January 28, 2026 

DAWN

The writer is an author and journalist.

ACCOUNTABILITY is an essential component of a democratic and rules-based system. There is no such concept of responsibility under authoritarian rule, which seeks to consolidate power without being subjected to checks and balances. In such a situation, the entire political system is designed to serve the interests of a narrow power elite. Freedom of expression is stifled in the name of national interest.

This is what is happening in this country as the shadows of absolutism lengthen. In an effort to consolidate its power, the hybrid set-up has imposed several draconian laws to curb democratic rights and freedom of expression. The recent conviction of Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir and her spouse, Hadi Ali Chattha,under the controversial Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca), 2016, appears to be a grim reminder that the country is slipping into an Orwellian nightmare.

The two lawyers-cum-human rights activists have been sentenced to a total of 17 years’ rigorous imprisonment for “tweeting and retweeting” some posts deemed by the authorities as seditious. According to the ruling, “The content, including tweets, re-tweets, shared and uploaded by the accused persons, expressed solidarity and support for the proscribed organisations”.

Mentioning X posts made by Imaan Mazari-Hazir in favour of Mahrang Baloch and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, the order noted that several had been reposted by Hadi Ali Chattha. The two have also been accused of defaming the forces through their posts on social media. They have been charged under antiterrorism laws.


A state becomes strong by allowing itself to be held accountable by the people.

There are questions about the fairness of the trial. According to lawyers, the couple were not given an opportunity to defend themselves. They were arrested when they were on their way to a sessions court for a hearing of the case.

A young firebrand lawyer, Imaan Mazari-Hazir had taken up the cases of missing persons and had raised her voice against state excesses. She has been fighting for those who have been incarcerated for years without being charged. Though detained previously, clearly, she did not give in to intimidation. The government, whose mandate is widely questioned, seems threatened by any voice of dissent. The couple are the latest in the list of prisoners of conscience.

The ruling set-up has weaponised Peca, which criminalises free comment, dealing a serious blow to whatever little democratic freedom is left. Even the private exchange of messages can be liable for prosecution. Criticism of state institutions is punishable under this draconian law, thus making the state and the government unaccountable.

The situation is such that Peca can be used against those who question the involvement of unelected state circles in politics. The defence minister has defended the hybrid power arrangement. But the question is whether there is any constitutional provision that lends legitimacy to such an arrangement. The political parties, which are part of the current set-up and who voted for the draconian laws, had, while in opposition, been critical of those involved in political manipulation and change of government. Now they are happy sharing power with them.

It gets worse, as there is little judicial recourse left after the enforcement of the 26th and 27th constitutional amendments. These controversial amendments have significantly undermined the independence of the superior judiciary, making it an extension of the executive. It has rendered the Constitution virtually ineffective, clearing the way for authoritarianism, which is not constrained by the rule of law or subjected to accountability through strong and independent institutions. Parliament is simply used to rubber-stamp the dictates of those beyond constitutional boundaries.

But all these actions are signs of weakness and insecurity in a system that seeks to earn legitimacy through enforcing laws aimed at silencing dissent. A repressive and authoritarian state loses credibility. It becomes weak, even if it has powerful instruments and agents of coercion. The use of hard power against its own people makes any state weaker. This is the lesson of history that officialdom has refused to learn.


The 27th Amendment grants the president and defence chiefs lifelong immunity from criminal proceedings; conversely, the rule of law in real democracies requires top state officials to be accountable to the public. Another recent example of the rulers and public representatives trying to make themselves unaccountable is the bill recently passed by the National Assembly, which aims to conceal the assets of lawmakers. All members of parliament are bound by the law to annually declare their assets to the Election Commission of Pakistan, the details of which are put on the election body’s website. This was meant to fulfil the requirement of transparency and allow the public access to information about their elected representatives. The practice was seen as part of the accountability exercise. But the bill has now stopped the ECP from putting the asset statement on the website. It may appear unimportant, but it reflects the mindset of our representatives to avoid any public accountability.

Defending the bill, the federal law minister contended that it empowers the legislative bodies to exercise greater control over the transparency of financial disclosures. One wonders what this controlled transparency means. The conviction of Imaan Mazari-Hazir and Hadi Chattha for criticising and questioning the action of the state is a travesty of justice. It also exposes the weakness of the state in not being willing to face public scrutiny of its actions. To raise voice for the victims of state excesses is not an anti-state act. A state becomes strong not by usurping people’s fundamental rights but by allowing itself to be held accountable by those it claims to represent. What we are witnessing is an unaccountable state where power is exercised without any transparency, oversight, or liability.


zhussain100@yahoo.com

X: @hidhussain

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026

Paradise lost: Kashmir, orientalism, and the politics of belonging

Colonial travelogues and Hindu nationalist narratives have long cast Kashmiri Muslims as perpetual outsiders in their own land.

Maheen Azmat 

December 26, 2025
DAWN

Kashmir has long occupied a curious space in the European imagination. For centuries, travellers, merchants, and colonial administrators produced narratives that constructed this Himalayan valley as a mythical ‘Paradise of the Indies’ — a land of extraordinary beauty whose inhabitants, strangely, were deemed unworthy of it.

This paradox, celebrating the land while denigrating its people, did not die with colonialism. It found new life in the ideological project of Hindu nationalism, which has weaponised these orientalist tropes to justify the ongoing colonisation of India-Kashmir and the systematic othering of its Muslim majority.

The question of who belongs in Kashmir, and who gets to define it, has never been merely academic. It is a question written in blood, displacement, and the language of competing nationalisms.

Annexed by India in 1947 through the contested Instrument of Accession, Jammu and Kashmir was granted ‘special status’ under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, a status effectively dismantled in 2019 amid heavily militarised conditions.

Today, as New Delhi strips Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and Bollywood produces films that either sanitise or demonise Kashmiri Muslims, tracing the genealogy of these representations becomes an urgent political task.

The colonial gaze and the ‘paradise’ myth

European fascination with Kashmir began with travellers like François Bernier, a French physician who accompanied Aurangzeb’s entourage to the valley in the 17th century. Bernier likened Kashmir’s mountains to Mount Olympus and its meadows to European gardens, “enamelled with our European flowers and plants, and covered with our apple, pear, plum”. The language of possession — ‘our’ fruits in ‘their’ land — reveals the European impulse to claim Kashmir as a distant reflection of itself, a space of familiarity amid the strangeness of the Orient.

This fascination with places and people perceived as similar to Europe created a substantial readership for travel writing as a genre. The European identity was affirmed through encounters with distant lands that could be made familiar, comprehensible, and available for appropriation.

As scholar Kim Phillips has argued, travel writing operates through a “referential pact”, whereby readers trust that their craving for knowledge about exotic places will be satisfied. These narratives became canonised over time, each new account building on previous ones, generating an ever-increasing interest in Kashmir.

This construction of Kashmir as a mirror of European beauty was paired with a troubling ethnographic curiosity about its people. George Forster, an East India Company employee who disguised himself as a Turkish merchant to enter the valley in the 1780s, described Kashmiris as possessing “stout, well-formed, European likeness”.

Other travellers went further, comparing Kashmiris to Jews — Europe’s internal other — and tracing their origins to the lost tribes of Israel. Charles von Hugel, an Austrian explorer, wrote in 1845 that Kashmiris had “almost Jewish features,” with their “white skin” and “colourless complexion” marking them as somehow out of place in the Subcontinent.

This preoccupation with denying Kashmiris their indigeneity — locating them elsewhere, whether in ancient Israel or in some European prehistory — served a colonial purpose. If Kashmiris were never truly native, then the land could be claimed, administered, and imagined by others. The beauty of the valley was severed from the people who inhabited it and made available for appropriation. As author Rafiq Ahmad in his study notes, such representations sought to attribute the creation of Kashmiri “traditions and customs to cultures more familiar to Europeans”, providing the civilisational basis through which orientalism continually reinforced its power and authority.

Yet alongside claims of ethnic kinship came harsh moral judgments. Edward Knight, a British officer who travelled through Kashmir in 1891, initially found Kashmiris “clever, cheery and civil”, before dismissing them as “among the most despicable creatures on earth, incorrigible cheats and liars, and cowardly to an inconceivable degree”.

William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, writing earlier in the century, described them as “selfish, superstitious, ignorant, supple, intriguing, dishonest and false”. The valley’s beauty, in this logic, was God-given and majestic; its people deserved no credit for it. Indeed, their very presence disrupted the Orientalist fantasy of Kashmir as an earthly paradise waiting to be discovered and possessed by more worthy inhabitants.

This aesthetic approach within colonial travelogues consistently portrayed the inhabitants as incompatible with their own topography. All anxieties around encounters with the unfamiliar were resolved by defining the European self through confrontation with the ‘other’.

For Phillips, travel and its associated cultural practices must be located within larger formations in which “inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible”. The presence of Kashmiris was represented as an “unregulated threat” waiting to spill over, to effectively ruin Kashmir’s beauty — a sentiment that has persisted well beyond the colonial period.

Rewriting history: from Firishta to Hindutva

The orientalist framework did not merely produce aesthetic judgments; it rewrote history. As historian Manan Ahmed has shown, colonial scholars drew selectively on Persianate sources such as Muhammad Qasim Firishta’s Tarikh-i-Firishta, to construct narratives of Muslim tyranny and Hindu victimhood.

Firishta himself, writing in the early 17th century, presented a nuanced picture of Kashmir’s rulers — praising Zainul ’Abidin, for instance, for recalling exiled Brahmins, abolishing discriminatory taxes, commissioning translations of the Mahabharata into Persian, and patronising both Sanskrit and Persian literature. But colonial readings flattened this complexity, extracting episodes of religious conflict and presenting them as evidence of inherent Muslim despotism and “foreignness to Hindustan”.

Kashmir’s complicated history of invasions and rulers — from the Buddhist chief Rinchana who converted to Islam under Sufi instruction, to Shah Mir who established the first Muslim dynasty, to the Mughal emperors who built lavish retreats there, to the brutal Dogra rulers of the 19th century — was reduced to a simple morality tale.

The region that had produced Habba Khatun, who gave Kashmiri its literary form and encouraged the synthesis of Persian and Indian music, was recast as a site of eternal religious conflict. The European imperialist instinct demanded “extended and extensive ethnographic descriptions of the inherent oppression of Hindus at the hands of Muslims,” as Ahmed notes, and these descriptions were duly provided.

This selective historiography has found eager inheritors in the Hindu nationalist movement. For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent organisations, Kashmir represents both a territorial claim and a civilisational wound.

The region is viewed through an India/Hindu versus Pakistan/Muslim framework, and its Muslim majority population is seen as evidence of historical injury against the ‘rightful’ Hindu inheritors of the land. The departure of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in the early 1990s — a genuine tragedy deserving serious engagement — has been instrumentalised as proof of Muslim barbarism, disconnected from the complex political history of the armed insurgency, Indian military occupation, and Pakistani intervention that produced it.


In 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “Kashmir humara hai” (Kashmir is ours) and promised to transform it into “swarg” (heaven) once again, he was drawing on centuries of representation that imagined the valley as a paradise stolen, corrupted, or held hostage by Muslim inhabitants. The rhetoric of restoration implies that its current population has somehow desecrated it, that their removal or subjugation is necessary for the land’s redemption. This is presented not as partisan ideology but as the “iccha” (wish) of 130 crore Indians, reflecting the national stake every citizen is encouraged to have in ‘protecting’ Kashmir.

From romance to revenge

Hindi cinema has served as a powerful vehicle for these narratives, translating political ideology into emotional spectacle.

For decades, India-held Kashmir functioned as Bollywood’s scenic backdrop — a place of snow-capped romance, safely depoliticised, its conflicts invisible. But as academic Julia Szivak has highlighted, the 1990s insurgency transformed Kashmir into a site of nationalist melodrama, where the “fight for survival of the Indian nation” was dramatised against the valley’s picturesque landscape. Kashmiri insurgents were portrayed as Pakistan-supported religious zealots, while heroes served as instructive guides establishing appropriate patriotic norms for Indian citizens.

Kunal Kohli’s Fanaa (2006) offers a relatively moderate version of this formula. Its Kashmiri heroine, Zooni, embodies ideal Indian citizenship: she salutes the flag, delivers patriotic speeches comparing Kashmir’s beauty to all of India, and ultimately sacrifices her love for her country by killing her militant husband to prevent a terrorist attack. The film distinguishes between ‘good’ Muslims — loyal, self-sacrificing, aligned with the state — and ‘bad’ Muslims whose desire for azadi (freedom) marks them as threats. It offers a conditional belonging: Kashmiri Muslims may be accepted if they perform their allegiance enthusiastically enough.


Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files (2022) dispenses with such niceties. Claiming to expose the ‘truth’ of the Pandit exodus, the film presents Kashmiri Muslims as uniformly bloodthirsty, deceitful, and sexually predatory. Characters are named after Hindu deities — Krishna, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu — anchoring their indigeneity to ancient mythology, while Muslims are depicted as foreign invaders. The film’s protagonist delivers a speech tracing Kashmir’s glory to pre-Islamic sages like Rishi Kashyap and Shankaracharya, describing the valley as the ‘Silicon Valley of the first millennium,’ before presenting its corruption as beginning with Muslim arrival — a narrative that mirrors colonial historiography almost exactly.

What’s striking is how these films reproduce orientalist tropes almost unchanged. The beautiful land defiled by unworthy inhabitants; the ancient civilisation destroyed by foreign invaders; the need for civilisation, order, and redemption from outside. The British claimed this role for themselves; Hindu nationalism claims it for the Indian state. The target remains the same: the Kashmiri Muslim, constructed as eternally alien, perpetually threatening, fundamentally incompatible with the paradise they inhabit.

The politics of paradise

To trace these representations is not to deny the genuine suffering of Kashmiri Pandits, nor to minimise the violence that has marked the valley’s recent history. It is, rather, to insist that this violence cannot be understood outside the longer history of how Kashmir has been imagined, claimed, and fought over. The ‘paradise’ myth was never innocent. From colonial travelogues to contemporary cinema, it has served to separate the land from its people, to make the valley available for possession by others.

Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a Kashmiri Pandit, described the valley in 1940 as “some supremely beautiful woman, whose beauty is almost impersonal and above human desire”. The feminisation of landscape and the language of desire and possession are tropes that have structured Kashmir’s representation for centuries.


As Emmanuela Mangiarotti argues, the Indian state has worked to fix a specific historical narrative through Kashmir that anchors “specific imaginings of community and the nation to a recognisable cultural repository”. Today, as the Indian state imposes unprecedented levels of military control, as communication blackouts silence Kashmiri voices, as demographic changes threaten to transform the valley’s character, these representations take on urgent political significance.

The question is not merely how India-held Kashmir has been represented, but whose representations count, whose stories are told, whose belonging is recognised. Colonial officers, Hindu nationalists, and Bollywood filmmakers have all claimed the right to define Kashmir, to determine who belongs there and on what terms. Kashmiri Muslims, however, have not just been passive observers, but have actively written back: in protests met with pellet guns, in poems circulated despite censorship, and in testimonies recorded before each communication blackout.

The orientalist tropes of the past, therefore, have found a new home in modern state policy and popular cinema. While the tools of representation have changed, they still rely on the old conviction that Kashmir’s landscape is a national treasure and its inhabitants, specifically the Kashmiri Muslims, are a threat to its perfection. The colonial equation remains intact: the land is everything, its people an inconvenience.

The author is a writer and LUMS History alumna exploring the intersections of gender, sociology, and South Asian politics. Her work deconstructs how cultural narratives and colonial tropes shape contemporary identity and state power. She can be reached at: 24020242@lums.edu.pk