|
Jawed Naqvi DAWN: April 22, 2025
TO describe the Donald Trump phenomenon as a tectonic shift in world politics, as India’s foreign minister recently did, is akin to the inebriated Majaaz Lucknavi coming home late at night to find policemen darting their flashlights between the door of the house and the ransacked cupboards left ajar.
The dazed poet stood in a corner and paused thoughtfully. Then sidling up to one of his terrified sisters, declared with utmost authority: “This must be the work of a thief.”
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s faux insights dodge the crunch question that India must face in a volatile world. How to remain in BRICS without annoying Trump? Conversely, how to be with Trump without being assessed as the weak link in BRICS? The question for Jaishankar involves two irreconcilable triangles India finds itself toggling between.
The Russia-India-China (RIC) group was the brainchild of an astute Russian diplomat, the former foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov. The so-called Primakov Triangle, forerunner to BRICS, was inaugurated in 1999 to counter emerging post-Cold War challenges from the West. A parallel triangle was taking shape at India’s behest. Brajesh Mishra, before he became Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s national security adviser in 1998, conjured a ‘triangle of democracies’ from east of Suez to the Indian Ocean — never mind the unabashed conceit it implied towards Iran and other South Asian electoral systems.
Mishra’s India-Israel-US triangle offered as a strategic concept on the one hand, also pandered to Hindutva’s ideological needs, given its political and financial hub in the US and hero worship of Israel as an anti-Muslim soulmate.
It was in 1993, after all, that a young Narendra Modi was invited to the US by the American Council of Young Political Leaders, said to be a CIA front. The US sojourn involved visiting the Statue of Liberty and Universal Studios where he was photographed in shirt and pants for the first time. But much of Modi’s work involved fortifying RSS networks in the US and other foreign hubs.
Primakov had noted that the West, instead of dismantling its war machinery, which Mikhail Gorbachev had naively thought would happen, was baring its fangs to its perceived foes. A US-led assault broke up Yugoslavia and eviscerated Iraq while Nato intensified its moves to encircle and destabilise Russia. The Chechen violence was part of the plot.
On the other hand, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 welded European powers into an economic union. India’s own dormant energies were unleashed by Manmohan Singh in the 1990s to make it a viable power to court for a joint future. RIC became the foundational brick for BRICS. So far so good.
Mishra’s perspective was a logical corollary to the Hindu right’s weakness for colonial patronage and incorrigible pro-West leanings. When the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, later reborn as BJP, gained power in 1977, it didn’t hide the agenda. Nehru’s Non-Aligned Movement was an eyesore but could not be readily abandoned. Vajpayee tweaked the focus and named it, ‘the real non-alignment’. He was the foreign minister when Moshe Dayan made his secret visit to Delhi and the Shah of Iran arrived for his last state reception abroad. No country wanted him after that.
In his role as prime minister, Vajpayee tested the bomb and sent a secret note to Bill Clinton, confiding that it was directed at China. Clearly, Primakov needed to activate everything in his arsenal to staunch India’s westward slide. The urgency was prompted by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the last Indian leader to stand up to the US. Rajiv had opposed the refuelling of US warplanes for Iraq in 1990, which the then minority government was ready to do. The next year he was assassinated at an election rally.
Mothballed relations with Israel were unwrapped in 1992 by Narasimha Rao, but its beneficiary was the Hindu right. Rao would that year sleep through the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which prompted former Rajiv aide Mani Shankar Aiyar to describe him recently as the BJP’s first prime minister.
The year of the Primakov Triangle witnessed damning events in the rival camp. It was in 1996 that Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister after whipping up hatred against the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Netanyahu called Rabin a traitor for supporting the Oslo Accords. A young Zionist zealot assassinated Rabin at a public rally. Netanyahu’s plan against the Palestinians was clearly set years before the events of Oct 7, 2023.
The two jostling triangles are in ferment today and India intersects both. They are not equal triangles, however. The one with China and Russia is on the ascent. Iran, seen as a more robust substitute for India as the third point of the re-jigged Primakov Triangle, is standing its ground against Trump. Russia is winning the Ukraine war. China looks primed to stall Trump’s insane tariff assault even though Trump is targeting their underbelly in Iran.
In Mishra’s world, the democracies he was mesmerised by are in a shambles, including his own. State institutions are being upended and all three are witnessing a growing conflict with their judiciaries. Israel and the US are speaking of civil war-like conditions. And MPs of the ruling party in India have accused the supreme court of instigating a civil war with its secular decision and fair verdicts.
Amid the chaos, there isn’t a word about the nightmarish impact on India’s energy security should Iran be bombed. Instead, polarising politics at home has become a tool to divert attention. It no longer makes news that Prime Minister Modi is not attending the landmark Victory Parade in Moscow on May 9. Not just that, the widely announced overdue visit by President Putin to Delhi is no longer discussed.
According to Tehran Times, a joint naval exercise last month by Russia, China and Iran had observers from Qatar, Iraq, South Africa, Oman, the UAE, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. India is hoping like Majaaz that it knows better.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2025
===============================================================================
Arifa Noor Published April 22, 2025
IT has been nearly a month since Mahrang Baloch was arrested. This previous weekend, the PTI’s Aliya Hamza was also arrested and taken to Adiala Jail.
The two women were arrested in different parts of the country, participating in political activity that perhaps has little in common. One, after all, is identified as a rights activist, who has opted for street agitation, shunning mainstream electoral politics — though her critics, who are in power, describe her in far harsher terms, denying her any legitimacy. The other is a member of a large political party, which has contested multiple elections allowing her to experience life in the power corridors.
But both events once again underlined Pakistan’s changing political dynamics, where women are pushing their way to centre stage, traditionally the domain of men. But this trend has largely gone unnoticed, even though the 2024 elections finally forced people to pay attention to the youth bulge, instead of either dismissing it or making light of it. The mobilisation of women, though, still seems to be underappreciated and understudied.
This is not to say that women’s mobilisation or politics has been missing entirely. There have been ample examples in the past too. Women activists of the PPP and the Bhutto women confronted one of Pakistan’s worst dictatorships. Begum Wali Khan, Kulsoom Nawaz and Maryam Nawaz proved to be no less.
But the focus tended to be on the known names of established heavyweight families, where crises catapulted the women into leadership positions. While this tradition continues, these women leaders are now being joined by educated, professional middle-class women, who have no legacy to inherit but have nevertheless captured the public imagination in a way we assumed only men could.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Balochistan where in the past year or so, Mahrang Baloch has become the face of Baloch anger and discontent. That she was a woman simply means that it took quite some time before the powerful realised her potency — it is only of late that her alleged links to the insurgents have started to be ‘exposed’ vociferously in officialdom’s conversations and speeches. Had her gender been different, the reaction, and perhaps the imprisonment, would have come far sooner.
Women’s leadership has also emerged at other levels. Post-May 9, the PTI has seen women emerge as politicians or political workers in their own right.
By braving imprisonment, with men — fearful of jail or worse — capitulating, these women have captured the public imagination. It is not without reason that Yasmin Rashid and Aliya Hamza contested elections against the Sharif family and are said to have emerged successful and that their careers and their electoral performance or success is their own or the PTI’s rather than legacy.
Similarly, in the PTM, too, there was evidence of women mobilisation, be it in terms of organisational efforts or those who turned up at their gatherings to speak. This is all the more remarkable because both the PTM and BYC have mobilised women in societies, which are far more conservative.
While the more prominent faces tend to be those of educated women, mostly with university degrees, there are also mothers, sisters, daughters and homemakers, who have suffered loss and displacement, and are no longer willing to suffer in silence. They speak up in whatever way they can; sometimes just by showing up at public gatherings. The change this signifies is not small but it passes unnoticed — because who in Islamabad or Lahore pays attention when a woman from a remote area in KP or Balochistan turns up at a PTM or BYC gathering with the picture of a missing loved one?
There are other indicators also of this woman mobilisation. Researchers are pointing out ‘deviancy’ in voting behaviour — a word used when women polling stations are reporting a result which is different from male polling stations in the same constituency, contradicting the long-held assumption of women voting the same way as male members of the family.
Afiya Zia, who has researched the issue, wrote in The News in 2019 that the deviancy was 18 per cent in 2018, up from 11pc in 2013. This was based on Fafen’s data. She also pointed out that this trend appeared stronger in KP and Sindh than in Punjab. (Fafen reported a similar 18pc deviancy for 2024 but it is hard to say how useful the data from this election is.)
These figures would lead (and have led) to sarcastic commentary about the charisma of Imran Khan. If the same screens where male journalists sit and hold forth on women’s choices had an equal number of women commentators, someone perhaps would have pointed out that this, too, reflects misogyny.
For what else is it when men feel they have the right to say that 50pc of Pakistan’s voters’ choices are irrational or emotionally driven? That their voting choices are driven only by the looks of the candidates?
And it continues to be misogyny when it is said that wives compel their husbands to vote for PTI or act in its favour. Because somehow, when male members force their entire families to vote for a party or candidate, due to patronage or caste, it is accepted as culture or acceptable politics but women playing a similar overbearing role fills the men of Pakistan with such dread that they have to ridicule it.
Neither is it new. Just a few years ago, it was said with confidence that Maryam Nawaz influenced her father to take such an inflexible stand against the establishment — apparently, had she not been around, her father would have not run into such trouble politically.
Five years down the line, no one asks what happened to those views. Because it was never fact or serious analysis, just misogyny and fear of change. Indeed, just as much as autocrats fear people, men of all hues and political leanings find it uncomfortable when women begin to stake a claim to the political stage. And the reaction to this is far from over.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2025
===============================================================================
Khurram Abbas DAWN: April 22, 2025
IN early March, European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen announced the ambitious €800 billion project Readiness 2030. The decision was a direct outcome of the waning of the nearly eight-decade-old North Atlantic security architecture. With US President Donald Trump and his associates’ threats of a reduction in America’s financial commitments to Nato, Trump’s push for a hasty peace deal between Russia and Ukraine and the US Indo-Pacific pivot, the EU has been compelled to scale up defence spending. The announcement of the project sends a clear message to the US and the wider world: if the era of American security guarantees is coming to an end, a new era of European rearmament has begun.
For decades, Europe largely aligned itself with the US leadership in global affairs, often following Washington’s lead without developing an independent security posture. However, Readiness 2030 signals a turning point. A more confident and assertive Europe is beginning to emerge — one that seeks to act in its own strategic interests rather than climbing onto the US bandwagon.
The EU has long been an economic giant but comparatively lightweight in military terms. By strengthening its military muscle, it may adopt a more assertive foreign policy in regional and global affairs. It means that the EU is on the path to becoming a true pillar in a new multipolar world. Readiness 2030 will provide a third major military-industrial hub after the US and China. Hence, there are chances of an increased European ability to project power independently in parts of the world. For middle powers such as India, Asean, GCC and Pakistan, a Europe with stronger military capabilities and an assertive foreign policy can open up new options for security partnerships beyond the US-China rivalry.
An assertive Europe also opens up new strategic opportunities for South Asia. As Europe tries to strengthen its regional and global role, it is well placed to emerge as a trusted broker of peace. The EU has maintained a neutral stance during Pakistan-India conflicts, earning it credibility in South Asia. A more confident and active Europe can add a valuable voice to efforts aimed at preventing crises in South Asia. It can also facilitate a dialogue between Pakistan and India in lesser politicised issues such as climate security. Its engagement on both sides can help ease Pakistan-India tensions. This plan has been announced at a time when EU-India trade nego-tiations are in progress. Changing EU priorities have opened a window for New Delhi to secure a better trade deal. Further, New Delhi might find a new partner that values ‘strategic autonomy’ and is supportive of its increasing role in global governance.
Islamabad has traditionally viewed the EU and the US together under the broad label of ‘the West’. However, recent developments confirm that the interests of the EU and the US are increasingly diverging, especially on matters of global governance and security. Hence, Islamabad needs to revisit its understanding of the West. It is important for Pakistan to recognise that the EU and the US are no longer a monolith and may pursue different approaches on key international issues.
The outcome of the EU’s plan will likely expand the bloc’s defence industry, which will create a new demand for strategic partnerships. A strategically hungry Europe could serve Islamabad’s political and strategic interests well. Therefore, Islamabad must proactively engage European capitals — bilaterally — to seek strategic partnerships. The EU plans to build a market for defence and seek global partnerships. If positioned well, Pakistan can offer co-production, R&D, or serve as a low-cost manufacturing hub for dual-use tech in an emerging European military-industrial complex.
Also, as Europe looks to diversify its supply chains and reduce its reliance on other countries, Pakistan can position itself as a reliable partner in rare earths and the critical minerals sector. Islamabad’s move to invite investment in this emerging sector could lay the foundation for a long-term and strategic Pakistan-EU partnership.
Today, Europe is entangled in security concerns, cyber threats, migration issues, a resurgent Russia, a rising China, an estranged US, and a waning rules-based order. In this process, human rights, civilian supremacy have taken a back seat — issues that long remained major irritants between Pakistan and EU. This means Islamabad will face less scrutiny of its GSP-Plus status review at a time when Europe’s attention is firmly on its defence and security priorities. Therefore, Islamabad should avail this opportunity by recalibrating its Europe policy — while addressing the issues of human rights and civilian supremacy for its own sake.
The writer is an analyst of South Asian affairs. The views expressed are his own.
X: @itskhurramabbas
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2025
===============================================================================
DAWN EDITORIAL: 22 April 2025
THE recent visit to Kabul by Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar is a sign that Pak-Afghan relations may be moving in a more positive direction.
Mr Dar’s interactions with the Afghan Taliban leadership were quite cordial, with promises from both sides to improve ties and address the irritants standing in the way of better relations. Ishaq Dar met the acting Afghan PM and the foreign minister, among other top officials. The Kabul authorities assured Pakistan that Afghan soil would not be used against this country, while Mr Dar expressed similar sentiments.
The high-level exchange comes after a period of relative turmoil, with both sides at times trading fire at the border, and Pakistan expressing frustration with the Taliban authorities for failing to neutralise the Afghanistan-based TTP.
From here, the warm smiles and promises to prevent hostile actors from harming either country must be translated into concrete efforts. Pakistan has suffered immensely due to TTP terrorism, and the state rightly feels that the Afghan Taliban have not done enough to prevent the terrorist group from attacking this country. That is why Kabul — as well as the Taliban high command in Kandahar — must ensure that the TTP and other anti-Pakistan groups are put out of business, and not able to harm Pakistan.
A recent BBC report has highlighted a disturbing fact: the banned TTP and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan have managed to acquire many of the weapons left behind by the Americans during their chaotic retreat in 2021. Both the US and the Afghan Taliban have a responsibility to ensure that terrorist groups are not able to access and use such sophisticated weaponry against Pakistan.
Mr Dar also said that border management and security issues would be addressed. As these unresolved issues have led to armed skirmishes between both states and frequent closures of frontier crossings, it is imperative that border disputes are resolved justly and speedily.
Moreover, Kabul called upon Pakistan to end the “mistreatment” of Afghan refugees that are being returned to their home country. Mr Dar promised to handle the returning Afghans with respect. While the repatriation process continues, Pakistan should treat these individuals with dignity, while Western states must speed up the process of accepting those Afghans that once worked for them, as they may face dangers to their life if sent back to their homeland.
On Kabul’s part, ensuring that no group based on its soil is able to harm Pakistan would be the biggest CBM, and lead to a vast improvement in ties. Islamabad, meanwhile, can build bridges with the Afghan side by handling the repatriation process in a more humane manner and listening to Kabul’s concerns regarding trade. Concentrating on these key areas can lead to a more normal and productive bilateral relationship.
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2025
===============================================================================
Qurat ul ain Siddiqui Published April 22, 2025
THE heat arrives early now. By April, much of Pakistan is already sweltering, with temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius and humidity thick in the air. In the south, fans spin uselessly as the heat turns predatory. Hospitals begin seeing heatstroke victims even before summer officially begins. Glaciers in the north, melting rapidly, feed rivers that now swing between drought and flood. In parts of Sindh, the mercury soars past tolerable limits, scorching crops into dust. Farmers in Thar brace for annual winds that dry out land and lives alike, all signs of a climate crisis Pakistan didn’t cause, but one it must now survive, against impossible odds.
For decades, our environmental policy has resembled a game of whac-a-mole — swatting at symptoms while not thinking much of the rot beneath. In the 1990s, the logging mafias of KP denuded mountainsides with impunity, triggering landslides that buried entire villages. The state responded with bans and task forces, but the lumber trucks kept rolling. By 2010, Pakistan’s forest cover had dwindled to among the lowest in Asia. Then came the Billion Tree Tsunami, launched in 2014 as a rare success story. Over eight years, more than a billion saplings were planted, reviving watersheds and creating green jobs. But in recent years, rains have damaged large swaths of the new plantations, while deforested slopes have left villages once again vulnerable to floods — exposing how fragile that progress remains.
What has played out in the forests echoes in other domains; bursts of ambition, followed by backsliding. Pakistan’s energy and water policies reflect a similar pattern of progress undercut by dysfunction. The country’s push into solar power has led to desert solar farms and rooftop incentives, yet the national grid, a creaking relic of the 20th century, remains hostage to inertia. Coal still powers a sizeable chunk of electricity, while gas shortages push factories to burn tyres, filling already polluted neighbourhoods with toxic fumes.Despite scattered innovations, the system remains locked in a cycle where short-term fixes overshadow long-term reform.
Water scarcity deepens these contradictions. By 2025, Pakistan is projected to be South Asia’s most water-stressed nation, with per capita availability dropping from 5,650 cubic metres in 1951 to just 860. The country’s storage capacity covers only 30 days of demand — well below the global average of 120. In cities like Karachi, many rely on private water tankers, paying in some cases as high as Rs6,000 for 1,000 gallons. Elsewhere, groundwater tables are plunging and contamination from sewage and industry is quietly poisoning what remains.
Both crises reveal the same fault line: a system built to serve the powerful while leaving the rest to endure — where thirst, like heat, is not just a symptom, but a manifestation of structural inequality.
Technical fixes alone cannot mend what is broken. The deeper malady lies in perception. A failure to recognise that environmental collapse is not a niche concern but the meta crisis swallowing all others. Inflation, terrorism, political instability; these are symptoms of a biosphere in revolt. When crops fail, farmers migrate to cities already bursting at the seams; when floods destroy infrastructure, foreign investors flee; when heatwaves cripple labour, GDP withers. The environment is the economy, it is national security, it is the ledger on which all debts eventually come due; the scaffolding of survival.
Pakistan’s predicament mirrors the Anthropocene’s central riddle: how do we reimagine a society built on extraction, growth, and waste within planetary boundaries? The answers lie not in grand technological gambits but in the unglamorous work of rewiring governance: integrating climate resilience into urban planning, teaching farmers to read weather apps alongside crop prices, slashing fossil fuel subsidies not through diktat but by making renewables cheaper than coal; rethinking incentives, redistribu-ting risk, and removing the luxury of inaction from those who have benefited most from delay.
Under the weight of rising temperatures and shrinking margins, we are being pushed towards choices we can no longer defer. The IPCC gives 12 years to halve emissions, but Islamabad has less time. By 2050, millions could end up enduring heatwaves beyond human tolerance, or forced to migrate in search of breathable air and viable soil. What is needed is neither optimism nor despair, but clarity — and a break from the myths of separation from nature and infinite ‘growth’. What Pakistan needs now is not just aid or awareness but agency, and a politics that treats climate and the environment not as a downstream concern, but as foundational to every policy choice that follows.
The writer is a journalist based in Canada.
quratulain.siddiqui@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2025
|
