Trump is sold on Pak oil. But where's the oil?
The hoax of the "massive oil reserve" owes its origins to former Pakistan PM, Imran Khan.In March 2019, Imran Khan announced a "possible massive find" offshore. It was touted as "Asia's largest oil and gas reserve".Hours after Khan's announcement, the Petroleum Division denied it, saying the drill did not yield the desired results, according to a 2024 report in the Karachi-based Dawn newspaper.The report says that ExxonMobil, ENI, Pakistan Petroleum Limited, and Oil & Gas Development Company Limited drilled beyond 5,500 metres but didn't find oil or gas reserves."The drilling work has now been abandoned," an official then told DawnNewsTV.Forget the imaginary, unproven massive offshore find. Pakistan's proven oil reserves are estimated at approximately353.5 million barrels as of 2016, ranking it 52nd on the list of countries with petroleum in the world.This is just 0.021% of the global oil reserves.India, in contrast, which is the world's third-largest crude oil consumer, India, has around 4.9 billion barrels of oil reserves, ranking among the top 25 globally.That is approximately 0.29% of the world's total oil reserves.For Pakistan, at current consumption rate, its reserves would cover less than two years without imports.To make matters even more complicated for Pakistan, most of its oil reserves are in Balochistan, the resource-rich province that has risen in rebellion against the Islamabad-Rawalpindi establishment.There was widespread anger in Pakistan in July when petrol prices were revised upwards by 5.36 Pakistani rupees a litre to 272.15 PKR a litre, reported news agency ANI. Pakistanis asked why the increase in fuel prices while crude prices in global markets had declined.Trump gives two hoots to facts and truths. Massage his ego, and sell him a dream, and Trump is all yours.The Trump family has also fallen for Pakistan's cryptocurrency pitch. That's the crypto dream of a country whose economy survives on the begging bowl.US total goods trade with Pakistan was estimated at $7.3 billion in 2024, according to a Reuters report.India-US bilateral trade stands at $129 billion, according to US Trade Representative data.Though America's need for its lapdog Pakistan is more strategic than for trade, the mention of "massive reserves" of oil in Trump's post only makes one wonder the nature of oil that Islamabad has used for Trump's tel maalish.- EndsTune InMust Watch
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Hindustan Times
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Hindustan Times
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Journalist Sneha Barve receives death threats days after assault while reporting illegal construction
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From the Opinions Editor: Citizens and Others
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In the early 1990s, when the Sangh Parivar had first raised the pitch against undocumented Bangladeshis in India, the then Congress-led Union Home Ministry had responded with Operation Pushback, a campaign to round up and deport alleged Bangladeshi migrants. The attempt was haphazard and short-lived, but not before many were detained and forcibly sent across the border bypassing due process and, in some cases, overlooking valid identity proof. Assam's own history of exclusion is steeped in post-colonial anxieties. The anti-Bengali sentiment in the state has roots in the mass migrations following Partition and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. The Bongal Kheda movement of the 1960s solidified in the Assam Agitation (1979–1985) and the subsequent Assam Accord sought to protect indigenous identity — but it came often at the expense of long-settled Bengali-speaking communities. The 2019 National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise stoked old fears. Over 19 lakh people were excluded from the final list, a majority of them Bengali-speaking, and Muslim. The process — opaque, inconsistent, and marred by bureaucratic hurdles — devolved into a Kafkaesque ordeal marked by detention centres, exclusion from welfare schemes, and a constant threat of statelessness. Under Sarma, the state government's recent move to invoke the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 — allowing district collectors to deport individuals labelled as 'foreigners' without the oversight of Foreigners Tribunals — raises pressing concerns about the erosion of institutional safeguards and the risk of communal profiling that could wrongfully implicate lawful residents alongside the undocumented. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has described the current spate of detentions in various parts of the country as targeted assault against vulnerable Bengali speakers. Referring to the Election Commission's plan to implement the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) nationwide, she has accused the BJP-led Centre and the EC of attempting to introduce the NRC 'through the backdoor'; of linguistic profiling and discrimination against minorities from the state. As a mark of protest, Banerjee launched a Bhasha Andolan (language movement) campaign — an emotive issue among the community — from Bolpur, the site of Rabindranath Tagore's Visva Bharati university, this week. With critical Assembly elections due in both Bengal and Assam next year, the thickening of identity politics can turn into a flashpoint. In 2021, the TMC's campaign slogan — Bangla nijer meyekei chay (Bengal wants its own daughter) — channeled regional pride in response to the BJP's aggressive Hindutva push. Now, amid corruption scandals and a spate of incidents of sexual violence raising questions over governance, the migrant issue has evidently given TMC a new platform. It has reoriented its campaign to focus on the rights of Bengali-speaking migrants — an estimated 22.5 lakh Bengalis work outside West Bengal. And yet, Banerjee herself has played into this narrative earlier. In January this year, she accused the BSF guarding Bengal's border with Bangladesh of letting in illegal Bangladeshi migrants into the state to pin the blame of infiltration on the state government. This reflects how identity once politicised becomes both a shield and a battleground. The rhetoric of 'infiltrators' and 'outsiders' may reap electoral dividends in the short term, but in the long run, it foments division, distrust and a breakdown of order. In Pune this week, for instance, a mob of around 60-odd people, several of them allegedly belonging to the Bajrang Dal, barged into the home of a Kargil War veteran's relative in Pune, and demanded identity proofs from the family, calling them Bangladeshis. The police on site apparently acceded to the demands of the mob, carting the family off to the police station in the dead of the night. Migration is a natural and necessary phenomenon in a country as diverse and dynamic as India. Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to move and reside freely within the country. For many, migration is not a choice but a compulsion — driven by economic hardship, displacement, or historical patterns of mobility. To reduce individuals to narrow markers of language, faith, or ethnicity is to chip away at the pluralistic foundations of Indian democracy. The warning bells are loud and clear: If identity continues to be weaponised, India risks further shrinking its civic space into something narrow, brittle, and unjust. When a system focuses on binaries — citizen vs infiltrator, us vs them — it erodes the nuanced, layered understanding of what it means to be Indian. Stay well, Paromita
