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Indian Express
2 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
As China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh inch closer to each other, India must explore feasible diplomatic options
Written by Udayan Das On June 19, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan had their first-ever trilateral meeting at the Foreign Office level hosted in Kunming, Yunnan. What might look like a sudden development is actually a steady culmination of geopolitical alignments of the past year. It is no secret that the relationship between China and Pakistan is on a firm footing. For one, the recent India-Pakistan standoff has only hardened this relationship. It is also commonplace to argue that Bangladesh has been working with China on several aspects for a long time now. What has changed, then, to bring about this realignment? There are two key shifts since Bangladesh's dramatic regime change in August last year that explain this. First, the weak link in the triangle, Bangladesh-Pakistan ties, is notably improving. Second, with the Delhi-Dhaka rift, Bangladesh is decisively inclined towards China. Bitter history and lingering issues notwithstanding, Bangladesh and Pakistan are in a convergence of convenience and opportunism. A meeting between Muhammad Yunus and Shehbaz Sharif in December 2024 initiated military and economic engagement. A high-level military delegation from Bangladesh held talks in Pakistan with the Chief of Army Staff, Asim Munir, in January. In February, the Bangladeshi Navy participated in Aman 2025 in Karachi after a gap of 12 years. In a historic first since 1971, the two states started direct trade from March 2025. Bangladesh's new regime is in search of partners in the region as it has firmly resolved to undo Hasina's and the Awami League's legacy of prioritising India in foreign relations. For Pakistan, it is an opportune moment to engage with Bangladesh on several fronts. Strategically, it balances and offsets India's asymmetry in South Asia. It is not surprising that one of the notes in the first meeting between the heads of state was about reviving the SAARC. With Pakistan's continuing economic woes, a new trade partner in Bangladesh is welcome too. Culturally, challenging the legacy of the 1971 War of Independence and the rise of Islamism can be the preface for an interesting period of relations between Dhaka and Islamabad. Yunus made an economic outreach when he went to China in March. A total of nine economic and technical agreements were signed on diverse issues. With US investments drying up and Bangladesh deliberately looking beyond India, China becomes its best option to resolve its economic difficulties. Interestingly, engagements are not limited to state interactions alone. China has been hosting delegations from Bangladesh's political parties and striving to develop people-to-people ties as well. Under the Hasina regime, China-Bangladesh ties had only grown, but with some tacit acknowledgement from India (seemingly lacking now). It was primarily about giving priority to India in major economic projects and making sure that India's security concerns were addressed. Yunus, however, has now welcomed Chinese companies to the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project (TRCMRP), while Hasina had preferred Indian involvement. Reportedly, Bangladesh and China are in talks to develop the Lalmonirhat Airbase, which is 135 kilometres away from the Siliguri Corridor. This is concerning as China's assistance cannot rule out its presence and surveillance near India's strategically vulnerable location. India's unease was further aggravated when Yunus touched a raw nerve by showcasing the Northeast as almost like a landlocked captive market sandwiched between China and the sole guardian of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh. In a sharp response, India curbed the import of ready-made garments from Bangladesh, a move intended to financially hurt Bangladesh and force it to acknowledge India's security sensitivities. The main concern for India in this triad is China's entry into its strategically crucial and vulnerable zones through an eastern front in Bangladesh. What options does India have? There is little to mend with Pakistan now that the hard lines are drawn. It is also a reality that China will attempt to intrude in South Asia and widen the chasm between India and other South Asian countries. There aren't many options for India other than to diplomatically engage and have a functional relationship with its regional counterparts for a stable neighbourhood. A punishing move, like India's restrictions on Bangladeshi imports, is only likely to harm its interests. It will provoke an even stronger anti-India narrative and create a vacuum that will be capitalised on by China. India's diplomacy has to pursue substantive gains amidst a neighbourhood where it is entangled in the identity politics of other states and an unforgiving asymmetric structure. The triad's cooperation also highlights that the longstanding features of South Asian politics show remarkable consistency. The Bangladesh-Pakistan bonhomie shows that small states may unite over rifts and grievances with big states in the region. Despite India's previously good relations with Bangladesh, Delhi always aligned itself with a particular regime and political party. India, therefore, is not merely an external player but is embedded in the corrosive domestic equations of the South Asian states. The lines between domestic and foreign policy remain blurred in the region. Finally, the smaller states will always be inclined to draw in an extra-regional balancer, here in the form of China, when rifts with the regional big power widen. The writer teaches at the Department of Political Science, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata
Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The vicious genius of Adam Curtis
In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn't understand his films because they aren't interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it's true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel. The other kids were in bands, you were in a reading group. When political freaks grow up a bit they often get very performatively into social binge-drinking, as if to prove a point, but it's all hollow. The joy isn't there. There are important things about the world that will always be closed off to the political obsessive, because political obsessives don't understand music. Adam Curtis considers himself to be a political journalist, and he definitely used to be one. His BBC documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s are thorny and thematically dense attempts to grapple with the condition of the present. Pandora's Box (1992) was about how human reason bumps up against the inherent messiness of reality, and how projects for rationally governing the world end up collapsing into bizarre forms of unreason. Over six episodes, Curtis talks about von Neumann's game theory, Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Kwame Nkrumah's dream of African self-sufficiency, the cult of Taylorism and how it overrode Marxism in the early Soviet Union, nuclear physics, insecticides, and the way our social biases are repackaged for us in the form of a supposedly neutral science. There are a lot of words in there. Plenty of interviews with experts and significant figures, but also Curtis's clipped, precise narration, set to a collage of footage dug out of the BBC archive. Street scenes, offices, factories, politicians getting out of cars, but sometimes more abstract shots of industrial infrastructure and spaceships exploding in the sky. According to Curtis, most of that footage was there because he needed to finish the film on time and couldn't find anything else. But since then, this stuff has become his stock in trade. You know you're watching an Adam Curtis film when you hear someone talking about how plans to rationally control society fell apart to a Burial track and lots of black-and-white archive footage of people dancing at Butlin's. He was convinced he was simply illustrating his ideas. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he was unleashing forces that he could neither control nor understand. And then something strange happened. His style has become very easy to parody, which might be why Curtis has spent the last few years steadily paring it down. Shifty is his most abstract, imagistic film yet. His narration has now vanished entirely; instead, there are a series of sparse title cards that flash up over the archive footage, saying things like 'The Concept Of Privatisation Had Been Invented By The Nazis' or 'Underneath There Was Nothing.' All in all, over five episodes and five-and-three-quarter hours, Adam Curtis gives us significantly fewer of his own words than are contained in this review. They are sparse and stony, less like an argument than propaganda signs glowing in the night. The story he tells with them is – if you've seen any of his previous work – a familiar one. Every episode begins with the same words. 'There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things become SHIFTY.' In Britain, that moment came at the end of the 20th century. Before Thatcher, Britain was about strong communities, solidarity, labour unions, and a productive industrial base. But during the Thatcher and Blair eras, all of that was emptied out, and we became a society of cynical, self-interested individuals, trapped in a fantasy of the past, and led by politicians who no longer believed in anything at all. This story is not necessarily untrue, but it's also not really groundbreaking. To the extent that this country does still have a unifying national myth, it's this one – about how Thatcherism tore all our unifying national myths apart. But it doesn't really matter, because Curtis is doing something different to ordinary political journalism. His constant rummage through the BBC's archives has yielded a lot of good stuff, and he has a real vicious genius for putting it together. At the start of the very first scene, we see Jimmy Savile ushering a group of angelic blond children into Thatcher's office. Once they're inside he gives a chortling thumbs-up to the camera, and then closes the door. Alongside the stories of monetarism and shots of fox hunters riding in front of huge hazy steelworks, there are weirder threads. A dog owner is concerned that their pet seems to have spontaneously switched sex. At the London Zoo, which can no longer rely on state financing, zookeepers now have to be personable and cheerful, play-acting for a public who have become the only source of income. A kid plays with the effects pedal on his guitar. A woman shows off her designer handbags. In the planning meetings for the Millennium Dome, they try to pin down the values of modern Britain, but discover that they don't really have any. In the 'Spirit Zone,' instead of endorsing any particular religion, they've decided to fill the room with fog and write the words 'How shall I live?' on the wall. They're very proud of it. 'I think the question 'how shall I live?' is anything but banal. In fact, I think it's the biggest single question, probably, that's begged in the entire dome.' None of this really coalesces into a single point, but trying to make things coalesce into a single point is part of the rationalist, sense-making project Curtis has been critiquing his entire career. Our world is shifty now, and things will not make sense. You won't understand them with facts, but music. There's far less actual music here than in any of Curtis's previous films. Instead of Kanye or Nine Inch Nails or Aphex Twin, a lot of the shots of decaying industry are set to the sounds of static or howling wind. But music is one of the threads here. In one episode, we're introduced to the Farlight CMI digital sampler, a machine that can take any sound, convert it into data, and digitally reproduce it. The first song to be recorded entirely using samples was 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is then banned from the BBC for being too flagrantly gay, but it's already self-replicating around the world. People start using the Farlight CMI to switch out samples in the track and create their own remixes. Which is, of course, what Curtis is also doing. Later, we meet a bedroom producer called DJ Fingers, playing around with turntables in his south London home. 'Basically you're just making music out of other people's records. You know the record inside out when you're cutting up this break.' Once again Curtis has found a vision of himself in the archives. But it's not exactly celebratory. He was one of the first people to point out that in recent decades newness seems to have vanished from the world: we just repeat old fashions, old music, old fantasies about how to live. What does it mean, then, when one of our greatest and most popular documentarians does nothing but rearrange the past? At the end of the final episode, there's a kind of Adam Curtis auto-parody, of the type I just did above. A Bowie song, paired with clips from old films. 'Will People Come Together As They Did In The Past And Fight Back?' his stark title cards ask. 'Or Is This Just Another Feedback Loop Of Nostalgia? Repeating Back Sounds Dreams And Images Of The Past, Which Is The Way The System Controls You, And Is The Way This Series Was Made.'
Spectator
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Grooming gangs inquiry is welcome, but too late
The announcement that there will, after all, be a statutory inquiry into the child rape and pimping gang scandal – euphemistically referred to as 'grooming gangs' – should be welcomed. The words 'euphemism', 'whitewashing' and 'cover-up' apply to more than just the language used to describe this phenomenon. I first investigated the scandal back in the early 2000s, and published the very first piece exposing it in the national media in 2007. A quarter of a century later, little has changed. A small number of victims have had compensation from local authorities and public apologies from police. But the vast majority of victims have never received support, compensation or validation. They struggle to get on with their lives while their perpetrators, often considered pillars of the community, continue living amongst them. The cowards and the deniers who for so long refused to accept the harm being done to children by violent exploiters are going to have to own up to being part of the problem. When I was interviewing social workers and sexual health professionals in the early 2000s about the gangs predominated by Pakistani Muslim men, many white liberals gave me the cold shoulder, not wanting to be quoted in an article asking, 'Why this community? Why these men?' Even though they knew I was on the left and determined not to fall into a racist rabbit hole, they were more concerned about keeping their noses clean than they were about the girls being sadistically abused right under those same noses. It may be true that racist opportunists have rejoiced at the idea that the crime of child abuse can be pinned on brown-skinned Muslims, whipping up racial hatred off the back of it – but white liberals have also spectacularly failed these girls. Child sexual abuse is known to happen mainly in family settings and care homes. We are often told that the majority is perpetrated by white men – an unsurprising statistic, given that more than 70 per cent of our population is white. Liberals continue to insist that any mention of ethnicity can only be underpinned by racist motivation, but this inquiry must look at the specifics – including ethnicity and cultural factors. As a feminist, I am interested in patriarchy as a cultural factor, so how can we possibly ignore the role played by Islamism in the normalisation of the degradation of females? To do so would be as counterproductive as ignoring the structures of the Catholic Church in producing so many clergy who abused children and subsequently covered it up. We would have to deny that watching violent and degrading pornography on a regular basis has any effect whatsoever on men's attitudes and sexual behaviour. Time and again, we have heard excuses as to why a statutory inquiry is unnecessary. First, we were told local ones might be more suitable – but what about cities like Bradford, long known to have a huge problem with gang-related child sexual exploitation? Do we trust those tasked with looking at their own failures? The police, the local authorities? Why would they admit what's been going on all these decades, when they could just as easily plead ignorance? The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) published its report in 2022. It fell a long way short of getting to grips with the issues relating to street-based rape gangs. Rather than focusing on geographical areas already known to have a major problem with grooming gangs, random towns and cities were chosen; a shameful waste of public money. In the final report, just five pages (out of hundreds) were dedicated to gang-related abuse, which largely focused on police and social services. It scarcely looked at specific religious or cultural factors involved in what may have motivated, or provided cover for, perpetrators. The voices of survivors were barely heard. Any new inquiry needs to be fearless. Data on ethnicity, occupation, and family structure must be included. Are these men able to evade the law because they operate within a clan? The gang leaders are pimps, making money out of these girls, yet the words prostitution and profit are rarely mentioned. How come so many abuse victims have been criminalised? Not just for misdemeanours such as being drunk and disorderly but also – because gang leaders tell girls to 'bring along your friend' – for pimping. Unless we ask these difficult questions, we won't know. Racists (such as those suggesting that mass deportations will solve the problem of child sexual abuse) will continue to control the narrative until we can come up with some answers as to why there is a predominance of men from these backgrounds doing the abusing. Since these child abuse gangs came under public scrutiny, we have learned shocking details of the scale of the problem, and the unimaginable horror these girls have endured. A national inquiry will lift the stone to uncover exactly how police, social workers, health professionals, and wider society have failed the victims. But the fact remains that some –and not only the perpetrators – would rather leave the stone unturned.
The Hindu
11-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Catholic Congress' hard line on courting fundamentalist votes unsettles LDF and UDF campaigns in Nilambur
The Catholic Congress, an influential non-ecclesiastical organisation within the Syro-Malabar Church, appears to have unsettled the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and opposing United Democratic Front (UDF) campaigns in the Nilambur Assembly by-election to some extent on Wednesday by striking a hard line position against the competing fronts soliciting the support of 'radical Islamist' political outfits in the high-stakes and no-holds-barred ballot box battle. In a strongly worded statement, the organisation, which claims to champion the socio-political interests of the Christian laity, has disavowed the LDF and the UDF's 'dalliance' with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP, chaired by 2008 Bangalore serial blast accused Abdul Nasar Madani) and the Welfare Party of India (WPI, an offshoot of the Jamaat-e-Islami) respectively. The Christian organisation, which has significant influence among the Christian settler-farmer community in Nilambur, a crucial electoral bloc, warned that enabling ultra-conservative Islamist groups to telegraph their so-called leverage in the bypoll would not bode well for the LDF and the UDF in future elections. Secular voters The Catholic Congress also took the line that secular voters would give a befitting reply to the UDF and the LDF's appeasement of 'terrorist forces and political Islam' in upcoming polls. The LDF and the UDF scrambled to decipher the electoral implications of the Catholic Congress' overt political positioning even as both fronts continued to slug it out over the touchy subject of 'myopically courting fundamentalist votes for short-term political expediency.' The UDF stated that the LDF had no qualms about seeking the Jamaat-e-Islami's support in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and the 2011 Kerala Assembly elections. The LDF sought to differentiate between the respective political lines of the WPI and PDP by insisting that the latter eschewed radical Islamism and towed a secular democratic line. However, the Catholic Congress's hard line stance on the LDF and the UDF courting 'Islamist' forces appeared to give some comfort to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Current stance A senior BJP leader claimed that the Catholic Congress's current political stance dovetailed with that of the National Democratic Alliance and has buoyed the chances of the party's candidate, who hails from the Christian settler-farmer community in Nilambur.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Is Sir Keir Starmer a Right-wing extremist?
Is Sir Keir Starmer KC – Left-wing human rights lawyer, former director of public prosecutions, and Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – a dangerous Right-wing extremist? Common sense, evidence and reality say emphatically not. Government materials issued as part of Prevent training programmes give a less clear answer. The Prime Minister's warning that uncontrolled migration risks turning Britain into an 'island of strangers' would appear to risk falling foul of the definitions used in a Prevent course taken by thousands of public sector professionals with a duty to make referrals to the scheme. This defines 'cultural nationalism' as a type of extreme Right-wing terrorist ideology, including the belief that 'Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups'. Sir Keir is no more an extremist than any other writer who has expressed concern over the unprecedented scale and pace of migration and cultural change in recent years. Why, then, has the Government risked labelling him as such? The short answer is that, riddled with political anxieties over the composition of terrorism in Britain – 80 per cent of the Counter Terrorism Police network's live investigations involved Islamism in 2023, compared with 10 per cent for the extreme Right – Prevent has given the appearance of loosening the definition of the latter in order to provide an artificial 'balance' to its work. As the Shawcross Review found in 2023, the programme has adopted a 'double standard' when dealing with Islamists and the extreme Right. The results have been farcical, with an 'expansive' definition of Right-wing extremism capturing 'mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, Right-wing leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation' even while Prevent funded organisations whose leaders have publicly made statements 'sympathetic to the Taliban' and referred to militant Islamists as 'so-called 'terrorists' of the legitimate resistance groups'. Such absurdities might be overlooked if Prevent had also proved ruthlessly effective at preventing atrocities. It has not. Prevent has failed to identify dangerous and violent suspects on multiple occasions, including Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, who was referred and dismissed on three occasions before carrying out his attack. A deradicalisation programme that seems to show less interest in deradicalising potential terrorists than in policing Right-wing thought is unfit for purpose. It beggars belief that two years after the Shawcross Review we are once again having the same conversations. Prevent must be reformed – or if incapable of change, dismantled entirely. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
