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By:

Rajiv Shah

22 September 2025 at 8:32:23 pm

New Alliances, New Pressures, New Fault Lines

To its west, old relationships in the Gulf are acquiring new strategic and military dimensions. Across the Atlantic, Washington is increasingly using tariffs as an instrument of foreign policy. At the same time, India holds the BRICS presidency in 2026 and prepares to host its summit when the grouping is being watched in the West as a potential challenge to the American-dominated global financial order. Individually, these developments may appear unrelated. Put together, they reveal a larger...

New Alliances, New Pressures, New Fault Lines

To its west, old relationships in the Gulf are acquiring new strategic and military dimensions. Across the Atlantic, Washington is increasingly using tariffs as an instrument of foreign policy. At the same time, India holds the BRICS presidency in 2026 and prepares to host its summit when the grouping is being watched in the West as a potential challenge to the American-dominated global financial order. Individually, these developments may appear unrelated. Put together, they reveal a larger geopolitical churn in which alliances, energy, trade, currencies and economic coercion are becoming interconnected. India finds itself almost at its centre. The emerging Saudi Arabia–Türkiye–Pakistan security equation deserves particular attention. Saudi Arabia brings enormous financial and energy influence; Türkiye possesses considerable military strength, NATO experience and an expanding defence industry; Pakistan brings a large military establishment and nuclear capability with the open support of Washington. Any arrangement containing a collective-defence commitment naturally acquires significance beyond ordinary diplomatic cooperation. Alongside it, another strategic convergence has gradually developed among India, Israel and the UAE. It would be incorrect to describe this as a formal military alliance. Yet geopolitics does not operate through defence treaties alone. India's extensive defence and technology relationship with Israel, its rapidly expanding economic and strategic partnership with the UAE, and the UAE-Israel relationship following the Abraham Accords have created considerable common ground. I2U2—bringing together India, Israel, the UAE and the United States—added another institutional dimension. Thus, without necessarily becoming opposing military camps, two interesting strategic formations are visible across West Asia: Saudi Arabia–Türkiye–Pakistan and the looser India–UAE–Israel convergence. Balancing Challenge India faces a similar balancing challenge. The Gulf is not a distant geopolitical theatre for New Delhi. Nearly nine million Indians live and work there. India's energy security, investments, trade and remittance flows are closely connected with the region. The proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor also requires relative stability across this geography. Polarisation in West Asia can therefore rapidly become an Indian economic and strategic problem. There is another question Indian planners cannot ignore. If a future India-Pakistan confrontation escalates, how would any collective-defence commitment involving Pakistan be interpreted by Saudi Arabia and Türkiye? It would be alarmist to assume that either country would automatically enter a conflict against India. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has substantial economic and strategic interests in maintaining good relations with New Delhi. Nevertheless, defence planners are paid to examine possibilities before they become crises. While these equations develop in India's neighbourhood, economic pressure is emerging from Washington. The US Senate has voted 86–11 for legislation intended to increase pressure on Russia by targeting major purchasers of Russian energy. The measure could authorise tariffs reaching 100 per cent against goods from countries continuing large-scale purchases of Russian oil and gas, with India among those potentially exposed. China is powerful enough to shrug off similar challenges from the West." However this does not mean that America has already imposed a 100 per cent tariff on India. Further legislative steps remain necessary, and presidential waiver provisions are important. But the overwhelming Senate vote carries a political message that New Delhi cannot dismiss. Tariffs are no longer merely tools of trade protection; they have become instruments of geopolitical coercion. Washington's argument is understandable: revenues from Russian petroleum help sustain Moscow's economy during the Ukraine war, and reducing those revenues increases pressure on Russia. But in that case what about European countries who too were/are customers of Russian oil? India's question is equally legitimate: who should determine where India purchases the energy required by more than 1.4 billion people? If Russian crude remains commercially advantageous and helps contain domestic energy costs, New Delhi cannot reasonably be expected to make every energy decision according to another country's geopolitical priorities. Strategic partnership cannot become strategic obedience. This is where BRICS enters the larger picture. India holds the BRICS presidency in 2026 and will host its leaders at an unusually sensitive moment. BRICS is no longer merely the original grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Its expansion has considerably increased its demographic, energy and geopolitical weight. More importantly, discussions around BRICS increasingly touch a sensitive nerve in Washington: alternative payment mechanisms, local-currency trade, development finance and the possibility of gradually reducing dependence upon the dollar-dominated international financial system. The BRICS Summit this time is poised to take some decisive steps which may affect western interests especially US. (The writer is an advocate, legal, geopolitical and public policy analyst. Views personal.)

Quota Illusions

The Maharashtra government’s scrapping of the five per cent reservation for Muslims in jobs and education has closed the book on a decade-long political fiction in which the language of social justice was bent to the purposes of electoral arithmetic.


The decision, formalised through an amended Government Resolution, followed the expiry of the earlier ordinance and an interim court stay. But its political meaning was unmistakable. Under Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the Mahayuti government has chosen to end a policy that was cynical rather than compassionate.


The quota has its origins in 2014, when the then Congress-NCP coalition government had announced it on the eve of elections with an eye to gaining minority votes. Naturally, the necessary legal scaffolding of data and the backwardness criteria that met judicial tests was never fully constructed.


Across India, reservation policy has too often been stretched beyond its constitutional logic to serve as a shorthand for inclusion. The intent of affirmative action, which is to remedy demonstrable social and educational backwardness, has been frequently diluted by gestures aimed at consolidating vote banks.


Defenders of the Muslim quota argue that withdrawing it sends a hostile signal to minorities. This charge rests on a misleading premise that Muslims as a whole are excluded from the reservation framework. In reality, Maharashtra already recognises social backwardness within the Muslim community through caste-based classifications whose entitlements remain untouched. What has been scrapped is not protection for the disadvantaged, but a religion-specific quota that courts have repeatedly viewed with scepticism.


The political backlash was predictable. The Congress and its allies accused the government of anti-minority intent, while the BJP dismissed the original quota as an unimplemented stunt. What this episode underscores is the corrosive effect of performative secularism. By repeatedly announcing policies that cannot survive legal scrutiny, parties cheapen the very idea of social justice. They also risk fostering resentment among beneficiaries who are promised gains that never materialise, and among others who see the system as arbitrary.


The Mahayuti’s move exposes the contradictions of its opponents. In 2020, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), which included Congress and the NCP, had sought to revive variations of the same idea, despite knowing its legal fragility. The result was a cycle of announcements and reversals that served politics better than people. Ending that cycle is arguably more honest.


Scrapping the Muslim quota does not solve the problem of deprivation within minority communities. But what it does do is reassert a basic principle that affirmative action must be based on backwardness, not belief.


The Maharashtra government’s decision is less about ideology than institutional hygiene. By withdrawing a legally hollow promise, it restores a measure of seriousness to a policy space long cluttered by symbolic gestures. In an era when identity politics rewards spectacle, such restraint is essential if reservations are to remain instruments of justice rather than illusions of inclusion.

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