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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.)

The Opposition’s Existential Question

While democracy needs a credible opposition, it is not the BJP’s responsibility to create one.

Elections in India since 2014 have increasingly generated an engaging debate- the “lack” of a political opposition to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Barring a few setbacks, especially the 2024 general elections, most electoral contests since 2014 have recorded a steady and spectacular march of the BJP. The post-West Bengal iteration of this debate has an even graver existentialist tone over the state of the political opposition to the BJP. Admittedly, the BJP’s Bengal conquest is monumental, epic in its symbolism and style, and given the BJP’s impressive track record in holding on to states it has won for long durations, it portends doomsday dimensions for the opposition. As the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and other members of the anti-BJP ecosystem come to terms with this realisation that the BJP is here to stay in Bengal, it’s an opportune time to revisit this debate over the “lack” of a political opposition.


There is nothing wrong in expecting a credible political opposition in the interest of the general health of a democracy. But the debate gains momentum when the BJP has won an election and loses steam quickly to resurface only when another opposition party bites dust in some election. It is almost as if the issue deserves only an electoral life and does not merit sustained attention. The boringly ritualistic and cynical tenor of this debate adds no value to the discourse over the role, position, and politics of the opposition parties in India. There is another self-destructive aspect to this “opposition-mukt” refrain. It is presented and argued in a way as if it is the BJP’s responsibility to find an opposition to itself.


Lazy Narrative

The argument that the BJP is working towards an “opposition-mukt” India finds resonance with much of the mainstream media including some international outlets, political analysts, and even in how most opposition parties react to each of the BJP’s electoral triumphs. This narrative almost denies the BJP the very agency as a political party. It is a political party’s job to win elections by defeating its political opponents. That the BJP contests every election seriously and in a methodical manner cannot be its disqualification. It is obviously not the BJP’s job to find itself a credible opposition. It is the opposition political parties’ job to become a credible, serious, and worthy opposition and alternative to the BJP.


Once India’s opposition parties recognise this simple truth, they could learn from the BJP and its previous avatar, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, itself. Post-Independence politics in India has not seen a better opposition party than the BJS and BJP. How has the BJS-BJP gone from being just one of the opposition parties with a small social footprint among some upper caste Hindus to become India’s party of power, governance, nationalism, and spread over a socio-political map that not only rivals the Indian National Congress (INC) in the 50s and 60s but is even better than that in the context of a more complex, more diverse, more aspirational, and more demanding India? That is the question any serious political party and analyst in India needs to ponder if the debate is to rise above the mediocre level of “opposition-mukt” India.


To be sure, the BJS-BJP did not set out to become an opposition party. It established itself as a serious political party which aspired to win power electorally, a simple but essential ambition for a political party in a democracy. In pursuit of this ambition the BJS-BJP, and the larger Sangh Parivar ecosystem, were prepared to grind, fight, introspect after every loss, learn, imagine, aggregate, regroup and reorganise, and live another day to fight another electoral battle. The BJP still does it, regardless of the fact that it now rules the Centre and 21 states. BJP’s opponents had pronounced West Bengal an impossibility for the BJP. The BJP did not think so. It fought on. Amid all this strife spanning decades and the march towards becoming India’s natural ruling party, the BJS-BJP has stuck to its ideology, mission, and larger goals, with only smaller concessions and some flexibility that it thought was politically necessary at the time.


Mindless Opposition

Now, even a cursory look at almost every political party currently in opposition to the BJP gives an impression that opposing whatever the BJP and the BJP-led government stand for is their idea of their job description. Except for the Left parties, there is hardly any sustaining and credible ideology any other opposition party consistently stands for and fights elections on. Starting a venture named ‘Aam Aadmi Party’ with the proprietor living a life that has progressively appeared as distant from the aam aadmi as does the real life of a film star from the common man he plays or smugly opposing a strategically important and critical national security project like the Great Nicobar Island just because the BJP-led government is executing it does not make an opposition party a credible voice of opposition. It just makes for a sad spectacle.

(The author is a senior journalist and Executive Director of Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini. Views personal.)

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