Author: pstaniland

“no other factor has influenced the tone and temper of India-Nepal relationship more decisively than the changing parameters of internal political forces in these two countries. Between the two, the Nepalese internal politics has played a relatively greater role in this respect”” Muni, India and Nepal, 1993, p. 8 (which I find much sharper on Nepali internal politics than his Foreign Policy of Nepal).

I get why US diplomats don’t publicly comment on human rights issues in India – just becomes catnip for the BJP and its base, who gleefully link it to George Soros, “regime change,” etc; it probably on average just makes things worse.

But US diplomats get paid – by American taxpayers – to offer real, independent analysis to their government. Which is why this, from a Politico piece on the “softly, softly” approach the US has taken toward India, suggests the need for some changes:

“A second State official was more blunt, saying the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi was well-known among diplomats for having “clientitus” — meaning it tends to parrot a host country’s line or at least avoid looking at it through a critical lens.

“Delhi is terrible on any kind of human rights reporting,” the second official said of the embassy there. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.”

This is especially problematic because so many US government officials with responsibility for India and Pakistan seem to have later gone on to become de facto lobbyists needing things from the Indian and Pakistani governments. Hard to imagine a worst set of incentives for producing autonomous or credible analysis. There are plenty of places to get bland, euphemistic takes on India and US-India relations; internal government communications, paid for by the US public, shouldn’t be one of them.

Rudra Chaudhuri has a very useful Carnegie India piece up on how to think about this new initiative:

“The iCET is not designed to deliver a single deal. There are, at least, eight to ten different streams for cooperation under the iCET, which serve as a framework for collaboration between the United States and India on critical and emerging technologies. Accordingly, there are a range of deals to be done across these technologies.”

Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur have edited a hugely important volume, just out from Oxford, about patterns of violence and state policy in India. I was lucky to be asked to write a chapter of it on internal security in comparative perspective, exploring the “de facto” rules of Indian state response to a wide variety of armed actors and how those resemble or diverge from other cases.

One of the most striking findings of their book is the dramatic decline in violence in recent decades in India. I’d noted some of this decline in the insurgency context in this 2020 Carnegie Endowment piece on the “Triumph of the State?” (pointing in part to an under-appreciated “internal security buildup” since the 1990s), but hadn’t realized how far-reaching the drop is across numerous other indicators. Yet as Ahuja and Kapur emphasize, the nature of violence has also shifted, with vigilantism taking on major symbolic and political importance. Arguments and theories built around data from the 1960s-1990s period clearly need to be seriously rethought for the post-2000 period.

The BBC’s Soutik Biswas has written a thoughtful overview of the findings and possible interpretations here. Read the article and buy the book.

Lee Bey is a prolific author and photographer of Chicago’s architecture, particularly its South Side (for instance, his book Southern Exposure). He just hosted an interesting WTTW show on the architecture of the South Side that is free to stream here.

At Museum of Contemporary Art.

A thoughtful post on the Nellie massacre 40 years later:

“I was born in Assam and grew up there. Yet, no one in my family or friends told me about Nellie. I read about it much later in my life. It was just not a part of collective memory or dinner table discourse in caste Hindu families in the state. But, I’m sure everyone who lived through the 1980s – our parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts or elder siblings – knew about it. They must have also known who the killers were or who incited them. But, most of them had either crafted a subconscious mental story to rationalise their ignorance or simply dismissed it as a stray local clash.

Everyone was responsible for Nellie, so no one was responsible for Nellie.

But, Nellie didn’t happen in a vacuum”