R Sreenivas VSM

What can we actually buy ₹10 in 2026?

The women of India and Pakistan need to deploy our ingrained common sense and suggest ways forward in our relationship. We need a women’s caucus. Not to throw accusations against each other but to think calmly and sensibly about the future ahead. For the sake of our children. We need to bring in the counterpoint: without naming it, without sounding defensive, but making it impossible to dismiss. For decades, India–Pakistan engagement has been trapped in a single script: territory, terror, recrimination. We repeat it with ritual precision, but it yields diminishing returns. What if we widened the frame? In West Asia, especially the Gulf, our interests often run in parallel: energy security, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, crisis response. These are not abstractions since they affect millions of lives and the resilience of both economies. Engaging here need not dilute our positions, create false parity, or reopen familiar disputes. It can remain tightly bounded, issue-specific, and without prejudice to core differences. Skeptics will argue that Pakistan cannot compartmentalise, that any engagement risks being instrumentalised, and that peripheral cooperation has never altered core hostility. But the purpose here is not transformation, it is insulation. Not to resolve the conflict by other means, but to prevent it from defining all means. Some may also say Pakistan has found a “role” in the Iran crisis and India should not be seen as seeking one. But this is not about visibility or mediation. Our interests are structural not transitory. If anything, the moment underscores a larger truth: even adversarial states operate beyond their disputes when interests demand it. When the central track is blocked, responsible statecraft does not stand still. It explores parallel ones, carefully, deliberately, and on its own terms. Sometimes, widening the field is not weakness. It is strategy. The women must speak.

The world is being reordered by those who act and those who define. If India wishes to be counted among the latter, it must ensure that its silence does not speak louder than its convictions. We are living through a moment when the rules of the international system are being rewritten in real time. Assassinations of leaders, the killing of civilians, open assertions of force—these are no longer aberrations but instruments. In such a world, silence is not neutrality. It is read, interpreted, and often misread as consent. India has long claimed a distinctive space in global affairs—not as an appendage to power, but as a voice shaped by its own civilisational experience and its history of speaking for sovereignty, restraint, and balance. That voice mattered because it was consistent, even when inconvenient. Strategic autonomy cannot mean adjusting our language to the hierarchy of power. Restraint has its place. Calibration is necessary. But when fundamental questions arise—about sovereignty, about the limits of force, about the protection of civilians—India cannot afford to be silent. A moral compass is not an ornament of foreign policy. It is its direction. Without it, realism drifts into accommodation, and autonomy into ambiguity. This war has damaged India’s interests in almost every practical sense. It has raised costs, narrowed diplomatic room, stressed shipping, complicated Chabahar, and injected fresh instability into a region vital to India’s economy and external strategy. Even if New Delhi can cushion the blow, it cannot plausibly claim that the blow itself serves India. The deeper question is whether India is willing to say so with sufficient clarity.

Indian Muslims publicly discussing how to divide, attack and finish off Hindus. “Brahmins should be attacked first” 🤯😳

Goes in uniform to swamijis who want PoK as “dakshina”. Replaces legendary 1971 victory pic in his office with a pedestrian caricature of medieval folklore. When trolled for repeated indiscretions, visits temple in civvies & drags in an entire secular force. How low is too low?