Nikhil Apte

Baluchistan is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Many foresee another Bangladesh in the making, but it’s not as simple as it seems. Here👇i explain why. #baluchistan #Pakistan #PakistanArmy

This is a photograph of Albert Einstein with an unassuming Indian man you probably haven’t heard enough about. He spent his life working on one idea: women should be able to live with dignity and make their own choices. Thread. 1/14

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@wartrophy_414 Idiot loser! get a life.

Retired Col Rajesh Pawar here, displaying his years of accumulated wisdom in a podcast. Calls the current CDS & COAS as midgets & how they don't inspire troops because of their heights. For context, the podcaster was asking about Information warfare from th`e retired col

@Uber cheating at pune airport at premier arrivals. Charging extra money and making customers wait in endless lines. @MORTHIndia @DPIITGoI @nitin_gadkari

Best story I’ve seen for some time..

JUST IN: The United States has not built a new oil refinery in fifty years. Fifty. The last one broke ground when Nixon was president and oil cost $3 a barrel. Trump just announced a $300 billion deal to build one. The largest energy investment in American history. Port of Brownsville, Texas. Groundbreaking Q2 2026. Binding 20-year offtake agreement. Processing American shale crude. Thousands of jobs in South Texas. “The cleanest refinery in the world.” The lead investor is Indian. Reliance Industries, controlled by the Ambani family with a 50.39% promoter stake, operators of the Jamnagar complex in Gujarat, the largest single-site refinery on Earth, are the confirmed major foreign partner. Trump thanked them on Truth Social as “our partners in India, and their largest privately held Energy Company” for their “tremendous investment.” Now hold two facts simultaneously. India’s Reliance Industries is investing billions in an American refinery to process American shale oil for American energy dominance. India’s government, led by Modi, is simultaneously importing over 40% of its crude from Russia at war-discounted prices, rejected the US “permission” framing for a 30-day Russian oil waiver on 7th March (“India has never depended on permission from any country”), and continues buying Iranian crude via Chabahar port logistics. The same country. The same week. Building American energy independence with one hand. Buying Russian crude with the other. This is not hypocrisy. This is the Modi Doctrine operating at its highest expression. Multi-alignment means India does not choose sides. It chooses deals. QUAD membership for security. Russian crude for energy. Chabahar for Iranian access. Reliance capital for American refining. Israeli defence technology for military modernisation. Gulf remittances for 10 million workers. No formal alliance with any power. Maximum leverage with all of them. Every relationship is transactional. Every commitment is calibrated. Every contradiction serves a constituency. Trump needs the refinery because the Iran war just proved that 50 years without building one left America dependent on foreign refining capacity for products its own shale produces. The Strait of Hormuz did not just close oil transit. It closed the refined product supply chain that feeds American gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and petrochemicals. Building domestic refining capacity is the structural response to Actuarial Warfare: if chokepoints can be closed by insurance spreadsheets, the only defence is not needing the chokepoint. Ambani needs the deal because Reliance’s Jamnagar complex processes Gulf crude that transits Hormuz. The same Strait that is mined, uninsured, and defended by 31 autonomous IRGC commands. Diversifying into American shale refining hedges against the exact crisis currently paralysing Reliance’s primary feedstock route. This is not philanthropy. It is the world’s largest refiner buying insurance that no P&I club can provide. The war created the crisis. The crisis created the deal. The deal was signed by the country whose Prime Minister was just given “permission” to buy Russian oil and told America it never asked. Fifty years. One war. One phone call. And the billionaire who builds it is from the country Washington cannot decide whether to sanction or celebrate. Full analysis here. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@ShekharGupta Nice… how do you see it ending? Especially now with the Iran kerfuffle next door.

Pakistan is fighting a two-front war. I saw it coming 15 yrs ago… #NationalInterest for the week theprint.in/national-inter…

Sat Sri Akal #zudio #manipur #sikh

Racial abuse is vile! There’s no excuse. North east is us. #wearenortheast

@maryashakil We can officially call going to PMO as teerth yatra 😊

First set of decisions signed by PM Modi from Seva Teerth reflect both symbolism & substance….’Seva’ as governance theme. Key moves: •Launch of PM RAHAT for cashless treatment upto 1.5 Lakhs •Target of 6 crore Lakhpati Didis •Agri Infra Fund doubled to 2 Lakh Crores •Startup India Fund of Funds of 10,000 crores Renaming of PMO complex as Seva Teerth continues push to shed colonial legacies. #PMModi

@sabizak I said it first 😊😊😊 x.com/firstpost/stat…

The Baloch quest is almost certainly doomed to fail. The geography is not in their favour. Unlike Bengal there is no contiguous border and no large Hindu population to provide an impetus for intervention from India. There is no other power that is interested in supporting them. I’m afraid if they continue to escalate they are likely to meet the fate of Tamil Tigers.

I have been posting repeatedly on X about the extraordinarily fast collapse of births across the planet: in rich and poor countries, in fast-growing and slow-growing economies, in religious and secular societies, under right-wing and left-wing governments, with high taxes and with low taxes. The pattern is universal. I knew this trend would continue. Still, the figures released this morning left me genuinely speechless. China’s government announced on Monday (see screenshot below) that births in 2025 fell to 7.92 million, a staggering 1.62 million fewer than in 2024, and that the total fertility rate has dropped to 0.93. Few economists have been more forceful than yours truly in arguing that births are collapsing, yet even I was surprised by these numbers. I was forecasting around 8.5 million births, not 7.92. To put this into perspective: if China could somehow sustain 7.92 million births per year from now on, its population would eventually stabilize at roughly 625 million, far below today’s 1.405 billion. In reality, as smaller cohorts reach childbearing age, births will fall well below 7.92 million. Hence, 625 million is a very generous upper bound, even under implausibly optimistic assumptions about life expectancy. Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776, the year the United States declared independence. I am still trying to process these numbers. This is the defining issue of our time.

@arunp2810 And credit also to @sanjeevsanyal to get this going and being a voyager himself

As INSV Kaundinya nears shores of Oman, Skipper Cdr Vikas Sheoran & crew deserve warm felicitations for successful completion of an historic if gut-wrenching voyage in a square rigged/flat-bottomed vessel. Well done, Shipwright Babu Sankaran for helping re-create history.

Trump's laid down the marker for a new Cold War. Moral imperatives aside, India shd take a trader's view of developments, instead of climbing on the easy outrage bandwagon. My piece in @timesofindia timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit…

Surprisingly, the closest someone came to breaking Kapil Dev's record was Mitchell Johnson in 2009. Any predictions for who can break it in the coming years?

@BDUTT Agree 💯 with the first part 😊

If nothing else, everyone who can afford it must at least commit a fixed generous tip to your delivery person - am all for market forces and capitalist ambition but something feels so wrong about behemoths growing on the back of barely earning men out in the cold today

From Afghanistan to Bangladesh….Watching a pragmatic and nimble foreign policy in motion of an emerging power in a transitional global order. It’s a privilege to be living in these interesting times. @MEAIndia @PMOIndia

@IndiGo6E 6410 Delhi - Pune passengers kept confined inside plane for 6 hours . No food. No support. Not allowed to deboard. @MCA21India @DGCAIndia #Kidnapping

@IndiGo6E Passengers made to sit in The aircraft for last 3 hours and counting 6E 6410. No clarity on anything

@indigo flight mess at delhi continues. Multiple flights delayed. Passengers left hanging. @MoCA_GoI @DGCAIndia @MpRammohannaidu @PMOIndia