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Oct 26, 2026
YagnaSri

Why India Is a Target: The Hidden Hand: External Interference in India since 1947 Part 2

International relations students usually explain foreign interference in terms of the interfering state's interests. A great power interferes when it stands to gain, and the target is receptive. The American scholar Dov Levin found that great powers intervene most often when they see a significant interest at stake and a local actor is willing to cooperate.[1] India has offered both conditions in abundance since 1947. This article examines five structural features that explain why. None of them is a weakness to be regretted. Most are strengths. Each, however, creates an opening that hostile actors have used. A Country Every Power Watches No great power can ignore India. It is the world's most populous country. According to International Monetary Fund estimates for 2025, it became the fourth-largest economy in nominal terms. It is the third-largest in PPP terms. It possesses nuclear weapons, one of the largest armed forces in the world and a slowly and systemically growing sophisticated blue-water navy. India's weight has always exceeded its wealth. Even in 1947, when it was poor, it was the largest of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. Its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, became a leading voice of the non-aligned world. Its choice of alignment therefore mattered to both Cold War blocs. Each feared that an India drawn to the other side would carry much of the newly independent world with it. Both Washington and Moscow sought to tilt India's alignment by working inside India: through parties, newspapers, cultural societies and intellectuals. The Soviet effort was greater and lasted longer. Its leftist footprints are visible, and assets that mutated into new woke gangs are effective and are being used ironically by the West even today. The American efforts, on the other hand, were smaller but real. They are also effective when the US wanted them to be. Even in the early days of independence and the early years of the Cold War, neither realised that they could not afford to leave India alone. Today, a new player, China, has entered the fray, and this contest includes new players, above all China, and new instruments, such as markets, technology, and digital media. The logic remains the same. The more India matters, the more other powers want to shape its choices to keep it down and, if possible, destroy it. India's location raises the stakes further. The peninsula projects into the centre of the Indian Ocean, across the sea lanes that carry oil from the Persian Gulf to East Asia and manufactured goods from East Asia to Europe and Africa. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands lie close to the western entrance of the Strait of Malacca, through which a large share of China's seaborne trade passes. On land, India borders Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan (at least officially) and Myanmar, and lies close to Sri Lanka. Several of these borders are disputed, and several pass through the difficult terrain inhabited by communities with cross-border ties. Such borders are natural routes for infiltration, smuggling, and militant movement. The North-Eastern insurgencies and J&K terrorists found sanctuaries in neighbouring countries for decades. A state placed like this will always be courted, pressured and watched. Geography does not change. Neither does the interest of other powers in the side India takes. Most countries have, at most, one difficult neighbour. India has two, and they are allied. Pakistan was founded in 1947 on the claim that Hindus and Muslims form two separate nations. That founding idea placed hostility to India at the centre of its national identity. Within ten weeks of Independence, in October 1947, Pakistan sent its armed forces and the tribal raiders, organised and led by its own army officers, into Jammu and Kashmir. It fought open wars with India in 1965 and 1971 and a limited war at Kargil in 1999. It has sponsored proxy violence in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir since the 1980s. China fought a war with India in 1962. It claims about 90,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in the east, including the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, and occupies Aksai Chin in the west. Its soldiers killed twenty Indian troops in the Galwan Valley on 15 June 2020. Otherwise, China's methods favour economic leverage, technology, and influence over open violence. It is using all of these on India. The two have been close partners for decades. China is Pakistan's principal arms supplier. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China supplied about 81 per cent of Pakistan's major arms imports from 2020 to 2024. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor passes through Gilgit-Baltistan, territory that belongs to India and is illegally occupied by Pakistan. China has repeatedly shielded Pakistan-based terrorists from being listed by the United Nations Security Council's sanctions committee. The strategic result of all these is what Indian planners call the "two-front" problem. Neither neighbour can defeat India in open war. Both have strong reasons to weaken it from within. For Pakistan, internal disorder in India is a substitute for a military victory it cannot win. For China, a distracted and divided India is a less effective rival in Asia. India's diversity is one of its glories. The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution now lists twenty-two languages. The 2011 Census recorded 121 languages and hundreds of mother tongues, thousands of castes and communities, and followers of every major world religion.[2] India has held this diversity together for nearly eight decades under a single Constitution, a remarkable achievement by any historical standard. For a hostile power, however, each difference is a possible seam to pull apart. The record shows foreign actors working along almost all of them. Region and language. Pakistan supported Khalistani militancy in Punjab in the 1980s and separatist militancy in Jammu and Kashmir from 1989. China armed Naga and Mizo insurgents in the 1960s and 1970s. Religion. Islamist organisations in India have drawn on foreign money and foreign ideology. Foreign church agencies have funded large-scale conversion work among tribal communities. Caste. Campaigns abroad present caste as the defining fact of Hindu society and have produced caste-specific laws and policies in the United States. Ideology. The Soviet Union funded the Communist Party of India. Maoist parties in India linked themselves to Maoist movements across South Asia. The writers Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan argued in 2011 that Western church, academic and human rights networks had worked, in particular, to widen Dravidian and Dalit fault lines in Indian society.[3] Their book presents an argument, and readers may weigh it for themselves. The broader point does not depend on it. A society with many seams offers an outsider many places to insert a blade. Two qualifications are essential. First, the seams are real, and many of the grievances along them are genuine. Foreign actors did not invent the Punjab water dispute, the alienation of parts of the Kashmir valley, or caste discrimination. They exploited them. Second, the presence of a foreign hand does not discredit anyone who shares a grievance. Most Indians who protest, organise or dissent do so for their own reasons. This series concerns the foreign money and direction that sometimes attach themselves to such causes. Democracy: Open Doors Work Both Ways India is the world's largest democracy. Close to ninety-seven crore citizens were registered to vote in the 2024 general election. It has a free press, independent courts, competitive elections at every level, and one of the world's largest voluntary sectors. These are India's greatest strengths. They are the main reason the country has held together, changed governments peacefully and corrected its own mistakes. They also give foreign money and foreign narratives many points of entry. Elections can be influenced by money given secretly to parties or candidates and both superpowers did this during the Cold War. A free press can be used to plant stories. The Mitrokhin papers record that the KGB did so on a large scale in the 1970s. Independent courts can be used to tie up major projects in years of litigation, funded from abroad. Voluntary organisations can carry foreign money and foreign agendas to the grassroots. Universities and think tanks can be shaped by foreign funding and foreign prestige. Authoritarian states close these doors by force. China, for example, restricts foreign NGOs, foreign media, and foreign websites, and controls funding for its universities and think tanks. India cannot do that without ceasing to be itself. Its task is harder: to keep the doors open while knowing who is walking through them. This asymmetry is one of the subject's central problems. An open society is more exposed to interference than a closed one. A closed rival can exploit India's openness while denying India the same openness in return. The answer to that asymmetry lies in transparency, not closure. Civilisation: A Target of a Different Kind The fifth reason is the one least often discussed in polite company. India is the only major country whose majority follows a Dharmic, non-Abrahamic faith. According to the 2011 Census, Hindus made up 79.8 per cent of the population. That fact makes India a target of a particular kind, distinct from the strategic contest between states. For proselytising missions, India is one of the largest remaining mission fields in the world. American mission databases such as the Joshua Project openly list Indian castes and tribes as "unreached people groups" and set goals for "church planting" among them. These are the organisations' own published statements of intent. Article 26 examines the record. For pan-Islamist movements, Hindu India is an ideological opponent, and parts of the subcontinent are regarded as unfinished business from 1947. Al-Qaeda announced a branch for the Indian subcontinent in September 2014. The Islamic State recruited from India from 2014. For parts of Western academia and media, Hindu society is often viewed through an older colonial lens of caste, superstition and backwardness, and Hindu political expression is presented as a threat in itself. None of this means that every missionary, every Muslim organisation or every Western scholar is hostile to India. Most are not. Indian Christians and Indian Muslims are full citizens with equal rights, and many have served India with distinction. The point is narrower. India's civilisational identity gives some foreign actors a motive to change it, and that motive has at times been backed by large sums of money from abroad. This dimension also explains a feature of the record that purely strategic analysis misses. Much of the violence sponsored from abroad has been aimed specifically at Hindus: the expulsion of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, the attacks on pilgrims to Amarnath, the attack on the Akshardham temple in 2002 and the killing of Hindu tourists at Pahalgam in April 2025, where survivors said the attackers asked victims their religion. Article 13 examines this pattern. Outsiders Need Insiders One lesson runs through every case in this series. Foreign interference only works when it finds willing hands inside India. The KGB needed Indian editors to print its stories and Indian politicians to accept its money. In 1959, American money in Kerala went to an Indian party that, according to Ambassador Moynihan, had asked for it. Pakistan's terror networks need local recruits, couriers and safe houses. Foreign-funded campaigns need Indian faces, Indian grievances and Indian litigants. Where foreign powers found no willing hands, they failed. In August 1965, Pakistan sent trained infiltrators into the Kashmir valley under the plan known as Operation Gibraltar. They aimed to spark a popular uprising. The people of Kashmir did not rise, and many reported the infiltrators to the authorities. The plan collapsed. A willing partner may act for several motives. Some act from greed: they accept money. Some act from fear: they are blackmailed or threatened. Some act out of anger: they hold a grievance against the State or another community. Some act from ambition or pride: they seek office, status or recognition abroad. Some act from conviction: they share the foreign actor's ideology. The record contains examples of every type. Conclusion India is a target because it matters. It sits at the crossroads of Asia, because two hostile neighbours work together against it, and because its diversity offers many seams. After all, its democracy keeps its doors open, and its civilisational identity is itself the object of some foreign projects. These are not reasons for India to become less diverse, less democratic or less itself. They are reasons for India to understand clearly how outsiders can use its strengths against it. The warning is that grievance, fear and greed at home are the raw material of interference from abroad. The hope is that a fair, confident and well-governed India gives outsiders very little to work with. Key sources Dov H. Levin, Meddling in the Ballot Box (Oxford University Press, 2020). Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2024 (March 2025). Census of India, 2011, Language and Religion tables. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India (Amaryllis, 2011). Bharat Rakshak, accounts of the 1947–48 and 1965 operations in Jammu and Kashmir.

Oct 26, 2026
Major General S.B. Asthana

Red Sea to Hormuz: Why Strategic Overreach, Airpower and Paper Pacts are Failing against Geography?

Introduction West Asia’s expanding conflict is no longer confined to individual battlefields. The confrontation involving the United States and Iran, renewed Saudi–Houthi hostilities, the vulnerability of maritime chokepoints and the uncertain credibility of collective-defence arrangements are increasingly interconnected. This strategic assessment examines why superior standoff firepower may fail to deliver decisive political outcomes, why the Mecca Pact faces difficult operational and political tests, and why airpower alone cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz. The central question is not simply who possesses greater firepower, but who can translate military action into a sustainable political end state. West Asia is no longer a set of separate wars. The US–Iran confrontation, the Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia and the contest for the Red Sea and Gulf sea lanes now feed one another. Yet the responses on offer remain familiar: standoff firepower, hurried alliances and the hope that coercion will somehow yield a settlement. This article argues that all three are failing against the same adversary, geography. It examines how the latest Saudi–Houthi escalation began, why the Mecca Pact has stalled at its first test, why Hormuz cannot be cleared from the air, and what a workable way forward might look like. The Strategic Backdrop: Geography, Friction, and Military Math War is governed by political and strategic aims, logistical sustainment and, above all, the friction of terrain. Standoff bombardment degrades exposed military and civilian infrastructure, but it rarely coerces an entrenched, ideologically resilient adversary into capitulation. Today the energy architecture linking the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea is caught in a dual vise: the Strait of Hormuz in the east and Bab el-Mandeb in the southwest. Between them lies an exposed Arabian Peninsula whose Vision 2030 depends on open sea lanes and unmolested infrastructure. Instead, Riyadh’s airports, refineries and pipelines are taking direct hits, and billions of dollars in precision munitions have not restored deterrence. The Ground Truth of Saudi-Houthi Clashes: Who Triggered the Current Escalation? The roots lie in 2014–15, when the Iran-aligned Houthis (Ansar Allah) seized Sana’a and Riyadh led a coalition to stop a hostile force consolidating along its 1,300-km southern border. A UN-brokered truce in 2022 sharply reduced cross-border fighting, but produced neither a political settlement nor a reunified Yemeni state. The UN recognised Presidential Leadership Council’s (PLC) legitimacy and administrative capacity are weak and Saudi–UAE rivalry over the STC fragments the recognised-government camp. A fractured Yemen is being controlled by multiple factions as shown in the image below. Western media often portrays the renewed Houthi strikes on Riyadh, Khamis Mushait and Dammam as unprovoked aggression. The operational sequence says otherwise. The Houthis have shown restraint towards Saudi territory since the truce. The flare-up began on 13 July, when Saudi-backed government forces struck the Sana’a airport runway to stop an Iranian aircraft carrying Houthi leaders home from the late Supreme Leader’s funeral; the aircraft diverted to Hodeidah. Riyadh evidently judged that a strained Iran would not retaliate, and that forces could retake Taiz and the coast. It was the mistake America has repeatedly made: underplaying the geographical advantage of the adversary and starting a confrontation without an exit strategy or a clear end state, assuming that the adversary is unprepared. The response was swift and asymmetric: The asymmetric counteroffensive. Ballistic missile salvos and drone swarms saturated Saudi air defences rather than engaging along the mountainous border. A maritime chokehold. The Houthis seized coastal islands and threatened tankers at Bab el-Mandeb, while Iraqi militias degraded the East-West pipeline bypass, cornering Saudi crude exports. The interceptor deficit. Air defence is an economic losing game: multi-million-dollar Patriot PAC-3 interceptors against $20,000 loitering drones. Stocks already depleted in earlier rounds, as the Pentagon concedes, take years to replenish. Riyadh’s Yemeni partners cannot carry the burden. The Presidential Leadership Council has limited administrative reach, and Saudi–UAE rivalry over the Southern Transitional Council fractures the anti-Houthi camp. Facing it are Houthis hardened by years of operational experience and sustained by Iranian missiles and drones. The Mecca Pact & Collective Defence: Why Paper Alliances Fail Operational Tests Signed in August 2026 and built on the 2025 Saudi–Pakistan defence agreement, the Mecca Pact was invoked by Riyadh at an emergency meeting on 5 October. The response was strategic evasion. Ankara ruled out ground forces in Yemen, limiting itself to intelligence sharing and air-defence advice inside Saudi borders. Islamabad offered solidarity, denied reports that its aircraft had struck Yemen, and refused offensive action against Houthi or Iranian interests. Why did the pact falter at its first test? The legalist escape hatch. The pact rests on the logic of collective self-defence, Article 51 of the UN Charter, echoing NATO’s Article 5. A defensive agreement does not compel partners to join offensives, and Saudi-aligned forces were the initiators of this cycle. Even Article 5 of NATO has limitations in the case of unilateral offensive by one member, as was the case with the absence of NATO’s support for America for unilateral action against Iran. National interest over coalition warfare. Pakistan shares a volatile border with Iran, is stretched by Baluchistan, is involved in military actions on Afghan borders and is marred by internal strife. Turkey, balancing Syria, Israel and NATO, will not spend blood in Yemen’s mountains. No command infrastructure. NATO has decades of integrated command and doctrine. Declaratory pacts remain paper fortresses; when friction arrives, political imperatives overwrite treaty ink. Thin backing elsewhere. Europe and Egypt offered assurances only once the Suez Canal was affected, and for economic reasons. Washington is over-committed and hesitant, particularly after the unpleasant experience of bombing the Houthis in 2025. Riyadh thus overestimated both the Pact and its patrons. There is a deeper hazard: an alliance built for deterrence can become a mechanism of entrapment, drawing members into a war they neither started nor can end. credible pact must define what its members will avoid, as well as what they will defend. Its early focus should be defensive: early warning, counter-drone and missile defence, maritime surveillance. “The recent Defence Pact signed between Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar and Indonesia can do no better, but India needs to be cautious in exporting Brahmos, Astra missiles and other military hardware to Indonesia” The Strait of Hormuz Asymmetry: Why Standoff Fires Cannot Clear Maritime Chokepoints The Red Sea crisis cannot be decoupled from Hormuz. America and Israel have caused significant damage to Iran’s military assets and civilian infrastructure, which were exposed to air attacks but had limited impact on assets located in tunnels. Installations using folds of ground in mountainous terrain had little impact from the air campaign. Hormuz is a constrained waterway, where deep-draft tankers are funnelled through two narrow channels near Larak Island, Hormuz Island and the Musandam Peninsula. Iran holds an insurmountable geographic advantage: The ratio of effort. One shore-launched anti-ship missile, a dispersed minefield or intermittent fast-attack craft sorties from its fortified Gulf islands can spike insurance rates and halt traffic. Iran needs no blue-water navy. No denial without ground occupation. Guaranteeing free navigation would mean seizing and garrisoning the Iranian islands, Abu Musa and Kharg among them, and neutralising a coastline honeycombed with missile tunnels. The force level mustered by the USA currently is inadequate for any meaningful ground operation. Capital-ship vulnerability. Pushing billion-dollar platforms into shallow, confined waters would expose them to shore batteries, hypersonic missiles and drone swarms. Carrier groups therefore stay hundreds of miles away in the Arabian Sea, unable to break Tehran’s local sea denial. The US-Iran Impasse: The JCPOA-Plus Dilemma and Washington’s Depleted Arsenals The military stalemate mirrors a diplomatic one. The war that began with US–Israeli strikes on 28 February 2026 saw an interim June ceasefire collapse. Washington entered with maximalist aims: regime transformation, elimination of enrichment and dismantling of the “Axis of Resistance”. Tehran’s aim was regime survival and imposing unsustainable costs. Judged against those aims, Tehran has withstood the air campaign: the regime stands, its deep nuclear facilities survive beneath hardened mountains, and its proxies still shape events. It feels no compulsion to capitulate as Washington seeks an off-ramp before election season. Iran’s conditions for reopening Hormuz, which carried roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG trade before the war, are stiff: verifiable cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Gaza and Lebanon, which Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects; lifting of the blockade; unfreezing of assets; sanctions relief; and recognition of its regulatory rights over Strait transit. Herein lies the trap. President Trump abandoned the 2015 JCPOA as insufficient; signing a deal that merely restores pre-war enrichment baselines, without curbing missiles or proxies, would be a domestic political defeat. Washington needs a JCPOA-Plus. Iran, holding the chokepoints, will not offer even baseline concessions without relief up front. Strategic Conclusions: What Next for West Asia and Global Energy Security? West Asia cannot bomb its way out. Standoff precision warfare has reached its culminating point, and ground campaigns across hostile mountain terrain are non-starters for American voters, NATO allies and regional monarchs alike. First, Washington and Tehran must discard maximalism and roll out face-saving steps: verifiable maritime de-escalation and eased interdiction first, with sanctions, nuclear limits and monitoring in later stages. Second, Riyadh must abandon the illusion of external salvation. Its security lies in coercive diplomacy, using military leverage to improve the terms of talks through Oman and the UN, with direct engagement with Sana’a and Tehran. Yemenis themselves want an end to the war; in one Sanaa Centre survey, 76 per cent feared escalation would hinder peace. A settlement must be Yemeni-owned. Third, India and Asia’s other importers must treat this as a catalyst. New Delhi should use its balanced ties with Tehran, Riyadh and the GCC to build a multilateral maritime framework, diversify energy sources and maintain forward naval deployments to secure its sea lines of communication. The ongoing military posturing against Iran by President Trump and Netanyahu needs to be viewed in the backdrop of two politicians looking weak in election prospects, trying to pose as strong wartime leaders to impress their voters, knowing fully well that adventurism will have consequences! Conclusion Standoff attacks can’t win wars. Defence Agreements/Pacts can give confidence for deterring the aggressor, but they neither give the liberty for unwarranted adventurism, nor can ensure regional peace. Peace needs an end state that adversaries may not prefer, yet can accept as cheaper than continued conflict. Until regional powers accept that geography cannot be defeated by airpower alone, West Asia will remain trapped in an escalatory cycle in which everyone fights, paper alliances falter and the global economy pays the price. The world is waiting for such realisation of reality by the parties to the conflict or the situation becoming cost-prohibitive for them, besides suffering economic and energy crisis for none of its fault. P. S.: First published at https://asthanawrites.org/2026/10/23/red-sea-to-hormuz-why-strategic-overreach-airpower-and-paper-pacts-are-failing-against-geography/. Republished with the permission of the author.

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Why India Is a Target: The Hidden Hand: External Interference in India since 1947 Part 2

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