Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Atul Aneja at the Vivekananda International Foundation argues that the new defence pact among Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan should send India towards Iran and Afghanistan. C Uday Bhaskar in South Asia Monitor writes that India lowered the Union Jack in 1947 and never lowered the Police Act of 1861. Sonia Grover and Venkatesh Raghavendra in the Deccan Herald argue that Indian cities flood because of runoff and not because of rainfall.
A defence pact that leaves Washington out gives India an opening in Tehran.
Atul Aneja argues that the collective defence pact among Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan should raise an alarm in India. He asks for hard analysis of the worst case rather than hope. His argument runs in two steps. The pact breaks the oil for protection bargain that Washington and Riyadh struck in 1945, so American power in West Asia is weaker than it was. And because Turkiye and Saudi Arabia now stand behind Pakistan, India must build its own deterrent and work on the two countries that sit along Pakistan’s other borders. Those two are Iran and Afghanistan.
The record
- The pact of collective defence was signed by Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Aneja calls it the Mecca accord. Turkiye is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Pakistan holds nuclear weapons. Washington is not a party.
- The oil for protection bargain was made on 14 February 1945 on board the USS Quincy, docked in the Suez Canal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. The United States would protect the sovereignty of the kingdom in return for access to Saudi oil.
- In 1974 the petrodollar agreements followed. They set up the Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation and a Treasury agreement. Riyadh agreed to price its oil only in dollars, and to put its surplus oil revenues into United States Treasury bonds.
- Aneja argues that the first pillar has now gone, so the second need not hold. Saudi money also buys American technology stocks. A fall in those purchases would cut the funding behind the American race with China in artificial intelligence.
- Halford J. Mackinder argued in his 1904 essay The Geographical Pivot of History that Eurasia is the strategic core of world power, and that control of the Heartland decides control of the world. Aneja names India, China, Iran and Russia as the four poles of the emerging order.
- Ahmet Davutoglu, a former foreign minister and prime minister of Turkiye, argued in his 2001 book Strategic Depth that Turkey is not an ordinary nation state. He held that Turkey should use its Ottoman imperial geography to lead the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Aneja calls this neo-Ottomanism and sets it against Iran’s own revivalism.
- Iran and Pakistan carry an old quarrel. In 1998 the Taliban, backed from Islamabad, killed eight Iranian diplomats and a correspondent of the Iranian news agency at the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif. On 16 January 2024 the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles and drones into Balochistan at the bases of the Jaish al-Adl.
- In April the Trump administration revoked the waiver that allowed India to invest in Chabahar port, which lies under sanctions. Aneja argues that India should carry on with the port even so.
- Chabahar stands on the Arabian Sea and is the southern entry point of the International North South Transport Corridor, which runs 7200 kilometres. From the port the line runs 700 kilometres north to Zahedan, joins the Iranian railway through Kerman, Yazd, Qazvin and Rasht, and meets the main corridor at Bandar-e-Anzali.
- That main corridor starts at Mumbai, reaches Bandar Abbas, and goes north through Astrakhan in Russia to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Iran also sits on the freight corridor that links it with Xian in China through Central Asia.
The argument
This is alliance building you can date and name. Saudi Arabia has not left the United States. It has bought a second protector. Carry it into balance of power and into the question of what a promise of protection is worth once it fails one test. It also cuts against the older reading that West Asia is held together by American power alone.
For the India and Iran question the article supplies both sides. The obstacles are named. Iran backs the Houthis whom Saudi Arabia fights, Turkiye is its old rival, its diplomats were killed in 1998, and Chabahar sits under sanctions. The opening is named too. A pact that arms Pakistan hands Tehran and New Delhi a shared problem.
For the energy question you now have two dates. The bargain of 1945 tied Saudi oil to American protection. The agreements of 1974 tied the price of that oil to the dollar. Aneja’s claim is that the second rests on the first, and that both are now loose.
“The military pact of collective defence among Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, should raise an alarm in India, demanding an adequate response that rejects wishful thinking, and goes for hardheaded analysis that anticipates a worst-case scenario.”
Atul Aneja
“In fact, the signing of the trilateral mutual security pact among Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan opens up a natural opening for a collaborative security partnership between India and Iran.”
Atul Aneja
India lowered the Union Jack in 1947 and left the Police Act of 1861 standing.
C Uday Bhaskar writes eighty years after Independence. His subject is the police action at Jantar Mantar in July and what it shows about the state. His claim is that the trouble lies neither in one protest nor in one party. It lies in the architecture of policing that India inherited in August 1947 and never took apart. The Indian Police Act of 1861 was written to hold down a colonial subject. Sections have been renamed since. The premise has not changed. The citizen is a person to be controlled rather than a bearer of rights to be heard.
The record
- The Constitutional Conduct Group wrote to the government in late July. It is a body of retired civil servants and includes a former National Security Advisor and a former Home Secretary. It said the use of force against peaceful protesters marked a departure from constitutional norms and democratic practice.
- Students and parents protesting against irregularities in the NEET examination had been sitting at Jantar Mantar for over a month. On 20 July, as the Monsoon Session of Parliament opened, they announced a march to Parliament.
- Delhi Police answered by invoking Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which is the new name for Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. What followed was barricades, tear gas and lathi charges.
- The Supreme Court heard petitions on 28 July. It said the police need a new protocol during agitations, and noted that guidelines already laid down had not been followed.
- A video of Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba slapping a woman protester went viral and brought demands for accountability.
- In 1996 Prakash Singh, a former Director General of Police, filed the petition that produced the judgment of the Supreme Court in 2006. That judgment laid down a fixed tenure for the Director General of Police, a Police Establishment Board, a Police Complaints Authority at state and district level, and the separation of investigation from law and order.
- Bhaskar writes that almost no state has carried the judgment out in spirit. Compliance exists on paper. Tenures remain hostage to political preference. Citizens have pressed for reform for thirty years without result.
- After the Mumbai blasts of 1993, the then Home Secretary N. N. Vohra submitted a report in October 1993. It carried observations by official agencies on a criminal network virtually running a parallel government, and on gangs under the patronage of politicians of all parties. The full report was never made public and its annexures are still classified.
- The author asks for three things. Enact the Prakash Singh directives in full. Replace the colonial procedure for protests with one that treats protest as a constitutional right, names several sites in every city, requires dialogue before the baton, and puts body cameras and name tags on all personnel in crowd control. Act on the Vohra report.
The argument
Here is a living example for the head on the legacies of the British rule. Bhaskar’s argument is structural rather than moral. A force built to hold down subjects will treat citizens as subjects, whoever holds office. That is a stronger line in an answer than any list of complaints about the conduct of the police.
The reform record supplies the second half. A judgment of the Supreme Court in 2006, a committee report of 1993 and thirty years of advocacy have not moved the Act of 1861. Use that distance between what the Supreme Court directed and what the states did. It is the same distance you argue about in answers on judicial direction and executive compliance.
The article is also material on civil liberties. Prior permission to assemble becomes prior censorship, in the author’s phrase, once a prohibitory order covers a whole district. That gives you a concrete case where an ordinary law of police administration meets the right to assemble.
“Eighty years ago India lowered the Union Jack and raised the tricolor. It did not, however, lower the 1861 Police Act.”
C Uday Bhaskar
“A democracy that cannot hear its people without beating them is veering towards electoral autocracy.”
C Uday Bhaskar
The monsoon was forecast below normal and the cities flooded anyway.
Sonia Grover and Venkatesh Raghavendra argue that Indian cities do not flood because too much rain falls. They flood because the rain has nowhere to go. The India Meteorological Department forecast a below normal southwest monsoon this year, with El Nino conditions expected to develop during the season. By the older reading of an El Nino year, 2026 should have brought worry about drought. The cities flooded all the same. What floods a city, the authors write, is how concentrated the rain is in any given hour.
The record
- Heavy rain hit Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Nagaland within days of each other. Mumbai and Pune had fierce downpours. Roads from Delhi and the National Capital Region to Ludhiana broke up under short and intense spells, while the total for the season stayed below average.
- Money is not the constraint. Thousands of crores have gone through the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, the Smart Cities Mission and the newer Urban Flood Risk Management Programme. AMRUT 2.0 alone has funded the rejuvenation of lakes and green spaces so that cities absorb rain instead of pushing it away.
- The technical manual of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, issued in 2019, sets out how to plan catchments, size drains and maintain them. Advisories go out before every monsoon asking municipal bodies to map hotspots, clear inlets, test pumps and use measures based on nature.
- There is no independently verified national record of flood hotspots. Cities report waterlogging points as eliminated. No outside body checks whether the claim holds the next monsoon.
- Most drainage systems were built decades ago for seasonal averages and smaller populations. Flood control is divided among several agencies. The wetlands, lakes and floodplains that once absorbed the excess have been encroached upon or covered in concrete. Every hectare lost is drainage capacity that pipes cannot replace.
- Studies of Indian cities such as Ahmedabad found that green roofs alone can cut urban runoff by a quarter. A canal in Kochi was restored with municipal bonds raised for work based on nature. Such cases remain pilots and not the rule.
- The authors ask for a registry of flood prone locations, audited from outside and updated after every monsoon. They ask for one authority answerable for each catchment, so that responsibility is not spread across agencies.
- They also ask that drainage standards be revised against measured rainfall intensity rather than seasonal totals, that plans before the monsoon follow the outlook for El Nino and La Nina, that wetlands and floodplains carry buffer zones where no development is allowed, that wetland zoning enter master plans, and that money be released against verified results rather than sanctioned budgets.
The argument
This belongs in the answer on Municipal Government. The failure the authors describe is not a shortage of money or of manuals. It is the absence of an independent record, and the absence of one body answerable for each catchment. The mission existed, the manual existed and the ministry existed. Accountability did not.
The El Nino point carries into any answer on climate and governance. A season forecast below normal still flooded the cities. That separates the question of how much rain falls from the question of what the land does with it, and it puts the weight on planning rather than on the rain.
The article also gives you the vocabulary. Blue green infrastructure means wetlands, urban forests, restored lakes, rain gardens and infiltration trenches, treated as drainage in their own right and not as a cosmetic add-on. Name the measures. A general call for better drains reads as filler beside a list of them.
“What floods a city isn’t the seasonal total; it is how concentrated the rain is in any given hour.”
Sonia Grover and Venkatesh Raghavendra
“The durable fix isn’t moving water faster but giving it somewhere to go before it becomes runoff.”
Sonia Grover and Venkatesh Raghavendra
Where this belongs in your syllabus
Open the note and read the full topic.
The questions this feeds
Questions from earlier years that today’s reading speaks to. Where the answer is written, the red link opens it. The full set is in the PYQ Vault.
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