Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Narain Batra in The Statesman argues that China’s hold on world markets grows out of the weakness of its own economy. Utpal Kumar in Firstpost argues that Pakistan’s three revolts are one revolt, and that its cause is the design of the state. Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy and Raghvendra Kumar in The Hindu put the Bay of Bengal at the centre of India’s new maritime framework.
China's hold on world markets grows out of the weakness of its own economy.
Narain Batra sets aside the usual line that China is strong abroad and weak at home. He argues that the two are joined. Chinese households cannot buy what Chinese factories make. So the surplus goes abroad at prices held down by the state. That gives Beijing a hold over the countries that buy. It also brings tariffs and anti-dumping duties down on China, and it eats into the money Beijing can send abroad.
The record
- China’s economy is about 18 trillion dollars. Research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies finds that China commands over 80 per cent of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity. It leads world production in electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries, and it holds a near monopoly on the processing of critical rare earths.
- The property market once accounted for nearly 30 per cent of China’s gross domestic product. Its collapse has wiped out trillions in household wealth.
- Youth unemployment, falling consumer prices and a fast demographic decline have together crushed the confidence of Chinese consumers.
- Beijing has not put money into the hands of households. It has sent state capital to state-owned enterprises and to advanced manufacturing instead. Domestic demand stays low as a result.
- Logan Wright, an economist and director of China market research at the Rhodium Group, writes in Foreign Affairs that this is not a passing slump. He calls it a systemic debt crisis decades in the making.
- Local government financing vehicles poured borrowed state credit into infrastructure and housing that earned nothing back. Local authorities now lack the revenue to service those debts. State banks roll over the bad loans to avoid open default, which locks capital into dead assets.
- That decay at home cuts what Beijing can spend abroad. Batra names new tranches of infrastructure finance under the Belt and Road Initiative and emergency loans to indebted countries.
- Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, older semiconductors and industrial goods reach world markets at prices held down by state support. Over 120 nations, including India, count China as their top trading partner.
- Beijing can use those supply chains as a weapon, by restricting the export of critical minerals or by trade sanctions. Batra says this buys immediate advantage in a dispute.
- States in Europe, North America and Latin America are raising tariffs, anti-dumping duties and supply chain restrictions. Batra reads this as a cost to China’s standing.
- For Washington he asks for neither panic nor complacency. He wants work on chokepoints in advanced technology, stronger regional alliances such as the Quad, of which India is a member, and AUKUS, and a real alternative for developing countries that need infrastructure and investment.
The argument
Here is a state whose strength abroad and weakness at home have one root. That is a direct answer to the question of what makes a state powerful. Batra’s test is the balance sheet, not the policy announced in public. It belongs in national interest, security and power, where the distinction is between the show of power and the base of it.
The use for India is direct. India is one of the 120 countries whose largest trading partner is China, and India sits in the Quad. The same facts serve a question on India and China, and a question on why India looks for other suppliers of solar panels, batteries and rare earths.
“Beijing is neither a ten-foot-tall economic giant immune to market forces nor a collapsing state on the brink of implosion.”
Narain Batra
“China is a potent, state-directed industrial superpower built upon a fragile, debt-laden domestic economy.”
Narain Batra
Pakistan's three revolts are one revolt, and its cause is the design of the state.
Utpal Kumar writes that Pakistan has always been a state in crisis. What is new is that it is no longer facing one crisis at a time. Balochistan has become a battlefield. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is held in a cycle of insurgency and militancy. Pakistan occupied Kashmir, long held up as the model of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy, has erupted in protest. Kumar argues that these are not three troubles. They are three faces of one design, a state gathered around Punjab and run under the shadow of the army.
The record
- The immediate trigger was the economy. Electricity prices rose and subsidies were slashed. Protests that began over livelihoods turned into demands for political rights.
- The people of Pakistan occupied Kashmir, and the Mirpuris above all, carried Islamabad’s Kashmir campaign abroad. Their families in Britain gave it a voice in British politics and media. Protests are now being seen in the United Kingdom as well.
- Kumar reports three beliefs taking hold there. Real authority rests in Islamabad and not in Muzaffarabad. Pakistan has neither the military capability nor the diplomatic weight to change the territorial position. The economic change visible across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir is hard to argue away.
- John R. Schmidt, in The Unravelling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, writes that the forefathers of the men who came to rule Pakistan were bystanders in the movement that created it. Those bystanders were Punjab’s landed elites, and they took over the institutions of the new state.
- Babar Ayaz, in What’s Wrong With Pakistan?, calls this the country’s genetic defect. The state never became an inclusive federation.
- Pakistan is nearly eight decades old. Kumar writes that it still behaves less like a federation than a coloniser managing its frontiers.
- He sets Pakistan against Iran. Iran has survived sanctions and isolation because it rests on a civilisational identity older than the modern nation-state. Pakistan has no such anchor, so its cohesion rests on the authority of the state and of the army.
- Pakistan has confused being useful to a great power with being strong before. It opened the way for the United States to China in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and lost East Pakistan in the same years. It stood at the centre of American planning under General Zia-ul-Haq during the Afghan jihad, and under General Pervez Musharraf after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Both spells ended in extremism and instability at home.
- Civilian leaders in Pakistan draw their standing from the approval of the army rather than from the vote. Imran Khan rose while his relation with the military was cordial and lost office when it broke. Shehbaz Sharif has kept the generals with him, and Field Marshal Asim Munir above all.
- The revival abroad is real but thin. Kumar dates it to the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025 and to his open warmth towards Pakistan’s military establishment.
The argument
This is the post-colonial state in its clearest form. One province holds the resources, the offices and the national identity, and the periphery is governed rather than represented. Revolt then follows from the structure and not from the moment. That argument answers the paper directly on ethnic conflicts and insurgencies, and it gives Paper I a case of relative deprivation that a candidate can name.
Keep the comparison with Iran. It separates a state held together by the army from a state held together by a shared past. That distinction is worth a paragraph in any answer on the making and unmaking of nations in South Asia.
“Pakistan often mistakes borrowed geopolitical relevance for permanent national power.”
Utpal Kumar
“Armies are trained to defeat enemies, not reconcile competing ideologies and identities.”
Utpal Kumar
India wants its place in the Bay of Bengal measured in rules and not in tonnage.
Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy and Raghvendra Kumar argue that India’s newest maritime idea needs a place to be tried, and that the Bay of Bengal is that place. The region is one of the most disaster prone in the world, and it has no settled way of answering a disaster together. Climate driven disasters, illegal fishing, weak cyber defences and broken supply chains all cross borders. Naval strength alone does not meet them. What is missing, the authors say, is shared norms.
The record
- On 13 July, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar introduced SHANTI while launching India’s candidature for the United Nations Security Council for the 2028-29 term. The letters stand for “Securing Holistic Advancement through Norms, Trust and Integrity”.
- SHANTI builds on two earlier frameworks. SAGAR, or “Security and Growth for All in the Region”, was set out in 2015. MAHASAGAR, or “Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions”, was announced in 2025.
- The Bay links India’s Act East policy with ASEAN. It gives access to the Malacca Strait, and it connects the eastern Indian Ocean to the main trade and energy routes of the world.
- China depends heavily on that strait, a weakness often called the Malacca dilemma. That dependence has driven its ports and infrastructure projects in the region, and with them the competition between powers.
- The Bay is a single connected system. Cyclones, fish stocks, shipping lanes and pollution cross national boundaries as a matter of course. The states along its shore face the same list: disaster response, coastal erosion, fisheries management, port resilience, protection of undersea cables and climate adaptation.
- Unlike the western Indian Ocean, which is marked by open conflict and contested waters, the geography of the Bay rewards cooperation.
- The region suffers less from a want of institutions than from their fragmentation. What is missing is a common framework to bring the existing mechanisms into line.
- At the meeting of BIMSTEC National Security Advisers in New Delhi in July 2026, member states adopted common principles for maritime law enforcement and for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. BIMSTEC also agreed to hold its first joint maritime security exercise in the Bay in November 2026. An agreement on sharing white shipping information is still under discussion.
- The authors call the Bay a natural laboratory, and India’s most governable maritime sub-region. They add that India’s central place there should rest on stewardship and not on dominance.
The argument
Learn the three names in order. SAGAR gave the vision, MAHASAGAR gave the reach, SHANTI gives the method. Those three steps are a ready opening for any question on India’s maritime policy, and each one carries a date.
The deeper claim is about what makes a state central in its own region. India is asking to be measured by rules and trust rather than by tonnage. Set that against the realist reading of power at sea, and use it in answers on the neighbourhood, on ASEAN and the Act East policy, and on the Indo-Pacific.
“If SAGAR was a statement of intent and MAHASAGAR a statement of reach, SHANTI is a statement of method”
Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy and Raghvendra Kumar
“from deterrence to resilience, from rivalry to shared responsibility, and from crisis management to governance of the shared maritime commons”
Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy and Raghvendra Kumar
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.
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 15mIndia maintains strong ties with countries that will assure a free and open Indo-Pacific and guarantee greater connectivity with rest of the world. Analyze.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024Does the idea of the 21st century as 'Asian century' continue to remain feasible given the growing friction between India and China?
- PSIR Paper I · 2024 · 10m'Relative deprivation is a major source of ethnic conflict.' Elaborate the statement with relevant examples.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 20mDiscuss the future of SAARC in the light of India's increased focus on other regional groupings like ASEAN and BIMSTEC.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 15mQuadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) performs an important role in India's strategic balancing act to withstand the dominance of China in Asia. Discuss.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 10mWhy do ethnic conflicts and insurgencies continue to remain major impediments to regional co-operation in South Asia?Answer