Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Yasmine Zarhloule in Carnegie follows a closed strait in the Gulf all the way to Morocco and Algeria. P.D.T. Achary in The Hindu reads the FCRA Bill of 2026 as a law that can take away what an NGO owns. Shashi Tharoor in The Indian Express argues that a Lok Sabha of 850 members would leave most of its members silent.
A closed strait in the Gulf now sets the energy choices of Morocco and Algeria.
Yasmine Zarhloule takes the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as her starting point. Her subject is not the war. It is what a crisis of this kind does to a state on the edge of the world economy that is trying to move to green energy. Morocco buys sulfur and ammonia from the Gulf for its fertilizer industry, and those supplies were cut. Algeria sells oil and gas, so the same crisis made it richer. Both were pushed away from the transition each had planned. She calls this the tension between the energy sovereignty a developing state wants and the upheaval that denies it.
The record
- The strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran in February 2026 set off a war. Iran then closed the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping. A United States blockade of Iranian ports followed.
- Ship traffic through the strait had fallen by over 95 percent since March. Brent Crude rose by more than 50 percent. The estimated shortfall in daily production was 14.5 million barrels.
- The World Bank projects urea prices to rise by nearly 60 percent in 2026. The Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that fertilizer prices could average 15-20 percent higher in the first half of the year. Wheat, rice and maize need fertilizer, and India and Brazil buy theirs abroad.
- Morocco holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s known phosphate reserves. It buys its sulfur almost entirely from Gulf countries, which account for roughly 44 percent of the sulfur traded in the world. The OCP Group imports about 3.7 million tons of sulfur a year.
- Morocco relies on imports for close to 90 percent of its energy needs. Moroccan households had already absorbed a rise in diesel and gasoline prices to around $1.60 per liter in April 2026. The government brought back financial support for the transport industry from March 2026.
- The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism of the European Union came into effect for fertilizers on 1 January 2026. It was meant to reward cleaner producers. As markets tightened, the European Commission proposed an emergency brake that would suspend it where there is severe damage to the internal market of the Union.
- Between 2020 and 2024 oil and gas gave Algeria roughly 82 percent of its exports and 45 percent of budget revenues. Algeria is the third largest supplier of gas to the European Union. Italy and Spain each take close to 30 percent of their gas imports from it.
- The Sahara Blend, the Algerian crude, was trading below $70 a barrel in January 2026. It topped $100 in March. By the middle of June it had fallen below $80, as the strait was expected to open again.
- Algeria cannot simply produce more. Its output is held down by the quotas of OPEC. In April 2026 it announced a rise of 6,000 barrels a day, for a total of 977,000 barrels. Demand for gas at home is rising by 4-5 percent a year.
- After the shock of 2022 Rabat announced a green ammonia strategy, with a $7 billion complex near Tarfaya. The complex is not yet working. With Gulf supply cut, the OCP has brought sulfur through Kazakhstan and the Black Sea instead.
The argument
This is a clean case of a chokepoint reaching states that are not fighting. Morocco and Algeria did not start the war. Their development choices were settled by it. Take the case into a question on globalisation and the developing world. It shows the cost falling on economies that have no say over the event that caused it.
The article also gives you a way to write about energy sovereignty. On paper a transition is a sequence of targets and milestones. In practice it gives way each time a crisis lands. Rabat looked for new suppliers and stayed with green ammonia. Algiers sold more oil and gas, which pushes it further into the rentier model it keeps promising to leave. That contrast is useful in an answer on the state in developing societies.
“They are the product of political choices by powerful state actors that trap the entire Middle East and North Africa in “forever wars,” with repercussions far beyond.”
Yasmine Zarhloule
“Much-heralded green energy strategies are hastily modified or even summarily suspended by the very governments that formulated them.”
Yasmine Zarhloule
A law written to keep foreign money out of politics can now take away what an NGO owns.
P.D.T. Achary was Secretary General of the Lok Sabha. He reads the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, which is listed for consideration in the monsoon session. His method is to compare the new Bill with the law it amends. The Act of 1976 and the Act of 2010 were built around one worry, which was foreign money entering politics. The Bill of 2026 turns the law on bodies that live on foreign contributions. Achary reads it as a threat to NGOs and to religious and cultural organisations.
The record
- India had no law on foreign contributions before 1976. The government of Indira Gandhi enacted the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act that year. The Emergency regime feared that foreign money was coming in through many channels, NGOs among them.
- The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 replaced the older law. Its primary focus, like that of the 1976 Act, was the legislature and political parties. It bars foreign contribution for candidates at an election, media personnel, public servants, judges, government employees, members of the legislature, political parties and their office-bearers, and organisations of a political nature.
- Foreign contributions were never prohibited in general. They were regulated, and the regulation grew stricter with each amendment. Any body running a cultural, economic, educational, religious or social programme must hold a certificate of registration, and without it no foreign contribution can be received.
- Section 16A(2) says that an asset built only partly out of foreign contribution vests as a whole in the designated authority. The vesting is provisional at first. It becomes permanent if the body fails to get a fresh certificate, or to have its certificate renewed or restored, within the time prescribed.
- The authority may then hand those assets to a ministry, a department or an agency of the central government, to a State government or to a local authority. It may also sell or auction them. The proceeds, with any unutilised foreign contribution, go to the Consolidated Fund of India.
- Clause (1)(c) of Section 14 of the 2010 Act allows a certificate to be cancelled if, in the opinion of the central government, it is necessary in the public interest. Achary calls the term public interest vague. The government is itself the custodian of public interest, so it can justify the act on that ground.
- Under Clause 16A(1)(b) of the Bill, a body that surrenders its certificate loses everything built with foreign money. The assets created out of the foreign contribution, with any unutilised portion of it, vest in the authority.
- A certificate may also be cancelled where a person or organisation is prosecuted in a case alleging religious conversion by force or inducement. Achary says such a complaint is easy to file in a police station or a court. He reads the provision as open to misuse against minority religious groups. The assets taken over could include places of worship.
- Clause 16L lets the government exempt any organisation, class of organisations or person from the Bill, if it considers the exemption to be in the public interest. Achary says the clause may be open to challenge under Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law. It marks off no intelligible differentia and shows no rational nexus with the object of the law.
The argument
Civil society is usually taught as an idea. Here it is a law, and the detail is what earns marks. Cancellation is the point on which the rest turns. Once a certificate goes, the money and the assets go with it, and the work stops. Learn the three provisions together: cancellation under Section 14, vesting under Section 16A(2), and the exemption under Clause 16L.
The second use is on rights. A law that gives the government the power to pick who it spares meets the test of Article 14. A class marked off by a law must rest on an intelligible differentia, and that difference must have a rational nexus with the object of the law. Achary says this clause has neither. The same passage serves a question on minority rights, because he expects the conversion ground to be used against religious minorities first.
“But when we look at the present Bill, it gives us a different picture. It in fact has a sledgehammer effect on NGOs and religious and cultural organisations.”
P.D.T. Achary
“This provision confers unfettered powers on the government to cancel a certificate at any time.”
P.D.T. Achary
A Lok Sabha of 850 members would leave most of its members with nothing to say.
Shashi Tharoor writes against the plan to raise the Lok Sabha to 824 or 850 seats through a revised delimitation. He grants the arithmetic. The population has more than doubled since the limit of 543 seats was fixed in 1972. He denies that the answer to it is a larger House. Past a certain size a chamber stops being a place of debate, because there is not enough time for its members to speak. The House that follows suits an executive that prefers obedience to scrutiny.
The record
- The proposal is to raise the Lok Sabha to 824 or 850 seats. The limit of 543 seats was established in 1972. No other democratic legislature is of that size.
- The House of Representatives of the United States was capped at 435 in 1929, when the population was 120 million. The American population is now over 335 million, and the House is still 435. Each member simply stands for more voters, with local staff, modern communication and an organised committee system behind him.
- Time in the chamber is fixed. Tharoor takes a debate of four hours, with time shared by party strength. At most 15-20 members out of 850 could speak in it. Backbenchers and members of small parties would be silent.
- In a House of that size most members would never ask a question, move a private member’s bill or speak in a serious debate in five years. Tharoor calls them silent placeholders who raise their hands when the party commands.
- Parliament is already meeting on fewer days each year. Bills have been passed by voice vote in minutes, without scrutiny by a standing committee, and the Opposition is often left out.
- Tharoor compares a House of 850 with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly. Both are large, both look representative, and neither can bargain over a law or challenge the executive.
- The government defends the plan by saying that one member cannot represent two to three million citizens. Tharoor answers that the duty of a member of Parliament is national legislation, foreign policy, macroeconomic governance and holding the Union executive to account.
- Local grievances, municipal infrastructure and civic amenities belong to the State legislature and to panchayats and municipal corporations under the 73rd and 74th Amendments. His remedy is to add MLAs as the population grows, not members of Parliament.
- He would rather spend the money saved on salaries, accommodation, travel and pensions for 300 more members on office space near Parliament for the members already there.
The argument
This is the strongest available answer to a question on the size and the working of the Union Legislature. The argument is institutional, not numerical. A chamber too large to debate gives up its oversight and leaves the cabinet in charge. Pair it with the standard material on the decline of Parliament, such as sitting days, voice votes and bills that never reach the committee stage.
It also gives you a line on representation itself. Tharoor measures representation by the quality of scrutiny, not by the size of the House. That is a direct entry into deliberative democracy, where the value of a body lies in the debate it can hold. The division of labour he wants between members of Parliament, MLAs and local bodies is also useful in an answer on the 73rd and 74th Amendments.
“An oversized legislature where the vast majority of members have no voice suits an executive that prefers compliance over scrutiny.”
Shashi Tharoor
“true representation lies in the quality of debate, the rigour of legislative committee scrutiny, and the empowerment of local levels of government — not in creating an unwieldy mega-chamber that replaces democratic discourse with empty theatre”
Shashi Tharoor
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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