Vladimir Putin may have won another “election” in Russia, and President Donald Trump may or may not implement his “dire” threats against Iran and its leaders, but the world continues to pay for two monumental follies of this unfinished decade of the 2020s: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022, and the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that opened almost exactly four years later, in February 2026.
Is anyone anywhere consoled by the fact that the price for these follies is being paid by people everywhere? Small Lebanon and oft-overlooked but substantial Yemen, with a population of around 35 million, are among the numerous places where the war begun in 2026 by the U.S. and Israel has violently exacerbated old hostilities and created fresh damage.
In Yemen’s case, hostilities between its Houthis and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with which the Houthis share the great Arabian Peninsula, have started to disturb daily life across a much wider world. This is because of the Houthis’ apparent success in the strategic waters of the Bab al-Mandab Strait (at the southern end of the Red Sea), which separates Arabia (and the rest of Asia) from Africa’s Djibouti and Eritrea.
The Red Sea port city of Mocha and Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait are reportedly in Houthi hands now.
Choked Waterways
For their imports as well as exports, countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and a host of other lands, including China, rely on cargo ships and oil tankers making safe voyages through three crucial Middle East waterways: (1) the Suez Canal that separates Asia from Africa, (2) the just mentioned Bab al-Mandab Strait and (3) the Strait of Hormuz separating Iran from Arabia.
The U.S. attack on Iran seems to have partially choked all three channels. If the precarious and oft-violated “truce” between the U.S. and Iran (which Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt helped attain) now gives way to renewed war, unpleasant consequences will be felt across a LARGE portion of our planet.
The Baloch
The smallest areas and least discussed people matter, although the Baloch people, to whom I wish to draw attention, are by no means small in number, and the lands where they live (in more than one country) are of impressive size. Pakistan’s Balochistan, much of it rocky and desert-like, is larger than any other province of that country and holds around 14 million people, of whom roughly 8 million speak Balochi and around 5 million converse in Pashto. Southeastern Iran, neighboring Pakistan’s Balochistan province, contains about 4.8 million Balochi speakers.
Across a not-so-wide sea from Pakistan and Iran lies the Arab country of Oman, where a million or so (out of around 5 or 6 million) speak Balochi.
Over the years, part of America’s strategy vis-à-vis Iran has been to encourage Baloch separatism. Not surprisingly, some in Iran’s Baloch population have welcomed the U.S.’s attacks on Iran. This is only one of the many scarcely discussed yet serious consequences of the U.S.’s attack on Iran. Impulsive decisions made in Washington can leave scars elsewhere for generations.
Washington will intervene, destroy and leave. The Baloch “problem,” and a dozen other sensitive questions in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East, will remain for the locals to resolve.
What’s DUSU?
With 91 constituent colleges, more than a dozen research centers, over 130,000 formal students and twice that number enrolled in its non-formal programs, Delhi University, established in 1922, is one of our world’s larger educational institutions. For years, politically minded youngsters in the Delhi region as well as national parties have been interested in elections for four DUSU posts — president, vice president, secretary and joint secretary — DUSU being the Delhi University Students' Union.
In elections held Sept. 19, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-aligned Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) won three of these while the Congress-aligned National Students' Union of India (NSUI) obtained none, but the most discussed winner is Deepanshu Shokeen, the new DUSU vice president, who, standing as an independent after failing to get an NSUI ticket, received 30,615 votes, defeating the ABVP’s Ishu Maurya, who got 16,910 votes. For a DUSU contest, this was an exceptional winning margin.
In a much closer contest, the ABVP’s Yash Dabas became the new DUSU president, defeating Vijay Meena (NSUI), 24,576 to 22,523. While India’s BJP Home Minister Amit Shah termed the ABVP’s DUSU success “a message” to “anti-national forces” who want to turn youth power into a “laboratory for their anti-national agenda,” Saurav Das, chief spokesperson of the Cockroach Janta Party, opined that the ABVP’s success was “not an overwhelming mandate but resulted from the division of votes among opposition groups.”
Das was pointing to the fact that a Left candidate for president, Anaya Raturi, finished third, getting 5,377 votes, while Ashmit Kumar of the Association of Students for Alternative Politics, or ASAP, (linked to the Aam Aadmi Party) secured another 1,388 votes.
Added Das: “A majority of students are against the present regime, but fractured, and hence it benefits the regime. But this is a silver lining. Those bagging positions must remember they are not kings or queens. The majority DID NOT vote for them.”
Accountability and Transparency
In an interview with Ajit Anjum (one of India’s remarkable band of independent YouTubers), Deepanshu Shokeen, 21, acknowledged that the Cockroaches (who remain a pressure group and did not field candidates in these DUSU contests) had brought about a change in India’s political climate. Shokeen also told Anjum that “accountability” and “transparency” would remain his chief demands from authorities.
Son of a bus conductor father and a mother working in a rural child-care center, Shokeen campaigned barefoot from one Delhi campus to another and among other things highlighted the negligence behind the recent collapse of a five-story building in Satyaniketan, a New Delhi neighborhood close to a number of colleges, in which seven Delhi University students living in the building as “paying guests” lost their lives.
The DUSU election results coincided with a huge Rahul Gandhi rally for students in Indore, about 500 miles south of Delhi. Indore has more people than any other city in the BJP-run state of Madhya Pradesh. Whether or not India’s “prominent” TV channels showed them, videos of the Indore rally, easy to access on YouTube, reveal a high level of student enthusiasm for Rahul’s message.
Rahul Raises His Pitch
At this rally, Rahul raised his pitch to a new level and said that India’s “system” was in the hands of six men: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shah, Ajit Doval (India’s security chief), Mohan Bhagwat (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh supremo) and billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani. Between them, charged Rahul, the six controlled every influential Indian institution.
As he’s been recently doing, Rahul also got several young women and men to tell their stories. The father and sister of one of the young men killed in the Satyaniketan tragedy were among the speakers.
There’s no denying Rahul’s impact, daring and inventiveness. Can one highly dedicated individual overcome the resources of a machine like the BJP, which moreover controls the national government and most state governments? Rahul does have behind him the once-extensive Congress Party, but, as the DUSU results showed, the Congress finds it hard to play a good ground game. It overlooked Deepanshu Shokeen’s winnability, for one thing.
For all its power, the Modi regime is unable to have its way every time. Its attempts to prevent the Indore rally failed. One obstacle after another was put up. The city’s Congress unit negotiating to hire space for the rally was even reminded that the 1991 killing, in another part of India, of Rahul’s father, Rajiv Gandhi, had been aided by challenges in organizing a crowd. In the end, the Indore event did take place, and available accounts suggest that it has strengthened Rahul’s connection with India’s students.
Bribes and Threats
Mamata Banerjee, 71, the spirited founder and leader of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and West Bengal’s chief minister for 15 years (2011-26), is a principal target for India’s Hindu Right. The principal individual taking aim at her is Suvendu Adhikari, 55, the state’s BJP chief minister since May. He was Banerjee’s chief lieutenant until 2020, when he switched and joined the BJP. In May, Adhikari won as a BJP candidate from two West Bengal constituencies. A by-election set for Oct. 6 will fill the Nandigram seat he vacated.
After a meeting with Adhikari, the TMC candidate in the Nandigram by-election, Sanchita Pradhan Dey withdrew her candidacy and joined the BJP, whereupon Banerjee announced, on Sept. 18, that she and her party would transfer support to Milan Pradhan of the Congress Party. Within hours, Pradhan was arrested for involvement in alleged violence in 2007!
After its loss in May, the Trinamool Cogress (TMC) has been deserted by a large number of its state members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and national members of Parliament (MPs), who have either joined the BJP or formed new political groupings. Because of desertions, the TMC has forfeited its electoral symbol — a pair of flowers drawn by Banerjee. This forfeiture is critical, for it is by pressing a key marked with their preferred symbol that India’s voters vote.
The currently thinning TMC section led by Mamata Banerjee, and that section’s leader, may have themselves created a portion of the difficulties they face. But it won’t be a pretty sight when the threats and bribes that have caused West Bengal’s legislators or would-be legislators to switch loyalties are fully revealed.
