The Mighty Must Fall
Two recent images have stayed with me. One is that of a stunned Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the back-seat of a car after he was questioned by a branch of London’s police. Millions across the world will remember the picture, and I’ll be one of them.
The translation of that image into words -- provided within minutes by the BBC’s “royal correspondent,” Sean Coughlan -- was also striking. Coughlan wrote of “the shell-shocked, disbelieving, haunted face” of King Charles’s brother as he sat “slumped in the back seat of a car after his release, fingers steepled, whether in prayer or protection.”
Older by several weeks is an image of Stephen Miller, deputy chief of President Trump’s staff, while he was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper shortly after the successful January 3 abduction by US special forces of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro. This footage too will remain with me. Not for how Miller looked, but for what he said.
“We live in a world,” said Miller, “a real world, that is governed by strength, by force, by power -- these are the iron laws of the world from the beginnings of time.”
RIGHT AGAINST MIGHT
Miller’s summary of our world’s “iron laws” is doubtless shared by a number of others, even if not everyone would employ his stark language. Nevertheless, another truth of history, witnessed by every generation and in every corner of the world, is that the mighty must fall. After all it was the ever-smiling, always jaunty and confident-looking ex-prince Andrew who invited a different kind of attention on February 20.
Despite the immoral conduct he’s been accused of, the former prince’s humiliation would have produced some sadness as well. For our world’s “iron laws” don’t wholly extinguish pity.
I should add that Miller’s verdict, unqualified by the slightest doubt, that our world is “governed by strength, by force, by power” reminded me of a contrasting line that Mahatma Gandhi had scrawled out in the year 1930 after he picked up salt from a Gujarat shore facing the Arabian Sea, thereby defying a strange ban imposed by a “strong” empire (in which the sun always shone somewhere).
Gandhi’s sentence read, “I want world sympathy in the struggle of right against might.”
After he wrote that line, Gandhi was confined in prison for seven months. But the Empire was compelled to release him and the thousands who had embraced prison along with him. Although piqued by the Indians’ struggle and by the concessions that London was forced to offer, Winston Churchill, the proud imperialist, acknowledged in the House of Commons on 12 March 1931 that “Such humiliation and defiance...has not been known since the British first trod the soil of India.” (Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, Chelsea House, New York, 1974. vol. V, p. 4995.)
I have recalled events from 1930-31 -- from almost a full century ago. Other struggles and imprisonments followed in India until independence came in 1947. In 2026 too we must ask for world sympathy in struggles of right against might, and for sanity against folly, whether these struggles are being waged in Palestine, or elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Ukraine, in Latin America, in Greenland, or anywhere else.
SUPREME COURT DEFEAT
On February 20, Donald Trump “lashed out” in (as the BBC put it) “unusually personal terms” against the six Supreme Court justices who had struck down his global tariffs. These six judges included three conservatives (Chief Justice John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett) and the court’s three liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson). The three conservative justices who saw the tariffs as constitutional but were outvoted were Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
The court’s four women justices (one of whom, Amy Barrett, had been nominated by Trump) all held the tariffs to be illegal. One of the two men sharing that view, Neil Gorsuch, had been nominated by Trump.
The resulting judgment was remarkable. As Neal Katyal, the Chicago-born Indian American lawyer who had led the successful challenge to the tariffs, put it: “There is something so extraordinary about this country, the idea that we have a system that self-corrects, that allows us to say you might be the most powerful man in the world, but you still can’t break the Constitution. I mean, that to me is what today is about.”
The argument that carried the day in the top court was that in America’s system of balance of powers, tariffs were for the Congress, not the White House, to impose. Neil Gorsuch, one of the six who accepted Katyal’s reasoning, was the first conservative Trump had appointed to the court. (Later, Kavanaugh and Barrett were named by him.) Writing out his concurring opinion, Gorsuch said that policies on taxes and tariffs had to go through Congress.
“Through that process,” observed Gorsuch, “the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.”
TRUMP LASHES OUT
For “more than an hour inside the James S Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Friday afternoon, Trump attacked the apex court... [and] accused unnamed ‘foreign interests’ of influencing justices...
President Trump called the apex court’s judgment “deeply disappointing” and said he was “ashamed of certain members of the court’. He praised Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh for dissenting, citing their “strength and wisdom and love of our country”.
Of the other Supreme Court Justices, including some he had appointed, President Trump said their decision was “an embarrassment to their families.” In a comment that should shock, Trump asserted: “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests.” He also “suggested that outside forces had ‘undue influence’ and that the justices might have been affected ‘through fear or respect or friendships.’”
Asked by the press about the pending framework on trade with India, Trump said, “Nothing changes.” He added, “They’ll be paying tariffs and we will not be paying tariffs.” We will soon know whether or not the American president is correct here.
A major issue in the India-US relationship is the H-1B visa. A report by the Pew Research Center showed that out of around 400,000 H-1B visas approved by the US administration in 2023, close to 300,000 went to Indians, many of whom were software programmers and computer engineers. Debate in the US on this visa has sadly been accompanied by a surge in hate speech targeting South Asians. Anti-India slurs have been acknowledged by Indian-American conservatives and pro-Trump figures like Vivek Ramaswamy and Dinesh D’Souza. “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric,” wrote Dinesh D’Souza in a post on X.
MODI AND ISRAEL
I type these lines on the eve of a Modi visit to Israel, where he will address the Knesset. Will India’s prime minister urge Israeli leaders to accept a two-state solution implying the creation of, and respect for, an independent Palestinian state? India buys major military and security equipment from Israel but has also had a cherished relationship with the cause of a free Palestine. After frequent equivocations, on February 20 India reaffirmed its support for a two-state solution to the Palestine issue and said it had joined more than 100 countries and international organizations in a statement condemning Israel’s attempts to expand unlawful settlements in the West Bank. What Modi says or refuses to say in Israel will be of interest.
India has associated itself as an observer, not a member, with Trump’s Board of Peace, which at first was linked to the rebuilding of Gaza but has subsequently been expanded – at least so it seems – in order to make a much wider contribution as a rival or ally of the UN. Unhappily we are very far from seeing India play a frank, active role as a champion of peace, neighborliness, and mutual respect between Israel and an independent Palestine. I’d like Modi to prove me wrong.
Reports from both Ukraine and Russia continue to speak of lives that are daily extinguished in a relentless war that has now entered its fifth year. The BBC suggests that many Russian soldiers – frequently ex-convicts, it would appear – are being brutally and summarily killed by their officers. Vladimir Putin will face a rough reckoning one day.
Meanwhile Trump may – or he may not – order massive destruction in Iran. Immense lethal power has already been moved from the US towards Iran by sea and by air. The exercise apparently constructed something like an “air bridge” across the Atlantic, over Europe, and over the Mediterranean. One word from Trump and a torrent of selective obliteration can start.
Will Trump give that word? Or will he be deterred by desire for the Nobel or by calculations about US elections at the end of this year?
STATE OF THE UNION
No clue emerged on Wednesday February 25 when Trump gave his State of the Union address to a joint session of both houses of the US Congress. Suspense remains, and anxieties and prayers continue.
The longest such address in American history, Trump’s speech was interspersed with the awarding of medals to military heroes and sporting stars. One of Trump’s aims was to contrast his warmth for American heroes with the Democrats’ supposed softness for illegal immigrants.
To the surprise of some, Trump refrained on this occasion from condemning the Supreme Court’s justices, four of whom were seated in front of him. Clearly his principal goal in the address, which millions watched, was somehow to reverse the trend in polls that suggest that American opinion may be veering away from him. The short response to the address that Abigail Spanberger, the Governor of Virginia, gave on behalf of the Democrats also sounded forceful to my ears.
