Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: India and Pakistan send delegations to the United States as part of a diplomatic blitz in the wake of their conflict last month, Nepal’s pro-monarchy movement presents a growing challenge to the government in Kathmandu, and Canada may not extend Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi his usual invite to the G-7 leaders’ summit.
India and Pakistan’s Narrative Battle
This week, delegations from India and Pakistan are in the United States to seek support for their governments’ positions in the wake of their military conflict last month. Both governments have invested significant resources in the effort, which involves senior politicians and distinguished former diplomats.
India’s contingent, led by prominent opposition politician Shashi Tharoor, is emphasizing terrorism and Pakistan’s links to it. The Pakistani group, headed by former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is projecting Pakistan as an innocent and peaceful actor and India as an aggressor.
The opposing delegations are participating in a veritable diplomatic road show, stopping in multiple countries. Yet it’s worth asking why India and Pakistan feel the need to wage this battle of narratives at all. The conflict ended more than three weeks ago, and the diplomatic offensive takes policy bandwidth away from pressing matters at home, including economic stress.
It’s an especially apt question for India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is proud, nationalistic, and adamant about not wanting international involvement in India’s bilateral disputes. But it has dispatched seven delegations to 33 foreign capitals—including places such as Bogotá and Ljubljana that don’t appear to have significant stakes in India-Pakistan relations.
By contrast, Pakistan—which is sending two delegations to five capitals—has long courted international involvement and mediation, especially on the issue of Kashmir.
Each government has strong motivations to carry out a diplomatic blitz in this case. A key target audience is the one back home, and both India and Pakistan will seek domestic political gains. The government in Islamabad, which isn’t very popular, can amplify its message of Pakistani innocence and Indian aggression by taking it abroad.
Modi’s government, which enjoys ample popularity, can further bolster support at home by projecting its efforts as multipartisan: The members of India’s delegation are indeed drawn from multiple parties. (Those in Pakistan’s delegation are, too, but they exclude members of the popular opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party).
Additionally, each country has concrete and urgent asks of the international community. Pakistan seeks global support following India’s ongoing suspension of the World Bank-brokered Indus Waters Treaty, which could in due course imperil Pakistan’s already-precarious water security. India wants Pakistan’s bilateral and multilateral donors to reduce assistance to Islamabad.
Furthermore, as I wrote last month, India is playing a long game, looking to do more over time to raise the costs of Pakistan not acting more expeditiously to curb anti-India terrorists and infrastructure on its soil. This entails new nonmilitary punitive steps—and now, a more robust diplomatic strategy to try to convince the world to reduce engagement with Pakistan.
Finally, India wants to reverse what it sees as a problematic trend that has emerged from its military clashes with Pakistan in 2016, 2019, and last month: With each side using increasing amounts of conventional force, the international community has focused more on concerns about nuclear escalation than on the terrorist attacks that triggered the hostilities. New Delhi wants to refocus global attention on terror.
India and Pakistan will struggle to secure all the support that they seek. India can count on global sympathy for its terrorism concerns—and in many Western capitals, for its allegations of Pakistani links to terrorism. But New Delhi can’t ease the world’s fears of nuclear escalation. That will help Islamabad, which aims to play up those fears and even redirect the focus toward worries about terrorism on its soil, for which it alleges Indian sponsorship.
But Pakistan’s play to demonize India will bump up against the fact that much of the world views India as an important strategic and commercial partner. That makes countries hesitant to embrace Islamabad’s pitch for global mediation on Kashmir, a position rejected by New Delhi.
Eventually, each government will need to convince its respective public that it won the narrative battle. That will help determine whether Indians and Pakistanis come to view their delegations’ efforts as a textbook example of successful diplomacy—or a pointless junket.
What We’re Following
Pro-monarchy protests surge in Nepal. Last Thursday, an estimated 20,000 people took to the streets of Kathmandu to call for the restoration of Nepal’s monarchy—marking some of the largest pro-monarchy demonstrations since they began several months ago. Nepal formally abolished its monarchy in 2008, becoming a republic.
The end of the monarchy also spelled the end of Nepal’s status as a Hindu state. Pro-monarchy protesters have called for Nepal to restore Hinduism’s status as a state religion as well, and the Hindu nationalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party has been active in the protests. The party’s leader, Kamal Thapa, was among those arrested on Thursday.
Nepal’s government has sought to downplay the protests, though the size of Thursday’s demonstrations may make that increasingly difficult. The movement is becoming a growing political challenge for Kathmandu—not because it’s possible that the monarchy will be restored, but because it reflects the degree of public dissatisfaction with the political class.
Pakistan negotiating steel deal with Russia. Pakistan and Russia are in serious talks over a deal to build a new steel plant in Karachi, according to Haroon Akhtar Khan, Pakistan’s special assistant to the prime minister on industry and production. The project would replace a now-defunct steel mill operated by the Soviet Union decades ago.
Fortuitously for Pakistan, the facility would be located near Port Qasim, one of the country’s biggest ports, which would likely reduce transport costs for raw materials. Pakistani officials estimate that the plant would cut the country’s steel imports by one-third; the country currently imports nearly $3 billion worth of steel annually.
The proposed deal has some sensitive geopolitical implications. Moscow has a long-standing partnership with New Delhi, though Indian officials were unhappy that Russia didn’t fully support India during its recent conflict with Pakistan. Instead, Russia called for de-escalation, like much of the international community.
Pakistan and Russia have explored possibilities for deeper partnership, mainly through energy and counterterrorism cooperation, but ties remain relatively modest. Economically isolated Russia will likely proceed carefully, not wishing to hurt its close partnership with India but also keen to pursue new commercial cooperation with Pakistan.
Modi unlikely to attend G-7. Though India isn’t a member of the Group of Seven, Modi has been invited to and attended every G-7 leaders’ summit that has been held since 2019. Now, that streak appears to be in jeopardy: This year’s summit, hosted by Canada, is less than two weeks away, and there is no indication that Modi is invited.
On Monday, the Times of India reported that a Canadian G-7 spokesperson “didn’t confirm” if Modi would get the invite. Canadian reports this week suggested that the Indian leader will not be invited. A noninvite wouldn’t be surprising. India-Canada ties have been severely strained in recent years.
Canada alleged that India was involved in the assassination of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia in 2023, while New Delhi accuses Ottawa of sheltering Sikh extremists. However, a new Canadian government has brought hopes of a relationship reset. Late last month, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke by phone with his new Canadian counterpart, Anita Anand.
Yet it would still be awkward for both countries if Modi were invited; with relations still tense, he might decline. If the Indian leader did attend, both countries would likely feel uneasy about pushing for a meeting on the sidelines. Each side is arguably better off trying to further calm tensions and target a high-level encounter later this year, perhaps at the G-20 leaders’ summit.
Under the Radar
Early Tuesday morning, the Pakistani city of Karachi experienced earthquake tremors—not an unusual occurrence.
But then came something more unusual: Hundreds of inmates at the city’s Malir jail were ordered out of their cells and into the prison yard to wait out the tremors. Instead, they staged a major jailbreak—one of the biggest ever in Pakistan, according to the home minister of Sindh province.
Inmates seized guns from prison guards—which led to a shoot-out that killed one prisoner—and then forced open the main prison gate; at least 213 people escaped. By Wednesday afternoon local time, dozens of prisoners had been apprehended—including one reportedly brought back to the jail by his mother—but more than 120 remained unaccounted for. Most of those who escaped were serving sentences on mild charges.
Officials moved quickly to punish those deemed responsible for the security lapses that led to the prison break. Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah fired the provincial chief of prisons and suspended the deputy inspector general of prisons and the jail superintendent. The provincial government plans to undertake a full security audit of Malir and all other prisons in Sindh.
However, the crisis appears to have been triggered by more than just security lapses: According to the BBC, the earthquake caused a panic in the overcrowded facility—it’s nearly 3,000 prisoners over capacity—that contributed to the frenzy that led to the jailbreak.
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Regional Voices
In Prothom Alo, scholar Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir writes about expectations for Bangladesh’s next budget. “Many hope that the budget will include a proposal for a universal, life-cycle-based social security system,” he writes. “Such a transformative initiative could play a vital role in overcoming the ‘lower social trap’ created by crises in livelihoods and build resilience.”
A Dawn editorial credits Chinese mediation for helping ease Pakistan’s tensions with the Taliban: “Perhaps working under the trilateral format with China can better address Pakistan’s security concerns with Kabul—especially in view of the presence of anti-Pakistan terrorist groups on Afghan soil—and amplify the message this country has been conveying bilaterally.”
In the Indian Express, economist Sajjid Z. Chinoy explains what accounts for India’s recent up-and-down GDP growth. “A closer read reveals a more mundane explanation of the growth gyrations in recent quarters: Sharp swings in the intra-year fiscal impulse in an election year and the resurgence of agriculture due to a strong monsoon,” he writes.