Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Worsening toxic smog threatens public health in parts of India and Pakistan, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks include big proponents of partnership with India, and Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake wins a parliamentary majority.
Smog Chokes Parts of India and Pakistan
For several weeks, toxic smog has blanketed parts of India and Pakistan, closing schools and businesses and presenting an acute threat to public health. Due to seasonal weather patterns and agricultural practices, these dangerous conditions typically arise at this time of year—but they seem especially serious in 2024.
Last week, as my own flight approached the New Delhi airport, the pilot informed us that poor visibility was making landing difficult. The plane managed to land on a second approach, likely aided by new technology to help navigate smog, even with visibility on the ground reduced to what seemed like a few hundred feet.
Under the Air Quality Index (AQI), which measures air pollution by levels of fine particulate matter, a reading above 300 is categorized as hazardous. This month, Lahore, Pakistan, recorded a staggering 1,900 AQI score. Air quality in Lahore and New Delhi consistently registered as the world’s worst this month; the smog is even visible in satellite images.
Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Pakistan’s Punjab province, has called for diplomacy with India to tackle the shared crisis a few times in recent weeks. She indicated that she may reach out to her counterpart in the Indian state of Punjab, but there has been no public response from India about Nawaz’s pitch.
The call for cooperation was always a long shot: Despite attempts, the two rivals have failed to work together on other shared human security threats in recent years, from the COVID-19 pandemic to floods. And the smog crisis can’t be fixed through regional diplomacy—the main causes are meteorological patterns and national-level policy.
Scientists and environmentalists say a prime cause for the smog is temperature inversion, which plays out this time of year across the Indo-Gangetic Plain—an area stretching from eastern Pakistan and northern India across much of Bangladesh. Temperature inversion traps cold air near the Earth’s surface and prevents wind and rain from eliminating pollutants.
Additionally, in late fall and winter, farmers in eastern Pakistan and northern India burn off agricultural waste in preparation for the next harvest, known as stubble-burning. This worsens the effects of other causes of air pollution, which include burning waste to generate electricity, heavy coal consumption in India, industrialization, and massive vehicular emissions in cities.
India and Pakistan have resorted to pointing fingers. Officials in the New Delhi city government, led by rivals of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have accused BJP-led neighboring states of sending diesel-powered buses into the city in defiance of bans. In Pakistan, authorities have blamed wind patterns in India.
Ultimately, each government has itself to blame. Despite crackdowns on stubble-burning, the practice continues, suggesting the need for India and Pakistan to offer cleaner, cheaper alternatives to farmers. Reliance on dirty fuels remains deep-seated. India has taken major steps toward a clean energy transition, but current plans still call for heavy use of coal.
Clean energy policies are expensive, and South Asian governments hope that developed countries can help cover the costs. In 2022, delegates at the United Nations climate conference agreed to establish a loss and damage fund to support mitigation efforts in the global south.
At this year’s summit, which ends Friday, progress has been slow and the mood fractious, with negotiators struggling to even agree on a conference agenda. A group of former leaders and climate experts recently called for a “fundamental overhaul” of the U.N. climate summit in a public letter.
India and Pakistan can’t count on help from each other or the international community as they confront their smog crisis. Instead, they will need to commit to long-term and expensive policy shifts. That is small solace for the millions of Indians and Pakistanis struggling to breathe today.
What We’re Following
Trump’s cabinet picks. Shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that “today, a lot of countries are nervous about the U.S. … We are not one of them.” Trump’s foreign-policy cabinet picks reflect some of Washington’s biggest proponents of partnership with India—as well as China hawks and Pakistan critics.
Rep. Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, co-chairs the India Caucus in the House of Representatives. His choice for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, introduced a bill in July that calls for deeper defense ties with India and mandates that the secretary of state track cases of Pakistan aiding anti-India militants.
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, tapped to be director of national intelligence, has long expressed her support for India and is also Hindu—factors that likely prompted Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to take the unusual step of congratulating her before Senate confirmation hearings begin.
Trump’s cabinet picks bolster earlier predictions that his administration will embrace the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, launched during Trump’s first term and intended to counter China. The next White House will likely accord relatively little priority to relations with Pakistan, though it may increase pressure on Islamabad to ease up on its alliance with Beijing.
Dissanayake wins parliamentary majority. One of the first promises Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake made after winning the election in September was to dissolve Parliament and call snap elections. His National People’s Power (NPP) party held just several seats in Parliament, making the move a risky one.
However, parliamentary elections last Thursday produced a thumping victory, with the NPP taking 159 of 225 seats. The showing was especially impressive because Dissanayake has struggled to win over Sri Lanka’s Tamil community, which hasn’t forgotten the NPP’s full-throated support for the brutal military campaign against Tamils during Sri Lanka’s civil war.
The strong performance positions Dissanayake, a populist who ran on an anti-corruption platform, to undertake reforms intended to strengthen public confidence in the government. It also gives him some cover to pursue policies that might not be as popular—potentially including austerity measures to shore up an economy still recovering from a 2022 crisis.
Dissanayake has vowed to renegotiate Sri Lanka’s current deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ensure it doesn’t feature austerity measures that hurt the poor. However, the IMF tends not to budge on its such conditions, and Dissanayake may back away from that pledge.
Landmark subregional electricity deal. Nepal began exporting hydroelectricity to Bangladesh via India last Friday, marking the launch of a milestone project with a range of economic and diplomatic boosts. It strengthens connectivity in a region that badly lacks it, and it enables Nepal to export its electricity surplus to a country other than India for the first time.
The project also strengthens energy security in Bangladesh, which has suffered increasing power outages in recent years amid economic slowdown. And it shows that India and Bangladesh can still cooperate amid creeping tensions in their relationship since the ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August.
The trilateral electricity deal is one of the most concrete examples so far of a trend playing out in the last few years: India has sought to strengthen ties with countries to its east—particularly Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal—to bolster connectivity, while Pakistan has sought to work with Afghanistan to scale up connectivity initiatives stretching into Central Asia.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have made headway on a transnational rail corridor with Uzbekistan. Subregionalization may be another blow to regional connectivity prospects, but it can strengthen commercial ties.
Under the Radar
Last Wednesday, a Pakistani cargo ship docked in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port—the first direct maritime engagement between the two countries since Bangladesh’s 1971 independence. It is an encouraging development for Pakistan’s relations with Bangladesh; there was little bilateral cooperation between the countries during Hasina’s 15-year rule.
During that period, Dhaka’s insistence that Islamabad had not properly apologized for the Pakistani military’s actions during the 1971 independence war—which many observers say amounted to genocide—made it difficult to move forward. But since Hasina’s ouster, the interim government in Dhaka has sent different signals.
Muhammad Yunus, who heads the interim government and is a sharp critic of India, met Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in New York during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in September and called for more cooperation with Islamabad.
For strategic reasons, India won’t receive a Bangladesh-Pakistan thaw well. New Delhi has lost leverage in Dhaka with the departure of Hasina, and it certainly doesn’t want the vacuum filled by Islamabad.
India will also have security concerns about the cargo ship and Pakistani activities in Bangladesh. In 2004, an arms cache was discovered in Chittagong that was reportedly destined for anti-India rebels, and New Delhi believes that Pakistani intelligence helped sponsor the operation.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right by Stephen M. Walt
- Russia’s War Economy Is Hitting Its Limits by Marc R. DeVore and Alexander Mertens
- Settler Colonialism Isn’t What You Think It Is by Ran Greenstein
Regional Voices
In Prothom Alo, professor Md. Shahabul Haque argues that Bangladesh’s interim government must do better on inflation. Dhaka’s “many positive initiatives are being put into shade by its failure to control the spiralling price of commodities,” he writes. “When the common people go to the market and see the prices of essentials, they cannot distinguish between this government and the past one.”
In Dawn, policy analyst Rafiullah Kakar argues against heavy-handed responses to rising militancy in Balochistan. “[T]hose advocating a more aggressive response appear to suffer from political amnesia,” he writes. “This hawkish stance has been the prevailing strategy for over two decades. The outcomes speak for themselves.”
In the Print, historian Anirudh Kanisetti describes the challenges that Indian historians face in trying to write for wider audiences. “[Y]oung Indian historians seeking to build an audience have to face tides of vitriol,” he writes. “The result is the opposite of the West: a negative feedback cycle where it’s difficult to make a living or find an audience if you want to do public history.”