Ultimately, a country’s true endurance is determined by its democratic resilience, institutional integrity and the capaciousness of its domestic social contract. If India ignores these structural lessons, it risks reproducing the very instability and institutional fragility it has long ridiculed...

"Perhaps the most consequential achievement of the protests was psychological. Fear of the Modi regime in India, classified as an electoral autocracy by global watchdogs, began to erode. That fear is difficult to measure, but it is central to Modi’s political power."

"If the Indian democratic experiment survives this dark era of majoritarian overreach, it will not be because its compromised institutions suddenly rediscovered their spine. It will be because the hopeful, optimistic youth of India decided to stand up and fight back." I write in The Telegraph

Taken together, the Global South and the Indo-Pacific — geopolitical terms that once possessed substantive strategic utility — now expose the same problem in India’s foreign policy. By substituting spectacle for substance, Modi has stripped them of real meaning and reduced them... In The Telegraph

Today’s unfortunate reality is that India is not merely absent from the high table making major international decisions, its absence is not being noted - it means India has become irrelevant to them. And if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. My column in The Telegraph

"Indian mega projects often travel under mixed labels because once the security frame is attached, scrutiny becomes harder. Opposition can be dismissed as naïve, anti-development or even unpatriotic."

India must decide if it is truly prepared to undertake the immense and painstaking effort required to be a great power, or if it has tacitly accepted the future of a secondary player in an order managed by others. The evidence suggests that, for now, the choice has already been made. My piece

"To conclude, the biggest lesson for India is not simply to buy more weapons. There are many exact weak points an adversary would try to exploit first. Every single lesson of the conflict in West Asia must be anchored to a concrete Indian vulnerability to build the system of systems."

The May 2025 exchange marked the beginning of a broader strategic reversal in which Pakistan stopped looking isolated and India started looking exposed. India now faces the prospect of a more confident Pakistan backed by an array of allies, while its own strategic options are narrowing.

"The social contract between the citizen and the state is broken and the future rise of India is being sacrificed for the immediate survival of a regime that has run out of ideas."

Sunny is entitled to his evolving opinions and his inherent contradictions, but we should not mistake these shifts for profound strategic wisdom or insight into matters that fall outside his cricketing expertise.

I write in The Telegraph on the West Asia crisis has only made it clearer what is wrong with Modi's foreign policy, and this tells us why India now needs a change.

"In this view, cricket is not merely a pastime or about athletic excellence; it is a massive platform to project a brand of nationalism that is increasingly narrow and intolerant."

"India does not enhance its security or stature by keeping quiet as others redraw the rules of force around it. It does so only by speaking clearly, defending its principles consistently, and making it costly for partners and rivals alike to treat Indian interests as expendable."

"The idea that India’s ties with these nations are so fragile that a principled diplomatic position would shatter them underestimates how transactional, durable and interest-driven those relationships are on both sides."

"This is not strategic autonomy. It is a risk multiplier. The question is not whether India can afford to alienate either the US or Israel; it is whether India can afford a West Asia engulfed in war. If this truly is “not an era of war,” then Modi must act as if he believes his own words."

On the eve of Carney’s trip, however, Ottawa has quietly signalled a shift, with senior officials saying they no longer believe India is now linked to violent crimes on Canadian soil. For Delhi too, the emphasis on business is convenient. This reset is not happening in a vacuum...

This is the great irony of the modern India-Pakistan fixture because if the rivalry were truly dead, it would no longer be the primary engine of the ICC’s business model. And ICC is nothing but the BCCI in very thin disguise, with the BCCI itself behaving as a cricketing arm of India’s ruling party.

On the much hyped 114 Rafale deal and what it tells us about the crisis in the Indian Air Force, and how institutional memory has been sacrificed at the altar of Modi’s political grandstanding. I write in The Telegraph

"It is here that the role of Jay Shah, the ICC chairman, comes into focus. ...This is why a failed T20 World Cup is not merely an ICC failure; it would be read as a personal failure of Shah, and by implication his father, India’s home minister Amit Shah."

"Pakistan’s chaos is a tragedy for its own fans; the BCCI’s calculated weaponisation of the sport is a global threat. ... Pakistan is indeed a mess, but the BCCI’s power may turn out to be a more dangerous illusion." I write at Cricket et al on Pakistan decision: www.cricketetal.com/p/armageddon...

What really happened during the India-China border crisis, including at Galwan? Then army chief Gen MM Naravane's memoir provides extensive details, of political decision making, restrictions on the military and the disengagement process. That's why it perhaps remains unpublished till date.

“Poor governance has become the hallmark of Modi’s era, not the aberration… Policy is too often driven by optics, centralisation, and an urge to shock rather than steady, iterative improvement.” On why the gap between India’s great-power rhetoric and its ability to protect citizens is widening.

"The problem was compounded by India’s inability to hedge. When the US turned hostile, India should have been able to activate a robust relationship with Europe, lean on Russia, or find alternative sources of investment and trade." In @themorningcontext.bsky.social, when Jaishankar needs a lobbyist

"That’s not cricket. Or, well, it is as the game is presently constituted."

I write in The Telegraph: Putin got the global images he craved of a leader not wholly shunned. Yet, by harder metrics that should concern India, It underlined a deeper failure. It showed that despite the setbacks of 2025, Modi’s foreign policy is still organised around optics rather than outcomes.

"A global sport whose financial viability hinges on a single domestic market, a single set of advertisers, and a single conglomerate’s tolerance for losses is not governed. It is blackmailed. ...It is a hostage situation dressed as a business arrangement. The reckoning for world cricket has begun."

"Nobody resigns. Nobody gets fired. Nobody even admits mistakes. India's foreign policy failed systematically across three continents, yet nobody in the establishment appears responsible for the consequences of policy failures accumulated over a decade of governance."

"He has invested enormous political and military capital in blaming and escalating conflict with Pakistan... Modi cannot blame Pakistan for the Delhi blast because doing so would require him to admit that his actions have produced outcomes he cannot control through force or rhetoric."

"When the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP has itself come down under Modi, how can defence manufacturing take off? Unless Indians elect the political leadership they deserve, defence manufacturing — like Delhi’s pollution — will remain the nation’s most glaring governance failure."