Category: 2. World

“This is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood and expand traditional constituencies of support,” Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar wrote in his 2020 book The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.

For over a decade, India has styled itself as a key node in a new multipolar order: one foot in Washington, another in Moscow, and a wary eye on Beijing.

But the scaffolding is buckling. Donald Trump’s America has turned from cheerleader to critic, accusing India of bankrolling Moscow’s war chest with discounted oil purchases. Delhi now faces the sting of Trump’s public rebuke and higher tariffs.

With multipolarity fraying, many say Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s planned meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Sunday looks less like triumphal diplomacy and more like pragmatic rapprochement.

Yet, Delhi’s foreign policy is at an uneasy crossroads.

India sits in two camps at once: a pillar of Washington’s Indo-Pacific Quad with Japan, the US and Australia, and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the China and Russia-led bloc that often runs counter to US interests. Delhi buys discounted Russian oil even as it courts American investment and technology and prepares to sit at the SCO table in Tianjin next week.

There’s also the I2U2 – a grouping of India, Israel, the UAE and the US that focuses on technology, food security and infrastructure – and a trilateral initiative with France and the UAE.

Analysts say this balancing act is no accident. India prizes strategic autonomy and argues that engaging with competing camps gives it leverage rather than exposure.

“Hedging is a bad choice. But the alternative of aligning with anyone is worse. India’s best choice is the bad choice, which is hedging,” Jitendra Nath Misra, a former Indian ambassador and currently a professor at OP Jindal Global University, told the BBC.

“India may not be fully confident of holding its own by aligning with a great power. As a civilisational state, India seeks to follow the course of other great powers in history who achieved that status on their own.”

To be sure, India’s global ambitions still outpace its capacities.

Its $4tn economy makes it the fifth largest, but that is a fraction of China’s $18tn or America’s $30tn. The military-industrial base is even thinner: India is the world’s second largest importer of arms and not among the top five arms exporters. Despite self-reliance campaigns, indigenous platforms remain limited and most high-value military technology is imported.

Analysts say this mismatch shapes India’s diplomacy.

It’s a reality which, many believe, underpins Modi’s visit to China amid what appears to be a cautious thaw in ties, frozen after the deadly Galwan clashes of 2020. (Nothing captures this imbalance between the two countries more starkly than India’s $99bn trade deficit with China, which exceeds its defence budget for 2025–26.)

Underscoring the shift in relations, China’s envoy in Delhi Xu Feihong recently denounced Washington’s steep tariffs on Indian goods, calling the US a “bully” . Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi echoed the conciliatory tone during a Delhi visit, urging the neighbours to see each other as “partners” rather than “adversaries or threats”.

Still, critics ask: Why is India choosing to open a strategic dialogue with Beijing now?

Happymon Jacob, a strategic affairs scholar, poses the blunt question in a post on X: “What is the alternative?” For decades to come, he argues, managing China will be India’s “core strategic preoccupation”.

In a separate article in The Hindustan Times newspaper, Mr Jacob also situates the recent talks between Delhi and Beijing in a broader frame: the trilateral interplay of India, China and Russia.

These three-way conversations, he notes, reflect wider realignments in response to US policy and allow Delhi and Beijing to signal to Washington that alternative blocs are possible.

But Mr Jacob also cautions that without normalcy with India, China can’t leverage “Indian unhappiness” with Trump for its “own larger geopolitical purposes”.

The larger picture is about how far big powers can really reconcile.

As Sumit Ganguly of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution points out, US-China rivalry remains “structurally irreconcilable”, while Russia has been reduced to Beijing’s “junior partner”. Against this backdrop, India’s room for manoeuvre becomes clearer. “India’s current strategy, as far as I can discern, is to try and maintain a semblance of a working relationship with China to buy time,” he told the BBC.

When it comes to Russia, India has shown little inclination to bend to US pressure.

Discounted crude from Moscow remains central to its energy security. Jaishankar’s recent visit to Moscow signalled that despite Western sanctions and Russia’s deepening dependence on China, Delhi still sees value in keeping the relationship warm – both as an energy lifeline and as a reminder of its foreign policy autonomy.

Mr Ganguly says India is also deepening its relationship with Russia largely because of two reasons: it fears a further closing of ranks between Moscow and Beijing, and due to the souring of ties between Delhi and Washington under Trump.

Trump’s repeated claims of brokering an end to the recent war with Pakistan have irked Delhi, while a much-hyped trade deal appears to have stalled, reportedly over US demands for greater access to India’s farm markets. Trump’s public rebukes over cheap Russian oil have added to the chill – a stance India finds inexplicable since China is a far bigger buyer.

Yet, history suggests that even serious rifts have not derailed relations when larger interests were at stake. “We have faced the toughest challenge until the next toughest challenge,” says Mr Misra.

He points to Washington’s tough sanctions after India’s nuclear tests in 1974 and again in 1998, moves that isolated Delhi and strained ties for years. Yet less than a decade later, the two managed to stitch together a landmark civilian nuclear deal, signalling a willingness on both sides to overcome mistrust when strategic logic demanded it.

The deeper question, as analysts now argue, is not whether ties will recover but what shape they should take.

In a new essay in Foreign Affairs, Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that India’s flirtation with multipolarity undermines its security.

Since the US, even in relative decline, will “tower over both Asian giants”, India should cement a “privileged partnership” with Washington to contain China, he says. Delhi’s refusal to choose, he warns, risks leaving it exposed to a “hostile superpower” on its doorstep.

But Nirupama Rao, former Indian ambassador to Beijing and Washington, says India is “a titan in chrysalis” – too large and ambitious to bind itself to any single great power. Its tradition and interests demand flexibility in a world that is not splitting neatly into two camps but fracturing in more complex ways. Strategic ambiguity, she argues, is not weakness but autonomy.

Amid these duelling visions, one thing is clear: Delhi remains deeply uneasy of a China-led, Russia-backed, non-American world order.

“Frankly, India’s choices are limited,” says Mr Ganguly. “There is no prospect of a rapprochement with China – the rivalry will endure.”

Russia, he adds, “can be relied upon but only to an extent”. As for Washington, “even though Trump is likely to be in office for another three years or so, the US-India relationship will endure. Both countries have too much at stake to let it fall apart over Trump’s idiosyncrasies.”

Others agree: India’s best option is simply to absorb the pain.

“India doesn’t appear to have a better choice than to take the blows from the US on the chin and let the storm pass,” says Mr Misra. In the end, strategic patience may be India’s only real leverage – the wager that storms pass and partners return.

The timing of the first of several recent anti-gentrification protests in Mexico City was no coincidence – 4 July, US Independence Day.

Demonstrators gathered in Parque México in Condesa district – the epicentre of gentrification in the Mexican capital – to protest over a range of grievances.

Most were angry at exorbitant rent hikes, unregulated holiday lettings, and the endless influx of Americans and Europeans into the city’s trendy neighbourhoods like Condesa, Roma and La Juárez, forcing out long-term residents.

In Condesa alone, estimates suggest that as many as one in five homes is now a short-term let or a tourist dwelling.

Others also cited more prosaic changes, like restaurant menus in English, or milder hot sauces at the taco stands to cater for sensitive foreign palates.

But as it moved through the gentrified streets, the initially peaceful protest turned ugly.

Radical demonstrators attacked coffee shops and boutique stores aimed at tourists, smashing windows, intimidating customers, spraying graffiti and chanting “Fuera Gringo!”, meaning “Gringos Out!”.

At her next daily press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the violence as “xenophobic”.

“No matter how legitimate the cause, as is the case with gentrification, the demand cannot be to simply say ‘Get out!’ to people of other nationalities inside our country,” she said.

Masked radicals and agitators aside though, the motivation for most people who turned out on 4 July was stories like Erika Aguilar’s.

After more than 45 years of her family renting the same Mexico City apartment, the beginning of the end came with a knock at the door in 2017.

Long-term residents of the Prim Building, a 1920s architectural gem located in La Juárez district, they were visited by officials clutching eviction papers.

Erika, the eldest daughter, recalls the shocking news: “They came to every apartment in the building and told us we had until the end of the month to vacate the premises, as they weren’t going to renew our rental contracts.

“You can imagine my mother’s face,” adds Erika, her voice momentarily wavering. “She’d lived here since 1977.”

The owners were selling to a real estate company. But they gave the residents a final, albeit unrealistic offer.

“They told us that if we could raise 53m pesos ($2.9m; £2.1m) in two weeks, we could keep the building,” she remembers with a hollow laugh.

“It’s a fortune! New apartments were available for around one to 1.5m pesos ($50,000 to $80,000) back then.”

Today, her old home is covered by tarpaulin and scaffolding, as a construction team converts it into luxury “one, two and three-bed apartments designed for short and medium-term rentals”, boasts the company’s website.

“It’s not a construction for people like me,” Erika – a newspaper layout designer – comments ruefully. “It’s for short-term letting in dollars. In fact, before we were forced out, we’d already started to see rents being charged in dollars in some buildings here.”

Erika and her family now live so far out of the city centre, they are officially in the neighbouring state, almost two hours away by public transport. It is what activist Sergio González refers to as “losing the right of centrality, with everything that entails”.

His group has recorded more than 4,000 cases of “forced displacement of residents with roots” from La Juárez district over the past decade. He was one of them.

“We are facing what we call an urban war,” he says at one of the subsequent anti-gentrifications protests held after 4 July.

“What’s in dispute is the ground itself – who does and who doesn’t have rights to this ground.” Most of the residents forced out of his neighbourhood were unable to stay in the city, he says. “They’ve lost rights which are protected under the city’s constitution.

“The first apartment I rented here cost around 4,000 pesos a month in 2007,” Sergio explains. “Today, that same apartment costs more than 10 times as much. It’s an outrage. It’s pure speculation.”

In face of the growing anger, the mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, unveiled a 14-point plan intended to regulate rent prices, protect long-term residents, and build new social housing at affordable prices.

But for Sergio, and thousands like him, the mayor’s plan came too late. He believes the administration needs to do more to tackle gentrification in Mexico at its core.

“We have a local and federal government which continues to promote a neoliberal economic model, that hasn’t changed,” Sergio argues.

“For as much as they have increased the social security safety net for people, which personally I think is very good, that hasn’t changed the economic paradigm by which they govern.”

He called the mayor’s measures “palliative”, and a case of “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”.

Claudia Sheinbaum’s critics say she failed to meaningfully tackle the issue when she was the capital’s mayor and, in fact, actively enticed foreigners to resettle in Mexico City by signing a partnership agreement with Airbnb to boost tourism and digital nomadism in 2022.

Erika points the finger of blame at a range of people for her family’s upheaval – the building’s former owners for selling to a real estate development company, the city government for not protecting long-term residents, even the tenants themselves for failing to act sooner over the creeping gentrification taking place around them.

However, she does not particularly blame the foreigners who have flocked to Mexico in their droves, particularly around the coronavirus pandemic. “If I had the means to live better elsewhere, I’d probably do it too,” she reasons, “and tourism has been good for Mexico, it’s a source of income.”

Yet plenty of others, including many on the recent marches, do blame the recent American and European arrivals – at least in part. They accuse them of being tone deaf to Mexican customs, of failing to learn Spanish or, in many cases, even pay taxes.

The wave of well-heeled Americans heading south feels particularly galling to some when placed in contrast with the Trump administration’s harsh treatment of Mexican and other immigrants in the US. Immigration is a problem when travelling from south to north yet apparently fine in the opposite direction, argue activists.

Back at the site of the 4 July protest, a wide esplanade at Parque México, the graffiti calling for “Yankees Out!” has been whitewashed, and the early-morning boxing and salsa classes continue unabated, often in English rather than Spanish.

Given the cost of living and the polarised politics in the US, the draw of the leafy streets of Condesa is obvious.

“It’s quiet, walkable, the park obviously is a great draw for people. It’s peaceful. We’ve really enjoyed it,” says Richard Alsobrooks during a short trip to Mexico City with his wife, Alexis, from Portland, Oregon.

As they walk through the Mexican capital, they admit to having half a mind to resettle here one day. “Obviously we don’t want to contribute to gentrification,” says Alexis, acknowledging the extent of the problem.

“But you need to have a good job in the US, and obviously the dollar goes a lot further here. So, I can understand the appeal – especially for those who can work remotely.”

Richard, who works for a major US sportswear company, says “the cost of living in America is too high”, and too often predicated around the idea of working until your 70s.

Both think, though, it is possible to relocate in the right way. “If you treat those around you with respect and try to be part of the community, that goes a lot further than trying to make somewhere your own,” says Richard.

“Exactly,” agrees Alexis. “Learn the language. Pay your taxes!”

Yet the speed of change in Mexico City over the past decade has left casualties.

Erika’s family life has spun on its axis in a matter of months, and her mother has struggled with depression. As we wander through her former neighbourhood streets in La Juárez, the memories come flooding back.

“That was a great bar called La Alegría, over there was the tortillería [tortilla shop], the tlapalería [hardware shop], I used to buy candies in that place when I was little,” says Erika pointing to another shop.

“Most of all I miss the people, the community. There’s hardly any families or children here anymore.”

Most of those small businesses are gone, replaced by hip cafes and expensive eateries.

“I think the soul of La Juárez has died a bit,” she laments. “It’s like you’ve been living in a forest, and gradually the trees are uprooted and then suddenly you realise you’re living in a desert.”

The body of Israeli hostage Ilan Weiss has been recovered in an operation in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military has announced.

Weiss, 56, was killed during Hamas’s attack in southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

The remains of a second hostage, whose identity has not been released yet, were also recovered, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

Israel launched a massive offensive in Gaza following the attack in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to the territory as hostages.

At least 63,025 Palestinians have been killed since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Ilan Weiss was killed while defending Kibbutz Beeri on the day of the attack. His body was taken to Gaza.

Weiss’s wife, Shiri, and daughter, Noga, were taken hostage by Hamas on the same day. They were released during a temporary ceasefire in November 2023.

“Ilan showed courage and noble spirit when he fought the terrorists on that dark day,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, before praising Weiss’s family’s “extraordinary strength in their struggle for his return”.

After the latest announcement, 48 hostages remain in Gaza – 20 of whom Israel believes are still alive.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been facing strong domestic pressure to agree a deal that would enable the return of all hostages still in captivity. Huge protests have been held demanding an end to the war.

However Israel is pushing ahead with its plan to take over Gaza City and eventually establish control over the entire Strip. Netanyahu argues the defeat of Hamas will secure the release of the hostages.

Western countries – and the UN – have warned that an operation in an area of Gaza where more than a million people live would have devastating consequences.

The Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said the military was operating with great intensity on the outskirts of Gaza City and would “deepen our strikes”.

The IDF also said a scheduled pause in military action which had been due to come into effect at 10:00 (07:00 GMT) would not apply to Gaza City.

later on Friday, Hamas warned that the planned Gaza City offensive would subject hostages in the area to the “same risks” as those faced by the group’s fighters.

“We will take care of the prisoners the best we can, and they will be with our fighters in the combat and confrontation zones, subjected to the same risks and the same living conditions,” the spokesperson for its armed wing said.

The health ministry said Israeli fire across the besieged territory killed 59 people on Friday. Footage filmed by the Reuters news agency showed a line of bodies in white bags outside Shifa hospital in Gaza City as relatives grieved nearby.

“What is the reason? Why did they strike them? Let them tell us, what did they do while they were sleeping? What did a three-year-old child do?” Manal Sahweil, a relative of people killed in an airstrike, said to Reuters.

A further five people including two children died from malnutrition in Gaza, bringing the total number of malnutrition deaths to 322, the health ministry said.

Last week, a UN-backed body, which monitors hunger levels around the world, raised its food insecurity status in parts of Gaza to the highest and most severe – confirming famine for the first time. Israel denies there is starvation in the territory.

Since 14 August, the day the offensive was announced, about 20,000 people have been displaced to the south from Gaza City in addition to about 40,000 moving further north, according the UN’s humanitarian affairs office.

Most of Gaza’s population has been repeatedly displaced. More than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed and the healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed.