It has been a short January so far. How much could the Government of India possibly have revealed about itself in such little time?

A lot.

On the world stage, its ‘strategic autonomy’ is visibly in tatters; regionally, it finds itself further besieged; and internally, with a spectrum of renewed faultlines among its own people, 2026 so far has shone a harsh light on India’s regime. If global positioning, regional security and internal cohesion are three concentric circles that any country should draw its strength from, then alarm bells should be ringing out loudly for all well-wishers of India.

The nasty kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, under US President Donald Trump’s orders, not a covert CIA op, has evoked concern of a Monroe doctrine gone rogue and the world finding itself repeating old, dangerous patterns. But even if we are in completely ‘precedented times‘, as a commentator remarked, the  ‘old United States’ – with the country re-enacting what it did with Manuel Noreiga in Panama in 1989 – spells serious trouble for the rest of the world.

Acts in the backyard are never just muscle flexing, as historian Greg Grandin once wrote on the US’s actions in 1989. It is about “warm-up acts” for the US in West Asia and “super-charging US militarism”. This plot to invade and “rule” Venezuela is not the end but the beginning of a serious challenge to a rules-based international order and possibly wider attacks and outside its ‘backyard’. China, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, others – any country with an interest in being counted – has stood up and called out the US. India, the self-anointed ‘leader’ of the Global South has only managed to issue two non-statements.

Neither of the two statements mention the US or spell out the cause for concern. “Recent developments in Venezuela are a matter of deep concern. We are closely........

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