Editorial 1: In the Crossfire – India and the Saudi-Houthi Conflict
Context
The fragile calm in Yemen has broken again, and this time Indian blood is part of the ledger. The Houthi movement has launched a two-phase assault on Saudi Arabia – targeting Riyadh and the airports of Dammam and Najran – while simultaneously striking Aden, the seat of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Saudi-led retaliatory strikes have reportedly killed 17 people. The truce that had, with interruptions, held since 2022 and formally collapsed in July is now visibly dead, and the war has returned to Saudi soil.
India is not a spectator. Two Indians have been killed and 14 wounded in Houthi attacks since July, an Indian national died in the Houthi attack on Dammam airport, the Houthis claim a yacht carrying 14 Indians was targeted by Saudi forces near Zuqar island, and thousands of Indian pilgrims are stranded by disrupted flights. The Hindu’s editorial of October 24 (‘In the crossfire: on India and the Saudi-Houthi conflict’) responds with a direct prescription: India must adopt a ‘pro-active position’ – prepare a contingency plan for worst-case scenarios, make the evacuation of stranded pilgrims its immediate priority, articulate a stronger position for stability, and work with Arab countries and Tehran to push for a diplomatic settlement of the wider Iran crisis, since, in its words, ‘for peace to prevail in the Persian Gulf, the guns directed at Iran must first fall silent’.
The editorial’s prescription deserves engagement rather than reflexive agreement or rejection. What would ‘pro-active’ mean for a country whose Gulf policy has been built on simultaneous friendship with Riyadh, Tehran and Tel Aviv, and whose nine-million-strong regional diaspora cannot be evacuated in any realistic contingency? The answer defines the next phase of India’s West Asia policy.
The structural context makes the question urgent. India imports the bulk of its crude and a large share of its LNG through the Gulf; the Red Sea corridor carries a substantial portion of India’s trade with Europe; and remittances from the Gulf states form the single largest stream in the world’s biggest remittance economy. Each Houthi launch therefore lands in three Indian balance sheets at once – the energy import bill, the freight and insurance bill, and the household incomes of remittance-dependent districts. A foreign policy that treats the file as regional background is mispricing a first-order exposure.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper II: India and its neighbourhood; international relations; effect of policies of developed and developing countries on India’s interests; Indian diaspora. GS Paper III: Internal security; maritime security; energy security. Essay/Interview: strategic autonomy, middle-power diplomacy.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. The strategic picture: a war that never ended, only paused
- The 2022 truce reduced large-scale exchanges but never produced a political settlement; its July collapse was a matter of time once the Houthis’ regional calculations – tied to Iran’s positioning and the Red Sea campaign – shifted.
- The two-phase pattern (deep strikes on Riyadh and Dammam plus border pressure on Najran, with a simultaneous Aden strike) demonstrates that years of Saudi and coalition bombardment have not eliminated Houthi missile and drone capacity, much of it sustained through external supply channels.
- Attacks near Dammam target the logic of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline redundancy – infrastructure built precisely to bypass Hormuz – signalling that no routing workaround is beyond reach.
2. India’s exposure is structural, not incidental
- Energy: a large share of India’s crude and LNG transits the Gulf and the Red Sea corridor; insurance premia, freight rates and supply timing all respond to each escalation.
- Diaspora: with millions of Indian workers across Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbourhood and the wider Gulf, every missile exchange is a consular event; the two deaths and 14 injuries since July make that concrete.
- Maritime: the Indian Navy’s presence in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden, built up during the Red Sea crisis, is now a standing requirement rather than a temporary deployment.
3. The limits of ‘pro-active’
- Military participation is not on the table: joining any coalition would endanger the diaspora, poison relations with Tehran, and abandon the strategic autonomy that lets India talk to all sides.
- Diplomatic activism has limits too: India is not a party to the UN-mediated Yemen process and lacks the leverage of the principal stakeholders; its influence runs through Riyadh, Tehran and Washington simultaneously, each with its own agenda.
- Yet India holds one underused card: it is among the very few states with working ministerial-level access to all three relevant capitals at once. In a conflict where the parties’ own channels are broken, a credible messenger has real, if bounded, value – and that value depreciates if it is never spent.
- The honest reading of the editorial’s demand is narrower and more useful than a generalised activism: its specific asks – pilgrim evacuation first, worst-case contingency planning, a stronger pro-stability position, and diplomatic work with Arab capitals and Tehran on the Iran file – are precisely the instruments India actually possesses, and treating the conflict as a first-order national interest rather than a background file is the operative core.
4. The consular and domestic dimension
- The advisory against filming interceptions reflects how modern conflict works: smartphone footage is intelligence, and civilians can compromise air defence with a video upload.
- India’s past evacuations – Yemen 2015 (Operation Raahat), Sudan 2023 (Operation Kaveri) – show that extraction is possible but never scalable to the full diaspora; prevention through early de-escalation diplomacy is always cheaper than evacuation.
- The deaths of two Indians since July have received far less policy attention than their significance warrants: they convert an abstract conflict into a documented Indian casualty list, which is precisely the threshold at which a bystander posture becomes untenable.
- Preparedness must be quiet and continuous – registration of nationals, employer coordination, evacuation contingency plans and insurance clarity – rather than improvised after each strike.
- Remittance corridors and worker welfare funds are wartime infrastructure too: disruption ripples into Kerala, UP, Bihar and Telangana households within weeks.
5. The regional architecture question
- The Saudi-Iran détente brokered in Beijing in 2023 lowered temperatures; its weakening is part of why the truce collapsed. Re-anchoring that channel matters more to India than any tactical alignment.
- India’s connectivity bets – IMEC, Chabahar, I2U2 – all assume a baseline of West Asian stability; each escalation raises the discount rate on those investments.
- A Gulf security architecture that includes Iran and excludes no major stakeholder remains the only durable answer, however distant it looks today.
- History offers the cautionary register: every previous Yemen de-escalation – 2022’s truce included – was purchased by exhaustion, not settlement, and every round since has begun from a worse baseline. India’s diplomacy should plan for recurrence, not just for resolution.
Way Forward
Adopt the editorial’s core advice in operational terms: name de-escalation in Yemen a stated Indian interest in every relevant bilateral and multilateral engagement, rather than a generic call for restraint.
Institutionalise the Saudi-Iran backchannel value India holds: use existing ministerial and NSA-level lines to press both capitals toward re-freezing the truce terms, offering India’s good offices where useful.
Upgrade consular readiness from advisories to standing infrastructure: mandatory registration drives, employer compliance on worker safety protocols, pre-negotiated evacuation logistics and a public dashboard of advisories.
Sustain and resource the naval deployment in the Arabian Sea-Gulf of Aden arc as a standing commitment, integrated with escort coordination and information-sharing mechanisms.
Hard-insure the energy lifeline: diversify liftings where contractually possible, use strategic petroleum reserves transparently, and coordinate with other Asian importers on freight-insurance stabilisation.
Prepare the diplomatic after-plan: when the next truce comes, India should be ready to support reconstruction and maritime-normalisation economics, which give the peace tangible stakeholders on all sides.
Finally, coordinate with other exposed Asian and African importers – Japan, South Korea, Egypt – on shared positions: a plural importer voice for freedom of navigation and truce restoration carries more weight than any single capital’s demarche.
And invest in the analytic capacity this posture requires: a standing West Asia crisis cell that integrates MEA, the Navy, the petroleum ministry and consular services, so that the next escalation meets a prepared system rather than a convening one. The measure of a pro-active policy is not the visibility of its statements but the absence of improvisation when the next missile flies.
Conclusion
The Hindu’s editorial is right that India is in the crossfire, and right that passivity has costs; the answer is not activism for its own sake but a deliberate, resourced policy that matches India’s actual exposure. The deaths of two Indian workers have already answered the question of whether this is India’s business. What remains is whether New Delhi treats West Asian escalation as a standing priority – with channels, contingencies and diplomacy to match – or continues to discover its interest after each strike.
Practice Question
Q: ‘India can no longer afford to be a bystander in West Asia.’ Discuss in the context of the renewed Houthi-Saudi escalation, and outline the contours of a pro-active yet autonomy-preserving Indian approach. (250 words)
Editorial 2: In Israel, Stakes are High, Change has Constraints
Context
Israel votes on October 27 in an election that is simultaneously a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu’s seventh bid for power and a test of whether a war-weary electorate believes change is possible without being destabilising. The Indian Express editorial (‘In Israel, stakes are high, change has constraints’) captures the essential tension: the desire for political change after years of war is real and widespread, yet the structural constraints of Israel’s fragmented politics – and the unifying pressure of an ongoing security emergency – sharply limit what any new government could actually alter.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, seeks another term despite carrying the political weight of the Gaza war’s origins on his watch, a hostage file that remains unresolved for many families, and a corruption trial that has shadowed his governance for years. His principal challengers – with former army chief and war-cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot among the most prominent – argue that the country needs new leadership to recover strategic direction. Yet no opposition bloc commands a clear majority in the 120-member Knesset, and the coalition arithmetic that has made Israeli governments chronically unstable remains intact.
Overlaying everything is Washington: the Trump administration’s open preference for Netanyahu, and the reported possibility of US-Israel military action against Iran after the November 3 American midterms, mean that Israel’s choice is entangled with an ally’s domestic calendar in ways that constrain every contender’s room to manoeuvre – whoever wins.
The editorial’s framing – high stakes, constrained change – also describes a wider democratic condition of this decade. Wartime electorates in several democracies have wanted both accountability and continuity, punishing leaders for failures while fearing the disruption of replacing them mid-conflict. Israel’s voters face that double demand in its purest form: how to render a verdict on the failures that preceded the war without weakening the state still fighting it. The answer a democracy gives to that question is itself a verdict on the system’s maturity.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper II: International Relations – West Asia; effect of policies and politics of developed countries on India’s interests. GS Paper III: Internal security linkages; energy security. Essay: democracy and wartime mandates.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. The democratic stakes
- An election held in wartime is a test of democratic resilience: campaigning, voting and a possible transfer of power while hostilities continue is something few democracies have managed; Israel has done it before and is doing it again.
- Netanyahu’s seventh bid crystallises the personalisation question: whether a single leader’s continued survival in office has become an end of the political system rather than an outcome of it.
- The opposition’s problem is arithmetic and identity: anti-Netanyahu majorities have existed before without producing stable governments, because the blocs opposing him agree on little else – from judicial reform to Palestinian statehood to Haredi conscription.
- Eisenkot’s candidacy embodies the paradox: a war-cabinet insider running on change, he offers competence and credibility on security – the very attributes that make his policy room smallest, since he helped design the war he would inherit.
- Israel’s repeated-election cycle of 2019-2022 – five elections in under four years – is the cautionary institutional backdrop: an electorate can deliver a verdict and still not produce a government capable of executing it.
2. Constraints on change
- Security consensus narrows policy space: on Gaza’s end-state, on Hezbollah, and on Iran, the differences between mainstream contenders are of emphasis, not of kind; a new government would inherit the same strategic map.
- Coalition mathematics constrains any winner: the 120-member Knesset’s fragmentation means any government rests on parties with veto power over its central promises, disciplining ambition on day one.
- The judiciary-executive tension that predated the war – the 2023 judicial-overhaul crisis – remains unresolved and will resurface for whoever governs, limiting institutional room for manoeuvre.
3. The American overlay
- Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu converts an alliance into a partisan preference, complicating Israel’s tradition of bipartisan US support and narrowing the next government’s Washington options.
- Reported planning for US-Israel strikes on Iran after the November 3 midterms ties Israel’s security calendar to America’s electoral one – an extraordinary entanglement that no Israeli voter can price accurately.
- A Netanyahu loss could strain the personal channel to Trump; a Netanyahu win could deepen Israel’s dependence on a single, volatile external patron.
- The deeper issue is the conversion of alliance into alignment: when a patron power signals a preferred electoral outcome, the client’s subsequent policies are read – fairly or not – as purchased, weakening the client’s strategic autonomy and the alliance’s domestic legitimacy in both countries.
4. Regional and war dimensions
- The Gaza file – ceasefire durability, hostage remains, governance of the strip – will dominate the new government’s first hundred days regardless of who leads it.
- The northern front with Hezbollah and the wider Iran shadow war define the security inheritance: the election decides who manages them, not whether they exist.
- Normalisation tracks with Saudi Arabia and the Abraham Accords architecture are hostage to the same files; regional diplomacy offers any winner an achievable legacy if the war files are settled.
- Israeli society itself is the understated constraint: reservist fatigue, economic strain from mobilisation, displaced northern communities and a polarised public sphere all limit how much change any government can absorb at once – the electorate’s appetite for rupture is smaller than its appetite for accountability.
5. What it means for India
- India’s Israel relationship – defence, technology, agriculture, I2U2 and IMEC – is structural and post-personal; it survives either outcome, and New Delhi has worked both Netanyahu and opposition figures before.
- An Iran escalation would hit India’s energy and connectivity bets immediately: Chabahar, oil prices, and Gulf stability are all sensitive to the post-midterm military question.
- India’s balancing posture – ties with Israel, Iran, the Gulf states and the Palestinian Authority – becomes more valuable and more difficult in an escalated West Asia; the election’s outcome calibrates but does not settle that challenge.
- Indian defence and technology cooperation with Israel is among the deepest India maintains with any partner – missiles, radars, drones, agriculture and water – and its continuity depends on institutions and contracts, which elections do not rewrite, rather than personalities, which they do.
Way Forward
Track the coalition, not just the winner: the government that emerges matters less than its arithmetic – a narrow, veto-laden coalition of any colour implies policy continuity by constraint.
Track the hostage and ceasefire files in the first hundred days: they are the quickest test of whether a new government can convert electoral mandate into negotiated outcomes, and the files on which public patience is shortest.
Watch the Iran file through the US midterm calendar: any post-November 3 military action is the single largest external shock risk for India’s energy and connectivity interests this quarter.
India should deepen institutional – not personal – links with Israel’s defence, technology and water-management establishments, insulating the relationship from electoral churn.
Prepare contingency energy and shipping responses for an Iran escalation: SPR release coordination, freight-insurance stabilisation and rupee-payment continuity should be pre-decided, not improvised.
Use India’s unique multi-alignment – Jerusalem, Tehran, Riyadh, Ramallah – to quietly support any ceasefire-consolidation track, consistent with the ‘pro-active but autonomy-preserving’ posture this moment demands.
Keep the IMEC and I2U2 files moving through bureaucratic channels regardless of the outcome: connectivity and technology corridors that pause for every election never arrive, and their value to India is precisely that they outlast governments.
Coordinate quietly with Gulf partners on post-election scenarios: Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will run the same arithmetic New Delhi does, and shared contingency planning now prevents divergent reactions later.
For aspirants: read this election as a case study in how electoral democracy operates under security emergency – a comparative anchor with wartime elections in Ukraine and post-war leadership changes elsewhere.
Conclusion
The Indian Express is right that the stakes are high and change is constrained. Israel’s voters can change the face of their government; they cannot, by one election, change the strategic map, the coalition mathematics or the American calendar that hem in whoever wins. For India, the prudent course is institutional depth with Israel, contingency preparation on Iran, and continued investment in the multi-aligned posture that keeps all doors open whichever way the Knesset arithmetic falls.
Practice Question
Q: ‘Wartime elections test not only leaders but the limits of democratic choice itself.’ Examine with reference to Israel’s 2026 election, and assess the implications of its possible outcomes for India’s West Asia interests. (250 words)
Editorial 3: Bihar Needs to Talk About Prohibition – and About Addiction
Context
Ten years after Bihar imposed total prohibition in 2016, the state’s experiment with legislated abstinence is producing numbers that should force a reckoning. As the Indian Express editorial (‘Bihar needs to talk about prohibition, addiction’) lays out, cases under the NDPS Act – the narcotics law – have jumped to 1,905 in five months, against 697 in all of 2019; seizures of habit-forming tablets have exploded from 29,762 to 9.29 lakh. The pattern is unmistakable: as liquor became harder to get, a share of the demand migrated to drugs, which are more dangerous, more concentrated and more criminalised.
The editorial’s intervention is significant because it shifts the debate from prohibition’s enforcement statistics – raids, arrests, seized bottles – to its substitution effects. A policy can succeed at suppressing its target while worsening the underlying harm, and Bihar’s drug numbers suggest exactly that substitution is under way. The 2025 merger of the state’s prohibition machinery into a unified bureau, and senior officer Kundan Krishnan’s admission that ‘mere police action will not suffice’, indicate that the state’s own administration now recognises the limits of the punitive model.
Bihar is not alone: prohibition states from Gujarat to Mizoram have wrestled with smuggling, illicit distillation deaths and enforcement corruption. But Bihar’s scale – over 12 crore people, a long porous border with Nepal, deep rural poverty – makes it the definitive test case of whether legislated temperance can survive contact with demand, and of what a state owes its citizens when the cure risks becoming worse than the disease.
Worth stating plainly at the outset: the harms prohibition sought to address were real. Alcohol-driven domestic violence, wage-draining drinking and public disorder were – and remain – serious welfare problems, particularly for women in poor households, and the policy’s original electoral mandate was substantially a women’s mandate. Any honest reckoning must weigh those gains, where they occurred, against the substitution costs now documented, rather than treating either side of the ledger as the whole account.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper II: Social issues – health, addiction, governance; federalism and state policy experiments. GS Paper III: Internal security linkages – organised crime, border smuggling. GS Paper IV / Essay: ethics of paternalistic legislation; evidence-based policy.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. The substitution problem
- NDPS cases at 1,905 in five months versus 697 in all of 2019 is not a marginal drift but a structural shift in the addiction economy: prohibition raised the price and risk of liquor, and part of the demand moved to psychotropic tablets and narcotics that are easier to conceal and more harmful per dose.
- Tablet seizures rising from 29,762 to 9.29 lakh shows an industrial-scale supply response – organised networks filling the gap that licensed liquor once served, with none of the quality control or age gates of legal sale.
- Substitution is the classic unintended consequence in prohibition literature: the alcohol-prohibition era in the United States pushed consumers toward stronger spirits and unregulated supply; Bihar’s variant is a shift across substances entirely.
- The dose-response difference matters clinically: a drinker displaced to psychotropic tablets or injectable narcotics faces addiction trajectories, overdose risk and infectious-disease exposure far beyond anything licensed liquor posed, and the state’s health system inherits those costs without having been budgeted for them.
2. The enforcement economy
- Total prohibition in a poor, high-density state creates an enormous illicit market: every seized consignment implies a supply chain, a protection economy and corrupted checkpoints – the fiscal cost of enforcement plus the fiscal loss of foregone excise is a double drain.
- Excise was once a significant revenue source for Bihar; the state has foregone it entirely while spending on a prohibition apparatus, tightening a fiscal position already dependent on central transfers.
- Police resources absorbed by prohibition enforcement are police resources withdrawn from other crime priorities – an opportunity cost rarely counted in the policy’s defence.
- The illicit liquor that survives enforcement is itself a recurring killer: spurious-liquor tragedies in dry districts have repeatedly taken lives, adding a direct mortality line to the substitution ledger that licensed markets almost never produce.
3. The public-health framing the debate avoids
- Addiction is a health condition before it is a crime: a policy built on arresting users and small sellers, without de-addiction capacity, converts illness into criminal records at population scale.
- Bihar’s de-addiction and rehabilitation infrastructure is a fraction of what substitution on this scale requires; the editorial’s demand to ‘talk about addiction’ is precisely a demand to move from criminal to clinical vocabulary.
- The 2025 bureau merger and Kundan Krishnan’s ‘mere police action will not suffice’ are institutional acknowledgements that the state lacks a demand-side strategy – treatment, counselling, livelihood alternatives for illicit-economy workers.
4. The border and federal dimension
- Bihar’s open border with Nepal and its position on trafficking routes from the northeast and the Golden Crescent’s eastern spurs make it a transit and consumption zone simultaneously; prohibition interacts with geography the state did not choose.
- Neighbouring states’ legal liquor creates arbitrage: smuggling inflows are structural, and inter-state coordination on excise and narcotics enforcement remains thin.
- The NDPS surge sits in a national context – Punjab’s drug crisis, the northeast’s trafficking corridors – where state-level supply suppression without a national demand-reduction strategy merely displaces the market.
5. The political economy of admitting error
- Prohibition was a signature political promise in Bihar, framed around women’s welfare and household economics – real harms that alcohol abuse inflicts, and a constituency that still values the policy’s intent.
- Admitting substitution does not require admitting that the original problem was imaginary: the honest policy question is comparative harm – whether the drug-and-illicit-liquor equilibrium of 2026 is worse than the licensed-liquor equilibrium of 2015.
- Political incentives run against review: no government wants to hand opponents a ‘rollback’ headline, so data that would trigger reconsideration in a technical agency gets quarantined in a political one – which is why the editorial’s call for public discussion is itself a policy instrument.
- The editorial’s real ask is deliberative: a decade of data exists, and a government that refuses to debate it turns policy into theology.
- The comparative lesson from other Indian states is available for the reading: some have loosened, recalibrated or restructured liquor policy after finding that prohibition’s administrative costs and illicit markets exceeded its gains, while others have made regulated availability work with earmarked revenues for health and welfare. Bihar does not need to copy any model; it needs to be willing to be compared with them.
Way Forward
Commission an independent decade-review of prohibition’s full ledger – health outcomes, crime substitution, enforcement cost, foregone revenue, household economics – published in full, as the evidence base for any course correction.
Build the demand-side architecture: district de-addiction centres, counsellor staffing, and integration with Ayushman Bharat and district mental-health programmes, scaled to the NDPS numbers the state itself is reporting. A state registering 1,905 narcotics cases in five months needs treatment capacity measured in the same order of magnitude, not pilot projects in a handful of districts.
Re-target enforcement up the supply chain: the 9.29-lakh-tablet seizures identify networks, and prosecuting distributors and protectors yields more than criminalising users and small carriers.
Strengthen inter-state and India-Nepal coordination on excise and narcotics flows, with shared intelligence and joint operations, since Bihar’s market is supplied from beyond its jurisdiction.
Pilot regulated, taxed availability models – as other states that reversed prohibition (like Mizoram’s partial experiments) have tried – with revenues hypothecated to de-addiction and women’s welfare programmes that were prohibition’s original justification.
Protect the deliberative space the editorial demands: legislative debate, committee examination and public consultation on the decade’s data, so that any reform – tightening, recalibration or phased repeal – carries democratic legitimacy rather than political face-saving.
Conclusion
The Indian Express has done Bihar a service by refusing to let enforcement statistics stand in for outcomes. Ten years in, the question is no longer whether prohibition can suppress liquor – it demonstrably can, at a price – but whether the state has reduced the sum of addiction-related harm, and the NDPS numbers answer that in the negative. Bihar needs to talk about addiction as a public-health condition, about substitution as a policy cost, and about whether a signature promise should be governed by evidence or by pride. The willingness to ask the question is the first reform.
Practice Question
Q: ‘When the cure aggravates the disease, evidence must override sentiment.’ Discuss with reference to Bihar’s prohibition policy and the rise in narcotics cases, and outline an evidence-based alternative framework. (250 words)
