Sushant Singh

"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."

India Sneezes, World Catches Cold SS on the JioStar fiasco

The crisis, with JioStar threatening to pull out of ICC's Indian media rights, is not rooted in Indians suddenly falling out of love with cricket. Rather, it exposes fundamental fault lines in India’s economy, governance, and the manner in which concentrated power shapes global cricket.

My piece.

"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."

Annus horribilis: 2025 was the year India learned it wasn't indispensable It is the logical consequence of foreign policy built on a decade of illusion rather than the realities of power. The question is whether anyone in the government has the courage to admit it.

For Delhi, 2025 was annus horribilis, the year India learned it wasn't indispensable on the world stage.

Not merely a bad year, but one that exposed every vulnerability hiding beneath India's foreign policy claims. Three structural failures surfaced simultaneously, with the US, China and Russia.

"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."

Why Modi did not go on a Pakistan-bashing spree after the Delhi blast A car explosion near Delhi's Red Fort killed at least 15 people. Unlike after the November 2008 attack or even post Pahalgam Narendra Modi's rhetoric has been different.

The Delhi blast matters not only because it represents a security failure, but because it reveals the deeper failure of Modi’s strategic approach. I write in The Caravan on why Modi did not go on a Pakistan-bashing spree after the Delhi blast. caravanmagazine.in/politics/mod...

Hollow autonomy Unless Indians elect the political leadership they deserve, defence manufacturing — like Delhi’s pollution — will remain the nation’s most glaring governance failure

"Defence indigenisation is a wicked problem as these recent statements by the military brass have underscored. It emerges from technology, industrialisation, organisational capability, political will and geopolitical constraints all in constant tension. There is no simple solution available."

"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."

His is a modern, multi-faith family grounded in progressive values—precisely the kind of modern Muslim the Hindu Right wants to delegitimise. Acknowledging Zohran could mean acknowledging an Indian legacy that Modi is trying to bury.

Narendra Modi's silence on Zohran Mamdani’s victory reveals what terrifies Hindutva supporters Zohran Mamdani represents everything whose existence the Hindu Right has spent decades trying to deny.

Modi's silence on Mamdani’s victory reveals what terrifies Hindutva supporters. Young, progressive, interfaith, anti-establishment and unafraid, Zohran represents everything whose existence the Hindu Right has spent decades trying to deny.

I write in The Caravan

caravanmagazine.in/politics/mod...

I write @themorningcontext.bsky.social: "The convergence of economic anxiety, cultural resentment, and political opportunity has created ideal conditions for anti-Indian sentiment to flourish. The far-right has successfully reframed Indian-American success... into an invasion narrative."

MAGA’s battle against Indian-Americans: wrong in its particulars but effective alright The far-right’s anti-India narrative offers simple answers to complex problems while drawing on real grievances that many Americans share

The viciousness of the Far Right's attack on Indian-Americans was striking, but few mainstream voices rushed to defend the Indian-American community. The uncomfortable truth is that the narrative resonates as a clever mix of economic problems and social anxieties that can’t be politically negated.

Strategic absence India needs its prime minister to show up, to defend its interests, to negotiate from whatever strength remains, and to stop pretending that domestic political theatre can substitute for international...

"Every summit Modi skips is another opportunity lost, another relationship weakened, another signal sent that India is retreating from the world stage. The great irony is that Modi’s fear of personal embarrassment is guaranteeing national degradation."

"Modi’s response to this crisis is to avoid rooms where Trump might be present. This strategy of evasion cannot hold.

...India needs its prime minister to show up, to defend its interests, to negotiate from whatever strength remains, and to stop pretending..."

My piece in The Telegraph, Kolkata

"The blood spilled in Leh is the price paid by people whose only crime was believing that they deserved to be heard by their own government. A government that shoots its own citizens for demanding their constitutional rights has lost all moral authority. The question is whether anyone still cares."

The Ladakh bloodshed is an outcome of the government treating its population as internal enemies. With central forces killing four civilians in Ladakh, the Narendra Modi government has exposed its administrative incompetence as well as its ideological malevolence.

"Hindutva ideology alone does not explain the Ladakh tragedy. Equally culpable is the staggering incompetence that characterises the Modi administration’s actual governance. ...In border regions like Ladakh, this incompetence becomes lethal."

My piece in The Caravan magazine.

"If India is poorly governed, economically fragile, geopolitically unmoored or socially divided, the diaspora cannot compensate for those weaknesses. Perhaps it is not even interested in doing so and it should not be expected to." [N/N]

Israel’s narrative—a small democracy surrounded by enemies, with Holocaust memory as its moral reference—resonates in US political culture. India’s narrative is murkier: a rising power with internal contradictions, communal tensions, democratic backsliding, high unemployment and authoritarianism.

"Comparing Indian-American influence to Jewish American political power reveals not just a gap but a chasm. It exposes uncomfortable truths about race, money, the evolution of institutions and diaspora politics itself."

When it comes to lobbying in the US, Indian-Americans are not Jewish Americans India tried to build an Israel-style lobby in Washington, DC. But money, race and ideology have kept Indian-Americans from becoming a political force.

Hindu Right has an Israel envy. It is reflected in the desire to copy Israel's lobbying model in the US. That has failed miserably in the past few months.

In @themorningcontext.bsky.social I look at the reasons for this failure, where Modi wasted a decade of India's foreign policy energies.

"Ultimately, the operational impact of the Saudi Arabia-Pakistan defense pact may prove more modest than initial assessments suggest. Pakistan has a well-documented history of overplaying a strong hand, from its relationship with the United States to its early partnership with China."

India Faces Down New Security Calculus The Saudi Arabia-Pakistan defense pact has a signaling effect on deterrence.

"Even if the partnership with Saudi Arabia fails to deliver in full operational terms, its signaling effect alters the deterrence landscape. India is now up against a Pakistan wholly backed by China, strategically supported by Saudi Arabia, and benefiting from newfound US benevolence under Trump."

"This systematic complicity isn’t accidental. Research by
Joyojeet Pal et al demonstrates how Indian sportspeople systematically align with ruling party initiatives, unlike their American counterparts who engage critically with political issues." [N/N]

"It is no surprise that every major cricket decision in India now serves BJP interests. What we witnessed during the Asia Cup was thus inevitable. It was sport subordinated entirely to political propaganda. This raises profound questions about Indian cricket’s moral leadership."

Cricket weaponised: Modi’s dangerous trivialisation of war Sushant Singh is a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale University and consulting editor with The Caravan magazine in India. He served in the Indian Army for more than two decades.

PM Modi's tweet on Asia Cup "wasn’t merely tone-deaf celebration. It represented something far more sinister; the deliberate equation of sporting triumph with military conflict, treating cricket victory as an extension of actual warfare where people die."

I write for Gideon and Pete's Cricket et al

Poor returns What India has seen on the Hill is a growing impatience with its slide towards illiberalism. The kind of support Modi and Jaishankar boasted of has melted into indifference and opposition

“Indian-Americans are successful, wealthy and visible, but not willing to be mobilised as a real political force for India. Modi’s noisy rallies and community events may have led to asset-building headlines but they have not built anything of substance.”

www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/poor...

“For a foreign policy premised on diaspora and bipartisan bonds, this is a very public reckoning. The assets Modi so loudly counted on were never tested before. When the time came, they failed.”

I write in The Telegraph (Kolkata) on how all those Modi has hailed in the US didn’t speak for India.

"The matches against Pakistan serve Modi's political needs perfectly - providing hyper-nationalist theatre that drip-feeds hatred and enmity against the neighbour. This calculated cynicism represents the death of sport and the triumph of performative politics. ...This is not cricket. It never was."

"What unfolds in Dubai over the next few days will not be sport. It will be another episode in the ongoing theatre of toxic Hindu nationalism, where the primary audience is domestic and the primary purpose is political."

The tragedy and farce of India-Pakistan cricket Sushant Singh is a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale University and consulting editor with The Caravan magazine in India. He served in the Indian Army for more than two decades.

At cricket et al, I write on the tragedy and farce of India-Pakistan cricket. It goes well beyond the saga of the missing handshakes. "Instead of building fraternal ties and people-to-people contact, the cricket field becomes the site of playing out their nationalist fantasies."