India

New Delhi, India – On January 3, 2026, a single directive from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) quietly ended the Indian Premier League (IPL) season of Bangladesh’s only cricketer in the tournament, Mustafizur Rahman, before it could even begin.

The Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), a professional Twenty20 franchise based in Kolkata that competes in the IPL and is owned by Red Chillies Entertainment, associated with Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, were instructed by India’s cricket board to release the Bangladesh fast bowler.

Not because of injury, form, or contract disputes, but due to “developments all around” – an apparent reference to soaring tensions between India and Bangladesh that have been high since ousted former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina received exile in New Delhi in August 2024.

Within days, Mustafizur signed up for the Pakistan Super League (PSL), the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) protested sharply, the IPL broadcast was banned in Bangladesh, and the International Cricket Council (ICC) – the body that governs the sport globally – was pulled into a diplomatic standoff.

What should have been a routine player transaction instead became a symbol of how cricket in South Asia has shifted from a tool of diplomacy to an instrument of political pressure.

Cricket has long been the subcontinent’s soft-power language, a shared obsession that survived wars, border closures, and diplomatic freezes. Today, that language is being rewritten, say observers and analysts.

India, the financial and political centre of world cricket, is increasingly using its dominance of the sport to signal, punish, and coerce its neighbours, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh, they say.

The Mustafizur affair: When politics entered the dressing room

Rahman was signed by KKR for 9.2 million Indian rupees ($1m) before the IPL 2026 season.

Yet the BCCI instructed the franchise to release him, citing vague external developments widely understood to be linked to political tensions between India and Bangladesh.

The consequences were immediate.

Mustafizur, unlikely to receive compensation because the termination was not injury-related, accepted an offer from the PSL – picking the Pakistani league after an Indian snub – returning to the tournament after eight years.

The PSL confirmed his participation before its January 21 draft. The BCB, meanwhile, called the BCCI’s intervention “discriminatory and insulting”.

Dhaka escalated the matter beyond cricket, asking the ICC to move Bangladesh’s matches from the upcoming T20 World Cup, which India is primarily hosting, to Sri Lanka over security concerns.

The Bangladeshi government went further, banning the broadcast of the IPL nationwide, a rare step that underlined how deeply cricket intersects with politics and public sentiment in South Asia.

The BCB on January 7 said the International Cricket Council (ICC) has assured it of Bangladesh’s full and uninterrupted participation in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, dismissing media reports of any ultimatum.

The BCB said the ICC responded to its concerns over the safety and security of the national team in India, including a request to relocate matches, and reaffirmed its commitment to safeguarding Bangladesh’s participation while expressing willingness to work closely with the Board during detailed security planning.

Yet for now, Bangladesh’s matches remain scheduled for the Indian megacities of Kolkata and Mumbai from February 7, 2026, even as tensions simmer.

Navneet Rana, a BJP leader said that no Bangladeshi cricketer or celebrity should be “entertained in India” while Hindus and minorities are being targeted in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, Indian Congress leader Shashi Tharoor questioned the decision to release Mustafizur Rahman, warning against politicising sport and punishing individual players for developments in another country.

A pattern, not an exception

The Mustafizur controversy fits into a broader trajectory.

While all cricket boards operate within political realities, the BCCI’s unique financial power gives it leverage unmatched by any other body in the sport, say analysts.

The ICC, the sport’s global body, is headed by Jay Shah, the son of India’s powerful home minister Amit Shah – widely seen as the second-most influential man in India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The IPL, meanwhile, is by far the richest franchise league in the world.

India, with 1.5 billion people, is cricket’s biggest market and generates an estimated 80 percent of the sport’s revenue.

All of that, say analysts, gives India the ability to shape scheduling of events and matches, venues, and revenue-sharing arrangements. This, in turn, has made cricket a strategic asset for the Indian government.

When political relations sour, cricket is no longer insulated.

Nowhere is this clearer than in India’s relationship with Bangladesh at the moment. India has historically been viewed as close to Hasina, whose ouster in 2024 followed weeks of popular protests that her security forces attempted to crush using brutal force. An estimated 1,400 people were killed in that crackdown, according to the United Nations.

India has so far refused to send Hasina back to Bangladesh from exile, even though a tribunal in Dhaka sentenced her to death in late 2025 over the killings of protesters during the uprising that led to her removal. That has spurred sentiments against India on the streets of Bangladesh, which escalated after the assassination of an anti-India protest leader in December.

Meanwhile, attacks on Hindus and other religious minorities in Bangladesh since August 2024 – a Hindu Bangladeshi man was lynched last month – have caused anger in India.

Against that backdrop, the BCCI’s move to kick Rahman out of the IPL has drawn criticism from Indian commentators. Senior journalist Vir Sanghvi wrote in a column that the cricket board “panicked” and surrendered to communal pressure instead of standing by its own player-selection process, turning a sporting issue into a diplomatic embarrassment.

He argued Bangladesh did not warrant a sport boycott and warned that mixing communal politics with cricket risks damaging India’s credibility and regional ties.

Echoing the concern, Suhasini Haidar, diplomatic editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest dailies, said on X that the government was allowing social media campaigns to overpower diplomacy. She referred to how Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar had travelled recently to Dhaka to attend the funeral of former Bangladesh PM Khaleda Zia, and wondered why Bangladeshi cricketers couldn’t then play in India.

Cricket analyst Darminder Joshi said the episode reflected how cricket, once a bridge between India and its neighbours, was increasingly widening divisions.

That was particularly visible late last year, when India and Pakistan faced off in cricket matches months after an intense four-day aerial war.

The Asia Cup standoff

The 2025 Asia Cup, hosted by Pakistan in September, was meant to be a celebration of regional cricket.

But citing government advice, the BCCI informed the ICC and the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) – the sport’s continental governing body – that India would not travel to Pakistan.

After months of wrangling, the tournament was held under a hybrid model, with India playing its matches in the United Arab Emirates while the rest were hosted in Pakistan.

But in three matches that the South Asian rivals played against each other during the competition – India won all three – the Indian team refused to publicly shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts.

“There is no rule in cricket that mandates a handshake. Yet players often tie each other’s shoelaces or help opponents on the field, that is the spirit of the game,” Joshi, the cricket analyst, told Al Jazeera. “If countries are in conflict, will players now refuse even these gestures? Such incidents only spread hate and strip the game of what makes it special.

“Sporting exchanges once softened bilateral tensions; this decision does exactly the opposite, making the game more hostile instead of more interesting.”

The controversy did not end with the final. India won the tournament, defeating Pakistan, but refused to accept the trophy from ACC President Mohsin Naqvi, who is also the Pakistan Cricket Board chairman and Pakistan’s interior minister.

The trophy remains at the ACC headquarters in Dubai, creating an unprecedented limbo that has defied resolution despite multiple ICC and ACC meetings. The BCCI requested that the trophy be sent to India. Naqvi has refused.

From bridge to divider

Unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh has historically enjoyed smoother cricketing ties with India. Bilateral series continued even during political disagreements, and Bangladeshi players became familiar faces in the IPL.

The Mustafizur episode marks a turning point. The current moment stands in stark contrast to earlier eras when cricket was deliberately used to soften political hostilities.

The most celebrated example remains India’s 2004 tour of Pakistan, the so-called “Friendship Series”.

That tour took place after years of frozen ties following the Kargil War, an armed conflict between India and Pakistan that took place from May to July 1999.

The then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee personally met the Indian team before departure, handing captain Sourav Ganguly a bat inscribed with the Hindi words: “Khel hi nahi, dil bhi jeetiye” which translates to “don’t just win matches, win hearts too”.

Special cricket visas allowed thousands of Indian fans to travel across the border. Pakistani then-President Pervez Musharraf followed the games and publicly lauded Indian cricketers who developed followings of their own in Pakistan.

The 2008 Mumbai attacks, carried out by fighters that Pakistan acknowledged had come from its territory, froze cricketing ties.

But in 2011, when India and Pakistan faced off in the World Cup semifinal in Mohali, Indian then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani, over – the two premiers watched the match together in what was widely seen as an act of “cricket diplomacy”.

By intervening in a franchise-level contract and linking it, however obliquely, to geopolitical tensions as has happened with the Mustafizur case, the BCCI sent a clear message, say analysts: Access to Indian cricket is conditional.

Sport journalist Nishant Kapoor told Al Jazeera that releasing a contracted player purely on political grounds was “absolutely wrong” and warned it would widen mistrust in the cricketing ecosystem.

“He is a cricketer. What wrong has he done?” Kapoor said.

Trump has ‘greenlit’ bipartisan push to sanction countries that buy Russian energy exports, Lindsey Graham says.

United States President Donald Trump has backed a bill to impose sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil, including China and India, an influential Republican senator has said.

Lindsey Graham, a senator for the US state of South Carolina, said on Wednesday that Trump had “greenlit” the bipartisan bill following a “very productive” meeting.

Graham’s Sanctioning Russia Act, drafted with Democrat Richard Blumenthal, would give Trump the authority to impose a tariff of up to 500 percent on imports from countries doing business with Russia’s energy sector.

“This bill will allow President Trump to punish those countries who buy cheap Russian oil fueling Putin’s war machine,” Graham said in a statement, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

““This bill would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India and Brazil to incentivize them to stop buying the cheap Russian oil that provides the financing for Putin’s bloodbath against Ukraine.”

China and Russia continue to be major buyers of Russia’s oil despite US and European sanctions imposed on the Russian energy sector in response to Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

China bought nearly half of Russia’s crude oil exports in November, while India took about 38 percent of exports, according to an analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Brazil dramatically ramped up its purchase of subsidised Russian oil after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but those imports have fallen substantially in recent months.

The latest US push to increase pressure on Russia comes as Moscow and Kyiv are engaged in Washington-brokered negotiations to bring an end to the nearly four-year war.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration for the first time gave its backing to European proposals for binding security guarantees for Ukraine, including post-war truce monitoring and a European-led multinational force.

Russia, which has repeatedly said that it will not accept any deployment of NATO member countries’ soldiers in Ukraine, has yet to indicate that it would support such security measures.

In his statement on his bill, Graham said the legislation was timely in light of the current situation in Ukraine.

“This will be well-timed, as Ukraine is making concessions for peace and Putin is all talk, continuing to kill the innocent,” he said.

BCB refutes reports saying ICC had issued an ultimatum over Bangladesh’s refusal to play its World Cup games in India.

Cricket authorities in Bangladesh have agreed to “work closely” with the International Cricket Council (ICC) to resolve security concerns regarding their team’s participation in the upcoming T20 World Cup in India.

The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) will cooperate with the tournament’s organisers in order to ensure the country’s participation, it said in a statement on Wednesday, three days after saying its men’s team will not travel to the neighbouring country.

“The ICC has conveyed its willingness to work closely with the BCB to address the concerns, and has assured that the board’s inputs will be welcomed and duly considered as part of the detailed security planning for the event,” the BCB’s statement said.

“The BCB will continue constructive engagement with the ICC and relevant event authorities in a cooperative and professional manner to arrive at an affable and practical solution that ensures the smooth and successful participation of the team in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026,” the statement added.

The sport’s governing body and the BCB reportedly held a virtual meeting on Tuesday in response to Bangladesh’s request for a change of venue for its fixtures.

India and Sri Lanka are co-hosting the 20-team tournament from February 7, but all of Bangladesh’s group matches were allocated to Indian venues.

Bangladesh’s refusal to travel to India stemmed from a recent controversy, when its star fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman was dropped by his Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Kolkata Knight Riders at the directive of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

It led to an outcry from cricket fans and administrators in Bangladesh, urging the BCB to take reciprocal action. In turn, the BCB asked the ICC to relocate its games from India to Sri Lanka over security concerns, saying its team will not travel to India.

Following two days of silence, the ICC – led by former BCCI chief Jay Shah – and BCB held a call to discuss the issue, with the tournament’s and Bangladesh’s opening match just more than a month away.

According to a report on ESPNCricinfo, the ICC told the BCB during the meeting that Bangladesh will need to travel to India or risk forfeiting points.

However, the BCB refuted the report and termed its claims as “completely false”.

“The BCB has taken note of certain reports published in a section of the media suggesting that the board has been issued an ultimatum. Such claims are completely false, unfounded and do not reflect the nature or content of the communication received from the ICC,” it said.

Earlier, Bangladesh’s interim government also banned the broadcast ‍of the IPL, saying the unceremonious dumping of a “star player defied logic” and had “hurt people”.

It is the latest flashpoint in a growing dispute with neighbouring India, which has now extended to cricket ties between the two nations.

The ongoing tensions flared in recent weeks after a 25-year-old Hindu man was lynched and burned publicly in Bangladesh following allegations of blasphemy.

A few days later, Hindutva activists tried to storm the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi as they rallied against the neighbouring nation for failing to protect its Hindu minorities.

Diplomatic relations between the once-close allies have been sharply tested since August last year, when former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to New Delhi from Dhaka after an uprising against her rule.

Bangladesh blames India for a number of its troubles, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s support for Hasina when she was in power.

Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.

Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.

While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.

The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.

India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.

Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.

“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”

Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.

The move comes after star Bangladesh fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman was dropped by his IPL team on the BCCI’s directives.

Bangladesh’s interim government has banned broadcast ‍of this ‍year’s Indian Premier League (IPL), the latest flashpoint in a growing row with neighbouring India, which has now extended to cricket ties between the two nations.

The move follows the decision by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to have the Kolkata Knight Riders drop Bangladesh pacer Mustafizur Rahman, ​who had signed for the IPL franchise for ‍this season.

The unceremonious dumping of a “star player” like Mustafizur from the IPL “defied logic” and had “hurt people”, the country’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said in a statement explaining its decision.

Bangladesh have also refused to play their matches of next month’s Twenty20 (T20) World Cup in India, demanding that those ‍be staged ⁠in Sri Lanka, co-host of the 20-team tournament.

The Bangladesh Cricket Board’s directors met in an emergency meeting on Sunday and confirmed their decision shortly afterwards.

“Following a thorough assessment of the prevailing situation and the growing concerns regarding the safety and security of the Bangladesh contingent in India and considering the advice from the Bangladesh Government, the board of directors resolved that the Bangladesh national team will not travel to India for the tournament under the current conditions,” it said.

“The board believes that such a step is necessary to safeguard the safety and wellbeing of Bangladeshi players, team officials, Board members and other stakeholders and to ensure that the team can participate in the tournament in a secure and appropriate environment,” the statement added, urging the ICC to take swift action.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has not publicly responded to Bangladesh’s ‌demand to play World Cup matches in Sri Lanka.

Tensions have risen ‌in recent weeks between India ⁠and Bangladesh.

Following the protests, the Indian board asked ‍Knight Riders to drop Mustafizur.

The IPL, the ​world’s richest T20 league, is scheduled ‌from March 26 to May 31.

Bangladesh will not travel to India for the T20 World Cup next month “under current conditions” and have requested their matches be moved elsewhere, the country’s cricket board has said.

Bangladesh bowler Mustafizur Rahman was released by his Indian Premier League team at the request of the Indian board amid growing tensions between the countries.

That led to an emergency meeting at the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB), who now say they have “formally requested” the International Cricket Council (ICC) moves all Bangladesh’s matches.

“The board believes that such a step is necessary to safeguard the safety and well-being of Bangladeshi players, team officials, board members and other stakeholders and to ensure that the team can participate in the tournament in a secure and appropriate environment,” a statement said.

The move threatens to bring chaos to a competition which begins on 7 February and has already been affected by the political tensions between India and Pakistan.

Bangladesh are due to play all four of their group-stage matches in India, including on the opening day against West Indies and against England in Kolkata on 14 February.

The tournament is being co-hosted by Sri Lanka, where all Pakistan’s matches will be played because of the tensions with India.

The killing of a Hindu man during violent protests in Bangladesh pushed strained ties between Bangladesh and India into a deeper crisis.

The man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by a mob in Muslim-majority Bangladesh in an episode that resulted in protests by Hindu nationalist groups in India.

Anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh has grown since former prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled to the country in 2024.

India has not agreed to send her back despite several requests, while violent protests broke out over the murder of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent student leader, in Bangladesh.

Mustafizur was withdrawn from an IPL contract with Kolkata Knight Riders on Saturday.

No reason for the decision was given by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) but secretary Devajit Saikia referenced “recent developments”.

“The board reviewed the situation in detail, taking into account developments over the last 24 hours and expressed deep concern over the overall circumstances surrounding the participation of the Bangladesh in matches scheduled to be played in India,” said the BCB, who also announced their 15-strong squad on Sunday.

“Following a thorough assessment of the prevailing situation and the growing concerns regarding the safety and security of the Bangladesh contingent in India… the board of directors resolved that the national team will not travel to India for the tournament under the current conditions.”

The ICC has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

Bangladesh squad for T20 World Cup: Litton Das (capt), Saif Hassan, Tanzid Hasan, Parvez Hossain Emon, Towhid Hridoy, Shamim Hossain, Nurul Hasan (wk), Mahedi Hasan, Rishad Hossain, Nasum Ahmed, Mustafizur Rahman, Tanzim Hasan Sakib, Taskin Ahmed, Mohammad Saifuddin, Shoriful Islam.

Amid growing political tension, a Bangladeshi official voices concerns over safety of players in India during the upcoming tournament.

Bangladesh will request the International Cricket Council (ICC) to shift its team’s T20 World Cup fixtures from India to Sri Lanka over concerns about its players’ safety, following the removal of a top Bangladeshi player from the Indian Premier League (IPL), a government official has said.

Amid growing political tension between the South Asian neighbours, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has been asked by its government to write to the ICC, requesting a change of venue for its games and seeking clarity on fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman’s abrupt removal from the IPL, youth and sports adviser Asif Nazrul said in a statement on Saturday.

“As the adviser in charge of the Sports Ministry, I have asked the BCB to explain the entire matter to ICC. The board should inform that where a Bangladeshi cricketer cannot play in India despite being contracted, the entire Bangladeshi cricket team cannot feel safe going to play in the World Cup,” Asif wrote in a social media post.

“I have also instructed the board to request that Bangladesh’s World Cup matches should be held in Sri Lanka,” he added.

“We will not accept any insult to Bangladeshi cricket, cricketers and Bangladesh under any circumstances. The days of slavery are over.”

BCB President Aminul Islam Bulbul said the board will hold an emergency meeting later on Sunday.

“The dignity and security of our cricketers are our top priorities, and we will take a decision at the appropriate time, keeping these in mind,” he told reporters late on Saturday.

Defending champions India and 2014 winners Sri Lanka will cohost the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 from February 7 to March 8.

Bangladesh are scheduled to play all their group-stage matches in India, with three fixtures allocated to Eden Gardens in Kolkata and one to the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.

Should the ICC – headed by former BCCI chief Jay Shah – consider the BCB’s request, Bangladesh will become the second country to have its games moved out of India.

Sri Lanka will host all of Pakistan’s matches as the 2009 champions will not travel to India in an ICC-brokered agreement that allows the bitter rivals to avoid travelling across their mutual border.

Earlier on Saturday, the team Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) confirmed that Mustafizur had been released from the franchise’s squad for IPL 2026 after the BCCI advised it to do so, and the move was confirmed by the Indian cricket board’s secretary, Devajit Saikia.

“Due to the recent developments which are going on all across, BCCI has instructed the franchise KKR to release one of their players, Mustafizur Rahman of Bangladesh, from their squad, and BCCI has also said that if they ask for any replacement, BCCI is going to allow that replacement,” Saikia told Indian news agency ANI.

Political tension spills over into sport

The ongoing tensions between India and Bangladesh have flared in recent weeks after a 25-year-old Hindu man was lynched and burned publicly in Bangladesh following allegations of blasphemy.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs last month condemned what it called “unremitting hostility against minorities”.

A few days later, Hindutva activists tried to storm the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi as they rallied against the neighbouring nation for failing to protect its Hindu minorities.

Diplomatic relations between the once-close allies have been sharply tested since August last year, when former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to New Delhi from Dhaka after an uprising against her rule.

Bangladesh blames India for some of its troubles, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s support for Hasina when she was in power.

Political tensions have spilled over into sport in recent months, with the Bangladeshi women’s cricket team’s recent tour of India postponed indefinitely, and the Indian men’s team’s tour of Bangladesh meeting the same fate in August.

The BCCI’s move to have Mustafizur removed from the IPL has met with backlash in Bangladesh, where the popular franchise league may face a blackout.

Bangladeshi government official Nazrul said he had requested the national broadcasting body to “stop broadcasting of IPL tournament in Bangladesh”.

New Year’s Eve celebrations are unfolding across the world as countries move into 2026 one time zone at a time.

The first major cities to mark the new year welcomed midnight with fireworks over their waterfronts, and large crowds gathered at public viewing points.

As the night continues, countries across the Americas will close out the global transition with events stretching from Rio de Janeiro’s beaches to Times Square in New York City and beyond.

This gallery shows how people are marking the start of 2026 around the world.

Hindutva activists tried to storm the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, India as they rallied against the neighbouring nation for failing to protect its Hindu minorities. The demonstration comes after a 25-year-old Hindu man was lynched and burned publicly following allegations of blasphemy.

More than 8,000 candidates sat for a government exam on a runway in Odisha in India, to compete for only 187 positions with the state’s Home Guard. Drones were used to monitor examinees. 18% of Indians under 24 are unemployed, according to the ILO.

India have dropped Test and one-day international captain Shubman Gill from their 15-man squad for the men’s T20 World Cup.

The 26-year-old’s omission follows him scoring 291 in his 15 T20 matches in 2025, with India’s chief selector Ajit Agarkar saying the batter was “short of runs at the moment”.

Gill missed the T20 international against South Africa on Friday as India won the match to claim a 3-1 series victory.

Suryakumar Yadav scored five runs in that game and, despite his tally of 218 runs in his 19 T20 outings this year, he retained the captaincy.

“We have full faith in our captain to deliver during the World Cup,” said Agarkar.

Suryakumar said: “I know what to do. I have time to fix it. We will definitely see Surya the batter.”

India, who are defending champions, will host the T20 World Cup with Sri Lanka from 7 February to 8 March.

India are in the same group as Namibia, Netherlands, Pakistan and USA.

In October, a small electronics manufacturer in the western Indian state of Gujarat shipped its first batch of chip modules to a client in California.

Kaynes Semicon, together with Japanese and Malaysian technology partners, assembled the chips in a new factory funded with incentives under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $10bn semiconductor push announced in 2021.

Modi has been trying to position India as an additional manufacturing hub for global companies that may be looking to expand their production beyond China, with limited success.

One sign of that is India’s first commercial foundry for mature chips that is currently under construction, also in Gujarat. The $11bn project is supported by technology transfer from a Taiwanese chipmaker and has onboarded the United States chip giant Intel as a potential customer.

With companies the world over hungering for chips, India’s entry into that business could boost its role in global supply chains. But experts caution that India still has a long way to go in attracting more foreign investment and catching up in cutting-edge technology.

Unprecedented momentum

Semiconductor chips are designed, fabricated in foundries, and then assembled and packaged for commercial use. The US leads in chip design, Taiwan in fabrication, and China, increasingly, in packaging.

The upcoming foundry in Gujarat is a collaboration between India’s Tata Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the country, and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), which is assisting with the plant’s construction and technology transfer.

On December 8, Tata Electronics also signed an agreement with Intel to explore the manufacturing and packaging of its products in Tata’s upcoming facilities, including the foundry. The partnership will address the growing domestic demand.

Last year, Tata was approved for a 50 percent subsidy from the Modi government for the foundry, along with additional state-level incentives, and could come online as early as December 2026.

Even if delayed, the project marks a pivotal moment for India, which has seen multiple attempts to build a commercial fab stall in the past.

The foundry will focus on fabricating chips ranging from 28 nanometres (nm) to 110nm, typically referred to as mature chips because they are comparatively easier to produce than smaller 7nm or 3nm chips.

Mature chips are used in most consumer and power electronics, while the smaller chips are in high demand for AI data centres and high-performance computing. Globally, the technology for mature chips is more widely available and distributed. Taiwan leads production of these chips, with China fast catching up, though Taiwan’s TSMC dominates production for cutting-edge nodes below 7nm.

“India has long been strong in chip design, but the challenge has been converting that strength into semiconductor manufacturing,” said Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at the Washington, DC-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

“In the past two to three years, there’s been more progress on that front than in the previous decade – driven by stronger political will at both the central and state levels, and a more coordinated push from the private sector to commit to these investments,” Ezell told Al Jazeera.

Easy entry point

More than half of the Modi government’s $10bn in semiconductor incentives is earmarked for the Tata-PSMC venture, with the remainder supporting nine other projects focused mainly on the assembly, testing and packaging (ATP) stage of the supply chain.

These are India’s first such projects – one by Idaho-based Micron Technology, also in Gujarat, and another by the Tata Group in the northeastern Assam state. Both will use in-house technologies and have drawn investments of $2.7bn and $3.3bn, respectively.

The remaining projects are smaller, with cumulative investments of about $2bn, and are backed by technology partners such as Taiwan’s Foxconn, Japan’s Renesas Electronics, and Thailand’s Stars Microelectronics.

“ATP units offer a lower path of resistance compared to a large foundry, requiring smaller investments – typically between $50m and $1bn. They also carry less risk, and the necessary technology know-how is widely available globally,” Ashok Chandak, president of the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), told Al Jazeera.

Still, most of the projects are behind schedule.

Micron’s facility, approved for incentives in June 2023, was initially expected to begin production by late 2024. However, the company noted in its fiscal 2025 report that the Gujarat facility will “address demand in the latter half of this decade”.

Approved in February 2024, the Tata facility was initially slated to be operational by mid-2025, but the timeline has now been pushed to April 2026.

When asked for reasons behind the delays, both Micron and Tata declined to comment.

One exception is a smaller ATP unit by Kaynes Semicon, which in October exported a consignment of sample chip modules to an anchor client in California – a first for India.

Another project by CG Semi, part of India’s Murugappa Group, is in trial runs, with commercial production expected in the coming months.

The semiconductor projects under the Tata Group and the Murugappa Group have drawn public scrutiny after Indian online news outlet Scroll.in reported that both companies made massive political donations after they were picked for the projects.

As per Scroll.in, the Tata Group donated 7.5 billion rupees ($91m) and 1.25 billion rupees ($15m), respectively, to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) just weeks after securing government subsidies in February 2024 and ahead of national elections. Neither group had made such large donations to the party before. Such donations are not prohibited by law. Both the Tata Group and the Murugappa Group declined to comment to Al Jazeera regarding the reports.

Meeting domestic demand a key priority

The upcoming projects in India – both the foundry and the ATP units – will primarily focus on legacy, or mature, chips sized between 28nm and 110nm. While these chips are not at the cutting-edge of semiconductor technology, they account for the bulk of global demand, with applications across cars, industrial equipment and consumer electronics.

China dominates the ATP segment globally with a 30 percent share and accounted for 42 percent of semiconductor equipment spending in 2024, according to DBS Group Research.

India has long positioned itself as a “China Plus One” destination amid global supply chain diversification, with some progress evident in Apple’s expansion of its manufacturing base in the country. The company assembles all its latest iPhone models in India, in partnership with Foxconn and Tata Electronics, and has emerged as a key supplier to the US market this year following tariff-related uncertainties over Chinese shipments.

Its push in the ATP segment, however, is driven largely by the need to meet the growing domestic demand for chips, anticipated to surge from $50bn today to $100bn by 2030.

“Globally, too, the market will expand from around $650bn to $1 trillion. So, we’re not looking at shifting manufacturing from China to elsewhere. We’re looking at capturing the incremental demand emerging both in India and abroad,” Chandak said.

India’s import of chips – both integrated circuits and microassemblies – has jumped in recent years, rising 36 percent in 2024 to nearly $24bn from the previous year. An integrated circuit (IC) is a chip serving logic, memory or processing functions, whereas a microassembly is a broader package of multiple chips performing combined functions.

The momentum has continued this year, with imports up 20 percent year-on-year, accounting for about 3 percent of India’s total import bill, according to official trade data. China remains the leading supplier with a 30 percent share, followed by Hong Kong (19 percent), South Korea (11 percent), Taiwan (10 percent), and Singapore (10 percent).

“Even if it’s a 28 nm chip, from a trade balance perspective, India would rather produce and package it domestically than import it,” Ezell of ITIF said, adding that domestic capability would enhance the competitiveness of chip-dependent industries.

Better incentives needed

The Modi government’s support for the chip sector, while unprecedented for India, is still dwarfed by the $48bn committed by China and the $53bn provisioned under the US’s CHIPS Act.

To achieve scale in the ATP segment for meaningful import substitution – and to advance towards producing chips smaller than 28nm – India will need continued government support, and there is a second round of incentives already in the works.

“The reality is, if India wants to compete at the leading edge of semiconductors, it will need to attract a foreign partner – American or Asian – since only a handful of companies globally operate at that level. It’s highly unlikely that a domestic firm will be competitive at 7nm or 3nm anytime soon,” Ezell said.

According to him, India needs to continue focusing on improving its overall business environment – from ensuring reliable power and infrastructure to streamlining regulations, customs and tariff policies.

India’s engineers make up about a fifth of the global chip design workforce, but rising competition from China and Malaysia to attract multinational design firms could erode that edge.

In its latest incentive round, the Indian government limited benefits to domestic firms to promote local intellectual property – a move that, according to Alpa Sood, legal director at the India operations of California-based Marvell Technology, risks driving multinational design work elsewhere.

“India already has a thriving chip design ecosystem strengthened by early-stage incentives from the government. What we need, to further accelerate and build stronger R&D muscle – is incentives that mirror competing countries like China [220 percent tax incentives] and Malaysia [200 percent tax incentives]. This will ensure we don’t lose the advantage we’ve built over the years,” Sood told Al Jazeera.

Marvell’s India operations are its largest outside the US.

The Trump effect

India’s upcoming chip facilities, while aimed at meeting domestic demand, will also export to clients in the US, Japan, and Taiwan. Though US President Donald Trump has threatened 100 percent tariffs on semiconductors made outside the US, none have yet been imposed.

A bigger concern for India-US engagement – so far limited to education and training – is Washington’s 50 percent tariff on India over its Russian crude imports. Semiconductors remain exempt, but the broader trade climate has turned uncertain.

“Over half the global semiconductor market is controlled by US-headquartered firms, making engagement with them crucial,” Chandak said. “Any alignment with these firms, either through joint ventures or technology partnerships – is a preferred option.”

The global chip race is accelerating, and India’s policies will need to keep pace to become a serious player amid growing geo-economic fragmentation.

“These new 1.7nm fabs are so advanced they even factor in the moon’s gravitational pull – it’s literally a moonshot,” Ezell said. “Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex engineering task humanity undertakes – and the policymaking behind it must be just as precise.”

As Afghanistan reevaluates its economic geography in light of the deteriorating relations with Pakistan, India has become a major option for Kabul in its quest for diverse trade routes. The recent top-level meetings between the Taliban and the Indian government indicate a desire on the part of the former to diminish their reliance on the Pakistani transit corridors and to gain more strategic independence. However, India’s role is more a matter of political calculation than of geographical convenience. Afghanistan has no direct land route to India, and therefore its trade with India is expensive routes via Iran with limited air corridors, making it very difficult for a sanctions-hit and cash-strapped economy to scale up. Although the engagement with New Delhi gives the Afghan government the chance to send diplomatic signals and obtain very limited economic relief, it also poses the question of whether India is going to be a long-term trading partner or merely a geopolitical counterweight in Kabul’s broader regional strategy.

Taliban officials have begun signalling a recalibration of economic policy. Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar publicly urged Afghan traders to explore alternative transit corridors, accusing Pakistan of using border closures as a tool of political pressure. Shortly thereafter, Nooruddin Azizi, Minister of Industry and Commerce of Afghanistan, had an official visit to New Delhi on 19 November 2025 for official discussions aimed at increasing bilateral trade, enhancing the mechanisms for import and export and finding out different ways for Afghan businesses to trade. This visit comes after the Afghanistan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi’s trip to India in October that lasted for eight days, which was his first trip to India, for which he was granted a temporary UN sanctions exemption, even though India has not yet recognized the Taliban government.

Over the past two decades, the Taliban’s propaganda has been persistently depicting India as a Hindu “kafir” state that is supporting the “anti-Islam” forces in Kabul, making Indian diplomats look like enemies and Indian consulates like secret intelligence stations working against Afghanistan and Pakistan. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was declared as a holy war against the “un-Islamic idols” and the whole Buddhist-Hindu civilization, which was a clear indication of the Emirate’s hardline ideological approach. However, this narrative has changed for political and economic reasons.

Moreover, the Taliban, having once described the Indian state as their ideological enemy, are now actively courting India, even sending their foreign minister and commerce minister to New Delhi to get access to trade routes and investment in infrastructure. However, the newly established open channels of communication between the two parties are indicative of a major pragmatism shift, wherein the former rhetoric of enmity and ideological purity has been replaced by the language of using one another in business transactions, thus, signaling the willingness of Afghanistan to retrieve economic lifelines and gain a strategic position in a region.

Historically, Taliban’s official communications are filled with references to Islamic unity, historical connections, and the values of Muslim brotherhood in its relationship with Pakistan. However, when relations with Islamabad were strained over the Tehrik-i-Taliban support, as well as border management and refugees; the Emirate quickly turned to engagement with other regional states instead of reconciliation with its closest Muslim neighbor. This selective realism reveals a definite order of priorities; Afghanistan is ignoring Pakistan’s main security issues but is ready to do anything for a state that is Hindu-majority and can offer trade routes, investment, and international legitimacy.

This transactional approach is not only limited to regional politics but also encompasses the global economic system. The Taliban constantly criticized “Western economic slavery“, interest-based financial systems and considering themselves as an ideological alternative to the West. Nowadays, the Taliban are lobbying India who is heavily involved in the Western capital markets and global financial networks positively to get banking access, reconstruction projects, and investments. The ideological rigidity at home is sharply contrasted with the foreign policy flexibility; those states which were once labelled as anti-Islamic are now being courted for material and political gains.

The Taliban’s selective pragmatism is also evident in the territorial and security sensitive issues. On one hand, they keep on challenging the issue of the Durand Line with Pakistan, an internationally recognized border between both states, while on the other hand, they are quite liberal with India. Likewise, in the past, Taliban-associated clerics and militants celebrated jihad in Kashmir, denounced Indian government actions toward Muslims there and such discourse got muted during visits to Delhi. It is very clear that economic and diplomatic goals are prioritized over ideological or sectarian consistency.

Afghanistan’s trade pivot underscores the delicate balance between ambition and structural reality. While the Taliban’s efforts to diversify transit routes reflect a desire for economic autonomy and greater regional leverage, geographic constraints, limited infrastructure, and entrenched economic patterns impose severe limitations. Engagement with India offers symbolic and partial relief, yet Pakistan remains the linchpin of Afghan commerce, providing the fastest and most cost-effective access to global markets. The Emirate’s strategy is as much a political signal-demonstrating flexibility, pragmatism, and a quest for de facto recognition as it is an economic maneuver. Ultimately, Afghanistan’s “strategic heart of Asia” narrative will be tested not by intent but by its capacity to reconcile aspiration with the unyielding realities of terrain, logistics, and regional interdependence.

New Delhi, India – A newly released Bollywood spy thriller is winning praise and raising eyebrows in equal measure in India and Pakistan, over its retelling of bitter tensions between the South Asian neighbours.

Sunk in a sepia tone, Dhurandhar, which was released in cinemas last week, is a 3.5-hour-long cross-border political spy drama that takes cinemagoers on a violent and bloody journey through a world of gangsters and intelligence agents set against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions. It comes just months after hostilities broke out between the two countries in May, following a rebel attack on a popular tourist spot in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which India blamed Pakistan for. Islamabad has denied role in the attack.

Since the partition of India to create Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four wars, three of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.

The film stars the popular actor Ranveer Singh, who plays an Indian spy who infiltrates networks of “gangsters and terrorists” in Karachi, Pakistan. Critics of the film argue that its storyline is laced with ultra-nationalist political tropes and that it misrepresents history, an emerging trend in Bollywood, they say.

What is the latest Bollywood blockbuster about?

Directed by Aditya Dhar, the film dramatises a covert chapter from the annals of Indian intelligence. The narrative centres on a high-stakes, cross-border mission carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and focuses on one operative who conducts operations on enemy soil to neutralise threats to Indian national security.

The film features a heavyweight ensemble cast led by Singh, who plays the gritty field agent tasked with dismantling a “terror” network from the inside. He is pitted against a formidable antagonist played by Sanjay Dutt, representing the Pakistani establishment, and gangsters such as one portrayed by Akshaye Khanna, while actors including R Madhavan portray key intelligence officers and strategists who orchestrate complex geopolitical manoeuvering from New Delhi.

Structurally, the screenplay follows a classic cat-and-mouse trajectory.

Beneath its high-octane set pieces, the film has sparked an angry debate among critics and audiences over the interpretation of historical events and some key figures.

Why is the film so controversial in Pakistan?

Despite the longstanding geopolitical tensions between the two countries, India’s Bollywood films remain popular in Pakistan.

Depicting Pakistan as the ultimate enemy of India has been a popular theme retold for years, in different ways, especially in Bollywood’s spy thrillers, however. In this case, the portrayal of Pakistan’s major coastal city, Karachi, and particularly one of its oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, Lyari, has drawn strong criticism.

“The representation in the film is completely based on fantasy. It doesn’t look like Karachi. 
It does not represent the city accurately at all,” Nida Kirmani, an associate professor of sociology at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told Al Jazeera.

Kirmani, who has produced a documentary on the impact of gang violence in Lyari of her own, said that like other megacities in the world, “Karachi had periods of violence that have been particularly intense.”

However, “reducing the city to violence is one of the major problems in the film, along with the fact the film gets everything about Karachi – from its infrastructure, culture, and language – wrong”, she added.

Meanwhile, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has taken legal action in a Karachi court alleging the unauthorised use of images of the late former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, and protesting against the film’s portrayal of the party’s leaders as supporters of “terrorists”.

Critics, including Kirmani, say the film also bizarrely casts gangs from Lyari into geopolitical tensions with India, when they have only ever operated locally.

Kirmani said the makers of the movie have cherry-picked historical figures and used them completely out of context, “trying to frame them within this very Indian nationalistic narrative”.

Mayank Shekhar, a film critic based in Mumbai, pointed out that the film “has been performed, written, directed by those who haven’t ever stepped foot in Karachi, and perhaps never will”.

“So, never mind this dust bowl for a city that, by and large, seems wholly bereft of a single modern building, and looks mostly bombed-out, between multiple ghettos,” Shekhar said.

He added that this is also in line with how Hollywood “shows the brown Third World in action with a certain sepia tone, like with Extraction, set in Dhaka, Bangladesh”.

How has the film been received in India?

Dhurandhar has been a huge commercial success in India and among the Indian diaspora. However, it has not escaped criticism entirely.

The family of a decorated Indian Army officer, Major Mohit Sharma, filed a petition in Delhi High Court to stop the release of the film, which, they claim, has exploited his life and work without their consent.

The makers of the film deny this and claim it is entirely a work of fiction.

Nonetheless, the film’s storyline is accompanied by real-time intercepted audio recordings of attacks on Indian soil and news footage, film critics and analysts say.

Is this an emerging pattern in Bollywood films?

Shekhar told Al Jazeera that focusing on a deliberately loud, seemingly over-the-top, hyper-masculine hero’s journey is not a new genre in Bollywood. “There’s a tendency to intellectualise the trend, as we did with the ‘angry young man’ movies of the 1970s,” he said, referring to the formative years of Bollywood.

In recent years, mainstream production houses in India have, however, favoured storylines that portray minorities in negative light and align with the policies of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kirmani told Al Jazeera that this frequently means “reducing Muslims across India’s borders and within as ‘terrorists’, which further marginalises Muslims in India culturally”.

“Unfortunately, people gravitate towards these kinds of hypernationalistic narratives, and the director is cashing in on this,” she told Al Jazeera.

Modi himself lavished praise on a recent film called Article 370, for what he said was its “correct information” about the removal of the constitutional provision that granted special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. Critics, however, called the film “propaganda” and said the film had distorted facts.

Another Bollywood film Kerala Story released in 2023 was accused of falsifying facts. Prime Minister Modi praised the film, but critics said it tried to vilify Muslims and demonise the southern Kerala state known for its progressive politics.

In the case of Dhurandhar, some critics have faced online harassment.

One review by The Hollywood Reporter’s India YouTube channel, by critic Anupama Chopra, was taken down after outrage from fans of the film.

Went looking for Anupama Chopra’s Dhurandhar review? It’s gone. The Hollywood Reporter India quietly made the video private.

For context, The Hollywood Reporter India was launched by RPSG Lifestyle Media, part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which also owns Saregama –…

— newslaundry (@newslaundry) December 9, 2025

India’s Film Critics Guild has condemned “coordinated abuse, personal attacks on individual critics, and organised attempts to discredit their professional integrity”, in a statement.

“More concerningly, there have been attempts to tamper with existing reviews, influence editorial positions, and persuade publications to alter or dilute their stance,” the group noted.

India, now the sole operator of the Anglo-French SEPECAT Jaguar strike aircraft, is to acquire surplus examples of the Cold War-era jets from Oman, which retired the type in 2014. The decision reflects the continued value of the Jaguar to the Indian Air Force (IAF) but also points to the service’s shrinking fighter force and delays in acquiring new equipment.

Multiple reports indicate that India and Oman have come to a deal that will put an undisclosed number of former Omani Jaguars into Indian hands. Starting in 1977, the Royal Air Force of Oman (RAFO) received a total of 27 British-made Jaguars, comprising 20 single-seaters, five two-seaters, and two ex-U.K. Royal Air Force aircraft used as attrition replacements. At least 13 of these were involved in various accidents, which would leave a maximum of ‘intact’ airframes 14 for India. Potentially, some further components could also be harvested from Omani aircraft that were written off while in service.

As for the IAF, the service selected the Jaguar for its Deep Penetration Strike Aircraft (DPSA) in 1978 and received 18 aircraft from U.K. Royal Air Force stocks as ‘interim’ equipment, 40 ‘flyaway’ aircraft direct from British Aerospace (BAe), plus around 128 more that were license-built in India under a transfer-of-technology agreement with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

The ex-Omani jets won’t be inducted into IAF service but will be broken down into spare parts to support the aging but still in-demand Indian Jaguar inventory. TWZ contributor and IAF historian Angad Singh told us that the jets will be dismantled in Oman and then shipped to India for ease of transport.

The IAF’s demand for increasingly hard-to-find Jaguar spares saw India turn to France in 2018–19. France, which retired its last Jaguars in 2005, shipped 31 complete airframes plus various spare parts to India, with New Delhi paying only for the cost of transport.

These airframes and spares are being used to support the IAF’s current six Jaguar squadrons, each of which has between 18 and 20 aircraft on strength. However, the fleet is being slowly eroded by attrition, with three Jaguar losses this year alone.

The last new Jaguar to be built in India came off the HAL production line in 2008; British and French production had long since ceased by this date. Since then, obtaining spare parts and components, including new or refurbished engines, has become much more complex. Already, India is reportedly having to cannibalize some aircraft to keep the others in the air.

Further evidence of the importance of the Jaguar to the IAF’s plans comes from the continued efforts to upgrade the jets, the oldest of which are now around 45 years old.

At the center of this effort is the Display Attack Ranging and Inertial Navigation (DARIN) modernization program for the Indian Jaguars, which first began in the 1980s and which has since progressed through three rounds of upgrades.

The first of these, DARIN I, kept the Jaguar’s original ‘chisel’ nose profile but added a new Sagem navigation/attack system, a combined map and electronic display, and a head-up display and weapon-aiming computer. A new Mil Std 1553B databus was added, making it easier to integrate new weapons and sensors. This would pay dividends during the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan, during which Jaguars employed laser-guided bombs.

Starting in the early 2000s, DARIN II changed the nose profile, with a new Thales laser targeting and designation system fitted. Other new additions included an Israeli-made Elbit head-up display, an inertial navigation/GPS system, and a multifunction display in the cockpit. Self-protection was enhanced with an Israeli-made Elta EL/L-8222 jammer, locally made Tarang radar warning receivers, and new countermeasures dispensers. New weapons included the ASRAAM air-to-air missile and the Textron CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon.

In a category of their own are India’s Jaguars tasked with maritime strike. These were originally fitted with a radar nose accommodating an Agave radar, used in conjunction with Sea Eagle anti-ship missiles. Under DARIN II, these items were replaced with the Elta EL/M-2032 and the AGM-84 Harpoon Block II, respectively.

The most significant of the upgrades is DARIN III, begun in 2008, which includes a new active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, the Israeli-made Elta EL/M-2052. The Jaguar became the first Indian combat jet to feature an AESA, and you can read more about the upgrade here.

The DARIN III program, led by HAL and informed by the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft program, saw the first flight of an upgraded Jaguar in 2012, but thereafter it suffered significant delays. Issues included integration of the locally developed open-system-architecture mission computer as well as a re-engining effort, which planned to replace the original Rolls-Royce Turbomeca Adour afterburning turbofans with Honeywell F125-INs. Replacement engines were finally canceled in 2019, after they were judged to be too expensive.

Other advanced DARIN III features include a fully ‘glass’ cockpit with three multifunction displays, an engine and flight instrument system (EFIS) digital display, and a digital head-up display. Also new is the Elbit Display and Sight Helmet (DASH), which is used to cue the ASRAAM missile. The ASRAAM, like the Magic 2 before it, is carried on the Jaguar’s unique overwing missile pylons.

The DARIN III program is planned to extend the life of at least some of the Indian Jaguars until 2050. However, the initial phase-out of the aircraft will begin before then. As Singh explained, the oldest (British-made) jets will not undergo the full upgrade, meaning that at least two of the IAF’s six Jaguar squadrons are due to disband in the near future.

Even the India-made HAL jets are now getting long in the tooth, but with examples still going through the DARIN III upgrade, at least some of them will be able to see out another 10 years or more of service.

“The Jaguar is still useful as a strike aircraft, and has been kept relevant with upgrades to electronic warfare, nav-attack systems, standoff weapons, and so on,” Singh told TWZ.

The fact that New Delhi has pressed on with upgrades to the Jaguar is a testament to the rugged reliability and precision-attack capabilities of the jet, despite its age, but it also points to underlying problems in the IAF, especially in terms of the size of its combat jet fleet.

Faced with the dual threats of Pakistan and China, the Indian government has said that the IAF needs at least 42 squadrons of combat aircraft. Currently, it has just 29, meaning the service is operating its smallest combat force since it went to war with China in 1962. The retirement of the veteran MiG-21 Fishbed has not helped matters in this regard.

Meanwhile, India’s plans to buy new off-the-shelf fighters are going nowhere fast.

After buying 36 Dassault Rafales, India announced a requirement for 114 fighters, initially specifying single-engine types. Subsequently, the competition appeared to be wide open, with the F-15EX, for example, now also being offered to India, and with the Rafale and the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet also in the running. If India decides to procure another single-engine fighter, after all, the Indian-specific F-21 configuration of the F-16 is also a viable candidate. But with no decision made, and with homegrown combat aircraft programs also proceeding slowly, the ‘squadron gap’ is only set to grow.

“The Indian Air Force is at 70 percent of its planned 42-squadron fighter strength — a number that was arrived at in the 1960s and will only be revised upward on any fresh assessment. Given this dire situation, the brass simply has no choice but to keep aircraft around, no matter how old,” Singh concluded.

Faced with this stark reality, it is less surprising that India is now searching far and wide for spare parts that will ensure its prozed Jaguars can see out their service life as maintaining them becomes ever more of a challenge.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

Alang, India – Standing on the windswept coastline of the Arabian Sea in the western Indian state of Gujarat, Ramakant Singh looks towards the empty, endless horizon.

“In the olden days, ships lined up at this yard like buffaloes before a storm,” says the 47-year-old. “Now, we count the arrivals on our fingers.”

Ramakant works at Alang — the world’s largest ship-breaking yard, located in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state. For two decades, Ramakant has cut apart vessels as large as oil tankers and cargo carriers that sailed in from Europe and other Asian countries for his livelihood.

With its unique tidal pattern and gently sloping beach, Alang in the 1980s became the backbone of India’s ship recycling industry, where ships could be beached and dismantled at a minimal cost.

Over the decades, more than 8,600 vessels — collectively weighing roughly 68 million tonnes of light displacement tonnage (LDT), which is the actual weight of a ship without fuel, crew and cargo — have been taken apart here, accounting for nearly 98 percent of India’s total and about a third of the global ship recycling volume.

Across the world’s oceans, an ageing fleet of cargo ships, cruise liners, and oil tankers is nearing the end of its life. Of the roughly 109,000 vessels still in service, nearly half are more than 15 years old — rusting giants that will soon be retired.

Each year, close to 1,800 ships are declared unfit to sail and sold for recycling. Their owners pass them on to international middlemen, known as cash buyers — operating out of global shipping hubs such as Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These brokers, in turn, resell the vessels to dismantling yards in South Asia, where the final act of a ship’s life unfolds.

In Alang, ships are driven ashore at high tide — a process called beaching. Once grounded, hundreds of workers cut them apart piece by piece, salvaging steel, pipes, and machinery. Almost everything — from cables to cupboards — is resold for use by construction and manufacturing industries.

However, over the past decade, the number of ships arriving on Alang’s coast has dwindled. Once a skyline of giant hulls that looked like high-rise buildings against the town’s asbestos roofs, only a few cruise ships and cargo carriers dot the horizon today.

“Earlier, there was plenty of work for everyone,” Chintan Kalthia, who runs one of the few yards still open, tells Al Jazeera. “Now, most of the workers have left. Only when a new ship beaches do a few come back to Alang. My own business is down to barely 30-40 percent of what it used to be.”

According to data from India’s Ship Recycling Industries Association, 2011-12 marked Alang’s busiest financial year since it began operations in 1983, with a record 415 ships dismantled. Since then, the yard has faced a steep decline — of the 153 plots developed along the 10km (6-mile) coastline, only about 20 remain functional, and even they are operating at barely 25 percent capacity.

“But what’s going wrong in Alang has multiple reasons,” says Haresh Parmar, secretary of the Ship Recycling Industries Association (India). “The biggest is that globally, shipowners are not retiring their old vessels. Post-COVID, a surge in demand led to record profits in shipping. With freight rates soaring, owners are pushing ships beyond their usual operational life instead of sending them for dismantling.”

A key factor behind the surge in freight rates is global disruptions. Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has had a ripple effect on global trade routes, with Yemen’s Houthi rebels repeatedly attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinians. The resulting security crisis has forced ships to bypass the Suez Canal and instead take the longer Cape of Good Hope route, sending freight rates soaring and delaying cargo worldwide.

Similarly, an analysis by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) conducted in June 2022 found that the Russia-Ukraine war and other Middle East tensions had pushed up marine fuel costs by more than 60 percent, adding to operational expenses and shipping delays.

Together, these factors have sharply reduced the supply of end-of-life ships heading to Alang. “When owners are earning well, they don’t scrap their vessels,” says Parmar. “That’s why our yards are standing empty.”

Compliance raising costs

But that is not the only reason why Alang is struggling.

India’s ship recycling industry has undergone a significant transformation since the country acceded to the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (HKC) in November 2019, becoming one of the first top ship-breaking nations to do so. Under the HKC and the 2019 Recycling of Ships Act, yards at Alang upgraded their infrastructure, installed pollution control systems, lined hazardous waste storage pits, trained workers, and maintained detailed inventories of toxic materials used in vessels.

These measures made Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling Yards (ASSRY) one of the most compliant ship-recycling clusters in the developing world, with 106 of ASSRY yards having received HKC Statements of Compliance (SoC). Sosiya is a village located right next to Alang on the Gulf of Khambhat coast in Gujarat. Together, Alang and Sosiya form the entire stretch of beach where ship-breaking plots operate.

But achieving these standards came at a high cost: each yard had to invest between $0.56m and $1.2m to meet compliance norms, raising operational costs at a time when competition from neighbouring countries remains fierce.

“Think of it like a roadside eatery versus a global burger chain — the chain has shinier rules, cleaner kitchens, and safer gear, but you pay extra for the sparkle. The Hong Kong Convention works the same way,” said Kalthia, whose company, RL Kalthia Ship Breaking Private Limited, became the first ship recycling facility in India to receive HKC compliance certification from ClassNK in 2015, as their website shows. ClassNK is a leading Japanese ship classification society that audits and certifies international maritime safety and environmental standards.

“Compliance makes things safer and brings us up to international standards — it gives us an edge only on paper,” says Chetan Patel, a yard owner at Alang. “But it has also raised costs significantly.”

That, in turn, has made it hard for Alang’s ship-breakers to offer prices comparable to those of competitors.

“When neighbouring markets can pay more, shipowners go there,” Patel said.

Competing ship-recycling yards are thriving. In Bangladesh’s Chattogram port and Pakistan’s Gadani yard, shipowners are being offered $540-550 per LDT and $525-530 per LDT, respectively, compared with $500-510 per LDT at Alang.

“We can’t match the rates offered by Bangladesh and Pakistan,” says Parmar. “If we tried, we’d be running at a loss.”

This is reflected clearly in the data: the number of ships decommissioned in India dropped from 166 in 2023 to 124 in 2024. In contrast, Turkiye’s figures nearly doubled to 94 from 50, and Pakistan’s rose from 15 to 24 during the same period.

Supporting industries struggle

Alang is not just a ship-breaking yard, but a vast recycling ecosystem that sustains the surrounding region’s economy.

From the coastal town of Trapaj — the last big settlement before Alang — an 11km (7-mile) stretch of road is lined with sprawling, makeshift shops selling remnants of decommissioned ships. Everything that used to be part of life at sea eventually finds its way here: rusted chains, rescue boats, refrigerators, ceramic crockery, martini glasses, treadmills from shipboard gyms, air conditioners from cabins, and chandeliers from officers’ quarters.

“Whatever is there on the ship, we own it,” says Parmar. “Before the cutting begins, all valuable items are auctioned and reach these stores.”

Ram Vilas, who runs a ceramic shop selling salvaged crockery by the kilo, says most of his customers used to come from commercial establishments across Gujarat. “Now, business has gone dead,” he tells Al Jazeera. “This stretch you see doesn’t even have one-tenth of the crowd it used to. With fewer ships coming in, we don’t have enough stock to fill our shops.”

The ripple effects of Alang’s decline extend to other industries as well. Waste is handled by specialised facilities, while reusable steel is supplied to more than 60 induction furnaces and 80 rerolling mills, some 50km (30 miles) away in Bhavnagar, converting it into TMT bars – reinforced steel rods – and other construction materials.

But with fewer ships arriving, the supply of scrap steel has dropped sharply, disrupting operations of furnaces, mills, and hundreds of small businesses that depend on ship-derived goods. More than 200 retail and wholesale shops that once bustled with activity now face dwindling sales.

“Gas plants, rolling mills, furnace units, transporters, drivers — everyone connected to this chain has lost their livelihood,” says Parmar.

In Bhavnagar, 29-year-old Jigar Patel, who runs a flange manufacturing unit, says his business has suffered.

“I opened my unit in 2017, seeing the opportunity with steel sheets easily available from Alang,” he says. “But in the past two years, the slowdown has hit hard. Now, I have to buy sheets from Jharkhand. It’s not just expensive, but the raw steel is harder to cut and process. The Alang sheets were more malleable and ductile — they were made for work and of international standard.”

Workers at Alang, most of them migrants from poorer Indian states in the north and east, including Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, have also begun to leave. “They only show up when ships arrive at the docks,” Vidyadhar Rane, president of the Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling and General Workers’ Association, tells Al Jazeera.

“Yard owners call them when there is work. The rest of the time, they find other jobs in nearby towns,” he says.

At its peak, Alang employed more than 60,000 workers. Today, that number has shrunk to fewer than 15,000, according to the union.

Ramakant, who first arrived in Alang at the age of 35, recalls working for seven straight years before the slowdown began. “Now, I only return when my employer calls,” he says, adding that he spends the rest of his time working in the industrial town of Surat.

The work at the yard, he admits, has become far safer than it once was. “This was once the deadliest job — we would see workers dying every other day. Now there’s training, safety gear, and order,” Ramakant says, looking towards the silent coast.

“But what’s the point of safety when there’s no work? Everything now depends on whether the next [ship] arrives at the yard or not.”