Editor’s Note

These are snapshots of freedom as a pause between futility and fragility, and each one a reminder that, out there, someone cannot still abandon hope as much as the other cannot stop the fight. The struggle itself is the only consolation in a world where politics is suddenly about domination and damnation.

Take this. Gaza is a war zone where the anger of the justice seeker is being neutralised by the power of hunger. If it was the genocidal rage of Hamas that shook the conscience then, today it is the starving child at the food queue that challenges the morality of retribution. The overwhelming image is that of freedom as total domination of a land where the struggle of Palestinians is reborn as the death cult of radical Islam. Peace is either surrender or victory. Both are contentious. The authorship of Gaza’s suffering is determined by the moral relativism of politics.

Or this one. As you read this, Alaska may have already become the site of a peace deal that legitimises Putin’s land grab. President Trump’s one-on-one with the Kremlin czar is largely necessitated by the American president’s craving for greatness, a validation the fabled dealmaker needs from history. He knows what it means to be more caricatured than appreciated. Zelensky, the citizen-president in a sweatshirt who refuses to trade national pride—or territory—for arms and Putin-friendly peace, may have lost some of the initial aura. Still, the truth that Ukraine withstood Russian aggression for so long is a minor epic on how national will overcomes Stalinism refurbished as grievance-powered nationalism in the ruins of the Soviet empire. He was not missed at the summit table in Alaska by the arbiters of peace. Zelensky had to lead the struggle for freedom from elsewhere.

The other image is of the trade war featuring the punisher-in-chief of the free world and his victims who are not falling in line despite the ever-changing terms of punishment. The plutocrat in the White House intends to make America great again by making the others poorer. What he thinks is a level-playing field—or globalisation recast as impulsive Americanism—is the blueprint for a new architecture of protectionism. National struggle for freedom in the marketplace has already set the stage for an updated version of anti-imperialism. If the second Cold War is in the making, it is one against many. Freedom, the victims know, lies not in the defeat of the one—or the idea it represents—but in the restoration of fairness in the democratic world. And that looks difficult as democracy is increasingly compatible with autocracy, as in Trump’s America.

These three random images clarify that the struggle for freedom, driven by ideologies or faith, resonates far beyond national boundaries. We are all in it together, for there are no witnesses in the expanded theatres of war. There are only stakeholders, like India in all the three. For Narendra Modi’s India, where the idea of the nation has replaced borrowed ideologies of progress, Israel is special, and the audacity of its existential struggle is something India can identify with. Today India may not be as demonstrative as we were during our Third-World days in showing solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, but Delhi, once upon a time one of the wandering statesman’s warmest destinations, has not disowned the cause altogether. As an unapologetic ally of Israel, India shares its struggle to preserve freedom, and we still stand for a Palestinian homeland. Such a position is possible when moral clarity is not influenced by the exigencies of the past.

Everyone has a stake in Alaska too. For India, it is a summit between two of its indispensable allies. Russia is one country India cannot deal with without the guidance of the past, even though the Soviet relic in India’s foreign policy is in many ways out of place in the India Modi is building. Maybe it is not the indebtedness to the past but pure pragmatism that keeps Russia as a permanent partner, independent of who controls the Kremlin—or of the volume of our import of Russian crude. India’s response to Ukraine explains this to some extent. Still it is America that we choose to call a natural ally. It is, by the strength of the shared principle of freedom. It is safe to assume that this relationship cannot be undone by Washington’s need for Pakistan or by a Pakistani General’s hatred for India. Or by an American president’s idea of greatness.

Freedom, as told from Gaza to Kyiv to Alaska, is an idea caught between shifting national interests and elastic morality. The struggle has always been about breaking free without getting hurt badly.

freedom issue 2025freedom struggleGaza CitygeopoliticsIndian politicspost-Cold War