Now China Too Says It Mediated Between Pakistan and India; Jaishankar to Attend Khaleda Funeral; Souring of the Indian American Dream
The Congress’s Existential Crisis Has a Surname. Will a Sister’s Turn Change Its Fate?
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December 30, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
It’s not just Donald Trump and the United States who say they helped helped settle conflicts between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand and others. In a speech today, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said the Chinese government had “mediated” in several places including “the tensions between Pakistan and India”:
“To build peace that lasts, we have taken an objective and just stance, and focused on addressing both symptoms and root causes. Following this Chinese approach to settling hotspot issues, we mediated in northern Myanmar, the Iranian nuclear issue, the tensions between Pakistan and India, the issues between Palestine and Israel, and the recent conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. In our efforts, there were no interference in the internal affairs of others, no incitement, no biased manipulation, and no selfish gains. There was only sincerity and good faith. Our principles and hard work will stand the test of history.”
Khaleda Zia, who passed away in Dhaka on Tuesday, was not the Indian government’s favourite Bangladeshi politician and New Delhi is still playing host to Sheikh Hasina, who kept her in jail and then house arrest for four years. But it is a measure of how much water has flown down the Padma over the past year and a half that Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a warm condolence message and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is being sent to attend her funeral on Wednesday. Khaleda, a former prime minister of Bangladesh – she was the first woman to occupy that post – was the nominal leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. She had been seriously ill for the past two months. Her sole surviving son and de facto BNP chief Tarique Rahman returned to Bangladesh from his self-imposed 17-year-long exile in Britain last Thursday.
President Droupadi Murmu has reportedly returned to the Tamil Nadu assembly a Bill it had passed seeking to replace the governor with the state government as the authority that appoints vice chancellors to the University of Madras. It appears that this Bill was passed in April 2022 and forwarded to the governor a few days later, following which he reserved it for presidential consideration in November 2023. The university has not had a VC since 2023, an unnamed professor complained speaking to Binita Jaiswal. She notes that this particular Bill was not one of the ten pending ones that were granted ‘deemed assent’ by the Supreme Court earlier this year in the state government’s litigation challenging the governor’s delay in deciding on Bills.
A day after an episode of violence in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar, the district administration on Monday announced a two-month ban on any social media posts that are “likely to disturb public order and peace”. It has also directed the information officer to make a “comprehensive list” of “all registered and unregistered news portal owners/operators, media organisations and social media news handles”. The episode involved an imam objecting to a youth securing some logs he was carrying with him, following
