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Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan pauses as he speaks with Reuters during an interview, in Lahore, Pakistan in March 2023.
Hard Numbers: Pakistan indicts Imran Khan (again), RFK wants polio vaccine revoked, India eyes one election, Australia charges big tech, Zuckerberg and Bezos make YUGE donations
200: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, were indicted on Thursday on charges of unlawfully selling state gifts, including jewelry, at undervalued prices. They pleaded not guilty the same day, calling the charges politically motivated amid nearly 200 cases Khan has faced since his 2022 ouster. Khan and Bibi received 14-year sentences before this year’s election, but those terms were suspended on appeal following a prior three-year sentence in a related case.
14: A lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's pick to helm the Department of Health and Human Services, has filed a petition to pause the distribution of 14 vaccines – including polo, hepatitis A, and other deadly diseases. The petition also asks the agency to revoke its polio vaccine approval and end COVID-19 vaccine mandates around the country.
1: India’s cabinet has approved legislation for simultaneous national and state elections, the first step in advancing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “One Nation One Election” plan. Supporters say it would put a stop to India’s state of “perpetual elections,” but critics argue it would favor the national ruling party, Modi’s BJP, in local races.
160,000,000: In its latest crackdown on Big Tech, Australia will charge social media giants like Meta and Google millions if they don’t pay local media for news content. All platforms with revenue over AU$160 million will be obliged to pay up, but charges will be offset by any commercial agreements voluntarily struck between the platforms and news media businesses.
1,000,000: Nothing says sorry quite like cold hard cash. Meta announced on Wednesday that it's donating $1 million to the inaugural fund of President-elect Donald Trump, and Amazon.com, not to be outdone, plans to do the same. The moves appear to be fence-mending gestures – or, as critics call them, attempts to curry favor. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's relationship with the president-elect soured after Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 for his praise of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, and Trump has been critical of Jeff Bezos for owning the Washington Post -- and the newspaper's political coverage.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives to address the media ahead of the commencement of the Winter Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, on Monday, Nov. 25.
Modi’s party posts landslide election victories
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party scored a big political win over the weekend. After losing its parliamentary majority in national elections in June, the BJP posted a landslide victory in a state election inMaharashtra, India’s wealthiest state and home to Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. The BJP ran in this election as the head of an alliance that includes two smaller parties.
This victory in India’s second most populous state, combined with a victory last month in the northern state of Haryana, will reduce the reliance of Modi’s BJP on unpredictable allies to move legislation forward at the national level.
Modi also notched a political victory by holding peaceful elections in the violence-plagued territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Though his party didn’t win there, the elections themselves helped to legitimize Modi’s 2019 controversial decision to downgrade the troubled province’s status from state to “union territory,” a move that revoked its previous autonomy and allowed for it to be ruled directly from Delhi.
How did Modi’s BJP-led alliance win big in a year that has seen incumbent parties take political losses in South Africa, France, the UK, Japan, the US, and India itself? In part, the win was secured with cash payments and increased subsidies from the government, politically motivated decisions that will threaten the longer-term fiscal health of these states.
Ian Bremmer’s 2024 elections halftime report
2024 is fast becoming the most intense year of democracy the world has ever seen. Some 4 billion people, nearly half the global population, are casting ballots in at least 70 countries. With so many people voting around the world, 2024 has been dubbed “The Year of Elections.” And we’re now about halfway through, so how are things going?
Ian Bremmer is here to unpack the wins, losses, and big surprises in elections in Mexico, India, South Africa, and Taiwan. Do large mandates from voters mean big political changes on the horizon? Can shaky coalitions work together without crumbling into chaos? And, of course, the final showdown of 2024 will take place in the United States this November, an election that will have far-reaching consequences not only for the United States … but for democracy itself.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
A protester holds a placard showing an image of burning PM Narendra Modi during a demonstration against the Manipur violence in Mumbai, India.
Getting Modi to talk about Manipur violence
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been reluctant to speak publicly about a surge of ethnic violence in the country’s Manipur province. An explosive viral video of a mob of men stripping and abusing a pair of women forced him to respond last week, but his political rivals say he’s done little to quell the broader conflict, which has killed at least 130 people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.
Podcast: Modi's India on the world stage
Listen: Is India a US ally? Based on the pomp and circumstance surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington in June, the answer seems obvious, right? They love us! We love them! End of story. Right?
Well ... it’s complicated.
India’s government is not ready to hitch its star to the American wagon, and the US has made it somewhat clear that it’s not a fan of India’s friendly ties to Russia and Iran. Add to that increasing international scrutiny of India’s eroding democratic norms, press freedom crackdowns, and religious persecutions, and the question becomes murkier still: Is India a US ally.
Ian's guest this week will do her best to answer that question and more. Barkha Dutt is an award-winning Indian broadcast journalist with more than two decades of reporting experienceSubscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.Demonstrators drape the national flag of Israel on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.
What We’re Watching: Bibi’s defiance, US strikes in Syria, Lula’s China visit, Putin’s Hungary refuge, India vs. free speech
Bibi’s not backing down
Israelis waited with bated breath on Thursday evening as news broke that PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was preparing to brief the nation after another “day of disruption” saw protesters block roads and strike over the government’s proposed judicial reforms.
The trigger for the impromptu public address was a meeting between Bibi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, also from the ruling Likud Party, who has voiced increasing concern that the looming judicial reform would threaten Israel’s national security, particularly as more and more army reservists are refusing to show up for training.
That never happened. While he talked about healing divisions, a defiant Netanyahu came out and said he will proceed to push through the reform, which, among other things, would give the government an automatic majority on appointing Supreme Court judges. This came just a day after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a bill blocking the attorney general from declaring Netanyahu unfit for office due to a conflict of interest over his ongoing legal woes and his bid to dilute the power of the judiciary. In response, the attorney general released a letter Friday saying Netanyahu's involvement in judicial reform is "illegal," suggesting a much-dreaded constitutional crisis may have begun.
Two things to look out for in the days ahead: First, what does Defense Minister Gallant do next? If he threatens to – or does – resign, it could set off subsequent defections and be a game changer. Second, how do the markets respond? Indeed, markets rallied Thursday before Bibi’s address in hopes that the government was set to backtrack on the reforms that are spooking investors, but the shekel value slumped after the speech.
US strikes Iranian-backed group in Syria
The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after a Tehran-aligned militia launched a drone attack against a US base near the province of Hasakah, killing at least one US contractor and injuring another contractor as well as five US troops.
While strikes on US bases in northeastern Syria are not necessarily uncommon, the scale of casualties seen Thursday is quite rare. Indeed, a high-ranking US official recently said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which takes orders directly from the supreme leader, has launched 78 attacks on US positions in Syria since Jan. 2021.
The US Department of Defense, meanwhile, said that the drone used in this attack was of Iranian origin, and that President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for a precision-guided retaliatory strike on an Iranian-backed group that reportedly killed 11 fighters.
Video footage suggests the strike was on Deir Ez-Zor, a province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. The US still maintains around 900 troops in the country’s northeast after President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 troops in 2018. It is at least the fourth known attack on Iranian assets in northwestern Syria under the Biden administration.
Iran, for its part, has not commented on the strikes, but the likelihood of increased tensions with the US is only rising.
Lula takes his beef directly to Xi Jinping
“Tell me who you walk with,” the saying goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” Well, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is rolling deep to his upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, taking nearly 250 businesspeople along for the ride. More than a quarter of them are from Brazil’s powerful meat export industry alone.
That tells you everything about the trip’s main focus: trade, trade, and more trade. And why not? It was during Lula’s last stint as president that China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest commercial partner, fueling a historic economic boom as it gobbled up huge quantities of Brazilian meat, soybeans, and iron ore. Nowadays, facing a much tougher economic and political environment, Lula is keen to recapture some of that commercial magic.
But the geopolitical context also matters. Important as China is commercially, the US is Lula’s most important regional security and investment partner, and Washington was Lula’s first trip beyond Latin America as president. As the US-China rivalry deepens, Lula and his dealmaking entourage will need to tread carefully in a world that is splitting apart under their feet.
Hungary is a safe space for Putin
The Hungarian government said Thursday it wouldn’t jail Vladimir Putin if he came to Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes.
Budapest’s reasoning was a doozy: While they have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, they say they haven’t gotten around to incorporating it into Hungarian law yet, so no-can-do on arresting Putin.
It’s all purely hypothetical, as there’s no chance of Putin going to Hungary any time soon. But that’s the point. Hungary’s avowedly “illiberal” PM Viktor Orban has long made clear that he won’t just toe the EU party line on Russia. He’s reluctantly gone along with EU sanctions on Russia, but he’s also said the EU is needlessly expanding and prolonging the war by arming Ukraine – something his government won’t do.
Moscow, for its part, says arresting Putin abroad would be “an act of war.”
India's opposition leader sentenced to prison for defamation
The world’s largest democracy seems to be getting less comfortable with a key tenet of it: free speech.
Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for “defaming” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also disqualified as a lawmaker by the lower house of parliament. In April 2019, Gandhi referred to the PM — along with two corrupt officials also named Modi and charged with embezzling millions of dollars — as “thieves.”
This is a big deal because Gandhi is Indian political royalty. After all, he's the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers (his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India's first PM), and was surely planning to run against Modi for the top job in 2024. What's more, he recently completed a five-month-long march in hopes of reviving the Congress party, which for decades dominated Indian politics but took a beating from the BJP in the last election.
Although his party is appealing the conviction, the stakes are very high for Gandhi due to a provision in India’s election law that disqualifies MPs sentenced to, coincidentally, at least two years in prison for any offense, including defamation. Gandhi turned to Twitter in defiance, tweeting up a storm on Thursday with messages like "Long live the revolution" and quoting Mahatma Gandhi with "truth is my God."
Meanwhile, opposition groups accuse the PM of using the courts to go after his political rivals. Indeed, Gandhi’s sentence comes on the heels of the recent arrest on corruption charges of Manish Sisodia, the head of the AAP, another opposition party that runs the capital, New Delhi. Democratic backsliding indeed.
Scotland's First Minister and Scottish National Party (SNP) Leader Nicola Sturgeon.
What We’re Watching: Sturgeon's resignation, NATO-Nordic divide, India vs. BBC, Tunisia’s tightening grip
Nicola Sturgeon steps down
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Wednesday that she is stepping down. She’s been in the role for over eight years, having taken power after the failed 2014 independence referendum. Speaking from Edinburgh, Sturgeon said she’d been contemplating her future for weeks and knew "in my head and in my heart" it was time to go. A longtime supporter of Scottish independence, Sturgeon was pushing for a new referendum, which was rejected by the UK’s top court late last year. In recent weeks, she and her colleagues had been debating whether the next national election in 2024 should be an effective referendum on independence. Sturgeon will stay in power until a successor is elected — likely contenders include John Swinney, Sturgeon’s deputy first minister, Angus Robertson, the culture and external affairs secretary, and Kate Forbes, the finance secretary.
Turkey divides Finland and Sweden
On Tuesday, NATO and other Western officials publicly acknowledged for the first time that Finland and Sweden might join the transatlantic alliance at different times, a notable public admission that negotiations with Turkey over Sweden’s NATO accession haven’t gone well. Neither Nordic country can become an alliance member without unanimous support from all existing members, and NATO-member Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a beef with Sweden. Erdogan is angry that Sweden’s government has provided asylum for dozens of Kurdish leaders he considers terrorists, and it didn’t help when a right-wing activist burned a Koran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, an act Sweden’s government treated as an offensive act of free speech that’s protected by law. Erdogan may also see a political opportunity to boost his reelection chances by defying European leaders in general and Sweden in particular. (Turkey’s elections are expected in May or June.) For NATO, Finland’s membership is arguably the more urgent priority. Though Sweden monitors occasional Russian naval intrusions into its territorial waters, it’s Finland that shares an 810-mile land border with Russia. European leaders hope that, if Erdogan wins his election, a deal can be cut in the coming months to allow Sweden to join the club.
India takes aim at BBC
Indian tax officials raided the BBC’s local offices on Tuesday in what they said was a probe into the British broadcaster’s business practices. But the move comes amid a broader government campaign to censor a new BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in anti-Muslim riots that killed more than 1,000 people in the state of Gujarat while he was governor in 2002. Modi has always denied stoking – or neglecting – the violence, and India’s Supreme Court has reached a similar conclusion. In the weeks since the doc aired in the UK, Modi’s government has cracked down swiftly in India, blocking it from being viewed online in the country, halting screenings at Indian universities, and forcing both Twitter and YouTube to remove it locally. Modi has often used internet laws to muzzle criticism, and tax officials have searched critical media outlets before. Last year the subcontinent slipped eight points to 150 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. How will the UK government respond?
Tunisia crackdown intensifies
Robocop is not messing around now. Tunisian President Kais Saied, whose monotone style earned him that nickname, has unleashed a ferocious crackdown on his critics and opponents in recent days. On Tuesday, sweeping arrests ensnared the leader of Ennahda, an opposition Islamist movement that once held power in the country. Saied, a constitutional lawyer who was elected as an outsider candidate in 2019, has led a massive overhaul of Tunisia’s government, diminishing the power of the legislature and the courts. He says he’s trying to make government more decisive and efficient in the only country that emerged from the Arab Spring with a democracy. His critics say he is plunging the country of 12 million right back into an authoritarian winter. See our full profile of Saied here.
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.
As Asia’s richest man falters, will his ties to Modi hurt the PM?
For years, India’s Adani Group, an Indian conglomerate and the world’s largest private developer of coal plants, faced repeated allegations of corruption, money laundering, and theft of taxpayer funds. Those claims tended to be of local origin, and they triggered low-level investigations that usually went away. Meanwhile, Gautam Adani, 60, continued to amass his wealth, becoming critical to India’s infrastructural expansion under powerful Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Known as “Modi’s Rockefeller,” Adani is now Asia’s wealthiest man.
US probe leads to scandal. Now, Adani’s family-run energy and transport empire has been slammed with a US-based investigation by Hindenburg Research. The New York-based financial forensics investigator has cited evidence of suspected money laundering, stock manipulation, and tax fraud, causing Adani Group’s market value to tumble. Crucially, the report also raises questions about Adani’s proximity to his friend and ally, Modi.
Starting off with diamonds and commodities, Adani is now the coal king of India. Despite protests and regulations against the use of dirty fossil fuel, the first-generation entrepreneur has also expanded into defense, media, and cement, but much of his money has come from energy and infrastructure contracts, many of them tendered during the Modi era. While the relationship between the two men has been under scrutiny for years, the widely cited Hindenburg investigation doesn’t just detail the extent of Adani’s misdoings, but it also claims he couldn’t have gotten so far without the government stonewalling regulators and supporting his expansion.
Modi’s been silent about his ties to Adani, but he has reportedly nurtured a connection with him since the 1990s. Before Modi was PM, he was the chief minister of Gujarat, the same state where Adani got his start and where one of Modi’s major gifts to him was land at a throwaway price, which essentially became the launchpad for Adani’s biggest power moves.
The fallout. The scandal has triggered a run on Adani’s companies, clouding prospects for India’s excellent emerging market potential, but their immense size and role in India’s recent growth spurt still have analysts convinced that Adani is too unique to fail.
With elections due next year, the bigger question is whether it will hurt Modi’s prospects for a third term. The Hindenburg findings prompted India’s divided opposition to demand an investigation into how regulators let Adani get this far. Many analysts claim that he and Modi have scratched each other’s backs for over two decades, noting that Adani was worth a mere $2.8 billion in 2014, when Modi became PM, and that he’s now worth $119 billion.
Still, analysts are doubtful the PM will be hurt by the fallout.
“I don’t expect these revelations about the Adani Group to harm Modi politically,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “He remains remarkably popular and can easily withstand the types of challenges that would doom more vulnerable politicians.”
Teflon Modi. Modi’s popularity is amongst the highest in the world. Despite recent and not-so-recent failures – from bungling India’s COVID response to not reigning in anti-Muslim policies of his Bharatiya Janata Party – Modi seems to be India’s Teflon Man.
“One reason why Modi doesn’t suffer politically from these episodes is that these challenges can be depicted as a reflection of his victimhood,” says Kugelman, referring to Modi’s often-used “they’re gunning for us” brand of Hindutva politics. Modi alleges that “powerful forces are unfairly conspiring to impugn and weaken him, and that can’t stand," he says.
Last week, Adani’s spokespersons took a similar nationalist approach against his American naysayers, claiming that an attack on the group was an attack on India. But while Adani is threatening legal action against the US-based investigators, Modi might not need to go on the defensive just yet.
“India lacks a strong and united opposition with the capacity to exploit these moments, and the main opposition group remains quite weak,” says Kugelman.
For now, Modi is popular enough at home that he doesn’t need to worry too much about the hits to his image.
“The Adani scandal will come and go like the others before it and will have little lasting political impact on Modi,” says Kugelman, noting that the PM can “easily withstand these political shocks.”