Daily Times Editorials 26th August 2026

Unequal India

India’s first review in nearly two decades by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has produced findings that New Delhi cannot easily dismiss as routine or unfounded criticism from abroad. CERD has expressed “grave concern” over reports of abuses by law-enforcement officials against Scheduled Tribes, Dalits, ethnic and ethno-religious groups and non-citizens, including excessive force, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence and extrajudicial killings. It has also called for urgent action over discrimination and hate crimes against Bengali-speaking Muslims and the treatment of Rohingya, migrants and asylum-seekers.

India’s response, as has become its tried-and-tested routine, was to point to its pluralism, diversity and extensive constitutional and legal safeguards. But even if its Constitution outlaws caste discrimination, the UN findings expose the difficulty with relying on constitutional architecture as an answer to evidence of discriminatory practice. Rights are ultimately tested not in constitutional text but wherever a vulnerable citizen encounters the coercive authority of the state.

The allegations concerning Dalits and tribal communities are especially troubling because they concern groups for whom formal equality has never automatically translated into social equality. Caste continues to shape access to land, education, employment and justice. Tribal communities, meanwhile, frequently find themselves caught between extractive development, displacement, security operations and weak institutional protection. India may dispute how caste should be classified under an international convention on racial discrimination, but arguments over terminology cannot make inherited disadvantage disappear. The problem becomes particularly serious when the institutions expected to protect disadvantaged communities are themselves accused of abuse.

The treatment of Bengali-speaking Muslims raises an equally uncomfortable question. India has every right to enforce immigration law and determine who is lawfully present on its territory. Still, citizenship cannot responsibly be inferred from a person’s language, religion, dress or name. CERD highlighted reports of racial profiling during police stops and identity checks, arbitrary detention and mistreatment, while warning against collective expulsions. Once immigration enforcement begins treating an entire linguistic or religious community as presumptively foreign, the distinction between border control and discrimination becomes dangerously thin.

CERD’s recommendations are not legally binding, but that does not make them inconsequential. India seeks greater influence in international institutions and routinely invokes its democratic credentials as a source of global legitimacy. Greater power inevitably brings greater scrutiny, and a confident democracy should answer such criticism through transparent investigations, police accountability and measurable improvement rather than reflexive defensiveness. *

Silver Lining?

Soon after Field Marshal Asim Munir held meetings with key Iranian leaders during a daylong diplomatic mission to Iran, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi spoke of “significant progress” on social media, hoping for the restoration of the Islamabad MoU. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was said to have set out his government’s view candidly, while an official in his office promised results from the visit would emerge soon. The language is cautious, appropriately so. It nevertheless suggests that the diplomatic traffic between Washington and Tehran, which had all but stopped in public, has begun to move again through Islamabad.

Munir and Naqvi met the people who will have to authorise any Iranian decision. That matters. As per another Iranian lawmaker, the field marshal delivered an American message, the contents of which remain private, as they should. Pakistan has won the right to carry it because it can speak to Washington without appearing to lecture Tehran, and speak to Tehran without treating Iran’s anxieties as an afterthought. Meanwhile, the US seems to have kept military action on the table while widening secondary sanctions across areas ranging from shipping to technology. Petrol queues in Iran have made the human cost of the pressure impossible to overlook. Economic pain may sharpen the incentive for diplomacy, although no durable negotiation can rest on the assumption that a proud and heavily sanctioned state will simply be coerced into accepting language it cannot defend at home.Download Interactive Maps

Ghalibaf’s insistence that Washington must fulfil the commitments of the stalled Islamabad MoU identifies the next obstacle with more honesty than most official statements. A renewed process needs a chain of events both sides can live with, including but not limited to a protected pause in escalation; defined channels for technical talks; a way to test commitments; and indications that compliance will draw a tangible response rather than another round of demands.

Since Tehran will require proof that restraint is not surrender, and Washington will require proof that a return to talks is more than a tactical respite, Pakistan’s value clearly lies in making each side hear the other’s red lines before they become public ultimatums.

Renewed calls for a negotiated solution are widening the political space, recognising that the conflict cannot be managed through coercion alone, though declarations from Paris cannot negotiate the clauses that matter. That task now falls back on the mediators who have opened this channel, and on the two capitals whose decisions will determine whether it survives. *