Imagine waking up tomorrow to find that your electricity has been off for 22 hours. Not because of a storm or not because of a technical glitch. But because your country has run out of fuel, that too entirely!! The energy minister goes on television and says, matter-of-factly, that the country is “completely dry.” Hospitals are performing surgeries by flashlight. People can not drive their vehicles. Food rots because there’s no refrigeration and streets pile up with garbage because the trucks can’t run.

This is not any kind of a post-apocalyptic fiction. This is “real” Cuba in May 2026.

And while it might be easy to dismiss this as the predictable endpoint of a decades-long socialist experiment, the reality is far more complicated because what’s happening in Cuba right now is the convergence of a 200-year geopolitical obsession, a deliberate pressure campaign, and a humanitarian catastrophe that experts warn could spiral into something nobody has planned for.

Fasten your seatbelts and let’s unpack this entire fiasco from the beginning!

The 90-Mile Obsession

The geopolitical analyst George Friedman often says: imagine you’re America. Two oceans protect you on either side. Canada is a friendly neighbor. Mexico is manageable. You’re essentially an island of continental size which is almost impossible to invade, enormously wealthy, with the world’s most powerful military. You should sleep well at night, right?

Well no! because there’s this one island, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Cuba.

Cuba sits at the mouth of the Straits of Florida, the narrow passage through which an enormous volume of American trade flows. The Gulf of Mexico is the economic circulatory system of the United States’ south and mid-west. Energy exports, agricultural produce, manufactured goods and a vast share of American commerce passes through these waters. Any hostile power controlling Cuba could, in theory, mine the straits, deploy submarines, or simply threaten the passage. The economic consequences would be catastrophic.

This is why political scientist and author Robert Kaplan, in The Revenge of Geography, describes offshore islands near great powers as permanently loaded geopolitical guns. Cuba to America, he argues, is structurally similar to Ireland’s relationship to Britain or Taiwan’s to China. None of these islands are threatening because of their own military power. They’re threatening because of who could use them. Britain spent centuries in anguish over Ireland not because the Irish were a military superpower, but because a hostile European navy based in Cork could strangle London’s Atlantic trade. China’s obsession with Taiwan isn’t about the island’s 23 million people rather it’s about the Taiwan Strait and Pacific access. Cuba, sitting across America’s most critical maritime passage, fits the same template precisely.

This is the geopolitical bedrock of everything that follows.

Backtracking US-Cuba Relations

1959–1990s: Revolution to “Special Period”

When Fidel Castro’s rebels toppled the Batista dictatorship on New Year’s Day 1959, Washington’s initial reaction was cautious but not hostile. Relations soured rapidly as Cuba nationalized American businesses, which were nearly worth billions of dollars, and Castro declared the country socialist and aligned with the USSR. Diplomatic ties officially broke in 1961, and events soon escalated.

In April 1961, a CIA-backed force of 1,400 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Castro. But surprisingly, this mission was decisively crushed by Cuba’s army in merely three days. And then, in October 1962, the world held its breath.

The Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy responded with a naval blockade. For 13 days, the two superpowers stood at the edge of nuclear war. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called this “the most dangerous moment in human history.” The crisis ended with a deal: Moscow withdrew the missiles; Washington pledged not to invade Cuba again. But the lesson Washington drew from this was that Cuba was important enough to almost die for.

What followed was decades of economic warfare. The US embargo, tightened progressively over the years, restricted Cuba’s access to international trade, financing, and technology. Millions of Cubans fled the island (for e.g. the 1980 Mariel boatlift saw 125,000 leave). President Reagan formally designated Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism” in 1982. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Cuba lost its primary patron overnight, the island entered what Havana grimly called the “Special Period”, that is, the years of extreme austerity, food rationing, and economic collapse, so much so that the GDP collapsed by ~34%.

2000s–2014: Geopolitical Thaw and Shifts

In the 2000s U.S.–Cuba relations remained frozen. The U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay became infamous in 2001 for holding terror suspects, drawing Cuban protests. Leadership gradually shifted in Havana when an ill Fidel Castro ceded power to his brother Raúl Castro (officially president from 2008).

Cuba was surviving, but barely.

In December 2014, something remarkable happened. Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro simultaneously announced the restoration of diplomatic relations, ending 50 years of mutual isolation. Cuba was removed from the US terrorism blacklist. Prisoner exchanges occurred. Commercial flights resumed. For the first time in half a century, American tourists could legally visit Cuban beaches.

The “Obama Thaw,” as it came to be known, was built on a pragmatic calculation, that is, six decades of isolation had not produced regime change. Perhaps engagement would. Just before leaving office in January 2017, Obama also ended the famous “wet foot, dry foot” policy which was a Clinton-era rule that had allowed any Cuban who made it to American soil to stay, while those intercepted at sea were returned. The logic was that by removing this unique lifeline, the US could encourage legal migration pathways and reduce the perilous raft journeys across shark-infested waters.

Then Donald Trump arrived.

2017–2021: Policy Reversals

Donald Trump reversed much of the Obama “thaw.” In his first term, he reinstated Cuba on the terrorism list, restricting travel, tightening financial transactions. By 2021 the Trump administration had imposed dozens of new sanctions on Cuban officials and businesses, especially targeting the military-run conglomerate GAESA (Gaviota, Acemex, and CIMEX) which controls much of Cuba’s economy.

After the turmoil of January 6, 2021, President Biden initially said he would review Cuba policy. In May 2022, he quietly removed Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list s part of a prisoner-exchange deal. But the internal situation, by then, in Cuba worsened: shortages of food and medicine sparked widespread protests in 2021, the largest ever demonstrations since 1959. Cuba blamed “U.S. economic warfare” and denied letting foreign diplomats visit to mediate.

2022–2025: The Venezuela Dominoes Fall

To understand the 2026 crisis, you need to understand one number: 26,500.

That’s the approximate number of barrels of oil per day that Venezuela was supplying Cuba as recently as2025, representing roughly 24% of the island’s total energy consumption, according to Reuters. This arrangement of subsidized Venezuelan oil had been the cornerstone of Cuba’s economic survival for over two decades. At its peak in the 2000s, Venezuela was shipping nearly 100,000 barrels per day to Cuba. It was, effectively, Cuba’s life support.

On January 3, 2026, the Trump administration captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on narco-trafficking charges. The oil stopped.

This move was strategic and sequential. As George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures says in one of the podcasts, Venezuela had been protected partly by Cuban security forces and removing Maduro also removed Cuba’s most powerful regional patron and demonstrated the reach of the “modern Monroe Doctrine.” With Maduro gone, the Trump administration declared there would be “zero” oil or money going to Cuba from Venezuela. Mexico, under US pressure, cut off oil shipments. For the first three months of 2026, not a single foreign oil tanker reached Cuban shores.

Cuba was consuming roughly 112,000 barrels of oil per day to function. It was now producing, domestically, only about 40% of its required fuel. Within weeks Cuba’s stores of fuel were depleted. With no crude to burn, most of Cuba’s thermoelectric plants went offline. According to energy analysts at ElectricChoice, “by Easter 2026 the grid was generating only ~1,278 MW against a 3,000 MW demand which is a deficit of ~1,700 MW.” The math was indeed catastrophic. Grid managers reported that nine major power units were shut down, causing daily blackouts of 18–22 hours island-wide. Reuters also confirmed this: “We have absolutely no fuel…no diesel,” said Cuba’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, on May 13, 2026, as “many districts of Havana[went] without light for 20 to 22 hours a day.”

Humanitarian Crisis and Exodus of the Century

The cascading effects were immediate and devastating. Electricity drives water pumps. Without power, taps ran dry. Without running water, sanitation collapsed. Streets in Havana piled with garbage because fuel-starved trucks could not run collection routes. Hospitals began cancelling tens of thousands of surgeries. Some delivered babies in darkness. Food in refrigerators and cold-storage facilities spoiled which further compounded the shortages caused by farmers unable to run tractors or irrigation systems.

While the physical crisis unfolded, a parallel information war was being waged.

The US government’s characterization of events as “failed nation,” or “targeted sanctions” contrasts sharply with Havana’s framing of “economic warfare.” And in fact, neither characterization is neutral. The Trump administration has reportedly been explicit about its objectives: officials are said to be following a ”Venezuela model,” demanding that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel step down as a prerequisite for any negotiations, and seeking “insiders” to help broker a government change by the end of 2026.

On the other hand, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio released video messages in Spanish directly addressed to the Cuban population. And are port attributed to Trump administration sources, published by Axios, claimed Cuba had acquired hundreds of military drones for potential attacks on US targets. The report has been widely criticized for relying on, in the words of analysts, “thinly sourced intelligence.” Critics warn that such narratives could serve as a pretext for future military escalation, which is more or less a pattern with historical precedent.

Amid, all these crisis, Cuba has experienced the largest migration event in its modern history since 2021. According to Cuba’s own National Statistics Office, more than one million Cubans left the island between 2022 and 2023 alone, reducing the population from 11.1 million to roughly 10 million by end-2023. More recent estimates from the Cuban Research Institute suggest the effective population has fallen as low as 8.6 million. This surpasses, in scale and speed, the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 and the 1994 Rafter Crisis combined.

But there’s a dark irony in the current moment: the fuel shortage that has paralyzed Cuba has also removed the motorized boats that Cubans traditionally used to make the crossing. Many are now reduced to rafts. The escape valve has been partially sealed by the very crisis that makes escape most necessary.

The Question Nobody Has Answered

Here is the uncomfortable strategic reality that analysts like Peter Zeihan have been raising: the United States appears to have a plan for breaking the Cuban government. It does not appear to have a plan for what comes after.

The logic of the current pressure campaign is that sufficiently low living standards will erode the Cuban military’s ability to maintain control, triggering either an internal collapse or a popular uprising that forces regime change. This is the “Venezuela model” of economic and political pressure rather than direct military intervention.

Cuba’s pre-industrial agricultural carrying capacity, which means the number of people the island who could sustain without industrial food production, is estimated at 2 to 3 million people. The current population is roughly 10 million. Those additional 7 to 8 million people exist because of an industrial food system that runs on fuel, which runs on imported oil. If that system breaks entirely, what follows is not political transition. It is societal collapse!

The “best case” scenario, as some analysts frame it, is a 20-year military and economic protectorate — an enormously expensive and complex reconstruction of an entire country’s agriculture, industry, and infrastructure. The “worst case” is a failed state 90 miles from Key West, generating waves of desperate migrants in numbers that would dwarf anything Florida has seen before.

But based on the current geopolitical scenario, What is clear is this: the crisis in Cuba is not primarily about Cuba. It is about who controls the maritime gateway to the American heartland. It is about whether the Monroe Doctrine is enforceable in a multipolar world.

Robert Kaplan once wrote that geography is the one factor in international relations that never changes. Cuba’s geography, which is 90 miles from Florida, astride the Straits of Florida and at the crossroads of Caribbean trade routes, was a strategic asset in 1823 when Monroe wrote his doctrine. But it was a nuclear flashpoint in 1962. And in 2026, it remains the reason that what happens on a small, fuel-starved island matters enormously to the most powerful country on earth.

As of now, the lights are out in Havana but the question is whether anyone in Washington has thought carefully about what happens when they come back on.

Sources Referred: ABC News, Euronews, PBS NewsHour, ElectricChoice, Geopolitical Futures (George Friedman), University of Navarra Global Affairs, CiberCuba, Columbia Law School (Horizonte Cubano), Wikipedia, United Nations February 2026 statement.

In the Republic, Plato describes a democracy that destroys itself not through conquest but through appetite, a city that, in its hunger to satisfy every desire of every citizen, produces leaders who feed those desires. He called such leaders demagogues, and he predicted that their democracy would eventually collapse inward, consumed by the very generosity it mistook for justice. Plato was, of course, writing about Athens. But he might as well have been watching a state election in India.

In January 2026, political scientist Madhav Khosla of Columbia University introduced a concept that cuts uncomfortably close to India’s present condition. Writing for the NYU Democracy Project, Khosla described the phenomenon of competitive populism, a phase that emerges not when a single authoritarian populist rises to power, but when the entire political ecosystem reorients around populist outbidding. In such a system, institutions do not so much collapse as become irrelevant. The real contest, Khosla argues, shifts from “who can govern better” to “who can offer more.” The answer to populism, in other words, becomes more populism.

Three Populisms and a Paradox

It helps to be precise about what we mean by populism, because the word has been stretched to cover everything from Bernie Sanders to Viktor Orbán.

To understand Authoritarian populism, we need to take a look at Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey which uses the language of “the people” against “the corrupt elite” while systematically dismantling the institutions that could check power, i.e., courts, press, electoral commissions. While Lula’s Brazil or FDR’s New Deal America would be an appropriate example of Democratic populism, which uses the same language of the people, but works broadly within constitutional constraints, deploying state power to correct structural inequality. Competitive populism, Khosla’s formulation, is something distinct from both: it describes a system where no single actor is fully authoritarian, but where all actors are fully populist. Institutions are not destroyed — they are simply bypassed. Elections happen, but they no longer adjudicate ideas. They adjudicate offers. India in 2025–26 exemplifies this third type. The BJP, Congress, AAP, TMC, DMK, parties of wildly different ideological lineages, have all converged on the same political grammar: announce a scheme, name it after a woman, denominate it in monthly cash, repeat.

The question that political theorist Jan-Werner Müller asked about European populism, “Can populist politics remain democratic without destroying constitutional norms?” and it finds a peculiarly Indian answer that it can remain formally democratic while destroying something perhaps more important: the deliberative culture that makes democratic governance legitimate. When elections become auctions, the citizen is no longer asked to evaluate a government’s record or programme. They are asked to calculate which party’s offer is marginally more attractive. In the words of the economist, Yamini Aiyar, this creates “a false binary” of welfare vs. vote-buying, reducing citizens to passive recipients or “labharthi” rather than active participants with rights. She calls this “competitive welfarism”: a system where parties advertise targeted cash and kind transfers instead of debating broader issues like health or education.

And this poses a paradox: can politics that appeals directly to “the people” remain democratic if it sidelines long-term policy and undermines constitutional checks?

The Long History of Freebies in Indian Politics

To understand where India is today, one must walk backwards through its political history, because the freebie did not emerge from nowhere. It evolved, mutated, and finally metastasized.

In the 1950s and 60s, Tamil Nadu’s K. Kamaraj , the “Kingmaker” of Congress politics, built his reputation through genuine public investment: free midday meals for schoolchildren, expanded access to education. It was redistributive, yes, but it was also structural. It changed outcomes. When J. Jayalalithaa later swept Tamil Nadu’s elections in the 1990s and 2000s by distributing color televisions, mixers, grinders, fans, and laptops, something had quietly shifted in the logic of political gifting. The gift was no longer an infrastructure investment dressed in political clothing. It was simply a gift which were targeted, timed, and terminal. It would not improve a child’s learning environment or a woman’s economic autonomy; it would simply arrive before an election and depart from memory shortly after.

This distinction matters enormously as Kamaraj gave ladders but Jayalalithaa gave lottery tickets and the electorate, accustomed to ladders never quite arriving, eventually learned to prefer the ticket. Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party, to their credit, added a wrinkle — free electricity up to 200 units, free water, free bus travel for women in Delhi — that at least engaged with utility infrastructure, however fiscally contested. But what followed was less nuanced. Once Delhi showed that freebies could swing elections at scale, every party in every state began racing to the same cliff. This is the moment when welfare policy slid into competitive populism. That is, when the opposition’s response to one party’s scheme was not a critique of the scheme’s design, but a counter-scheme offering more.

The structure mirrors, in a disturbing way, what happened to reservation policy. Reservations which, as we know, is an affirmative action for historically marginalized communities were constitutionally grounded, empirically motivated, and corrective in intent. Over decades, however, they too became a political instrument, with competing parties offering expanded reservation quotas to new groups as election season approached, with little regard for judicial limits or sociological data. This parallel is not about moral equivalence but about political logic. In both cases, the tool becomes untethered from its rationale. The offer outgrows the argument and the auction replaces the policy.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

Abstract concerns about democratic culture tend to dissolve in the acid of actual data. India’s freebie economics are specific enough to be alarming. Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna Yojana, which was launched in June 2023 and was widely credited with delivering the BJP a surprise victory in state elections, transferred ₹1,000 per month to eligible women. Its budget for2025–26 stands at ₹18,669 crore and ironically, ISRO’s entire annual budget is ₹13,705 crore. Maharashtra’s Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana promises ₹1,500 per month to 2.5 crore women, with an initial allocation of approximately ₹46,000 crore — since revised to ₹26,500 crore for 2026–27, while the DRDO, India’s primary defense research body, receives ₹29,000 crore. These are not rhetorical comparisons. They are opportunity costs made visible.

The Economic Survey 2025–26 puts the aggregate cost of unconditional cash transfer programme across Indian states at ₹1.7 lakh crore for FY26 which is a fivefold increase since 2022–23!! The survey is unambiguous in its assessment: such transfers do not increase permanent income, improve skills, or raise productivity. They provide temporary relief while preserving the architecture of poverty intact. Meanwhile, the Niti Aayog’s education data reveals the infrastructure abandoned in the rush to distribute cash: over 1 lakh schools operate with a single teacher; 1.19 lakh schools have no electricity; 14,505 schools have no drinking water; 98,000-plus schools lack girls’ toilets; only 51.7% of secondary schools have science labs. Teacher vacancies reach 38,000 in Karnataka, 52,000 in Madhya Pradesh, 77,000 in West Bengal. Graduate unemployment nationally sits at 13%.

The RBI has flagged that free electricity, water subsidies, and agricultural debt waivers distort markets, weaken credit culture, and suppress private investment. The Supreme Court, under then-CJI NV Ramana in 2022, cautioned that a balance must be maintained between welfare and fiscal sustainability.

The Fiscal Paradox: Strong Centre, Hollow States

India’s macro story, on the surface, looks sturdy. The centre’s fiscal deficit has fallen from 9.2% of GDP in FY21 to 4.8% in FY25, aiming for 4.4% in FY26. Capital expenditure has risen as a share of total central spending from 12.5% to 22.6% between FY20 and FY25.India received three sovereign credit rating upgrades in 2025 alone. Inflation stands at 1.7% as of December 2025. Potential growth has been revised upward to 7%.

But beneath this gleaming surface, state finances tell a different story. In FY19, Indian states collectively ran a near-balanced revenue account, a deficit of just 0.1% of GDP. By FY25, that had widened nearly seven-fold to 0.7% of GDP. Revenue deficits are deteriorating in 18 states. Ten states have flipped from surplus to deficit. Meanwhile, state fiscal deficits overall have risen from 2.6% to 3.2% of GDP, and in some states unconditional cash transfers now constitute 1.2% of GDP and up to 8% of the total state budget. Punjab and West Bengal (over ~38% as of May 2026) carry some of the highest debt-to-GSDP ratios in the country, trapped in a cycle where borrowing finances consumption rather than investment.

The central government has tried to steer states back toward capital spending through SASCI (Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment) offering 50-year interest-free loans exclusively for infrastructure projects. The scheme has scaled from ₹12,000 crore in FY21 to ₹1.5 lakh crore in FY25,with cumulative transfers of ₹4.5 lakh crore. Without SASCI, state capital expenditure as a share of GDP would have slipped from 2.11% to 1.92%.

This is the central paradox: states are spending their own revenues on cash transfers while depending on interest-free central loans to maintain the capital spending that actually generates growth. The fiscal discipline that has impressed rating agencies at the central level is being quietly hollowed out at the periphery, where elections are won and lost.

The Political Irony: Nobody is Clean

In the political front, the freebie debate in India is almost always narrated as a partisan story though, the BJP crying ‘revadi’, the Congress crying ‘nyay’, the AAP crying revolution. but if you take a look at the data from SBI’s Ecowrap and the state finance records, it makes the partisan framing look faintly ridiculous.

If you’re thinking, “Isn’t SASCI useful? that’ll push more Capex and ultimately, Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF)

Yes! you’re right! SASCI is genuinely useful but the argument isn’t that SASCI is bad. The argument is subtler and actually more damning.

The problem is what states are doing alongside SASCI, not with it. Just to give you a little idea on the infographic above -

• SBI Research shows that for every ₹1 of SASCI, states reduce their own capex by about ₹0.34 on average, and by ₹0.55 in revenue-deficit states. If states were genuinely adding SASCI on top of their own capital spending, the scheme would be unambiguously good. Instead, many are using it as a replacement. They’re basically freeing up their own revenues to fund cash transfers, then pointing to SASCI-funded infrastructure as proof of governance. The Centre is effectively subsidizing states’ political spending. (Read More)
• SASCI stabilizes the capex headline number, which is what rating agencies and macro analysts see. But beneath that stability, capital spending from states’ own revenues has remained flat, while the increase in capital expenditure is being supported entirely by the scheme. India’s infrastructure story, to the extent it exists at the state level, is increasingly a story about central government credit rather than state fiscal health. That’s a fragile foundation. What happens when the Centre pull back some budget?
• And that brings me to the third point, SASCI was conceived to be tied to specific capital projects and reforms. The share of unconditional loans allocated to states under the scheme has reduced from 80% in 2022–23 to only 38% in 2025–26, which means the Centre has actually noticed the substitution problem and is tightening conditionalities. But the damage from the earlier years of loose, untied allocation is already baked into state fiscal habits.

And to analyze how bad is the situation with the states, let’s go one by one and start with — Karnataka, governed by Congress, has grown its cash transfer programme 94 times over in six years, the most extreme figure in the entire country, funding Siddaramaiah’s five guarantees from its own revenues while drawing ₹18,000 crore in central interest-free loans to build the roads and schools it can no longer afford from its own pocket.

Jharkhand, governed by the JMM-led INDIA bloc, clocks 47 times growth — Hemant Soren’s Maiyan Samman Yojana scaling rapidly even as SASCI utilization declines to 67%, meaning the state is simultaneously expanding its transfer commitments and losing the capacity to execute the infrastructure projects the Centre is handing it for free.

West Bengal, under Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, records the single highest SASCI utilization rate in the country at 97% — a figure that reads like a governance triumph until the SBI research makes the mechanism visible: Lakshmir Bhandar (24 times growth) consumes Bengal’s own revenues, and Nirmala Sitharaman’s interest-free loans build Bengal’s bridges.

But the BJP’s hands are no cleaner.

Madhya Pradesh, whose Ladli Behna Yojana detonated the nationwide cash transfer race in June 2023, has grown its transfers 14 times over and now funds 31% of all its capital expenditure through SASCI. Haryana, under BJP’s Nayab Singh Saini, scaled cash transfers 14 times ahead of the 2024 elections. Maharashtra’s MahaYuti government runs Majhi Ladki Bahin at ₹26,500 crore a year which is 25 times the state’s FY20 transfer baseline, while simultaneously recording 95% SASCI utilization and depending on central loans for 13% of its capital budget. Even Uttar Pradesh, BJP’s largest and most symbolically important state, draws the single biggest absolute SASCI allocation in the country, an estimated ₹48,000 crore, to fund infrastructure its own budget cannot fully cover. The only states that escape this logic are Gujarat, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh: not because they are governed by more virtuous parties, but because they have kept cash transfer growth restrained, maintained lower debt burdens, and thus preserved enough fiscal room to fund their own capital spending. Andhra Pradesh under TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu funds 88% of its capex from its own revenues, which by the way is the best ratio among large states, and is projecting the highest capex growth ambition in India for FY26. The contrast with neighboring Telangana, which inherited BRS-era debt and now cannot absorb even the SASCI money allocated to it, utilization collapsed to 58% and falling, is not a story about which party governs better. It is a story about what fiscal choices, made over years, do to a state’s capacity to govern at all. What the numbers collectively describe is not a BJP problem or a Congress problem or an AAP problem. It is a SYSTEMIC PROBLEM!

The Global Mirror

Other democracies have navigated this terrain too. Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Mexico’s Oportunidades (now Sembrando Vida) are the canonical examples of conditional cash transfers: money that flows only when children attend school and when family members appear for health checkups. The conditionality is not punitive; it is structurally generative. It uses the transfer to pull recipients into systems like, education, healthcare, that compound their human capital over time. The Bolsa Família, at its most rigorously implemented, helped reduce Brazil’s Gini coefficient (measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality within a nation or a social group) meaningfully over two decades. India’s schemes lack this conditionality almost entirely. The money arrives because an election is coming, not because a child enrolled. This is not a welfare model. It is a vote-purchasing model wearing welfare’s clothing.

Conclusion

There is a phrase in Chantal Mouffe’s political theory that has always felt like a warning label for precisely this scenario: the moment when agonistic democracy, where we have a healthy conflict between genuine alternatives, collapses into antagonistic populism, where the fight is no longer about what to do but about who can give more. India’s political discourse increasingly resembles the latter. The major parties do not meaningfully dispute fiscal priorities; they dispute who among them is more generous. Religion and caste fill in wherever the freebie discourse leaves a gap but not as serious social policy but as identity mobilization, the complement to the cash offer rather than its critique.

India’s freebie crisis is, at bottom, an institutional design problem. And institutional design problems are the hardest to fix, because the institutions most capable of fixing them, i.e., courts, fiscal commissions, an engaged electorate, are themselves being gradually reshaped by the same competitive dynamic they are supposed to correct.

Unlike many claims, I believe, India is not heading toward authoritarianism. Its election may somewhat remain genuine (despite many alternate claims). But Khosla’s insight deserves weight: a democracy can lose its substance without losing its form. The question is not whether India is dying. The question is whether it is governing and whether, in the race to the auction block, it has forgotten what governing was for.

On a monsoon afternoon in Siliguri, battered lorries line up through the mud at transport nagars, waiting for their next load down India’s narrow land bridge. “This is the Siliguri Corridor or ‘Chicken’s Neck’ — where India narrows to just 20 miles wide as it connects the mainland to the resource-rich North-East,” anthropologist Townsend Middleton describes, picturing trucks “awaiting repairs, a wash, [and] their next load” in a canal of traffic. Here, geography dictates destiny: any blockade would “instantly realign the geopolitics of Asia” by severing India’s Northeast from the rest of the country. For context: the distance between the two shores of the English Channel at its narrowest is 34 kilometers. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil transits daily, is 39 kilometers across. India’s single land link to an entire civilizational corner of its territory is narrower than both.

But in the past two years, the geopolitical weather around it has shifted in ways that have pushed it from a chronic concern to an acute one. A new government in Dhaka has tilted demonstrably toward Beijing. A dormant World War II–era airbase in northern Bangladesh is being revived under Chinese supervision, its runway barely 12 kilometers from the Indian border. A river development project funded by China is inching toward the corridor’s southern edge. And somewhere in the Chumbi Valley, the People’s Liberation Army continues its patient infrastructural buildup at the tri-junction where India, Bhutan, and Tibet converges. The Chicken’s Neck, it turns out, is not merely a metaphor. It is actually a strangle-point, and several hands are closing around it.

Understanding ‘Chicken’s Neck’ Geographically

This “strip of land” is bordered by three foreign countries and abutting Chinese-held heights, the corridor is the only land route tying India to its eight North-Eastern states (the “Seven Sisters” plus Sikkim). At its thinnest it is barely 17–22 km wide. Losing it, even temporarily, would “isolate Northeast India” entirely. The corridor runs through the plains of North Bengal flanked on the west by Nepal and on the north by Bhutan, with Bangladesh immediately to the south. Beyond Bhutan lies China’s Chumbi Valley. But it wasn’t always an “Achilles’ heel” for India.

A Wound Drawn by a Pen

In 1904, the British geographer and imperial strategist Halford Mackinder wrote that Maps were not passive documents. They were instruments that outlived empires. Few places on earth make this abstraction as visceral, as measurable in kilometers, as India’s Siliguri Corridor.

To understand the Siliguri Corridor is to understand that its vulnerability is not natural but an accident of history and cartography. Before August 1947, the land that became East Pakistan, and then, after the liberation war of 1971, became Bangladesh, was simply Bengal. The north-eastern territories were connected to Calcutta and the Indian heartland by rail and road routes that passed through what is now Bangladeshi territory. Traders from Agartala in Tripura could reach Kolkata through a journey of under 400 kilometers. The same journey today, forced through the Siliguri bottleneck, is over 1,600 kilometers.

The historical research paper “The Siliguri Corridor: A Historical Analysis of Geo-Political Vulnerability in Eastern India,” notes, this strip “had long been a frontier zone,” but only after Partition did it become India’s Achilles’ heel. Colonial cartography also played a role: British boundary-making often ignored ethnic and geographic realities, leaving post-colonial India with a narrow lifeline hemmed in by new states. The result: a 60 km corridor (some 45–50 million Indians live beyond it) that India must protect at all costs.

What the Radcliffe Line created, in other words, was not just a border but a permanent strategic liability — one that India inherited with independence and has spent the decades since trying to manage, mitigate, and, as we shall see, increasingly to harden.

The Mountain That Watches

Fifty-odd kilometers northeast of Siliguri, the Chumbi Valley pushes southward from the Tibetan Plateau like a finger pointing at India’s most sensitive geography. The valley is narrow and ironically is a compressed corridor of its own, and its military significance has been recognized since at least the Anglo-Russian Great Game of the nineteenth century, when British strategists debated its utility as a route for Russian invasion and eventually used it themselves for the Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa in 1904. Today, the valley is Chinese territory, and from its southern reaches, the Siliguri Corridor is, on a clear day, visible to the naked eye.

This is not incidental. The Doklam Plateau, which juts northward from Bhutan into the Chumbi Valley’s western wall, achieved global attention in the summer of 2017 when Indian and Chinese forces entered a 73-day standoff after Indian troops halted a Chinese road-construction project on the plateau. The strategic logic of the standoff was straightforward, if its diplomatic resolution was anything but. An Indian official closely involved in the negotiations told journalists, “The Zompelri Ridge is the only major geographical obstacle to China having a direct vantage point to the Siliguri Corridor.” If China secured positions on the Doklam Plateau, it can enable PLA troops to “potentially roll down the Zompelri ridge and cut off India’s seven north-eastern states at the Siliguri Corridor that is barely 60 km away.”

The Chellaney thesis, named after strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney, one of India’s most prolific and consistently alarming commentators on Chinese strategy, argues that Beijing’s behavior in the Himalayan borderlands represents not a series of opportunistic land grabs but a coherent, patient campaign of territorial attrition. “By establishing positions that could potentially threaten the Siliguri Corridor,” Chellaney wrote in 2017, “China was essentially holding a strategic gun to India’s northeastern connectivity.” The image is melodramatic, but the underlying geometry is real. From the Chumbi Valley, PLA artillery can observe and, in the event of conflict, engage Indian logistics infrastructure feeding the corridor.

Former Eastern Army Commander General Manoj Pande has spoken of China’s “persistent attempts to come close into areas of Doklam,” framing the 2017 standoff not as a resolved crisis but as one episode in a continuing campaign. General Upendra Dwivedi, similarly, has emphasized that China’s infrastructure investments are not separable from its military posture. The roads built in Tibet are army roads first and civilian assets second. This is a significant analytical claim, because it implies that any assessment of Chinese military capacity near the corridor that focuses only on current deployments is necessarily incomplete: the infrastructure itself is part of the threat.

The analogy that fits in here is of the GIUK Gap: the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom chokepoint that NATO spent the Cold War obsessing over, because a Soviet fleet that could break through the Gap could sever the trans-Atlantic supply lines on which European defense depended. The Siliguri Corridor performs an analogous function in India’s strategic geography: it is the point at which everything converges, and the point whose closure produces cascading, existential consequences. The only but major difference is that the GIUK Gap is oceanic, offering the vast and mobile geography of the North Atlantic as a buffer. The Siliguri Corridor offers 22 kilometers of tea garden and highway.

The Southern Front: Dhaka’s Pivot and its Consequences

If the Chinese threat to the Siliguri Corridor is geological in its patience and pace, that is, a slow accumulation of infrastructure, position, and leverage over decades but the developments south of the corridor since 2024 have moved with something closer to alarming velocity.

The ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 and the installation of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus as head of an interim government marked not merely a change of government in Dhaka but, by most accounts visible from New Delhi, a fundamental reorientation of Bangladeshi strategic alignment. Under Hasina, Bangladesh had maintained a carefully calibrated relationship with both India and China, accepting Chinese investment while preserving the security and transit arrangements that underpinned Indian strategic equanimity. That calculus appears to have shifted. Yunus’s visit to Beijing in April 2025, during which he told Chinese officials that “Bangladesh is the only guardian of the ocean access for the entire region, including the northeast of India”, a statement read in New Delhi as both a territorial assertion and a veiled threat which signaled a willingness to use geography as diplomatic leverage that his predecessor had carefully avoided.

The Teesta River project is the most symbolically loaded of the subsequent developments. The Teesta, rising in the Sikkim Himalayas and flowing through the Siliguri Corridor before entering Bangladesh, has been a source of bilateral friction between India and Dhaka for decades, with Bangladesh seeking a more equitable water-sharing arrangement from its upper riparian neighbour. Under Hasina, India had been the preferred partner for a comprehensive Teesta river management project, a preference that reflected both geographic logic and political trust. India’s status as the upper riparian state, and the precedent of the 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty, made New Delhi the natural primary interlocutor for any meaningful water governance framework. When Bangladesh’s Water Resources Advisor Syeda Rizwana Hasan accompanied the Chinese ambassador to the Teesta project site in Rangpur’s Tapa Madhapur, a location that sits kilometers from the Siliguri Corridor, and declared that Beijing was “keen to start implementing the Teesta master plan as soon as possible,” the project ceased to be a bilateral water dispute but an engineered economic and infrastructural presence, under Chinese supervision, on the doorstep of India’s most sensitive chokepoint.

Here’s what Dr Brahma Chellaney says about this issue -

The Lalmonirhat airbase, as mentioned in the above tweet, originally constructed in 1931 by the British as a forward Allied base during the China-Burma-India theatre of World War II, has sat largely dormant since partition interrupted the operational logic of its location. The Yunus government’s decision to revive it and was framed as a part of a broader civilian aviation corridor initiative, and almost immediately attended by Chinese official site visits, triggered a wave of alarm in Indian security circles. The airbase sits 12 kilometers from the Indian border. Satellite imagery, according to analysts at multiple Indian defense research institutions, has revealed evidence of hardened shelters, drone aprons, and upgraded fuel storage.

Then, in November 2025, the PNS Zulfiqar, a Chinese-built Pakistani warship, docked at Chattogram — the first Pakistani naval vessel to enter a Bangladeshi port since 1971. Whether this constitutes a coordinated strategic squeeze with China operating through Bangladesh and Pakistan to encircle India’s most vulnerable corridor, or a more opportunistic convergence of interests remains genuinely contested.

Retired Lieutenant General S.L. Narasimhan, speaking on Indian strategic forums, has argued for a degree of skepticism about the direst readings of the Lalmonirhat situation. The base is close enough to the Indian border, he observed, that it falls within range of Indian artillery and could be neutralized in the opening phases of any conventional conflict; its value as a military asset is therefore constrained by its own exposure. He has also questioned whether China will actually station its own military assets there, suggesting that the complications of a trilateral India-Bangladesh-China dynamic might dissuade even Beijing from so provocative a move. These are serious counter-arguments, and they deserve weight. But they are also, one might note, arguments that apply to peacetime and to conventional conflict scenarios.

The greater worry, expressed by analysts at the Observer Research Foundation and the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, is not that the Lalmonirhat base will be used to launch a World War I style offensive but that its surveillance and ISR capabilities, combined with those of the Teesta project’s Chinese engineering presence, will give Beijing persistent, real-time intelligence on Indian troop movements through the corridor. In a crisis, that asymmetry of information is not a secondary concern. IT IS THE WAR.

Government Intervention

The recent policy shifts in West Bengal under a new BJP-allied administration represent an effort to address precisely this governance deficit through centralization. The transfer of seven national highways to the National Highways Authority of India and the National Highway Infrastructure Development Corporation and the grant of 120 acres to the Border Security Force, with provisions for up to 600 acres signals a fundamental shift in the management logic of the corridor from state to central authority.

The most revealing indicator of Delhi’s intent, however, is the proposal to carve a new Union Territory from the Seemanchal region, the four Bihar districts of Purnia, Katihar, Araria, and Kishanganj, that forms the southern buffer of the corridor. Home Minister Amit Shah’s three-day visit to the region, during which he bypassed the Bihar state capital to hold closed-door sessions directly with District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police, was not read in New Delhi as a routine political tour. The discussions, according to multiple sources, focused on an internal security audit covering changing patterns of infiltration, human trafficking routes, drug smuggling networks, and demographic shifts — the full architecture of non-conventional threat that the corridor both generates and absorbs.

The Seemanchal UT proposal is contentious. In Bihar, it raises the spectre of cultural fragmentation for the Mithila region, already diminished by the creation of Jharkhand. The J&K precedent of 2019 hangs over all such discussions, and not coincidentally: the government that reorganized Jammu and Kashmir has signaled, through its actions in Seemanchal, that it is prepared to use the language of extraordinary security need to achieve administrative transformations of considerable political consequence.

Hardening the Neck: Defense Architecture and the Underground Railway

India’s military response to the convergence of pressures on the Siliguri Corridor has been systematic, layered, and, in at least one respect, genuinely imaginative. The Trishakti Corps, the 33 Corps, headquartered at Sukna near Siliguri, is responsible for the corridor’s ground defence and maintains a state of readiness evidenced by frequent joint exercises including Exercise Poorvi Prahar, conducted in cooperation with the Navy and Air Force. Rafale aircraft at Hashimara Air Base provide the IAF component of the corridor’s air defense architecture; they are supported by MiG-29 variants capable of firing BrahMos supersonic missiles, and by a layered air defense network comprising S-400 systems, Israeli-origin Barak-8 medium-range surface-to-air missiles, and indigenous Akash systems. New garrisons established at Kishanganj in Bihar, Bamuna in Assam, and Chopra in West Bengal, with a fourth planned for Mizoram, represent a deliberate effort to extend the defensive perimeter and multiply points of response.

The most significant single infrastructure commitment, however, is the proposed underground railway. Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has formally proposed a 40-kilometre underground rail link within the corridor, a tunnel running at depths of 20 to 24 meters, designed to ensure that the Northeast’s rail connectivity with the mainland survives even if surface infrastructure is compromised by conflict, sabotage, or natural disaster. The engineering logic is straightforward and compelling: at present, the corridor concentrates a railway line, a national highway, and an oil pipeline into a 22-kilometre width. The destruction or blockade of any two of these assets would constitute a strategic emergency. Moving one of them underground, beneath the reach of conventional artillery, beyond the interruption of surface blockade, adds precisely the kind of redundancy that the current infrastructure profile dangerously lacks.

Lieutenant General Narasimhan has called this “the right way to go” and “a very good move,” though he notes, sensibly, that the engineering challenges in North Bengal’s geology, i.e., high rainfall, seismic activity, complex drainage, are not trivial. The parallel that suggests itself is the Channel Tunnel, built to ensure that British-continental connectivity could be maintained regardless of surface naval or air interdiction. But a more instructive comparison may be Switzerland’s approach to national redoubt doctrine, the systematic hardening and tunnelling of the country’s key military logistics infrastructure to ensure survivability in precisely the scenario that currently haunts Indian planners: a narrow corridor under sustained external pressure.

The Gorakhpur-Siliguri Expressway, a planned 519-kilometre, four-lane connection linking Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal, and the proposed international transit corridors through Nepal and Bangladesh represent the parallel effort to build strategic redundancy through route multiplication. The World Bank’s 2017 observation that Bangladesh could serve as a “transit corridor” to the Northeast, reducing travel times from 1,600 kilometers to under 600, has taken on a different complexion since Dhaka’s pivot: what was once a development opportunity has become a strategic contingency whose political conditions can no longer be assumed.

Conclusion

This corridor is a combination of military problem, a governance failure, a developmental deficit, an archaeological residue of colonial cartography, and, in Middleton’s formulation, a site of “chokepoint pragmatics” — of everyday life conducted in the crevices of an impossible geography.

What the current moment reveals is that these dimensions cannot be addressed sequentially. The underground railway does not solve the Lalmonirhat problem. The Seemanchal UT proposal does not address the Doklam dynamic. New garrisons at Kishanganj do not substitute for a functioning relationship with Dhaka or a resolved border with Beijing. And none of these measures addresses the deeper structural condition that Partition created. The Siliguri Corridor exists because the Radcliffe Commission drew a line in 1947 that made it exist. That line cannot be undrawn. But the processes that determine whether the corridor functions as a lifeline or a liability are, in principle, alterable.

The Chicken’s Neck is not destiny. But in the present strategic environment, with four adversarial or newly unreliable neighbors converging on its perimeter, with Chinese surveillance infrastructure closing in from north and south, with domestic governance arrangements still catching up to the corridor’s strategic salience, it is something close to a reckoning. India has 22 kilometers in which to get the answer right.

PS: I wish to acknowledge the foundational ethnographic and analytical work of Townsend Middleton (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), whose study “Connective Insecurities: Chokepoint Pragmatics at India’s Chicken Neck” (Ethnos, 2020) has shaped the conceptual framing of this essay. The historical analysis draws on the research paper “The Siliguri Corridor: A Historical Analysis of Geo-Political Vulnerability in Eastern India” (IJSSRR, 2024). Strategic assessments have been triangulated across analyses published by the Observer Research Foundation, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, the Lowy Institute, and Defense Research and Studies