US President Donald Trump announced that the war on Iran is nearly over, the US having achieved its goals. But if Iran did not reach a deal with the US, the US would bomb it back into the Stone Age, he threatened. In this, Trump displayed rare historical perspicacity.

Iran is one of those few places on earth to have hosted continuous hominin and human activity from the time of the Homo erectus to the present.

Whether American bombs would drive Iranian civilisation back in time to the Stone Age or to the Bronze or the Iron Age remains to be seen. The US used up more bombs over its 17-year campaign against Vietnam than it had during World War II, but Vietnam survived, and thrived, to become a major supplier of manufactured goods to the US.

Bombs might pulverise Iran’s physical infrastructure, but it is unlikely to cripple its civilisational integrity — Iran is one of the few parts of the developing world to not have been formally colonised — or force it to revise its narrative that survival is victory enough.

Alice had the sense, in Wonderland, to understand the distinction between meaning what one says and saying what one means, at least after the March Hare pointed out the difference. Trump has no dearth of people around him who are as mad as the Tea-Party hosting bunny. What he lacks is the sense to either mean what he says or to say what he means.

He said it was never his goal to effect regime change in Iran, although he had called upon the people of Iran to take over after he bombed the regime to obliteration. Now, he says that he has both effected regime change and that he does not care about regime change. The net effect of Trump’s latest announcement of the war’s proximate conclusion is that oil prices shot up, stocks fell, and US treasuries came tumbling after, pushing up yields.

Perhaps the markets paid more attention to what Trump’s statement meant, rather than what he said, especially with the Houthis having joined battle, threatening not only to bomb Israel but also to close Saudi oil’s exit from its Red Sea port by attacking ships passing through Bab-al-Mandab: the war is not ending anytime soon.

India’s Timid Attempt

As things stand, with Europe’s diesel futures touching $200 a barrel, India’s attempt to prevent Reliance from exporting petrofuels by levying additional duties on exported fuels seems timid. It would make sense for a refinery to pay the extra duty and still make a killing in the export market.

The government continues to put off oil companies having to raise retail prices, on account of the elections to state legislatures in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal and Assam now underway.

The government continues to maintain that there is no cooking gas shortage, but The Indian Express reports that trains to Bihar leaving Mumbai are packed with people fleeing a city where they get no fuel with which to cook. Clearly, of some type of gas, there is no shortage.

Another Failed WTO Ministerial

The World Trade Organisation has been paralysed by the largest economy having gone rogue. President Trump, in his first term, stopped appointing members to the appellate body of the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism. This means that disputes cannot be settled beyond final appeal at the WTO. In his second term, Trump unleashed a tariff war, his so-called reciprocal tariffs totally brushing aside the Most-Favoured-Nation norm of the WTO, which says that the tariff offered to any member outside of any special trade arrangement must be offered to all other members as well.

Instead of addressing this mortal attack on the multilateral trading system, the 14th Ministerial Conference of the WTO at Yaounde, Cameroon, tried to extend the moratorium on tariffs on cross-border digital commerce and create a plurilateral agreement on investment facilitation. It met with failure on both goals and dispersed, postponing further deliberations to the next Ministerial to be held in Geneva. India rejected plurilateral agreements in principle.

Legislative Feats: The good, The Bad and The Thwarted

Parliament rushed through legislation to amend a 2019 law that gave people the right to define their own gender identity. The law, Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, more or less gave statutory form to a 2014 verdict of the Supreme Court, in the National Legal Services Authority vs the Union of India case, which said people who did not identify with the biological sex they were born into had the freedom, under the Indian Constitution’s promise of individual liberty, to identify themselves as belonging to a third gender.

It provided a legal shield against the discrimination faced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, inter-sexual, asexual and other gender-fluid individuals (LGBTQIA+) in post-colonial India.

Now, by amending the law with little discussion and even less rationale, the government has taken away the right to self-determination of one’s gender identity, transferring that right to a medical board, whose decision has to be approved by the District Magistrate, and criminalised the actions of anyone who helps or supports a gender-fluid individual who is not certified by the medical board.

This is an attack on liberty, the LGBTAIA+ community, and society as a whole. The arbitrary powers of prosecution the criminalisation of solidarity with a transgender individual gives the government one more tool of oppression, even as it strengthens the drive to homogenise society in vastly diverse India.

IBC Tweaks, FCRA Retreat

This law, as amended, is bad, even toxic. At the same time, Parliament passed tweaks to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code to improve that law. This is not the only contrast between the two laws. If one was rushed, the other was referred to a Select Committee and the government adopted all the recommendations of the Select Committee, Parliament adopting the bill ‘as reported by the Select Committee’.

As amended, IBC now provides for corporate turnaround of a borrower which fails to service its loan, with the debtor still being in charge, albeit under the watchful eye of the creditors. Till now, once resolution commenced, the incumbent management was removed from the picture, a resolution professional was put in place, and the fate of the resolution process depended on the integrity and competence of the said RP.

Complaints have been rife against RPs and their conduct. As of December 31, 2025, of the claims admitted of Rs 11.14 lakh crore, recovery for the banks has been 32.78%, at 3.65 lakh crore, as per data provided by the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI). In cases where promoters have not tried to rob their own companies, pressure from creditors could arguably force incumbent managements to turn things around and emerge from insolvency, preventing any haircut for the lenders.

Something like this happens under America’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where a court, rather than the lenders, keeps a tight watch on the performance of the company given the chance to turn itself around under Chapter 11, with the benefit of a moratorium on debt servicing. A similar facility has not worked in India under the IBC. The latest amendment to the law institutes this facility, and many companies and their lenders stand to gain from this provision of the creditor-initiated insolvency resolution programme (CIIRP) that retains the borrower in charge of the company. The whole process is outside a formal court process, but gains legal sanctity by being recognised under the law.

The attempt to amend the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act yet again, for the state to acquire the right to take over the assets of any entity that has been receiving foreign contributions but has its licence to receive such funds scrapped or discontinued, has been opposed tooth and nail by the Christian church, and those who agree with its contention that this is a backdoor attempt to intimidate the minorities.

The government has withdrawn the attempt to pass the bill in the current session, probably on account of the sensitivities that could hamper the ruling side’s prospects in the forthcoming assembly elections in Kerala.