A mea culpa in national interest

Many of you might think I got something so wrong in National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree! But some deserve a mea culpa. I'd deal with the most recent this week

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

Where does a columnist acknowledge that he has a disagreement with himself? Or rethink a stated view failing the test of time. This being the last National Interest of 2025 is a good occasion to do so.

Will I do so every year-end? I hope not. I hope I won't have arguments to rethink, recalibrate, or simply resile from that often.

An opinion column is exactly what it is meant to be: One writer's opinion. It can't and shouldn't win everybody's approval. It is better if it is provocative. The readers' disagreement with some columns will be more intense than with others. The readers then have the recourse to write back, in a letter to the editor. Where does the writer go, except to you -the reader?

I know so many of you might think I got something so wrong in one or another of the nearly 50 National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree with that! But I can list at least five over some 25 years that deserve a mea culpa. I'd deal with the most recent of these this week. This was published on September 28, 2024. It asserted that Islam doesn't kill democracy. The ArmyIslam combo does. How come Pakistan and Bangladesh rarely have a peaceful transition while Islamic Indonesia and Malaysia do?

Similarly, I argued that Myanmar had a military-ruled hybrid system (they're polling this Sunday) despite being almost entirely Buddhist, especially after they brutally expelled most of their tiny Muslim minority, the Rohingya. And if Buddhism was the challenge to its democracy, how come Sri Lanka had no such issues? As I look back, I see many flaws with this formulation. The first is that so many Islamic countries have no democracy, despite their army not interfering. My distant vision was clouded by what I see in the neighbourhood. Iran has no military rule, and while it has regular elections, the unelected clergy rules. This is the classical hybrid arrangement and stable, unlike Pakistan's where power equations occasionally shift.