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Myra MacDonald Profile picture
Myra MacDonald
@myraemacdonald
South Asia specialist. Author of "Heights of Madness", "Defeat is an Orphan", and "White as the Shroud; India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir."
May 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I am sympathetic to India’s complaints about terrorism emanating from Pakistan. And I am very dubious about CPEC. All that said, the choice of words here seems unnecessarily undiplomatic and focused on a domestic audience. There’s an element of being rude to a guest that India would not have done before. But it’s also striking that Jaishakar reserves his harshest language for Pakistan (the far weaker country) than for China (the far stronger country) nibbling away at its borders.
Mar 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Some comments on this story. 1) The question of how much visible security should be given to public buildings in central London is a long-running debate (applies both to embassies and U.K. govt buildings) Free movement & access vs visible security. 2) So too is the question of how much you should crack down on potential troublemakers and how much you should monitor them less obviously. No easy answers in a multicultural society.
Mar 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The collapse of the SNP, and with it any near-term chance of Scottish independence/break-up of the U.K., will deserve a book/books one day and certainly merits more attention from U.K. and foreign correspondents. >> >> It would be interesting to establish how far the SNP was brought down by the trans/women’s rights row. My own sense is that the Gender Recognition Bill was the trigger rather than the cause >>
Jun 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A lot of people admired Mussolini in 1930s. But in most countries, people were horrified once they saw how fascism turned out. The nature of Indian history (WW2 being something done to it rather than something it chose) means it is not as inoculated against fascism as others >> > This is why I found it so disturbing that India chose to make a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose (who sought an alliance with Nazi Germany and the imperial Japanese) the centrepiece of its Republic Day celebrations earlier this year >>
Mar 22, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This is a useful thread on Ashley Tellis’s view of the US-India relationship post-Ukraine. I’ll add a few things (but read the whole thread first before commenting). 1) There is a risk of overly focusing on India’s votes at the UN. Its position at the UN is pragmatically defensible (even if I disagree with it.) However, I don’t believe you can separate them from a re-appraisal of values (and here India has put interests over values)
Jan 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
India has always had a rather ambivalent attitude to Subhas Chandra Bose, who initially sought Hitler's support and then allied with the Japanese, but was also fighting for Indian independence. That said, I think this is going too far. Dangerously so. For a while now I've been thinking that the decolonisation agenda so popular among western leftists could do real damage to India. Seeing a right-wing PM who critics say has dictatorial tendencies celebrating a man who sought support from Hitler tends to support that.
Jan 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The row between Tom Devine and Geoff Palmer on Edinburgh's Colonialism and Slavery Review reminded me of a Twitter spat I had with Palmer in 2020 over the wording of the offensive David Hume footnote. See the Guardian for one version of the row: (m)

theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/j… I have now unearthed the thread. You'll see I quoted a JSTOR article (twice!) on the exact wording of the Hume footnote:
Aug 26, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
In all the discussion of the Afghan debacle, it's important to be clear that the US did not go into Afghanistan originally to build democracy, support women's rights etc. Those were post-hoc justifications. It was a response to 9/11, driven by a combination of fear and revenge > I have unearthed this document from Sept 13, 2001 on a meeting between Armitage and Pakistan's intelligence chief which captures the mood at the time:
nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB3…
Apr 24, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Seeing lots of criticism on here about the US failure to help India. FWIW 1) I think the US should help India both for humanitarian reasons and pragmatic self-interest. That much should be obvious. > > 2) Helping India is far harder than some believe. You are looking at a near failure of state capacity and that is hard to fix from outside (unless you want to send in military hospitals, logistics support and mobile vax clinics etc)
Aug 31, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is worth reading. As ever, I'd urge caution in interpreting exactly what is happening on the LAC in Ladakh (reminder, this is uninhabited, remote, high-altitude terrain and it's extremely difficult to get certainty on clashes there) >> >> One problem I see is that we still don't know for sure what is motivating the Chinese. Is this about tactics on the ground, or a broader geopolitical power play? If it's the latter, it can be anything from i) growing US-India ties ii) Tibet >>
Jul 23, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Well worth taking the time to watch this interview with John Gray. Quite bleak about the huge changes underway, the retreat of liberalism, the rise of religion (including woke religion) and nationalism, and civilisational fracturing.

unherd.com/thepost/john-g… He also argues that the Cold War was abnormal in that it was between two ideologies that emerged from the west & the Enlightenment - communism and liberalism. Now sees us reverting to a much earlier period of separate civilisational zones (including west, India, China, Russia).
Jun 16, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
If I am reading this right, the assertion that 17 of those who died were "exposed to sub-zero temperatures" suggests it was terrain-related/eg fall into a ravine/river rather than due only to fighting. That changes the picture a bit if confirmed. For perspective, and am I only commenting on Siachen here, the majority of casualties at these high altitudes are weather- and terrain-related. (Pakistan lost 140 men in the Siachen region in 2012 due to an avalanche, not fighting.) >
May 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I have been avoiding commenting on the India-China standoff but my only comment after years of trying to make sense of this stuff, is that it’s really hard to know for sure what goes on in these mountains > > Whatever is happening is far too remote and too far from civilian populations to verify anything. Maps and satellite photos can help but they can also mislead >
Apr 8, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I am trying not to get into the war of words between #India and #Pakistan over whether or not the Indian Air Force shot down a Pakistani F-16 in their recent confrontation. But since it keeps coming up on my timeline, some general observations (thread). I learned from my first book on the Siachen war that nobody is a reliable witness. A lot of this is fog of war - tricks of memory, but also hierarchy – people will say what their bosses want to hear, aggrandise their own role, cover up for incompetence or simply get it wrong.