The lotus in Bengal

Recently: How is new technology reshaping the battlefield? Matthew Ford on why the most sophisticated weapons systems can’t overcome the oldest problems in warfare.

Today: India’s prime minister wins a state his party had never won. … Five thousand U.S. troops are leaving Germany after the chancellor says a word too many. … &c.

For members: How are the new authoritarians doing? + La Niña is out, El Niño may be in—with the American South still waiting for rain.

+ New music from Mei Semones ...

Modi comes back

On Monday, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, walked into the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in New Delhi as confetti fell, declaring, “The lotus blooms in West Bengal”—a reference to the party’s symbol.

His party had just won 206 of 294 seats in the eastern state—the first BJP victory there in the party’s 46-year history. Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister who’d governed Bengal since 2011 and become one of Modi’s most prominent national critics, lost both her government and her own seat. The BJP also held Assam, the northeastern state it’s governed since 2016, and its coalition returned to power in Puducherry, a federally administered territory on the southeastern coast. Two years ago, Modi lost his parliamentary majority; on Monday, he recovered a state his party had spent decades failing to crack. How’d he do it?

Some of the answer may be in plain view: The BJP campaigned on religious polarization—accusing Banerjee of “appeasing” Bengal’s Muslims, who make up about 27 percent of the state’s population—and capitalized on voter fatigue after 14 years of Banerjee’s government. Some may be in the campaign’s mechanics: Before voting, the Election Commission of India ran a “Special Intensive Revision” of Bengal’s electoral rolls, removing at least 2.7 million eligible voters—a figure exceeding the BJP’s margin of victory. The Commission has done the same in more than a dozen states. It’s unclear whether the removed voters would have changed the result.

It’s been, in all events, a month of mixed fortunes for governments on the populist right around the world. Hungary turned its out. Argentina’s just won decisive midterms. Italy’s has governed more conventionally than its opponents expected it to. And now, India’s has won where it had always lost. … See “After Orbán,” below.

Meanwhile

• The truce that won’t hold still. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said on Monday that U.S. forces sank six Iranian small boats while moving to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as the United Arab Emirates reported Iranian missile and drone fire. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the ceasefire isn’t over; Donald Trump says he’s reviewing Tehran’s 30-day proposal but doubts its viability. It’s Week 19 of the year, Week 10 of the war.
• Five thousand troops, one word. The Pentagon will pull 5,000 troops from Germany over the next six to 12 months, fulfilling Trump’s threat after Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Iran had “humiliated” the U.S. Trump named Spain and Italy as possible next targets. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the rift as another episode in “the ongoing disintegration of our alliance.” The chairs of the Senate and House Armed Services committees, Roger Wicker and Mike Rogers, criticized the president for the move—still a rare thing among Republicans in Washington—warning it will embolden Russia.
• Tracks in the Karoo. Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 Press Freedom Index hits a 25-year low, with the U.S. falling seven places to 64th, between Botswana and Panama. … Three people have died on a cruise ship off Cape Verde in a suspected hantavirus outbreak; about 150 remain aboard. … Japan and Australia sign a critical-minerals and defense pact during Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s visit to Canberra. … A Cameroon trial shows malaria vaccines cutting child mortality by 70 percent. … & Paleontologists have found 132-million-year-old dinosaur tracks on South Africa’s Western Cape coast.

From the despatch

After Orbán

How are the new authoritarians doing?

Last Sunday in Budapest, Hungarians voted Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party out of office after 16 years, handing Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party a parliamentary supermajority and a mandate to dismantle the authoritarian legal architecture he’d spent his tenure constructing. On Wednesday in San Salvador, Nayib Bukele signed constitutional reforms allowing life sentences for children as young as 12—his fourth year of emergency rule, with roughly 1 percent of the country’s population in detention and his approval ratings still above 80 percent. In the same week, two regimes of the populist anti-liberal right, moving in opposite directions.

Stepping back, the wider picture doesn’t seem any less mixed. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, lost his parliamentary majority last year and now governs in a coalition. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won another term and jailed his most plausible challenger. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has governed more conventionally than her critics expected. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, just won the country’s midterms decisively. And in the United States, Donald Trump’s administration has spent the year demolishing institutional norms at a pace that has surprised even its supporters. Prominent formerly pro-Trump voices, from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly to Candace Owens, have publicly broken with the president over the war with Iran. And the ongoing release of files connected to Jeffrey Epstein keeps producing documents that contradict what the administration has said about Trump’s relationship with the late financier and convicted sex offender.

So while some evidence suggests populist anti-liberalism may be breaking, some suggests as much as the opposite.

Weather report

The long dry

39.3508° N, 101.7102° W

La Niña and El Niño are the two phases of a Pacific climate pattern that shapes weather around much of the planet—La Niña the cool phase, El Niño the warm—and they push weather in opposite directions. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now says La Niña has faded out, and gives El Niño a 61 percent chance of emerging by mid-summer …

New music

‘Kurage’

Mei Semones is a Brooklyn-based, jazz-influenced, indie-rock musician producing lyrics in English and Japanese. You’ll hear both here. (Kurage means jellyfish.) Mei sings and plays guitar, accompanied by her father, Don (incidentally a chemical engineer), on euphonium.