I read the Dune series before I picked up any serious political literary work. The Dune universe was my first highly layered and psyche-shaking encounter with power as a teenager.

And then, years later, in my formal study of politics (and armed with an alarming number of PDFs), I was hit with something mildly inconvenient: the world I was studying looked suspiciously like Arrakis, just with less sand. And maybe the world leaders may have a lesson or two to learn from the tragic but prophetic anti-hero, Paul Atrides, on how to rule the universe (for now, just the world).

As the final part of the movie series drops this year in December, I feel the need to talk about how this Denis Villeneuve movie has suspiciously high similarities that we may want to carry beyond the IMAX screens and into our politics.

We live in a world where you can spend years reading about power and hegemony– or you can simply watch what happens when everyone really, really wants that crude oil (or spice, in the context of Dune). 

It would be unfair to reduce Dune to Science fiction. I'd say it's a brilliant political non-fiction with better costumes and handsome villains (man I miss feyd rautha).

The crux of the entire series: whoever controls the most valuable resource in the universe, controls everything else.

What could this resource be? Some would look at the current Strait of Hormuz situation and say crude oil or natural gas; others would go on to include data, and even your attention span.

‘The spice must flow’ may sound like just another dramatic line from the movie, until you start finding yourself hunting for an LPG cylinder in the current times of resource shortage. These are essentially great times to realise exactly why Baron Harkonnen expended two of his nephews to protect the control over spice-loaded Arrakis. *cough* Trum- *cough*

My favourite part of Dune is that it removes that blurry, politically soothing language that our leaders often hide behind when they want to expand power. Empires in today’s world rarely identify themselves as an empire.

Language is softened, and political correctness conceals growing authoritarian tendencies. Regimes like to offer you softer entrances, words like border security and national interests. In Dune, however, every leader is refreshingly honest about the fact that they are there to take things and stay in charge. It is almost admirable. Almost. 

And then there is prophecy and faith, a key part of the whole million-year plot of Dune. It is not natural, but a careful manufacture. The Bene Gesserit (an all-female, quasi-religious order in the Dune-verse) are the chief architects who strategically plant prophecies and run a brilliant PR for an incoming super being who will in the future lead the known-universe (Kwisatz Haderach).

It is almost funny how echoes of this exist in the way narratives are built around leaders today. The myth of inevitability is spoken of, again and again, until it feels like a reality. If people start believing that a certain person is destined to lead, they are far more willing to follow.

This is more common across spaces where oppression and turmoil have become a thing of daily life, and the populace needs a Messiah, a sense of faith, to break free from their decades-long bondage from external powers (like the Fremen people on Arrakis).

Faith, it turns out, is one of the most efficient political technologies ever invented, and it remains highly compatible with fear. The crux: Do not just rule, become inevitable.

Another interesting juxtaposition is the role of ecology and environment. Arrakis is a desert planet. Natural resources, apart from spice, are rare, and that lays a perfect breeding ground for scarcity politics. Scarcity creates values, and value creates the need for control. When people are fighting for their survival, dissent becomes a luxury, and fighting back becomes harder than usual. If at all, they fight back, they become ‘rats’. Controlling the choices available is a key textbook tool for gaining power in both reality, and it the dune-verse. 

From what panned out in West Asia to what went down in Venezuela, or through the ripples of South Asia, it becomes very tempting to say that Dune predicted our modern world. But I differ. Dune predicted nothing.

The creator of the Dune-verse simply paid attention and then exaggerated just enough to make the existing patterns obvious (we miss you Frank Herbert, you would’ve loved dune memes).

The real discomfort lies in how little exaggeration in such books and movies is actually needed. At some point, you stop reading books like Dune as fiction and start reading it as a particularly well-written mirror. Through the dramatic sandy backdrops, dune hints to us that many leaders in the guise of charming speeches and buttered-up campaigns, have been following this exact same playbook for centuries, just like the messiahs and god-emperors of Dune. 

Don’t fall for the types of charming and good-looking Paul Atreides, do not fall the the myth of inevitability.

But the spice must flow. And so must everything else. As it was written. Qithlas'ha

TW: mention of rape and abuse

please bear with this little storytime:

I spent the first 15 years of my life in an all-girls school in a small town. It was a crazy place in its own right. There, I had my first encounters with everything ranging from bullying to raging showdowns in the corridors during recess. In no way will I ever look back and say that it was a sane space. But somehow, it was the last time I ever felt fully safe. ever.

What came right after was my first building block of understanding the phenomena of *drum rolls*, the boys’ locker room. For my senior secondary, I moved to a co-ed school, and at first, it wasn’t that crazy. Most boys were kind, welcoming, and ‘harmless’. They shared homework, lunch and bus rides back home. It was all fairly neat until I started noticing the first set of inconsistencies in their behaviour.

A boy who could be waving at you during the morning assembly was laughing with his friends in a mob when a girl passed by— pointing at her skirt, or her chest, a bra strap that could be flashing off her plain white shirt, or god knows what. Their language changed, their tone, the themes of their jokes, the names of their group chats, the look in their eyes— everything was so different in a no-female setting. Like a whole new person whom I didn’t know.

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My teenage self didn’t get to process this much. The most common pattern was how these boys acted so unnaturally hateful when a girl rejected them. The same girl they gazed at for hours became the centre of jokes for the size of her breasts and the ‘hairiness’ of her legs. The change was almost overnight, so abrupt, so radical, and extremely difficult to digest.

Over the course of both my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I got more time and examples to build my understanding of this. This one time, my male peer sheepishly told me that the boys in our class have a separate GC where they often discuss… ‘women’. He went ahead and shared some distasteful ‘memes’ and ‘stickers’ that float on that group, and how he absolutely hates to be a part of it.

I could largely empathise with him, almost thanked him for sharing this with me, but also followed it up with a question— ‘Why are you still part of that group?’. His answer explained everything I ever needed to know— ‘I don't want to be excluded from my friend group, I still have two more years to graduate’. The answer, well… was uncomfortable to say the least. This was my first introduction to the discomfort of boys’ locker room realities.

Enough of backstories, let me take this buildup to exactly where I wanted it to land— the news all of our mothers and us have been gutting for the last few days, the existence of this ‘how to rape your wife 101’ telegram group.

I grew up reading all sorts of feminist literature, I am a student of politics, daughter of a feminist mother, and I work on the ground with women through my work. I, for the larger part of my life, always felt like I was well-equipped, well-read, and thoroughly in touch with the realities of being a woman. Like I had seen it all, the worst was all under, and nothing could move me.

But somehow, each time I read news like this, my legs get a little colder. I shrink and stare at the ceiling, often trying to be okay, trying to make peace. The only way I move on from one horrifying piece of news is, well… reading another even more gut-wrenching article, and then another, and another, endlessly.

Which discipline should I refer to for an answer to what I feel? Should I speak with a psychologist, or a scholar of gender studies, or must I read books that run page after page explaining the politics of patriarchy? Which theory must I dig into? Who should I cite? Where do I go with the heavy feeling of helplessness? How do I explain it to someone that numbers have started running from ‘ten men assaulted a woman’ to ‘hundreds of men are interested in learning how to abuse their wife while she sleeps?’— and yet I do not feel shocked anymore?

For a brief second, my brain rejects it, and I tell myself that it is too much, it cannot be real. and this is immediately followed by this… weird feeling…like a door closing in my head, like ‘ofc this is real, it always has been’.

From reading ’s Handmaid’s Tale to realising that so much of it isn’t fiction anymore. It’s like a prophecy coming true, pacing out right in front of me each day, a little more.

We grew up learning that if we do all the right things, there is a very high chance that we may be safe. If we dress right, avoid eye contact, clip our sentences, not drink too much, tick the box for every condition— we may just make it out alive (if not fine).

But there is a big, big lie that sits in the middle of all this conditioning. They tell us that safety is a destination we will arrive at. What no one tells us is that it can be taken away even when we are inside the place we were told we had arrived. No one really prepares you to save yourself from the person you love, you marry, and you make babies with. Suddenly, the lessons collapse and boundaries are blurred. Isn’t the idea of love all about the act of being vulnerable, to close your eyes and fall into the arms of the one person who will always watch over you?

Most of the victims of such telegram groups will never really know what happened to them. They will continue to kiss their husbands a good morning, carry their surnames, and plan surprises for their birthdays. Most of the men around me, my friends, colleagues, peers, and acquaintances, will comfortably move through life without ever having to fully confront this reality. The internet will sing ‘not all men’ in chorus and then continue talking about Coachella outfits. You and I will go to bed with that throbbing pain in our chest, again.

Not all men have perpetrated, but somehow almost all men have avoided engaging with the issue and hide behind the guise of neutrality. They continue to stay in those GCs, brush away jokes, laugh along, breed an ecosystem that continues to grope, rape and kill women.

And maybe that is the scariest part of it all. Monstrous men will continue to exist, and they will always be explained and apologised away by the nicer ones.

(read the original CNN report here)

To speak of unrest in South Asia is not an interruption of order but a renewal of the order itself. From the monumental task of nation-building to the era of market liberalisation, the subcontinent’s long postcolonial journey now finds itself under the shadow of profound volatility.

Political polarisation, economic fluctuations, a diverse social fabric, and ecological vulnerability have all contributed to a landscape marked by a smorgasbord of challenges, characterised by institutional endurance, which is undoubtedly debatable but certainly questionable in its legitimacy. What was once seen as progress has now come to resemble a never-ending U-turn. This turbulent juncture exposes the cracks of a developmental project that promised modernity through growth but delivered unequal emancipation.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta observes, the moral authority of the post-colonial state was underpinned by policies of welfare and nationalist values, but now finds itself under scrutiny due to majoritarian populism and neoliberalism—a framing that explains why market reforms lead to resentment and mobilisation indirectly, rather than liberal stability.

To speak then, of a “new age of unrest” is to acknowledge a historical paradigm in which sovereignty, subsistence, and sustainability are entangled. South Asia’s faultlines are not unusual because it is a region trying to rebuild its order from the remnants of its own collapsed promises.

Political Polarisation

The political landscape of South Asian states is marked by a structural crisis of governing through division today. The recognition of states’ sovereignty was built on hopes, however fragile they may be, that democracy could accommodate diversity while secular values could absorb majoritarianism. These hopes are now crumbling under the weight of a shared regional pathology, i.e., the weaponisation of identity as an instrument of rule.

One of the most insidious ramifications of polarisation is that it makes politics ontological. The focus has shifted from policy-making to resurrecting a past based on identity, civilisational pride, and ethno-nationalism, which systematically hinders the creative imagination of the future. The institutional endurance has also decayed as the media, universities, and judiciary have all been hollowed out across south asian states. Ayesha Jalal argues that Pakistan, as a “garrison state,” militarises society and treats any form of dissent or opposition as an attack on the traditional fabric and the idea of a nation.

The diversity of South Asia and the inevitable social hierarchy foster polarisation even more by the normalisation of everyday hate, vigilantism, and validating a false sense of meritocracy and superiority. The social unrest that this unleashes goes far deeper and rots the very idea of coexistence from inside.

At last, it also paved the way for populist regimes as south asian people across all countries suffer the most because issues like inequality are weaponised and channelled into identity politics rather than forging a class-conscious solidarity.

If the region has to survive its own differences, it must learn to be comfortable with disagreement.

Economic Pendulums

The South Asian economy has, for a long time, dealt in extremes. But this cannot be reduced to a cyclical characteristic, as it reveals deeper structural fragilities within the system. It is essential to acknowledge that the unrest in the region is not despite the growth but because of it.

Economist Kaushik Basu calls the post-liberalisation growth a form of “premature affluence” that has been impressive in terms of achieving middle-income consumption but lacks the depth of a broad-based productivity. There is a pattern of growth and development without transformation despite decades of restructuring.

The post-1990s economic structure that persists has bolstered the elites, while a large number of workers remain employed in informal and unprotected jobs. The informal sector is flexible, but it also leads to lower tax revenue and chronic unemployment. As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have argued, the binary between growth and redistribution needs to be done away with.

In a region where 10% of the population owns 77% the national wealth in India, and elite tax exemptions cost more than the education budget in Pakistan, not to mention the Gen Z protests in remittance-dependent Nepal, inequality is bound to breed political resentment, which further fuels populism. Fiscal populism ensured steady consumption through debts and subsidies but overrode long-term policy change in key areas of healthcare, education, and public infrastructure.

Unless the region addresses issues at the institutional level, the economic pendulum will keep swinging.

Climate Crisis

Climate Change lays bare the contradictions within South Asia’s growth story. It does not lead to turmoil the way elections or wars do. It destabilises slowly and reveals that development in these states remains colonial by design, i.e., extractive and elite-centred, and therefore is a form of dispossession.

Every natural calamity in South Asia reveals that governance in the region is not based on care. Climate Apartheid is reinforced when growth is built on overconsumption, and displacement consequences hit the poor. Activists argue that South Asian states do not operate from a rights-based responsibility model and are therefore unequipped to handle the crisis, ultimately depending on aid and resorting to political spectacle in the name of reform.

Rapid urbanisation, agrarian extraction, and mismanagement of water systems have all contributed to a cyclical crisis that is central to the region’s growth. Perhaps the most destabilising repercussion is the migration induced due to climate. Unlike the West, where at least the refugee discourse exists, the refugees in South Asia are almost invisible. Moreover, it exacerbates gendered violence and pushes the marginalised to fend for themselves. The unrest does not always translate into protests and movements rather leads to conflict over resources and a steady erosion of belonging. The region ultimately is faced with the question: What does development mean in a decaying world?

The Way Forward

South Asian turbulence isn’t restricted to the nations in the region but also extends to players beyond it. The area is strategically placed, from both continental and maritime angles, forming a point of competing fields. From the USA’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to the Chinese BRI, the region finds itself at a crossroads of balancing acts. Smaller states like Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives are at higher risk of facing difficulties navigating external pressures, debts, and aid.

Historical precursors have, and will continue to shape trust and suspicion among neighbours, like how the brutality of partition still divides the political psyche of Pakistan and India. The past still influences everything from how nations navigate defence spending to how they create cultural exchange. The continued suspicion and cognitive disdain prevent the nations from generating meaningful partnerships or dialogue. A huge chunk of the security dilemma in South Asia can be traced back to colonial interventions, generating instability to date. As the global academia, leadership, and players look towards Indo-Pacific as the next centre of power, South Asia will continue to find itself in spaces of potential fragility, from both within and from the outside

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