pronouncements acknowledge that India gained freedom from the British in 1947. Yet his BJP believes the country has been truly free for much less time. The clearest articulation of this sentiment came from Kangana Ranaut, a Bollywood actress and since 2024 a BJP lawmaker, who declared in an interview some years ago that India only achieved independence with the election of Mr Modi in 2014. The statement is one of those to be taken seriously, not literally. In the eyes of the BJP’s leaders, the India they inherited was too effete, too anglophone and too accommodating of minorities. Their project was to build a “civilisational state defined by the country’s ancient Hindu heritage”, as Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank in Washington, put it in a paper in 2024. He described the new political order as India’s “Second Republic”. A new republic needs a new identity. Around independence in 1947 the constituent assembly settled on what India’s national symbols should be. Over time, civic bodies picked up the statuary of British kings, queens and sundry dukes and deposited them in far-off parks (or, deliciously, in the zoo). State governments renamed cities and institutions. The BJP has been on a similar mission since 2014. The obvious purpose is to promote its Hindu-first vision. The national song was passed over for anthem status in part because its invocation of Hindu deities was seen as excluding Muslims. That is no longer a concern. In recent years the government has changed to saffron—a colour associated with Hinduism and the party itself—its flagship train service, the logo of the public broadcaster and, last month, the uniform of the men’s national hockey team. Last year it overhauled a jobs scheme named after Mahatma Gandhi and rebranded it as VB-G RAM G, a tortured acronym reverse-engineered to include the name of Lord Ram. For all that, it is the non-religious parts of the BJP’s project that more closely resemble the nation-building of a young country. Along with national symbols and a shared vision of the future, a new republic must have an origin story to give it meaning. Unfortunately for the BJP, the freedom movement and its pantheon of heroes already fulfilled that purpose. That left two strategies.
The first was to repurpose long-dead figures. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was demoted from nation-builder to incompetent, entitled scion of the elite. In his place the BJP’s myth-makers built up Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Nehru’s home minister, who they insist was robbed of the top job. (Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat has immortalised Patel with the world’s tallest statue.) In any case, they say, Subhas Chandra Bose, a revolutionary with no time for Gandhi’s non-violence humbug, was the real first prime minister. The other is to lean on the one towering figure they do have. In June the cabinet feted Mr Modi for becoming India’s “longest serving elected PM for consecutive terms”. The heavy caveating excludes Nehru’s first five years (elections had not yet been held) and Indira Gandhi (she lost power and then regained it). The animus against Nehru is understandable. There cannot be two first prime ministers of independent India. The BJP may have saffronised India. But its revisionism has failed to take. That much was clear during protests for education reform last month in Delhi. Students carried copies of the constitution. They displayed photos of B.R. Ambedkar, its architect; Bhagat Singh, an anti-colonial revolutionary; and Gandhi. They chanted slogans dating to the freedom struggle. Despite having spent most of their conscious lives in the second republic, their symbols were those of the first. Building a nation is no easy task. Retrofitting one is harder still.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/08/16/indias-refounding-fathers
The promise and the pitfalls of China’s new Arctic shipping route Will China ever learn to love chocolate? A glum China pines for the 1990s
The promise and the pitfalls of China’s new Arctic shipping route The Northern Sea Route is a pricey and risky alternative to the Suez Canal Aug 20th 2026 FOR A WORLD newly preoccupied with maritime choke points, the voyage of the Dubai Tower offers a flicker of promise. The container ship set off from the Chinese port of Ningbo on August 15th to begin the first regular cargo service between Asia and Europe via the Arctic Ocean. Sea Legend, the vessel’s Chinese owner, says that it will complete the 5,000km journey to Felixstowe, on Britain’s east coast, in about 20 days. That is roughly twice as fast as sailing the usual route via the Suez Canal. Crucially, the “Arctic Express” (as the company calls the service) avoids the risk of being entangled in the Middle East’s military conflicts.
The new service via the so-called Northern Sea Route (NSR), which runs through the Bering Strait and over the top of Russia, is an early test of China’s Arctic ambitions. In 2018 the country outlined plans to develop shipping routes, mining and infrastructure in the Arctic, hoping to take advantage of rapidly receding polar ice. Many of the plans, which are marketed collectively as a “polar silk road”, have met resistance. Seven of the eight countries with Arctic territory are Western democracies. They worry that China is working closely with Russia in the region and that Chinese activities there could be useful for future military purposes, such as operating submarines. Some bridled at China, whose northernmost point is on about the same latitude as Hamburg, declaring itself a “near-Arctic state”. Nonetheless China hopes to attract fresh interest in the northern route from governments and companies alarmed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the threat from Iranian-backed Houthi fighters to shipping in the Red Sea. China is also more anxious than ever about its own reliance on the narrow Malacca Strait, the hinge between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, through which most of its energy imports pass. And China will soon not be alone on the NSR. In June Japan said that it would revise its Arctic policy to promote the route. A South Korean shipping company, PanStar, plans to send one of its container ships on a trial run through the Arctic Ocean on
August 22nd, aiming to complete the voyage from Busan to Felixstowe in just 18 days. Thanks to climate change, conditions for the NSR are likely to grow more favourable. The minimum summer extent of Arctic ice has been shrinking by more than 12% a decade. In March the maximum extent of winter ice reached its lowest level since records began in 1979. On August 16th, the latest available reading, Arctic ice covered 5.5m square kilometres. That is well below the median extent of ice on the same date in the years between 1981 and 2010 but above the lowest ever extent, recorded in 2012. That September, the ice shrank to just 3.4m square kilometres. One selling point for Sea Legend’s service is that a shorter sailing time means less fuel burned—fuel accounts for seven-tenths of shipping costs. That also reduces carbon emissions. And cooler weather on the Northern Sea Route is better for transporting some high-tech goods that are sensitive to temperature. Without refrigeration, temperatures inside containers on the Suez Canal route can reach 60°C. The Dubai Tower is carrying goods including batteries, solar modules and electric-vehicle components, mainly from cities in China’s Yangzi river delta. For all those apparent advantages, the Arctic Express also highlights the limitations of the NSR. It will run only from August to October, when the route is largely free of ice. Sea Legend plans eight voyages in that window, using seven vessels. For the rest of the year, only ships with reinforced hulls may navigate the Arctic. Sea Legend has bought or leased some of these, but only relatively small ones, as they are costly and in short supply. They may also need to be escorted by Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers. All the extra costs erode the northern route’s price advantage. So do insurance premiums. They are usually higher for the NSR than for the Suez Canal, despite war-risk premiums for the canal. They are also 40% higher than for sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, the chief alternative to the Suez Canal. Allianz, an insurance giant, warned in its recent annual safety review of the shipping industry that the remote Arctic route posed significant extra risks because of its harsh weather and the limited infrastructure available for repairs, assistance, rescue or salvage. It said that
machinery damage or failure caused almost half of the reported shipping incidents in Arctic waters in the past decade. The environmental impact is potentially greater, too. Bellona, a Norwegian environmental group, warned in a report last year that in the Arctic there are no effective ways to deal with fuel spills because of the difficulty of cleaning up fuel in cold conditions and the distance from emergency-response centres. (The International Maritime Organisation has banned the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic since 2024, though Russia does not heed the ban.) Noise pollution from ships also affects marine mammals such as whales and walruses in the Arctic more than elsewhere, since low- frequency sounds travel farther in cold water. Ships on the northern route pass through vital feeding and breeding grounds. International carriers avoid the route in large part because of geopolitical risk. Ships on the NSR often need permits, ice-breaking services or other assistance from Russia, potentially violating Western sanctions linked to its war in Ukraine. Shipping may in future be disrupted by an intensifying contest between Russia and other countries to control the region’s ample mineral resources. The Arctic, once preserved as a zone of peace, is becoming increasingly militarised, as Donald Trump continues to threaten Greenland and NATO seeks to deter Russian aggression on its northern flank. All this helps to explain why total transit cargo on the Northern Sea Route was just 3.2m tonnes in 2025, up from about 3m the year before. That is tiny compared with about 464m tonnes through the Suez Canal last year. The bulk of Arctic shipping is between Russian and Chinese ports, rather than between Asia and Europe, much of it consisting of shipments of Russian oil or gas. In a recent report, the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, concluded that the route’s “most viable function…remains that of a selective corridor for Arctic resource exports.” Still, as Malte Humpert of the Arctic Institute in Washington argues, the NSR will grow in importance for China as a seasonal trade corridor for when traditional routes are disrupted. He envisages hundreds of annual container passages a decade hence. “The question is when Western operators decide to re-enter the market—and more importantly, whether they still