Features

Roots at Home and Thoughts in the world:

Published

2 years ago

2024/01/21

Thilina Walpola

The influence of Tagore on Mahagama Sekera

by Liyanage Amarakeerthi

(Text of the speech delivered at a Panel Discussion held at Svami Vivekanda Cultural Center in Colombo, on January 12, 2024 to commemorate Mahagama Sekera. Sekera was an influential a poet, a novelist, a painter, a lyricist, a filmmaker, and a literary scholar, and he died in 1976 at the age of 47)

This panel is primarily about the ways in which Mahagama Sekera’s art was shaped by Indian thought. Since ‘Indian thought’ encompasses a great deal of philosophical schools and religions, including Buddhism, there is no Sinhala art which has not been shaped, one way or another, by something ‘Indian.’ So, I must be specific and quite narrow in my focus. Hence, the focus on Tagore.

Gurudeva Ravindranath Tagore has inspired us, Sinhala people or Sri Lankans in multiple ways. As the panel today will amply demonstrate, Tagore’s influence can be seen in nearly all domains of our art scene. In the field of music, perhaps, his influence is the most pronounced. The Sinhala term for influence is abhasaya – a Sanskrit word, and it means ‘light’ or ‘reflection’. Gurudeva’s light has been quite pervasive in Sinhala art scene, though in recent times the significance of that light has been forgotten to some extent.

In this speech, I want to remind ourselves of that significance by focusing on the poetry and literary thought of Mahagama Sekera – one of our greatest modern poets. In doing so, however, I will be highlighting what I consider to be the most important lesson we could have learnt from Gurudeva Tagore. I have been arguing for more than a decade now in my Sinhala writing that Tagore’s strong critique of ethnic and cultural nationalism, a line of thought that could have enriched our cultural and political thought, failed to make a significant impact on the Sinhala language intellectual world. But it is never too late to rediscover that aspect of Tagore, and Mahagama Sekera’s work provides us with an opening into that rediscovery.

Many are Sri Lankan scholars and artistes who studied at Shanti Niketan, and all of them brought back some of aspects of Tagore’s thought. The most influential among them is perhaps, Ediriveera Sarachchandra, who later became a great playwright, a novelist, and a scholar in literature. And he is, arguably, the most important renaissance figure in the 20th century.

His days at Shanti Niketan are beautifully described in his memoir, Pin aeti Sarasavi varamak Denne. The influence of Tagore has certainly helped Sarachchandra and others to discover ‘our own traditions’ in art. Sarachchandra’s turn to folk theater to find an indigenous form of modern theater may have been encouraged by what Gurudeva did in the field of theater in the early 20^th century. Tagore’s influence on the field of Sinhala music has been pointed out by many knowledgeable scholars.

While paying tribute to Gurudeva for everything we have learnt from him, one must also recognize the fact that we have also missed one of the key lessons of Tagore. The lesson is the importance of cultivating a critical distance from nationalism, especially from ethnic nationalism, and the need of learning critically from Western modernity, especially science.

Tagore saw Western scientific, technological, and artistic achievements as human achievements that can be shared with all humanity. While critiquing Western colonialism and fighting to defeat it, Gurudeva had this to say, “Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goals of human history. And India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other. She has made grave errors in setting up the boundary walls too rigidly between races…”(Tagore. Nationalism. 2009: 34).

Gurudeva’s belief in our shared humanity did not make him a thinker floating in the sky, and he was an inter-culturalist thinker. The rooted cosmopolitanism of Tagore is a lesson we have either overlooked or insufficiently learnt. Sarachchandra, who was the most known intellectual to be influenced by Tagore and his legacy never mentioned Gurudeva’s brilliant critique of nationalism. The renaissance generation of Sinhala literary culture in the middle of the 20^th century, especially the intellectuals associated with the University of Peradeniya, were ready to learn from the world rather than being parochially restricting themselves to what was taken as indigenous tradition. But their openness was not articulated as it was often done by Tagore. For example, Gurudeva once said,

“That our forefathers, 3,000 years ago, has finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe so poor. Had it been true that all that is to be done has been done in the past, once for all, then our continued existence could only be a burden to the earth…( The Makers of Modern India. 2012: 188).”

Sekeara did not live long enough to articulate his intellectual positions in non-literary writings- a mode in which Tagore was remarkably prolific. But Sekera’s worldview is quite close to Tagore’s.

Mahagama Sekera, to repeat my main argument, provides us with an opportunity to revisit the Tagore we have missed. At numerous places in Sekera’s poetry one finds moving calls for an ethnic unity and harmony in Sri Lanka. For example, in Mak Nisada Yath, he imagines that Sri Lanka’s scientific and technological development would result in greater ethnic unity and stronger integration of diverse cultures:

“From the exhaust pipes
Of hydro-powerhouses
Comes out the rings of white fumes
Like an embryo of a future dream.
Seen on the other side,
Is the mountain rage of sapphire,
And this river descends from
Under the shadow of the mountain peak
Adorned with the Buddha’s footprint.
Sebastian.Nadaraja Mohamad
When this electricity
Lightens up
This country tomorrow
We will unite
At the peak of Sri Pada mountains!!

Constant call for ethnic unity is found in many other poems of Sekera. Originally published in 1964, many years before the beginning of Sri Lanka’s civil war, these poems indicate an impending danger of ethically motivated political violence. Perhaps, the resurgence of Sinhala ethnic nationalism in the decade of 1950 has made Sekera worried about the eventuality that ethnic and cultural hype would bring about.

In addition to expressing his fears about the rise of ethnic nationalism, Sekera’s rooted cosmopolitanism is seen in his openness to the literary developments in the West and elsewhere.

Sekera’s poetry during the 1960s shows that he has been interested in what was happening in Western poetry. His collection, Heta Irak Payai (1963) attests to the fact that modernist poems of Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, or the French symbolists have shaped his art during that decade. Sekera was one the first Sinhala poet to experiment with the way poems are printed on page. Many poems in that collection are printed to make poems to something look at rather than something to be read.

When matured as a poet, he gradually moved away from such modernist experimentalism to Sinhala folk traditions and to narrative poems but without losing touch with the literary developments after modernism. In his narrative poems, he was still within the modernist tradition by using style of free verse which came into Sinhala in the early 1940s. The ‘free verse’ is a style defended and promoted by the ‘Peradeniya School’- a group of poets and critics who were educated at Western universities. Sekera seems to have kept close contact with such Avant Garde groups in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Though he was still using free verse style in the main, Sekera’s thematic vision was shaped by Asian philosophical traditions. For example, the narrative poem, Prabuddha, what considers to be his masterpiece, has numerous references to Upanishad, Bhagavat Geeta, Dhammapada, and other such texts. And the poem portrays a musician, who attempts to lead a refined and enlightened life without getting caught in capitalist consumerism and Westernized individualist life. Thus, Sekera has made a conscious attempt to learn from both the West and the East.

Sekera’s work, to sum up this section, demonstrates a cosmopolitan literary and artistic vision, which was not the mainstream of his time, especially during the 1970s. That literary cosmopolitanism has been directly and indirectly shaped by Gurudeva Tagore. If Sekera’s sensibilities, to be specific, are not shaped by Tagore, one sees a remarkable kinship between the thoughts of the two literary figures. Much like Tagore, Sekera was a poet, a writer of short fiction, a novelist, a lyricist, a filmmaker, a painter, and so on. In that sense too, Sekera looks to be modeling himself on Tagore. With his openness to new media, new art forms, I am sure Tagore would have made films if he were to live a decade or more.

Tagore was a rich thinker in whose fertile mind the best of the West or of modernity mingled into a fine synthesis with Asian thought. As Amartya Sen correctly puts it, Tagore was not just a rationalist objectivist. He believed in epistemological heterodoxy i.e. the existence of many forms of truth. “…While Tagore believed that modern science was essential to understanding physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were interestingly heterodox.

He did not take the simple ‘realist’ position often associated with modern science” (Argumentative Indian. 2005: 104.). In Sekera, I see a beginning of a wonderful synthesis of rationalist thought and visionary qualities found in Asian thought that cannot be rationally explained. All his narrative poems, Nomiyemi (1973) in particular, move away from naturalist realism into a realm of poetry where rationality and irrationality meet in a fine synthesis. This aspect of Sekera would have refined so much better in the next decade of his life. Sadly, that crucial decade never arrived.

In addition, in creating that poetic realm, Sekera often taps into Sinhala folk wisdom. In the famous section his mother the narrator of Prabuddha says,

‘Having walked over forests and jungles,
bringing all kinds of reeds home,
dying them in red, green, and so on
weaving mats in various designs,
You showed me, my mother,
This entire universe also has a certain design.

I did not know my mother,
That your face was a mirror
that reflected those days,
My own mind these days,
In those sunken eyes
I never saw happiness nor sadness.
Did you take in all suffering and comforts,
With a great sense of equanimity?
And, by doing so, did you gain peace and calmness of mind?
I earned money, fame, and glory.
I had palatial houses, cars, vehicles, and so on.
But none of them gave me peace of mind.
Had you realized that truth,
Without any of those material things?

Maknisada yath , (It was because..,) 1964 , the first of his long poems (or narrative poems) makes it abundantly clear that he has been heavily influenced by Ravindranath Tagore, especially by Geethanjali. For one thing, Sekera sees the divine in the everyday life of working people. For him divine is not necessarily in a supernatural place beyond this world.

“…when I open my eyes and look around
This is what I see:
Tractors
Factories
Airplanes
Machines
Electrical lights
The greatest secret of the world,
Electricity,
are gods.
The factories
Are the temples.

If there is an all-powerful god
Who creates this mother earth
And trees and plants
And all beings on it,
Who created machines
Rockets
I plead to Him
For one thing
Please grant us a powerful hand
And powerful mind.”

It is not difficult to see a shadow of Tagore’s though in these lines. Gurudeva Tagore, unlike Mahatma Gandhi, defended the technological advances of modernity. After this opening section Sekera explains why he is asking for a ‘powerful mind:’

Where there is a mind without fear
And no head is bent down [in submissiveness],
Where awareness is independent
And the world is not divided by narrow walls of indigenousness
Where there are words spring from the depths of truth

…

Where, the pure stream of water, which is reason,
Has not evaporated in the deadly dessert of outdated conventions,
Where you have led human minds forward towards
refined thoughts and actions
to such a kingdom liberation
My father, please wake my country up!! (71-2).

All of us know that the ideas and words in this excerpt are taken from Tagore- the famous 35^th poem of Gitanjali. To the contemporary reader this section might look like plagiarism. Typically, poets borrow things from other poets without being accused of stealing. After all, the idea of plagiarism is something quite modern and Western. All South Asian classics, especially the classics in modern South Asian languages such as Sinhala, have borrowed metaphors, stories, and even entire sections from the classical literary works in Pali and Sanskrit. Numerous sections of classical Sinhala poems are re-tellings of some sort. But to be fair by Sekera, when this section was turned into a song and the lyrics were published in a book, he acknowledged the fact that it was adaptation.

Though indebted to Tagore in the section above, Sekera pushes Tagore’s poetic thought a bit further.

“It was the man who,
Made the world emerge from the darkness.
It was the man who made the world fertile up to this day
It was the man who created God.
To create the mental kingdom of liberation

At least partially,
It was the man who shed
tears,sweat and blood up to this point (72).”

It is clear here that Sekera sees humanity to be more powerful than divinity. In fact, divinity is an offshoot of human efforts to make the world a better place. He goes onto celebrate the scientific advances humans have made. In fact, in the book cited, originally published in 1964, Sekera says, “in 25 years, humans will go to the moon,.. by that time, there will green grasses growing on the moon to welcome humans.’

Barely four years after the book’s publication, humans indeed landed on the moon, and, though for the green grass on the moon we will have to wait a while, Sekera’s optimism about human capabilities has a strong foundation. In that too, one can see the influence of Tagore. In many literary works of Tagore, one finds divine-like power among ordinary, working people, and the supernatural powers emerge out of extremely mundane situations. Some short stories of Tagore, such as “A single night,” are wonderful examples of such instances. This essay does not have space to deal with those stories.

Though Tagore was not entirely a rationalist thinker and an objectivist, he believed that science could help human beings to create a better life for themselves. His belief in modern science was one of the key points at which he differed from Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore and Gandhi disagreements on science have been documented by scholars and numerous times by Amartya Sen.

In 1934, Bihar was struck by an earthquake that killed thousands of people. Gandhi said that it was divine punishment for untouchability. Tagore, who was also working on untouchability along with Gandhi disagreed strongly and argued that such unscientific views about natural phenomena could propagate such interpretations among masses (Sen 2005: 103-4). For Tagore, untouchability was something to be defeated by socio-political reforms. In that sense, Sekera is much closer to Nehru than to Gandhi among the makers of modern India.

I argued earlier that Sekera’s attitude towards modernity and science is akin to that of Tagore’s. Sekera may have recognized that Pundit Nehru inherited Tagore’s appreciation of modern science and technology. In hearing Nehru’s death, Sekera wrote a song in which he correctly recognizes some salient aspects of the first prime minister of India.

The great river of thought
that comes from the past to the future
overflowed your noble heart and came forward.
Without dividing the humanity
Into segment with its many branches
That river of thought flowed treating everyone equally.
With your eyes that sees
All three times
You saw today
The world that comes into being tomorrow.

Tagore’s novels such as The Home and the World, and Gora that turn his cosmopolitan sensibilities into arresting literary expressions are much superior literary works compared even to the best of Sinhala literature. And there is nothing comparable with Tagore’s books Nationalism, The Religion of the Man among the books written by Sinhala literary writers. Sekera’s work too shows such limits. Though some of them are local masterpieces, we would expect much greater work from him. Unlike Tagore, Sekera died young. It seems to me that by the time he died, he was looking for the best modes to turn his sensibilities into literary or artistic expressions.

One can easily detect a major reason for Tagorean cosmopolitanism to be overshadowed in Sinhala cultural and political scene: the most important founding father of Sinhala nationalism, Anagarika Dharmapala, intensely disliked Tagore. And Dharmapala’s modern day disciples such as Gunadasa Amarasekara propagated for decades a kind of extreme nationalism that has no regard or understanding of rooted cosmopolitanism of Tagore.

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The NPP Government is more than a JVP offspring:

Published

14 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Rohana Wijeweera

It is also different from all past governments as it faces new and different challenges

No one knows whether the already broken ceasefire between the US and Iran, with Israel as a reluctant adjunct, will last the full 10 days, or what will come thereafter. The world’s economic woes are not over and the markets are yo-yoing in response to Trump’s twitches and Iran’s gate keeping at the Strait of Hormuz. The gloomy expert foretelling is that full economic normalcy will not return until the year is over even if the war were to end with the ceasefire. That means continuing challenges for Sri Lanka and more of the tough learning in the art of governing for the NPP.

The NPP government has been doing what most governments in Asia have been doing to cope with the current global crisis, which is also an Asian crisis insofar as oil supplies and other supply chains are concerned. What the government can and must do additionally is to be totally candid with the people and keep them informed of everything that it is doing – from monitoring import prices to the timely arranging of supplies, all the details of tender, the tracking of arrivals, and keeping the distribution flow through the market without bottlenecks. That way the government can eliminate upstream tender rackets and downstream hoarding swindles. People do not expect miracles from their government, only honest, sincere and serious effort in difficult circumstances. Backed up by clear communication and constant public engagement.

But nothing is going to stop the flow of criticisms against the NPP government. That is a fact of Sri Lankan politics. Even though the opposition forces are weak and have little traction and even less credibility, there has not been any drought in the criticisms levelled against the still fledgling government. These criticisms can be categorized as ideological, institutional and oppositional criticisms, with each category having its own constituency and/or commentators. The three categories invariably overlap and there are instances of criticisms that excite only the pundits but have no political resonance.

April 5 anniversary nostalgia

There is also a new line of criticism that might be inspired by the April 5 anniversary nostalgia for the 1971 JVP insurrection. This new line traces the NPP government to the distant roots of the JVP – its April 1965 founding “in a working-class home in Akmeemana, Galle” by a 22-year old Rohana Wijeweera and seven others; the short lived 1971 insurrection that was easily defeated; and the much longer and more devastating second (1987 to 1989) insurrection that led to the elimination of the JVP’s frontline leaders including Wijeweera, and brought about a change in the JVP’s political direction with commitment to parliamentary democracy. So far, so good, as history goes.

But where the nostalgic narrative starts to bend is in attempting a straight line connection from the 1965 Akmeemana origins of the JVP to the national electoral victories of the NPP in 2024. And the bend gets broken in trying to bridge the gap between the “founding anti-imperialist economics” of the JVP and the practical imperatives of the NPP government in “governing a debt-laden small open economy.” Yet this line of criticism differs from the other lines of criticism that I have alluded to, but more so for its moral purpose than for its analytical clarity. The search for clarity could begin with question – why is the NPP government more than a JVP offspring? The answer is not so simple, but it is also not too complicated.

For starters, the JVP was a political response to the national and global conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, piggybacking socialism on the bandwagon of ethno-nationalism in a bi-polar world that was ideologically split between status quo capitalism and the alternative of socialism. The NPP government, on the other hand, is not only a response to, but is also a product of the conditions of the 2010s and 2020s. The twain cannot be more different. Nothing is the same between then and now, locally and globally.

A pragmatic way to look at the differences between the origins of the JVP and the circumstances of the NPP government is to look at the very range of criticisms that are levelled against the NPP government. What I categorize as ideological criticisms include criticisms of the government’s pro-IMF and allegedly neo-liberal economic policies, as well as the government’s foreign policy stances – on Israel, on the current US-Israel war against Iran, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and the apparent closeness to the Modi government in India. These criticisms emanate from the non-JVP left and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Strands of nationalism

To digress briefly, there are several strands in the overall bundle of Sri Lankan nationalism. There is the liberal inclusive strand, the left-progressive strand, the exclusive Sinhala Buddhist Nationalist (SBN) strand, and the defensive strands of minority nationalisms. Given Sri Lanka’s historical political formations and alliances, much overlapping goes on between the different strands. The overlapping gets selective on an issue by issue basis, which in itself is not unwelcome insofar as it promotes plurality in place of exclusivity.

Historically as well, and certainly after 1956, the SBN strand has been the dominant strand of nationalism in Sri Lanka and has had the most influential say in every government until now. Past versions of the JVP frequently straddled the dominant SBN space. Currently, however, the dominant SBN strand is in one of its more dormant phases and the NPP government could be a reason for the current dormancy. This is an obvious difference between the old JVP and the new NPP.

A second set of criticisms, or institutional criticisms, emanate from political liberals and human rights activists and these are about the NPP government’s actions or non-actions in regard to constitutional changes, the future of the elected executive presidency, the status of provincial devolution and the timing of provincial council elections, progress on human rights issues, the resolution of unfinished postwar businesses including the amnesia over mass graves. These criticisms and the issues they represent are also in varying ways the primary concerns of the island’s Tamils, Muslims and the Malaiyaka (planntationn) Tamils. As with the overlapping between the left and the non-minority nationalists, there is also overlapping between the liberal activists and minority representatives.

A third category includes what might be called oppositional criticisms and they counterpose the JVP’s past against the NPP’s present, call into question the JVP’s commitment to multi-party democracy and raise alarms about a creeping constitutional dictatorship. This category also includes criticisms of the NPP government’s lack of governmental experience and competence; alleged instances of abuse of power, mismanagement and even corruption; alleged harassment of past politicians; and the failure to find the alleged mastermind behind the 2019 Easter bombings. At a policy and implementational level, there have been criticisms of the government’s educational reforms and electricity reforms, the responses to cyclone Ditwah, and the current global oil and economic crises. The purveyors of oppositional criticisms are drawn from the general political class which includes political parties, current and past parliamentarians, as well as media pundits.

Criticisms as expectations

What is common to all three categories of criticisms is that they collectively represent what were understood to be promises by the NPP before the elections, and have become expectations of the NPP government after the elections. It is the range and nature of these criticisms and the corresponding expectations that make the NPP government a lot more than a mere JVP offspring, and significantly differentiate it from every previous government.

The deliverables that are expected of the NPP government were never a part of the vocabulary of the original JVP platform and programs. The very mode of parliamentary politics was ideologically anathema to the JVP of Akmeemana. And there was no mention of or concern for minority rights, or constitutional reforms. On foreign policy, it was all India phobia without Anglo mania – a halfway variation of Sri Lanka’s mainstream foreign policy of Anglo mania and India phobia. For a party of the rural proletariat, the JVP was virulently opposed to the plantation proletariat. The JVP’s version of anti-imperialist economics would hardly have excited the Sri Lankan electorate at any time, and certainly not at the present time.

At the same time, the NPP government is also the only government that has genealogical antecedents to a political movement or organization like the JVP. That in itself makes the NPP government unique among Sri Lanka’s other governments. The formation of the NPP is the culmination of the evolution of the JVP that began after the second insurrection with the shedding of political violence, acceptance of political plurality and commitment to electoral democracy.

But the evolution was not entirely a process of internal transformation. It was also a response to a rapidly and radically changing circumstances both within Sri Lanka and beyond. This evolution has not been a rejection of the founding socialist purposes of the JVP in 1968, but their adaptation in the endless political search, under constantly changing conditions, for a non-violent, socialist and democratic framework that would facilitate the full development of the human potential of all Sri Lankans.

The burden of expectations is unmistakable, but what is also remarkable is their comprehensiveness and the NPP’s formal commitment to all of them at the same time. No previous government shouldered such an extensive burden or showed such a willing commitment to each and every one of the expectations. In the brewing global economic crisis, the criticisms, expectations and the priorities of the government will invariably be focussed on keeping the economy alive and alleviating the day-to-day difficulties of millions of Sri Lankan families. While what the NPP government can and must do may not differ much from what other Asian governments – from Pakistan to Vietnam – are doing, it could and should do better than what any and all past Sri Lankan governments did when facing economic challenges.

by Rajan Philips

Features

A Fragile Ceasefire: Pakistan’s Glory and Israel’s Sabotage

Published

14 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Smokes over Beirut: Israel’s Ceasefire Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon

After threatening to annihilate one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, TACO* Trump chickened out again by grasping the ceasefire lifeline that Pakistan had assiduously prepared. Trump needed the ceasefire badly to stem the mounting opposition to the war in America. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the war to continue because he needed it badly for his political survival. So, he contrived a fiction and convinced Trump that Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire. Trump as usual may not have noticed that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariff had clearly indicated Lebanon’s inclusion in his announcement of the ceasefire at 7:50 PM, Tuesday, on X. Ten minutes before Donald Trump’s fake deadline.

True to form on Wednesday, Israel unleashed the heaviest assault by far on Lebanon, reportedly killing over 300 people, the highest single-day death toll in the current war. Iran responded by re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and questioning the need for talks in Islamabad over the weekend. There were other incidents as well, with an oil refinery attacked in Iran, and Iranian drones and missiles slamming oil and gas infrastructure in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The US tried to insist that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire, with the argumentative US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Budapest, Hungary, campaigning for Viktor Orban, calling the whole thing a matter of “bad faith negotiation” as well as “legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of Iran, and warning Iran that “it would be dumb to jeopardise its ceasefire with Washington over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.”

But as the attack in Lebanon drew international condemnation – from Pope Leo to UN Secretary General António Guterres, and several world leaders, and amidst fears of Lebanon becoming another Gaza with 1,500 people including 130 children killed and more than a million people displaced, Washington got Israel to stop its “lawn mowing” in southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to “open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,”. Lebanese President Joeseph Aoun has also called for “a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, followed by direct negotiations between them.” Israel’s involvement in Lebanon remains a wild card that threatens the ceasefire and could scuttle the talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad.

Losers and Winners

After the ceasefire, both the Trump Administration and Iran have claimed total victories while the Israeli government wants the war to continue. The truth is that after more than a month into nonstop bombing of Iran, America and Israel have won nothing. Only Iran has won something it did not have when Trump and Netanyahu started their war. Iran now has not only a say over but control of the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire acknowledges this. Both Trump and Netanyahu are under fire in their respective countries and have no allies in the world except one another.

The real diplomatic winner is Pakistan. Salman Rushdie’s palimpsest-country has emerged as a key player in global politics and an influential mediator in a volatile region. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Defence Field Marshal Asim Munir have both been praised by President Trump and credited for achieving the current ceasefire. The Iranian regime has also been effusive in its praise of Pakistan’s efforts.

It is Pakistan that persisted with the effort after initial attempts at backdoor diplomacy by Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye started floundering. Sharing a 900 km border and deep cultural history with Iran, and having a skirmish of its own on the eastern front with Afghanistan, Pakistan has all the reason to contain and potentially resolve the current conflict in Iran. Although a majority Sunni Muslim country, Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia Muslim population after Iran, and is the easterly terminus of the Shia Arc that stretches from Lebanon. The country also has a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia that includes Pakistan’s nuclear cover for the Kingdom. An open conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have put Pakistan in a dangerously awkward position.

It is now known and Trump has acknowledged that China had a hand in helping Iran get to the diplomatic table. Pakistan used its connections well to get Chinese diplomatic reinforcement. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart and secured China’s public support for the diplomatic efforts. The visit produced a Five-Point Plan that became a sequel to America’s 15-point proposal and the eventual ten-point offer by Iran.

There is no consensus between parties as to which points are where and who is agreeing to what. The chaos is par for the course the way Donald Trumps conducts global affairs. So, all kudos to Pakistan for quietly persisting with old school toing and froing and producing a semblance of an agreement on a tweet without a parchment.

It is also noteworthy that Israel has been excluded from all the diplomatic efforts so far. And it is remarkable, but should not be surprising, the way Trump has sidelined Isreal from the talks. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been enjoying overwhelming support of Israelis for starting the war of his life against Iran and getting the US to spearhead it. But now the country is getting confused and is exposed to Iranian missiles and drones far more than ever before. The Israeli opposition is finally coming alive realizing what little has Netanyahu’s wars have achieved and at what cost. Israel has alienated a majority of Americans and has no ally anywhere else.

It will be a busy Saturday in Islamabad, where the US and Iranian delegations are set to meet. Iran would seem to have insisted and secured the assurance that the US delegation will be led by Vice President Vance, while including Trump’s personal diplomats – Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran has not announced its team but it is expected to be led, for protocol parity, by Iran’s Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and will likely include its suave Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice President Vance’s attendance will be the most senior US engagement with Iran since Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal under President Obama.

The physical arrangements for the talks are still not public although Islamabad has been turned into a security fortress given the stakes and risks involved. The talks are expected to be ‘indirect’, with the two delegations in separate rooms and Pakistani officials shuttling between them. The status of Iran’s enriched uranium and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be the major points of contention. After Netanyahu’s overreach on Wednesday, Lebanon is also on the short list

The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan) took months of negotiations and involved multiple parties besides the US and Iran, including China, France, Germany, UK, Russia and the EU. That served the cause of regional and world peace well until Trump tore up the deal to spite Obama. It would be too much to expect anything similar after a weekend encounter in Islamabad. But if the talks could lead to at least a permanent ceasefire and the return to diplomacy that would be a huge achievement.

(*As of 2025–2026, Donald Trump is nicknamed “TACO Trump” by Wall Street traders and investors as an acronym for “”. This term highlights a perceived pattern of him making strong tariff threats that cause market panic, only to later retreat or weaken them, causing a rebound.)

by Rajan Philips

Features

CIA’s hidden weapon in Iran

Published

14 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

We are passing through the ten-day interregnum called a ceasefire over the War on Iran. The world may breathe briefly, but this pause is not reassurance—it is a deliberate interlude, a vacuum in which every actor positions for the next escalation. Iran is far from secure. Behind the veneer of calm, external powers and local forces are preparing, arming, and coordinating. The United States is unlikely to deploy conventional ground troops; the next moves will be executed through proxies whose behaviour will defy expectation. These insurgents are shaped, guided, and amplified by intelligence and technology, capable of moving silently, striking precisely, and vanishing before retaliation. The ceasefire is not peace—it is the prelude to disruption.

The Kurds, historically instruments of Tehran against Baghdad, are now vectors for the next insurgency inside Iran. This movement is neither organic nor local. It is externally orchestrated, with the CIA as the principal architect. History provides the blueprint: under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, Kurdish uprisings were manipulated, never supported out of sympathy. They were instruments of leverage against Iraq, a way to weaken a rival while projecting influence beyond Iran’s borders. Colonel Isa Pejman, Iranian military intelligence officer who played a role in Kurdish affairs, recalled proposing support for a military insurgency in Iraq, only for the Shah to respond coldly: “[Mustafa] Barzani killed my Army soldiers… please forget it. The zeitgeist and regional context have been completely transformed.” The Kurds were pawns, but pawns with strategic weight. Pejman later noted: “When the Shah wrote on the back of the letter ‘Accepted’ to General Pakravan, I felt I was the true leader of the Kurdish movement.” The seeds planted then are now being activated under new, technologically empowered auspices.

Iran’s geographic vulnerabilities make this possible. The Shah understood the trap: a vast territory with porous borders, squeezed by Soviet pressure from the north and radical Arab states from the west. “We are in a really terrible situation since Moscow’s twin pincers coming down through Kabul and Baghdad surround us,” he warned Asadollah Alam. From Soviet support for the Mahabad Republic to Barzani’s dream of a unified Kurdistan, Tehran knew an autonomous Kurdish bloc could destabilize both Iraq and Iran. “Since the formation of the Soviet-backed Mahabad Republic, the Shah had been considerably worried about the Kurdish threat,” a US assessment concluded.

Today, the Kurds’ significance is operational, not symbolic. The CIA’s recent rescue of a downed F-15 airman using Ghost Murmur, a quantum magnetometry system, demonstrated the reach of technology in intelligence operations. The airman survived two days on Iranian soil before extraction. This was not a simple rescue; it was proof that highly mobile, technologically augmented operations can penetrate Iranian territory with surgical precision. The same logic applies to insurgency preparation: when individuals can be tracked through electromagnetic signatures, AI-enhanced surveillance, and drones, proxy forces can be armed, guided, and coordinated with unprecedented efficiency. The Kurds are no longer pawns—they are a living network capable of fracturing Iranian cohesion while providing deniability to foreign powers.

Iran’s engagement with Iraqi Kurds was always containment, not empowerment. The Shah’s goal was never Kurdish independence. “We do not approve an independent [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he stated explicitly. Yet their utility as instruments of regional strategy was undeniable. The CIA’s revival of these networks continues a long-standing pattern: insurgent groups integrated into the wider calculus of international power. Israel, Iran, and the Kurds formed a triangular strategic relationship that terrified Baghdad. “For Baghdad, an Iranian-Israeli-Kurdish triangular alliance was an existential threat,” contemporary reports noted. This is the template for modern manipulation: a networked insurgency, externally supported, capable of destabilizing regimes from within while giving foreign powers plausible deniability.

Iran today faces fragility. Years of sanctions, repression, and targeted strikes have weakened educational and scientific hubs; Sharif University in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific centres, was bombed. Leaders, scholars, and innovators have been eliminated. Military readiness is compromised. Generations-long setbacks leave Iran exposed. Against this backdrop, a Kurdish insurgency armed with drones, AI-supported surveillance, and precision munitions could do more than disrupt—it could fracture the state internally. The current ten-day ceasefire is a mirage; the next wave of revolt is already being orchestrated.

CIA involvement is deliberate. Operations are coordinated with allied intelligence agencies, leveraging Kurdish grievances, mobility, and ethnolinguistic networks. The Kurds’ spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria provides operational depth—allowing insurgents to strike, vanish, and regroup with impunity. Barzani understood leverage decades ago: “We could be useful to the United States… Look at our strategic location on the flank of any possible Soviet advance into the Middle East.” Today, the calculation is inverted: Kurds are no longer instruments against Baghdad; they are potential disruptors inside Tehran itself.

Technology is central. Ghost Murmur’s ability to detect a single heartbeat remotely exemplifies how intelligence can underpin insurgent networks. Drones, satellite communications, AI predictive modeling, and battlefield sensors create an infrastructure that can transform a dispersed Kurdish insurgency into a high-precision operation. Iran can no longer rely on fortifications or loyalty alone; the external environment has been recalibrated by technology.

History provides the roadmap. The Shah’s betrayal of Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement demonstrated that external actors can manipulate both Iranian ambitions and Kurdish loyalties. “The Shah sold out the Kurds,” Yitzhak Rabin told Kissinger. “We could not station our troops there and keep fighting forever,” the Shah explained to Alam. The Kurds are a pivot, not a cause. Networks once acting under Tehran’s influence are now being repurposed against it.

The insurgency exploits societal fissures. Kurdish discontent in Iran, suppressed for decades, provides fertile ground. Historical betrayal fuels modern narratives: “Barzani claimed that ‘Isa Pejman sold us out to the Shah and the Shah sold us out to the US.’” Intelligence agencies weaponize these grievances, pairing them with training, technological augmentation, and covert support.

Geopolitically, the stakes are immense. The Shah’s defensive-offensive doctrine projected Iranian influence outward to neutralize threats. Today, the logic is inverted: the same networks used to contain Iraq are being readied to contain Iran. A technologically augmented Kurdish insurgency, covertly backed, could achieve in months what decades of sanctions, diplomacy, or repression have failed to accomplish.

The operation will be asymmetric, high-tech, and dispersed. UAVs, quantum-enhanced surveillance, encrypted communications, and AI-directed logistics will dominate. Conventional Iranian forces are vulnerable to this type of warfare. As Pejman reflected decades ago, “Our Army was fighting there, rather than the Kurds who were harshly defeated… How could we keep such a place?” Today, the challenge is magnified by intelligence superiority on the insurgents’ side.

This is not a temporary flare-up. The CIA and its allies are constructing a generational network of influence. Experience from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon proves these networks endure once operationalised. The Shah recognized this: “Iran’s non-state foreign policy under the Shah’s reign left a lasting legacy for the post-Revolution era.” Today, those instruments are being remade as vectors of foreign influence inside Iran.

The future is stark. Iran faces not simply external threats, but a carefully engineered insurgency exploiting historical grievances, technological superiority, and precise intelligence. The Kurds are central. History, technology, and geopolitical calculation converge to create a transformative threat. Tehran’s miscalculations, betrayals, and suppressed grievances now form the lattice for this insurgency. The Kurds are positioned not just as an ethnic minority, but as a vector of international strategy—Tehran may be powerless to stop it.

Iran’s containment strategies have been weaponized, fused with technology, and inverted against it. The ghosts of Barzani’s Peshmerga, the shadows of Algiers, and the Shah’s strategic vision now converge with Ghost Murmur, drones, and AI. Tehran faces a paradox: the instruments it once controlled are now calibrated to undermine its authority. The next Kurdish revolt will not only fight in the mountains but in the electromagnetic shadows where intelligence operates, consequences are lethal, and visibility is scarce.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa