ICYMI#TheTribineOpinion: Trump brings peace in Gaza for now, Pak threat brings India-Afghanistan closer

Finally, US President Donald Trump has seen the Gaza peace plan through in its first stage —the ceasefire, release of hostages and UN humanitarian aid. Hostage diplomacy thrives in the shadows, where after using the back-channels you can deny they were ever put to use and the optics of compassion mask deeper calculations, writes our London correspondent Shyam Bhatia in the Op-Ed piece From Beirut to Gaza, compassion as currency.  Unless governments find collective mechanisms — perhaps through the UN or regional security pacts — to delegitimise bargains through hostage diplomacy, after each set of new releases, they would live under the fear of next batch of captures, he stresses. The hostage releases on both sides has brought brief relief and international applause but behind every exchange are human stories rarely told. Some of the Israelis who returned home after earlier deals never truly escaped captivity; several have since taken their own lives, overwhelmed by trauma, he writes.

Comparing the Gaza truce to Kafka’s The Trial where a man undergoes a nightmarish prosecution by a mysterious, oppressive authority without ever being told what crime he is accused of, former PU professor Shelley Walia writes, as the war pauses, the trial continues. In his Op-Ed piece A truce without peace: Gaza’s Kafkaesque trial, he says bombs have fallen silent, but the bureaucracy of control moves faster. Terms like security, self-defence and peace process have lost their meaning, becoming mere justifications for policies that prioritise control over human rights, he writes.

Afghanistan paid a price for the week-long visit of its Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to India. Within hours of Muttaqi’s arrival in New Delhi, Pakistan carried out attacks on Kabul, targeting the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). However, by inviting Muttaqi, India has advanced the calibrated, step-by-step normalisation of its relations with Afghanistan. It is necessary to keep engaging with the Taliban to ensure that anti-India terror groups do not use Afghan territory, writes Jayant Prasad, ex-ambassador to Afghanistan in his Edit article Pak threat brings India, Taliban closer. India must fulfil its visa promises if its people-to-people ties with Afghanistan are to thrive, he suggests.

Back home, a 71-year-old lawyer, Rakesh Kishore, who hurled an object at the Chief Justice of India BR Gavai, became an algorithmic star instead of being considered a figure of disgust, writes senior SC advocate Sanjay Hegde in the Op-Ed article The CJI’s restraint and the media’s reckoning. The lesson of the incident is twofold  — first, the Chief Justice taught us the power of calm, and second, the aftermath reminds us that calm must not mean complacency.

The spate of deaths of children caused by the consumption of cough syrup adulterated with a toxic industrial chemical in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh has brought the focus back on India's dysfunctional drug regulation system. Norms are there, they are revised to make them more stringent, but there is no will to implement them, writes science commentator Dinesh C Sharma in his Edit piece A new blot on Indian pharma. Drug regulation in India needs a fundamental change. The focus of drug regulatory authorities and the government is on the drug and pharma industry and not on consumer or patient interest, he writes.

The death of a senior Haryana IPS officer Y Puran Kumar and a Haryana police personnel thereafter reveals a lot about institutional silence. For every Puran Kumar whose story reaches the public, countless others remain unheard — clerks, constables, teachers, soldiers — quietly bearing indignity until it breaks them, writes former IPS officer Rajbir Deswal in his Oped piece Why did The System let Puran Kumar down. The system's silence is not neutrality; it is complicity. The ability to listen, to understand and to accommodate must be seen as an administrative virtue, not weakness.

As we celebrate 20 years of the Right to Information Act (RTI) Act, there have been discussions on the benefits that it has brought and the challenges as well. Although a beginning has been made by applying transparency to governance, it has remained only a beginning. And accountability has been even less forthcoming, writes former Chief Information Commissioner of India Wajahat Habibullah in his Edit Plug the gaps to bolster RTI Act. The people themselves will have to take the lead to make the 20-year-old law more effective. The RTI Act seeks to make the governed prime partners in governance, he suggests.

While the Internet came in vogue in the mid-1990s, AI has taken the world by storm over three decades later. The term ‘to Google’ is on the cusp of becoming an archaic relic, a testament to the breathtaking velocity of this shift, writes Manish Tewari, Lok Sabha MP and Former I&B Minister, in From Internet to AI, a story of non-regulation. It must be acknowledged that the AI-driven disruption is inevitable and, in many forms, desirable. If the Internet was transformative, artificial intelligence (AI) is transmogrifying, he writes. The fuel for AI is data. A global consensus on data governance and privacy is paramount. With the India AI-Impact Summit to be hosted in New Delhi on February 19-20, 2026, the objective must be to lay down foundational ground rules for the AI era.