India Policy Watch: Predictions 2026

Insights on current policy issues in India

—RSJ

The usual routine for the first post of the year is my list of predictions. This is a bit of an indulgence. But like all indulgences, I love doing them. There isn’t any science to them, nor are these so specific with binary outcomes that you can truly gauge how accurate you were at the end of the year.

Over the years, however, I have tried to be more specific with predictions with a tighter range of figures wherever possible and avoided extrapolating a trend to arrive at a prediction or two. There’s a pleasure in looking at trends and then taking an imaginative, bucking-the-trend leap about where a thing or two will end up. But that was when things were normal and boring. And, when peering into the future brought a minor frisson of excitement into my boring life.

We live in the age of Trump now, where daily events and announcements are such sharp departures from the past that you can only shake your head in disbelief and update your priors. This may seem like making predictions daunting. On the contrary, I think it makes them more fun.

So, I had more than my usual share of fun in coming up with the ten predictions for 2026. There’s only one key difference about this set of predictions from those made in previous years. In the past, I tried to keep my predictions individually distinct but mutually compatible. Simply put, the consequences of one prediction, were it to come true, wouldn’t negate the other predictions. I have done away with this kind of compatibility. This is because Trump is shaking up geopolitics in a manner that all bets are off on what this year could bring in terms of one-off events. Any of these one-off events, if they come true, could obliterate every other prediction about the economy or the market.

With that out of the way, here are my somewhat specific predictions for 2026.

1. Almost every fear that the traditional liberals have now about Trump upending the post-Cold War global order will come true this year. This includes the US engineering at least three more regime changes. My guesses are Iran and Cuba, apart from Venezuela, of course. I had this prediction even before Maduro’s evacuation. Further, Trump and Vance will bully Denmark and the EU into ceding significant but not full control of Greenland while coming within a hair’s breadth of using the military option there. And finally, this will mean the end of NATO as we know it, and I won’t be surprised if he imposes an embargo on federal funding for NATO until some of his other absurd demands are also met. I’m being conservative here about the possibilities. The Trump administration loves spectacle, projects its domestic insecurities onto the world (especially Europe), expecting them to act in the MAGA way and can spin any act, however absurd, as being America First. This is the recipe for more madness.

2. Outside of these US-led interventions, things will be much quieter in the rest of the world, unlike the belief that the US, Russia and China agreeing to and carving out their spheres of influence will lead to more military interventions. I don’t see China doing anything tangible on Taiwan beyond the usual optics of naval exercises around it or involving itself in fresh territorial disputes in Southeast Asia or India. It needs access to markets to continue to keep its export engine chugging, and it can ill-afford political clashes and embargoes. China hasn’t shown even an iota of interest in protecting its “allies” (Iran, Venezuela) and challenging the US. All it wants this year is to let its exports rise unfettered and get the GDP growth back to 5 per cent. At least 2026 isn’t going to be the year for China to indulge in geopolitical muscle flexing. Something similar holds true for Russia, too. It will find a way to close a deal with Ukraine because it can’t afford to have more tightening of screws on its economy or further commitment of Western Europe to arm itself and Ukraine. Barring Iran, where I predict a regime change, West Asia will be quieter too. Netanyahu will focus on winning the elections to stay out of prison, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE will be busy whitewashing their reputations and taking away business and investments from the rest of the world.

3. Surprisingly, in 2026, Europe will buck the trend of right-wing parties gaining ground in elections. I think the overt support from the MAGA crowd plus the US national security strategy document published last month that openly seeks to support “patriotic European parties” and “to help Europe correct its current trajectory” will backfire. The firm stand by the current leaders to Trump’s bullying, to China’s dumping and promised manufacturing stimulus will steal some of the thunder of the right. The result of this will be seen in their underperformance across the board: of Farage’s Reform UK in the midyear local elections, AfD losing what seems like a slam dunk now in state elections in Germany and similar setbacks in France and the Netherlands for right-wing parties. And, in perhaps the most visible sign of this, Orban will lose in Hungary this April.

4. On the global economy, things will be fairly stable because, as I mentioned back in October 2025, we have gone past peak Trump. Nothing surprises the market anymore, and every possible geopolitical lurch is already priced in. The dollar will continue to weaken with all major currencies as investors will continue to derisk from Trump volatility, long-term US deficit math and inflation challenges. Trump will continue to impose random tariffs based on his whims, but the average US tariffs that are currently at about 14 per cent will stabilise within a 100 to 200 basis points from here.

5. The independence of the Chair of the Federal Reserve will be compromised as Trump will hire a lackey to replace Powell. But this won’t make any medium-term difference. Inflation is the single biggest risk to any thesis about the US economy for 2026. My prediction is that it will continue to rise and go beyond 3 per cent by year-end as the real impact of tariffs flows through the system. A new Fed Chair who will cut rates to keep Trump happy will soon have to deal with even more inflation that will hurt the Republicans' chances in the mid-term and, more importantly, along with the weakness of the dollar, spook bond markets. The bond markets are the ultimate disciplining mechanism, as we have seen in the past, and even Trump kind of understands it. My guess is we will go through this cycle once during 2026 before order is restored and the Fed Chair starts to do things independently.

6. China will be at its best behaviour around the world as it figures out how to dump the excess manufacturing capacity it has built up post COVID-19. China will be on a PR overdrive through the year, talking all the right stuff and mending fences all around the region, including with India (I predict a Modi-Xi summit during the year). China has had a record export surplus in 2025 through some front-loading of its exports before Trump tariffs came up, and by its strategic use of intermediate bases like Vietnam and Malaysia to bypass trade restrictions. 2026 will beat that record before real measures against Chinese dumping take shape around the world. The Chinese stock market, which benefited in 2025 on the back of historic cheap valuation and AI momentum from the Deepseek breakthrough, has given a false sense of the strength of its economy. There is no respite for its domestic economy - consumption isn’t picking up, fiscal deficit is above 10 per cent, total debt to GDP ratio is almost at 300 per cent, and real estate troubles and a weak banking sector continue to hamper it. China needs the world now more than ever but it will find during the year that the world isn’t willing. This will mean fairly targeted anti-China trade measures from Western Europe that will push China to work on a compromise. Expect multiple trade deals that will look like wins for Europe.

7. Many had predicted an AI bust in 2025. I was absolutely sure it wasn’t happening. Now there’s a stronger belief that the AI bubble will bust in 2026. I’m still sceptical. It’s true that there is almost no relational justification for the capital that has gone into AI investments in 2025. But for the bubble to bust, there has to be a shortage of capital or a spectacular surprise in the financial performance of those betting big on AI. I see neither of them happening this year, unless, of course, there is a serious flight of capital out of the US because Trump does something that’s beyond the realm of imagination right now (starts a nuclear war, for instance). There will be a minor correction perhaps among the so-called AI stocks (maybe 10 per cent), but there is no crash coming here in 2026. Instead, we will see real gains from AI showing up in multiple sectors and much stronger use cases that will justify the hype.

8. It will be business as usual for the Indian economy. GDP growth at a little over 7 per cent, inflation back to 4.5 per cent, and market indices at about 5 per cent higher. There won’t be any interest rate cuts, and I see the RBI letting the rupee breach 100 to a dollar during the year. The defence of INR beyond a point is not helping with the liquidity that’s needed to keep domestic credit and consumption going. I expect the budget next month to be significantly more reform-oriented because this is the last opportunity to do so for this team. The 18 months after the budget are dotted with five big state elections that will preclude any big move. The budget will have a significant tax break across slabs to boost consumption momentum, which is already flagging after the GST rate cuts last quarter. I expect more specific deregulation measures, including rationalisation of entire regulatory bodies and ministries in the budget.

9. BJP will lose Assam to its surprise and make significant gains in Tamil Nadu (10-15 seats) and Kerala (5 seats) assembly elections. West Bengal, where I have been twice in the past month, will be too close to call, but I sense a hung verdict with part of TMC breaking away to form the government with outside support of the BJP. UDF will win Kerala, with Shashi Tharoor positioning himself as a CM candidate during the campaign. But his rise to the post will be scuttled by the central leadership.

10. By the end of the year, a significant breakaway group will threaten to quit Congress and form a new party. Therefore, this will be the last year of Rahul Gandhi leading the Congress or maybe even the Congress as we know it. The moment of reckoning for the post-Modi BJP won’t arrive in 2026 (it will wait till UP elections). But I expect some serious jostling to begin between the Amit Shah and Adityanath factions during the latter part of the yea,r leading to Adityanath threatening to resign (but not resigning) as the CM in the run-up to UP elections in 2027.

Those are my predictions. I will wait and watch.

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Global Policy Watch: The Long History of Non-fuel Mineral Geopolitics

Global issues relevant to India

—Pranay Kotasthane

The weaponisation of minerals seems unprecedented, but it really isn’t. While people are well aware of instances when fuels (oil, gas, etc.) were weaponised, past cases of non-fuel minerals being weaponised are hard to recall. That creates a perception that China’s hold over rare earths is unprecedented and undefeatable.

Yet, there are multiple prominent cases in which the geopolitical leverage countries had because of their dominance over critical minerals dissipated quickly. It’s not as if these countries stopped producing the minerals; they just couldn’t weaponise them for too long.

Take the case of Cobalt. It was the in-fashion dual-use material of the 1970s. One tonne of it went into every F-16’s jet engine. The US imported almost all of it, most of which came from then-Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo). The USSR was signing mineral agreements with African countries, providing technical assistance in exchange for a share in total output. Modelled on the OPEC, there were cartels for Bauxite, Copper, and the like. A US Congressman termed the situation the ‘materials myopia’ of the West. And then, things came to a head when some rebels occupied mining regions in Zaire, leading to a supply cutoff and a sudden price increase.

And yet, there was no repeat of the 1973 Oil Crisis. What really happened?

A combination of several moves eventually reduced the strategic edge that Cobalt-producing countries enjoyed. First, the high prices made Cobalt mining in other, more stable countries lucrative—mining in Canada, Brazil, and Australia picked up.

Even as these new mining projects were taking shape, prior research on substitutes for Cobalt was commercialised much more quickly. The more abundant Molybdenum began displacing Cobalt in certain alloys as jet engine makers warmed to new composites and carbon fibres.

Next, companies began to economise. Just like we read reports today that every electric car, submarine, or jet fighter uses X kgs of neodymium, without which the world would come to a grinding halt, there were similar concerns about Cobalt in the 1970s. But the demand proved more elastic than people had assumed. Non-priority uses of cobalt were reduced by using other materials in alloys, and when substitution wasn’t possible, efficiency improvements helped contain overall demand.

The fourth leg was government intervention. Military stockpiles were built to meet emergency defence applications. For the broader commercial market, governments also took up price-risk mechanisms and offtake guarantees.

The net result wasn’t that Congo was displaced as the world’s major Cobalt producer; it still accounts for over 70 per cent of global supply today. Rather, Cobalt itself was displaced as the hitherto indispensable material necessary for dual-use applications. Once substitutes were developed, the hackles were lowered, Cobalt stopped being a geopolitical talking point, and the world became comfortable with buying Cobalt from Congo once again.

Several such instances exist in the near past. China cut off tungsten exports to the US during the Korean War in the early 1950s. China had been supplying half of American demand at a dirt-cheap $16 per pound. Then came the operationalisation of the Defence Production Act of 1950, which allowed the government to offer offtake guarantees, write off investments, and provide low-interest loans. The US government guaranteed a price of $63 per pound to domestic miners, and within three years, domestic firms were producing thrice the government’s reuired demand.

Similarly, Mercury was another dual-use material of the 1950s, crucial for walkie-talkies and ammunition. A looming shortage and rising prices caused widespread furore. But through the same process of market-led substitution and alternative sources backed by government guarantees, the strategic significance of Mercury went down.

I see a version of these Cobalt, Tungsten, and Mercury stories playing out in the case of China’s weaponisation of rare earths, too. As I have written in multiple editions, substitutes will be operationalised, alternative sources will emerge, and efficiency improvements will reduce per-unit requirements. Additionally, the Law of One Price (LOOP) will play its role. China’s extensive export controls have meant that the international prices of Chinese rare earth oxides (say in Europe) are at least three times the domestic prices in China. Under such stark conditions, many Chinese companies will be willing to take the risk of evading controls in exchange for the promise of extravagant profits. Shell companies might be set up, and third countries might be used to convert ‘black’ rare earths into ‘white’. LOOP will kick in, and the price differential will wither away.

Given these trends and in the spirit of making falsifiable predictions, I claim that by December 2028, China will lose its geopolitical leverage due to its dominance in rare earths. While it will remain the world’s largest rare earths producer, the strategic importance of these materials will decline. China will stop putting additional export controls on these technologies and begin diluting existing ones by that time.

Hope this newsletter will be alive three years from now to test this prediction. But if not, I am sure some sharp readers are keeping track.

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Matsyanyaaya: Pax Silica! Ab Tera Kya Hoga India? Part 2

Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action

—Pranay Kotasthane and Tannmay Kumarr Baid

(An edited version of this article first appeared in India’s Worldon 16th January 2026)

In January 2026, the United States envoy, Sergio Gor, invited India to join Pax Silica. Pax Silica is a US-led effort with an aim to align partners across semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and critical minerals. The stated objective of the initiative is to reduce dependencies in the technology supply chain and shape how the AI economy is built.

This invite came barely a month after New Delhi was conspicuously absent from the initiative’s inaugural summit in Washington. Some suggested that the absence reflected India’s declining relevance in Washington’s technology calculus, while others inferred that it proves India was a lightweight in the semiconductor domain.

Despite the alarmism, one of us (Pranay) had blogged that India’s initial absence from Pax Silica matters far less than the noise suggested, and that India would eventually become a part of the grouping. That position seems to have held its ground. The core reason is simple: India already sits at the centre of the global semiconductor and AI ecosystem, with or without formal membership. The absence reflected ongoing trade frictions and tariff disputes, rather than a downgrade of India’s role in the US technology strategy.

India is deeply embedded

Framed as a new organising principle for the global silicon and AI supply chain, Pax Silica aims to coordinate trusted partners through policy alignment, joint projects, and investment coordination to diversify supply chains, with an outward focus on reducing dependence on China. That ambition was understandable. But even then, the way the initiative was launched suggested it was more a political signal than an operational framework.

Read in that light, India’s absence weakened Pax Silica on paper, but it did not materially alter or affect India’s position in the global technology ecosystem.

India is, and remains structurally embedded in the semiconductor value chain. Pax Silica does not, and cannot, change that in the foreseeable future. This is important because semiconductor design is explicitly identified as a core pillar of Pax Silica. In this segment, India is already indispensable. Nearly every top-25 fabless semiconductor company by revenue operates large design centres in India. Crucially, these are not peripheral support offices. Most of them work on core intellectual property and system-level design. These are the processes that are at the heart of chip development cycles.

This massive base that global companies have in India is driven by incentives, talent availability, and ecosystem depth. The Indian government claims that nearly 20 per cent of the global chip design talent is in India. Any attempt to bypass India’s design base would impose higher costs and slower innovation on the very firms Pax Silica seeks to support. In that sense, India is already inside the tent where it matters most upstream.

This design strength also explains why India’s absence from a diplomatic grouping did not imply exclusion from future technology gains. The semiconductor supply chain is not neatly modular. Design, software, and systems integration are tightly coupled with downstream manufacturing and deployment. Pax Silica may seek to coordinate trusted production nodes, but it cannot exclude India, which is where a significant chunk of the thinking, testing, and iteration already takes place, and hope to succeed.

Manufacturing cannot be wished away

India’s manufacturing role, while still emerging, is no longer hypothetical. Eight OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) plants and one commercial CMOS fab are under active construction. While these projects do not compete with Taiwan or South Korea on advanced logic nodes, they do not need to. Assembly, testing, and packaging are becoming increasingly cutting-edge to squeeze out better performance without necessarily making transistors smaller. This is also where diversification is most feasible and easiest to achieve.

In the coming decade, India is likely to emerge as a meaningful OSAT node. If the objective is to reduce concentration rather than just signal alignment, then having capacity in a large, independent market is a huge asset, not an inconvenience.

The same logic applies to artificial intelligence. Pax Silica places heavy emphasis on AI infrastructure and deployment, yet India sits close to the centre of both. Indian software firms are well-positioned in what Kai-Fu Lee has described as “enterprise AI”, where models are integrated into business processes rather than built from scratch. This adoption, rather than just creation, is where most economic value is likely to accrue over the next decade.

India is also one of the largest potential markets for AI deployment across finance, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, and public services. An effort to shape the global AI economy while leaving out both major integrators and a market of this scale will struggle to deliver returns for participating firms. AI supply chains do not end at data centres. They end where systems are deployed at scale.

Looking Ahead

The first cut of participants in Pax Silica reflected diplomatic convenience rather than supply chain completeness. We have seen this before. Coalitions built around technology tend to expand in phases. Early announcements prioritise ease of alignment over comprehensiveness.

There is also a risk of over-securitisation. Treating AI and semiconductors purely through a national security lens can narrow choice and raise costs. Recent easing of certain chip export controls and deals with China in rare earths suggest that even Washington recognises the limits of blunt restriction. China will continue to remain a player in the AI, semiconductor and critical minerals market in the future, and an attempt to cut it off entirely is neither feasible nor economically wise. The aim must remain to reduce single-source dependence.

Timing and next steps

A more plausible explanation for India’s initial absence lies in trade frictions rather than strategic distance. Tariff disputes continue to weigh on India–US economic ties. It is reasonable to hypothesise that India may have chosen not to join a high-visibility economic grouping while being singled out on trade, or that the US may not have chosen to include India at that moment. This made the absence a bargaining position, not an outright rejection of cooperation, as subsequent events now suggest.

There is precedent for this approach. India was not a founding member of the Mineral Security Partnership either. That triggered similar concern at the time. India joined later, once the contours of the grouping were clearer and its interests better reflected. Pax Silica has followed a similar trajectory. Semiconductor and AI firms with deep exposure to India have little incentive to see India permanently excluded from any framework that shapes their operating environment.

Even in December, there was little reason for alarm. Semiconductor firms have continued to expand design and engineering work in India. AI providers have continued to invest in Indian data centres and deployment to monetise their models. OSAT capacity under construction did not hinge on the outcome of one summit.

India’s continued priority should be domestic execution: improving manufacturing competitiveness, reducing regulatory friction, scaling packaging and testing capacity, and focusing on AI deployment. Delivering on these projects will be the make-or-break factor for India.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Paper] Ore Wars: The Problem of U.S. Dependence on Foreign Materials, a 1982 paper by John Orme, is a prescient take on mineral geopolitics.

2. [Puliyabaazi] A conversation on the opportunities, barriers, and information asymmetry in the legal market in India, ft. Bhargavi Zaveri.

3. [Article] Amitabh Kant on the five reforms India needs. Good to see this line in the article: “to export competititvely, India must import efficiently.” We’ve been talking about this since 2020 in this newsletter.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay is a long read by Joe Zadeh about the persistent fears in the West surrounding the reheating of rice. It’s the first piece that we’re publishing online from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’. The magazine contains lots of other deeply researched and engaging pieces about contemporary food culture – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of it. You should buy a copy.

Speaking of things to buy, we have added five extra tickets for our sold-out event this Wednesday at Oxford House with Ixta Belfrage, Melek Erdal and Rukmini Iyer. These are sure to sell out so act quickly!

Buy Issue 2

‘What are you talking about?’ Dad asked me, a look of incredulity on his face. ‘I’ve been reheating rice all my life.’ It was a warm Saturday evening. We were sitting at the dining table in his home in Gateshead, drinking beer and eating from a plastic tub of M&S bell peppers stuffed with ricotta. I had just told him that I was researching a story about the dangers of reheated rice – more specifically, the illness that has come to be dubbed ‘fried rice syndrome’ or ‘reheated rice syndrome’ across the Western world. Search those terms on most platforms, and you’ll find hugely popular posts issuing dire warnings about the condition. ‘Hospital workers say it’s some of the worst cases of food poisoning they’ve ever seen. And it can lead to death,’ reported food52, in a TikTok post with more than 431,000 likes at the time of writing.

Dad didn’t take this news well. He got up from the table, marched to the fridge, took out a glass container and started pointing at it animatedly. ‘What is this?’ he asked, before taking a second identical container from the fridge and waving it around. ‘And this, what is this?’

‘Rice,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said defiantly. ‘And I will reheat some tomorrow, and the next day and the next day.’

Like many Iranians, my dad takes rice very seriously. When we cook polow together, he says things like ‘Careful!’, ‘Be gentle!’ and ‘You need to keep an eye on your rice, Mister!’ as if we were bathing a newborn baby. Despite having been divorced for twenty-nine years, his ex-wife – who is British and, incidentally, my mother – still cooks perfect Iranian-style rice due to how ardently she was drilled on his methods. When asked if he owns a rice cooker, he takes great pleasure in saying: ‘You’re looking at it.’

According to the food52 video, you should eat rice within a day of cooking it. After that window has passed, they advised viewers to ‘just throw it away. Just throw away your leftover rice, friends, it’s really not worth it.’ They’re not the only ones making this claim. On LADBible, a headline read: ‘“Fried rice syndrome” is real and can kill you, doctor says’. A post on the ‘r/TrueOffMyChest’ subreddit titled ‘I almost died from fried rice syndrome’ tallied over 500 replies. If you look at the comments on these posts, you’ll find lots of astonished people – frequently of Middle Eastern, Asian, African or South American descent – saying something to the same effect as Dad: I’ve reheated rice all my life, and I’ve never got ill. How can this be true?

This stark division in rice-reheating attitudes is almost comically widespread. While appearing on The Graham Norton Show in 2023, the British and Malaysian-Chinese stand-up Phil Wang joked that the main difference between white people and Chinese people is that the former are ‘absolutely terrified of reheating rice. For white people, rice has one chance to be food. And if there’s any left over after the meal, it just becomes poisonous straight away.’ Out of curiosity, I texted seven white friends to ask if they were brought up to believe that reheating rice was dangerous. All seven said yes.

Like my dear father, and Phil Wang, I have also been reheating rice all my life. As I write this, there is one container of rice in my fridge, and three in my freezer. Cooked white grains linger in my kitchen like coins in trouser pockets: forgotten for long periods, then rediscovered with joy. And I have never, to my knowledge, got sick from them.

As I plied Dad with more and more internet evidence of rice-related anxiety, he fell silent. We looked out the window into the back garden. The closing notes of the day’s sun played out on the grass. ‘China, India, Pakistan, Iran,’ he said, quietly. ‘Russia, Greece, Turkey, Japan,’ he continued, becoming louder and bolder. ‘Malaysia!’ I realised he was listing countries that ate rice. ‘There would be a lot less people in Iran if reheated rice was deadly. There are communities in Iran that are so poor, they eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They don’t have a fridge or a chiller. How can you explain that, Joseph? How?’

Of course, this wasn’t the first conversation I’d had about the dreaded syndrome. But I’d always thought that it was only a risk if you didn’t cook your rice properly in the first place, and so I’d dismissed it, with an air of superiority, as something not worth worrying about. But as the odd cultural divide became more apparent, my curiosity was piqued. How can so many people be terrified of reheated rice, while others live their lives in fluffy ignorance? Are the warnings overblown or have I – and most of the non-Western world – been dancing with death all these years? Is there something in the way that different cultures cook or store rice that protects against these toxic side-effects? And where did the very specific – and rather problematic – name fried rice syndrome come from? I felt compelled to find some answers.

Reheated rice fears have circulated for decades, but many of the recent posts on TikTok and other platforms seemed to have been triggered by the recirculation of a story about a young man in Belgium supposedly dying from fried rice syndrome. Despite regularly inspiring breaking-news-style posts – ‘Man, 20, found dead in his bed by devastated parents after he reheated common pasta dish’ reads a headline in the Sun from 2023 – the incident actually took place in 2008. As that headline reveals, the man hadn’t actually eaten rice, but leftover spaghetti (resulting in some online publications running confusing headlines like ‘20 Year Old Dies of “Fried Rice Syndrome” After Eating Leftover Pasta’). I texted the same seven friends from earlier to ask if they’d ever received warnings about reheating pasta as they had for rice. All seven said no.

According to a 2011 report about the case in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, the man became sick after eating spaghetti leftovers that had been cooked five days earlier and then left in the kitchen at room temperature. Within 30 minutes of eating, he experienced a headache, abdominal pains and vomiting. He was found dead the following morning. The autopsy revealed the presence of the bacterium Bacillus cereus (B cereus), which was also detected in samples of the pasta dish that were analysed. The paper also references four other fatal cases attributed to B cereus food poisoning: two more associated with pasta, one with fried rice and one with noodles.

‘B cereus is the microorganism culprit behind the so-called fried rice syndrome,’ confirmed Enzo Palombo, a microbiologist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, whom I spoke to over Zoom. The name comes from Latin: ‘Bacillus’ means ‘little staff’ or ‘little wand’, while ‘cereus’ means ‘wax-like’. In your mind, picture a microscopic sausage that glistens and wiggles and can multiply into endless sausage links, and you’re not far off. B cereus is a close relative of the notorious Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. ‘Most of the time, it’s a benign presence,’ said Palombo. ‘But when the conditions are right, it has a few tricks up its sleeve that allow it to act as a food pathogen.’

Most food-borne bacteria are destroyed by heat during cooking, Palombo informed me. But B cereus is one of a few species capable of forming spores. ‘These spores are incredibly resilient: they can last for hundreds of years, and can resist acid, heat and other environmental conditions. They think they might even be able to survive in outer space.’ No matter how hot your stove, the spores of B cereus can survive in your food in a dormant state, waiting for an opportune moment to return, like a cryogenically frozen billionaire.

How do dormant spores turn into a nasty bout of food poisoning? According to Palombo, the ‘danger zone’ in microbiology is between 5°C (the temperature of the fridge) and 65°C (the temperature that food should rise above when cooked). ‘So, imagine you’ve cooked your rice or pasta and there is B cereus in there. You’ve killed the bacteria through cooking but the spores have survived. If you chill it right away, then you’re fine, if you reheat it properly then you’re fine,’ he told me. But if you leave it at room temperature for too long and there’s sufficient moisture, then the spores spring back to life and begin feeding on the starch while secreting toxins. ‘Bingo,’ Palombo continued, ‘these toxins are what will muck up your guts and cause you to have diarrhoea, vomiting or even more severe consequences.’

It’s worth emphasising that the Belgian case was rare and extreme – B cereus infection is usually mild, and hospitalisations are infrequent. The global mortality rate for cases associated with food poisoning is just 0.05%, and deaths generally occur in those predisposed to developing more severe illness (young people, old people, pregnant people and people with compromised immune systems).

Much of what Palombo and I talked about – danger zones and safe storage – felt intuitive. I don’t leave food out for hours. I divide big batches of cooked rice into smaller boxes so that it cools quicker. I always keep everything in either the fridge or freezer, and always thoroughly reheat. But I still felt deeply puzzled about some things. If B cereus is a risk with any starchy food, then why aren’t we as fearful of reheated pasta as rice? And if reheating rice does carry this potential to cause illness, why is the perception of risk so inconsistent across cultures?

‘It’s something I’ve always known about, but that just comes from a catering background,’ said Farokh Talati – Head Chef at St John Bread and Wine in London and author of the cookbook Parsi: From Persia to Bombay– when I asked him about rice anxiety. ‘Rice is the cornerstone of my cooking,’ he told me. ‘In my own home life, I’m loose. I’ll cook my rice, and put the leftovers in the fridge once it’s cooled down. When I heat it back up, I’m not there probing it, I just put a bit of coconut oil in a pan, fry the living crap out of it, and then eat it.’ But when it comes to his professional life, Talati has to be much more cautious, because of strict health and safety regulations. ‘But it’s not so much around just rice itself – it’s around everything we touch from raw foods to raw vegetables.’

I asked Talati if he had any theories about why rice might have acquired such a unique fear factor? He responded, ‘I can’t help but think: Is there something deeper going on? Is it something about how the West perceives the East? Is there something really ingrained in us here that sees rice as a scary thing, an unknown thing? What is this food that’s coming over? It’s not part of our cuisine – is it making us sick?’

Throughout history, rice has certainly been known to trigger animosity among Europeans. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that eating rice caused one to become addicted to opium. The notable French gastronomist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin – famous for his aphorism, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’ – thought eating rice made you soft and cowardly. Meanwhile, in his 1883 pamphlet, How, When and What to Eat: A Guide to Colonial Diet, the Australian doctor and novelist Stephen Mannington Caffyn cautioned that ‘We might expect to find rice-eaters everywhere a wretched, impotent, and effeminate race, and such is the case.’

It is certainly odd that food poisoning caused by B cereus has become so widely known as fried rice syndrome – a term used not just on social media and in news coverage, but even in peer-reviewed academic publications. I found it difficult to trace the exact historical origin of the name. The first complete scientific proof of B cereus as a microorganism capable of causing food-borne disease came in 1955, in Norway, and had nothing to do with rice – it was traced to a vanilla sauce prepared from corn starch that had been linked to a wave of illnesses in care homes and hospitals in Oslo.

One of the earliest associations between B cereus and fried rice that I could track down was a 1973 article in the British Medical Journal that reported on eighteen outbreaks of food poisoning in the UK dating back to 1971, many of which had been traced to Chinese restaurants and takeaways where boiled rice was being stored at room temperature for long periods of time before being fried. But the phrase ‘fried rice syndrome’ was nowhere to be seen.

Around the time that this article was published, a completely separate food scandal associated with Chinese food had erupted, with misplaced fears about MSG stoked in the US by anti-Chinese racism and dodgy science. In a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr Ho Man Kwok wrote: ‘For several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant,’ before going on to describe symptoms that included numbness at the back of the neck, general weakness and palpitations. While Kwok posited MSG as only one possible cause among many, it was latched onto by scientists and the media. In 1969, experiments – now found to have been crucially flawed – appeared to confirm ‘Chinese Restaurant syndrome’ as a legitimate medical condition caused by MSG, one that could make you sterile and cause brain damage in babies. The subsequent public health scare lasted for decades.

It doesn’t feel like a stretch to posit that fried rice syndrome may have been coined during this racially charged moment in culinary history, in which food safety fears were being rampantly fuelled by a dislike and distrust of immigrant culture. ‘I think there is a bit of a stigma in how it has come to be named fried rice syndrome,’ said Palombo. ‘It seems to suggest that Asian food is the problem, but it’s not. Any starchy food should be considered a contamination risk.’

I was starting to understand how reheated rice, specifically, had become such a uniquely panic-inducing food for white people. But if beneath the noise there was still a very legitimate danger of food poisoning, why was this risk being so little discussed, underplayed or even ignored in other cultures? In essence: Why was my dad angry about this?

‘I had no idea this was a massive thing until I read your email,’ said Mandy Yin, founder of the Malaysian restaurant Sambal Shiok in North London, after I sent her links to the TikTok rice panic. At the same time, it didn’t surprise her. ‘Years ago, I was with my husband’s family – half Scottish, half Welsh – and we ordered a massive Chinese takeaway. Immediately after finishing, everyone refused to keep the rice. I was like: There’s so much food being wasted!’

Yin told me that at Malaysian street food stalls and markets, the rice for nasi lemak is often cooked in the morning, wrapped in banana leaf parcels along with sambal, peanuts, anchovies, and egg, and then sold throughout the day. In fact, in many cuisines, there is an abundance of recipes in which leftover rice is actively preferred over freshly cooked.

A beloved dish in Tamil cuisine called pazhaya sadam literally translates as ‘old rice’. Food writer and novelist Chitrita Banerji told me of a similar recipe in rural Bengal called panta bhat: ‘During the summer, people will pour water over leftover rice and just leave it – not in the fridge, but outside. The hot temperature outdoors will ferment it to create this kind of milky liquid. You eat it with raw onions and maybe some raw green chillies. It has a sharp, slightly funky taste. And that is considered very healthy and cooling for your body.’ I find it hard to believe that these recipes, widely circulated and often passed down through generations, would have survived if they were inherently poisonous.

Comparing the rates of B cereus poisoning between different countries didn’t help to clear things up much. At first glance, when you compare a Western nation like the US with China, the world’s leading consumer of rice, the data are striking. According to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate from nearly twenty years ago, around 63,400 B cereus episodes occur annually in the US, whereas a ten-year survey of infections in China (from 2010 to 2020) logged only 7,892 cases in total. That suggests that far more people are getting sick from fried rice syndrome in the US than in China (particularly when the population discrepancy between the two is factored in). However, the methods used in these studies are so different as to basically preclude comparison – whereas the US figure is an estimate to account for likely under-reporting of mild cases, the Chinese survey focused explicitly on confirmed cases. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: Might there be something in how different cultures are preparing and cooking rice that may somehow be preventing B cereus infections?

Searching for answers, I came across the work of Paul W Sherman, a biologist at Cornell University who spent a large chunk of his academic life studying the social life of naked mole rats. In the late 1990s, he collaborated with a graduate student called Jennifer Billing to investigate a uniquely culinary question: Why did humans start using spices in food? And why, despite a now-established global spice trade, is their use far more important in some cuisines rather than in others? Could it be, they posited, that people in hotter countries use more spices because spices kill bacteria that grow faster in warmer climates, keeping their food safer to eat?

Sherman and Billings surveyed 107 ‘traditional’ cookbooks from thirty-six countries globally, creating a database of nearly 7,000 recipes, across which forty-two spices were used. Their analysis found that countries with higher average temperatures appeared to add more spices to their recipes relative to countries with lower average temperatures. They also discovered that higher average temperatures (where food-borne pathogens would be more prolific) were associated with the use of spices with stronger antimicrobial effects. They concluded that beneath the veneer of cultural differences in taste preference, culinary spice use might also have an evolutionary premise.

It’s certainly rare that I cook plain rice without any spices added at all. I’m usually riffing on one Iranian recipe or another, which almost always involve turmeric, sometimes saffron and occasionally clove, cinnamon, ginger or cumin. Likewise, when Talati told me how he cooked what he described as ‘plain rice’, it still involved ‘boiling it with spices like star anise, cinnamon, clove and cardamom’. Similarly, Yin said that, when cooking rice, ‘I do generally always use garlic and white pepper, oyster sauce and soy sauce, and some sort of chilli sauce or sambal feature regularly too.’

Star anise, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger and garlic have all, in peer-reviewed scientific papers, shown antimicrobial effects that inhibit B cereus in some shape or form. And they aren’t the only ones: similar studies are out there for the antimicrobial effects of ingredients including rosemary, black pepper, coriander, oregano, thyme, galangal, onion, capsicum and pomegranate (a popular ingredient in Iranian cooking). Even the banana leaf, mentioned by Yin as packaging for parcels of rice, displays antimicrobial properties, although I couldn’t find any studies of its effect on B cereus specifically.

Could the use of certain spices in various cultural methods of rice preparation be preventing the proliferation of fried rice syndrome? I put my spice thesis to Palombo. He agreed that traditional medicinal plants have a lot of antibacterial compounds. ‘Before modern methods of food preservation, people would rely on stuff like this,’ he said. ‘Salt is also an inhibitor of microbial growth, so if you’re adding salt to your rice when you cook it, that might have an effect too.’ I started to think of all the Iranian recipes I cook at home, which my dad taught me and his mother taught him, as not just guides for good meals, but as repositories of traditional knowledge, from a time before fridges and microwaves, in which many of the ingredients had been combined in particular ways for a myriad of now-forgotten-yet-essential reasons. And like a child reciting a prayer, I was now repeating these actions, without ever truly understanding why.

The spice theory is interesting, but it is just a theory. Since Billing and Sherman published their work in the nineties, some of their findings have been challenged. A 2021 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour painted a more complicated picture, which suggested that spice use is better predicted by socioeconomic factors like poverty and poor health outcomes than by temperature or infection risk. And when I asked Banerji about the use of spices to cook rice in Bengal, she was quick to burst my bubble: ‘In Bengal, the day-to-day rice is cooked plain, without any added spices or even salt. The use of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, bay leaves, or even saffron is seen for more “fancy” recipes, like pilafs and biryanis. It is not daily food.’

How then to think about fried rice syndrome after everything I’d learned? It was certainly more complicated than a simple public health warning. The name itself is useless and misleading, and probably originates from a particularly racist moment in culinary history. Yes, improper storage and reheating of your rice can make you sick, but so can the same treatment of any starchy food. I’d become less wary of rice in particular, and more wary of room temperature itself. Will I now think twice about the tempting arancini and frittatina di pasta that sit out on cafe counters in Italy next time I’m on holiday? Yes. Will I try at least one anyway because risk excites me? Yes.

I walked away from this intensive phase of research with a very odd picture of the world, one divided into two tribes: the reheaters and the dumpers. Box by box, the faithful reheaters filled their fridges and freezers with cooked rice, building for the future, like beavers constructing a mighty dam. Meanwhile the other tribe, the fearful dumpers, poured their leftovers into a never-ending waterfall of perfectly edible white grains that showered down into a black abyss, deep into the underworld.

That evening, once Dad had calmed down, we did what we do best: we cooked rice. He’d been to the Kurdish shop on Sunderland Road to get fresh dill and fava beans so that we could make baghali polow, an Iranian rice dish that people have been cooking since at least since the Safavid Dynasty. We washed basmati ritualistically five times and then parboiled it. Steam bellowed from a big pot, dill leaves were separated from stalks, fava beans were rinsed. We drained and washed the parboiled rice again, then mixed it with the dill and beans. We added oil, butter and turmeric into the pot, carefully placed and sizzled some thinly sliced potato and delicately spooned the rice back in. Dad said, ‘Careful!’ a lot. Melted saffron was drizzled over, and then the lid went back on for an hour.

We ate the baghali polow together and watched the football, and Dad told me all his rice memories: about being taught to cook by his mum; about living in a Caspian seaside town in Mazandaran and smelling the rice fields in the summer (‘a lovely sweet smell’); about how in Iran, your Sunday best clothes that you’d wear for special occasions are called ‘lebas polo khori’ – ‘rice-eating clothes’. When the game finished and I got up to leave, he presented me with three glass containers of leftover baghali polow, which I took home, and which I would ultimately reheat, the next day, and the next day and the next.

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Joe Zadeh is a British-Iranian writer based in the north east of England. He writes fast-paced and wide-ranging nonfiction about the things that underpin our everyday lives, but often escape scrutiny. His longform essays have questioned the way we think about time, examined the cultural history of charisma, and shone a light on the consequences of the modern world's addiction to concrete. Previous bylines include the Guardian, VICE, and Rolling Stone. He currently works as a contributing writer for the US publication Noema.

Ibrahim Rayintakath is an illustrator and art director based in his coastal hometown of Ponnani, India. His editorial work, which explores themes of culture, politics and mental health, has appeared in various outlets like the New Yorker, the New York Times and NBC.

By: John Elliott

Perhaps no one in living memory has spanned the two cultures of Britain and India as sensitively and closely as Sir Mark Tully, the BBC’s veteran broadcaster, who died in New Delhi age 90 on January 25, a Sunday as he would have wished. His loss will be felt throughout South Asia and across the world where listeners to the BBC will remember the rich tones of his warm but powerful voice, not just reporting on India and its neighbors, but also leading Something Understood, a weekly faith and music-oriented BBC radio program.

I first met Mark in Sri Lanka during the Tamil uprising of 1983 and quickly realized he was a tough and persistent reporter, but with a ready smile for people he met, charming them with fluent Hindi as well as his cultured English. He was a kind, caring and religious man, who once thought of becoming a priest. His broadcasting, and later his books, were often strongly influenced by a deep sense of right and wrong, which partly led to strong negative views about modern development.

Mark Tully immersed himself in the countries he covered and developed a wide circle of friends and trusted contacts ranging from poor villagers to those at the top of government who frequented his home in Delhi. They all helped him deliver revealing reports that uncovered the stories of a region going through massive change. Later his books, with iconic titles like No Full Stops in India that was published in 1991, vividly portrayed aspects of life in the remotest parts of the subcontinent.

Famous on the BBC’s radio air waves across South Asia, he was scrupulous about his detachment, even though he was specially lauded in Pakistan in the 1980s. People there listened out for his radio reports on the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) that aimed at unseating the country’s military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq. I remember how, in a country where the media had little freedom, the BBC brought hope crackling down the airwaves with news of the MRD’s rallies and protests.

Mark was the BBC’s New Delhi-based bureau chief for 20 years and foreign correspondents were frequently chased by children calling out “Are you Mark Tully, Are you Mark Tully?” One day, near the Pakistani city of Hyderabad, a colleague and I were asked the question at a chai stall. “Yes, I am!” I said, exasperated by the repeated questions. Stirring the chai, the stall holder spoke to me in his own language and, when I didn’t reply, declared “You’re not Mark Tully, you don’t speak Urdu!”

Sometimes the Tully name was used more threateningly. In December 1992, he had become the symbol of all that was resented about the international media by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu extremists who were targeting foreign journalists after demolishing a revered 16th Muslim Mosque in Ayodhya. (A new Hindu temple was opened on the site by prime minister Narendra Modi early in 2024).

Tully escaped with some other journalists, rescued by a nearby temple priest. “We were surrounded by a huge mob screaming, ‘Death to Mark Tully!’ and ‘Death to BBC’,” he later told the Los Angeles Times for a profile headed “The BBC’s Battered Sahib: Mark Tully has been expelled by India, chased by mobs and picketed. He loves his job.”

His big events ranged from India-Pakistan wars, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the foundation of Bangladesh, to the uprisings in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. I saw him center stage on stories like the Indian army’s storming of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi, and Union Carbide’s Bhopal gas disaster. He was always aware that what he said on the air waves could have a much more immediate and maybe cataclysmic impact than most newspaper reports.

He irritated and infuriated successive governments and was expelled from India along with other foreign correspondents during Indira Gandhi’s 1975-77 State of Emergency, but was awarded the highest civilian honors. In India he received the Padma Shri (for distinguished service) in 1992 and the Padma Bhushan (for distinguished service of higher order) in 2005. In the UK, he was knighted for his contribution to journalism in 2002, though he rarely used his full Sir Mark Tully title.

Mark was born on October 24, 1935, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where his father was with Gillander Arbuthnot, a British managing agency firm. His mother’s family had worked for generations in what is now Bangladesh.

He was brought up, colonial style, with a European nanny, then at a British boarding school in Darjeeling north of Calcutta. His teenage school years were spent at Marlborough College in the UK. That was followed by Trinity Hall at Cambridge University, where he studied theology, but abandoned the idea of becoming a Church of England priest after two terms at a theological college.

Mark often said that he didn’t think his lifestyle would have fitted with being a priest, mentioning beer and whisky, and sometimes talking about his complex personal life. “There’s always been a dichotomy in my character– very religious, yet morally really rather bad,” he told The Independent newspaper in 1994. “I simply wasn’t confident of my own moral integrity,” he said in an interview with The Hindu newspaper. “And the Church mattered enough to me— as it still does — so that I didn’t want to let it down.”

He remained married to his wife Margaret after she returned to London from India in the early 1980s, and spent the rest of his life based in Delhi with his partner, devoted assistant, and sometimes co-author Gillian (Gilly) Wright

“It reflects great credit on my wife and on Gillian,” he said in the Independent interview. “After such a long relationship, I didn’t want a divorce and have to write ‘finis.’ I wanted to remain friendly with her (Margaret) and my children.” Asked about this in a 2004 interview with the Cambridge University alumni magazine Cam, he replied: “I can’t speak for my wife or Gilly….Of course, I am not comfortable with the situation, not least because it doesn’t conform with the teachings of the Church.”

After abandoning what he saw as his vocation as a priest, he did not know what to do, so taught for a while and then spent four years working with a housing charity in Cheshire.

His life was transformed when he joined the BBC in 1964. A year later he moved to India, initially in management but quickly transferring to reporting, becoming the bureau chief, a post he held for 20 years. Aided by his deputy, Satish Jacob, and in later years by Gilly, he travelled extensively across the sub-continent, building relationships that included top political leaders and covering ordinary people’s miseries and their gradually changing lives as well as the big events.

If there has been criticism of his coverage, it is that he was – and remained – too critical and opposed to the development and modernization that has replaced traditional lifestyles and attitudes. He did not, of course, advocate continuing poverty or a lack of development, but he refused to accept that western-style consumerism and other forms of change were the way to achieve progress. He was also a virulent critic of the current Indian government’s Hindu nationalism.

No Full Stops had been “didactic,” he later admitted (in the preface to his next book) pleading that, along with economic growth, it was also necessary to “protect the country’s ancient culture, not merely ape…. the sterile materialism of the modern Western culture.”

He was not afraid to air unfashionable views, as he showed over India’s widely condemned caste system on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2003. “We have to look to the good and the bad in the caste system,” he argued. “The good side of it is that it offers security, it offers companionship, a community to belong to and that sort of thing.”

Mark has said that his passion for India was greater than his passion for journalism. He was happiest travelling the country talking to contacts and reporting and commenting on what he saw and heard on the radio.

He did not easily adapt to television and the BBC’s increased commercialization, and thought change should come by “evolution not revolution.” That led to him resigning from the BBC in 1994 after he was told to stop voicing his criticisms. But he continued to do occasional programs – in 2017 for India’s 70th year of independence, he and Gilly made a memorable cross-country journey that combined his hobby as a railway buff with reflections on the emerging India.

Away from the constraints of daily reporting, Mark became a prolific author, producing a total of more than a dozen books that vividly explored life in India with titles like India in Slow Motion and India’s Unending Journey as well as No Full Stops. Recently he was in the final stages of editing a memoir-style autobiography that Gilly will now complete.

Mark was also celebrated as the leading host on Something Understood, the BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning program of words and music that started in 1995. Listeners tuned in from all over the world. Focused on faith, spirituality, and human life, this took him back to his original vocation till the BBC ended the series in 2019.

Regretting the BBC’s decision, Mark told the Radio Times magazine that he felt sad because he knew a lot of listeners liked it. “They say two things to me about it – that there is nothing else like it on the radio, and that this is what radio should be all about. And I think that’s true.” So many listeners instantly mention this when they hear the name Mark Tully – and tune in when the BBC runs repeats.

Mark is survived by his wife Margaret and four children, Sarah, Sam, Emma and Patrick, and by his partner Gillian.