Notes of Nagesh

By Nagesh Bhushan  Iran’s current military doctrine, often referred to as  “Decentralised Mosaic Defence”  (or simply “Mosaic Defence”), represents a strategic shift designed to ensure the regime’s survival and operational continuity in the face of a potential war with the United States or Israel. Articulated publicly by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in early 2024 and refined through 2025–2026, the strategy is a direct response to two decades of observing U.S. military campaigns, which Iran believes rely heavily on “decapitation strikes” against leadership and centralized infrastructure. Core Philosophy: Resilience Through Fragmentation The central premise of the Mosaic Defence is that a centralized command structure is a vulnerability. If the enemy destroys the capital, kills senior commanders, or severs communication hubs, the entire war effort collapses. Instead, Iran has moved toward a  fully distributed command hierarchy . Autonomous Nodes:  Milit...

By Nagesh Bhushan How India's Supreme Court judges may be trading favorable rulings for comfortable post-retirement sinecures — and what the data reveal about justice for sale New Delhi  |  Mar 2026 Corruption, as any economist will tell you, is fundamentally a story about incentives. Bribe a customs officer and she waves your container through. Offer a politician a directorship and he tweaks the regulation. The logic is ancient and depressingly universal. What is rarer — and considerably more alarming — is when the same logic appears to grip the apex court of the world's most populous democracy. A paper published in the  Journal of Law and Economics  by Madhav Aney and Giovanni Ko of Singapore Management University, and Shubhankar Dam of the University of Portsmouth, makes a disquieting argument. Studying 652 judgments of the Supreme Court of India between 1999 and 2014, the authors find statistical evidence that some judges ruled in favour of the government...

♦️ The Mystery: Do Judges Trade Rulings for Jobs? In a robust democracy, the judiciary acts as the ultimate neutral referee. However, researchers Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, and Giovanni Ko uncovered a pattern in the Supreme Court of India that suggested the referee might be playing for the home team. They observed a frequent "revolving door" where retiring justices were quickly appointed to prestigious government positions. This raised the specter of a "Quid Pro Quo"—the suspicion that judges were systematically trading favorable verdicts for post-retirement career security. The researchers deconstructed this mystery into two measurable questions: 1.       The Incentive:  Do judges respond to the temptation of future appointments by ruling in favor of the government? 2.       The Reward:  Does the government actually follow through by appointing the specific judges who ruled in its favor? While the "ruling-for-jo...