The Basket and the Transponder
In the summer of 1666, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb placed Shivaji Bhonsle under house arrest in Agra. The Maratha king had come to court as a vassal; he left as a prisoner. The logic of the empire was simple: visibility is capture. To appear before the throne is to be contained by its framework. For several weeks, Shivaji feigned illness and began sending large baskets of sweets to the poor and to holy men — a gesture of piety, of thanks for prayers offered on behalf of his health. The guards grew accustomed to the baskets. They inspected them, then stopped inspecting them. One evening, Shivaji climbed into a basket. His son climbed into another. They were carried through the gates of the imperial capital and disappeared.
The historian Jaysinghrao Pawar spent decades returning to this event — and to the broader administrative genius of the Maratha state — with a single insistence: this was not a miracle, not divine intervention, not the romantic cunning of a folk hero. It was management. Shivaji had built a system — an intelligence network called Harkara, a decentralized administrative structure that could function without him, a naval infrastructure along the Konkan coast designed not for battle but for passage. The basket was not a trick. It was the moment when an institutional capacity, built over years, executed its function. The escape from Agra was the output of a system, not the inspiration of a man.
This distinction matters enormously for understanding what India is doing in March 2026. The dominant geopolitical vocabulary — swing state, strategic autonomy, multipolar balancing — treats New Delhi’s current posture as a position, a stance adopted in response to the Hormuz crisis. Pawar’s framework suggests something different: that what looks like agility is actually infrastructure, and that infrastructure of this kind was not built for this crisis. It was built before any specific crisis, precisely so that no specific crisis could contain it.
The conceptual apparatus for this kind of statecraft exists, and it is not Western. Kautilya’s Arthashastra — composed somewhere between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE, attributed to the minister who helped found the Maurya Empire — describes what it calls the mandala: a geometry of interstate relations in which the neighbor is always a potential adversary, the neighbor’s neighbor a potential ally, and no relationship is permanent because permanence is not the goal. The goal is the maintenance of maneuverability. Western international relations theory has a concept of balance of power, but the balance of power assumes that states are trying to achieve stability. The mandala does not assume stability as a goal. It assumes that the system is always in motion and that wisdom consists in moving with it rather than against it.
On March 11, India joined the 140 co-sponsors of UN Security Council Resolution 2817, condemning Iranian attacks on shipping in the Gulf — a vote that placed New Delhi alongside Washington and against Tehran. On the same week, Indian refineries continued processing Iranian crude, delivered through channels established under the Rial-Rupee-Dirham bilateral trade agreement that explicitly circumvents dollar-denominated settlement. To Western eyes, this is hypocrisy or confusion. Through the lens of the mandala, it is precision. India is not choosing between two blocs. It is maintaining simultaneous relationships with both — not because it cannot decide, but because decision, in the Kautilyan framework, is the trap. The neighbor is always a potential adversary. The adversary’s adversary is always a potential ally. The geometry keeps moving.
There is a naval precedent for this that Pawar also documented, less celebrated than Shivaji but perhaps more directly relevant to the current moment: Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha admiral who controlled the Konkan coast in the early eighteenth century. Angre did not dominate the sea lanes through superior force — the Portuguese, the British, and the Mughal-aligned traders all had larger fleets. He controlled them through indispensability. Every major maritime power operating along the western coast of India needed Angre’s cooperation to move safely. He extracted tribute from the Portuguese, negotiated with the British East India Company, raided those who refused terms, and made himself the necessary intermediary for any commerce that wanted to arrive and depart intact. He was not neutral. He was structurally central — the node through which all flows had to pass, precisely because he had made himself the most efficient route and the most dangerous obstacle simultaneously. When the British finally defeated him in 1729, they did not replace his function. They inherited it. The coast still needed someone to manage its passage. Power had moved; the structure remained.
On March 8, 2026, the tanker Shenlong entered the Strait of Hormuz and switched off its AIS transponder — the Automatic Identification System that makes vessels visible to maritime surveillance networks, insurance systems, and port authorities. It disappeared from the screens of Lloyd’s adjusters, from the satellite tracking feeds, from the legal apparatus of international maritime commerce. On March 9, it reappeared on the other side of the strait. On March 11, it docked in Mumbai. The cargo was Iranian crude. The passage was invisible. The arrival was not.
Pawar would have recognized this immediately. Not the technology — the operation. The basket that the guards had stopped inspecting. The route that the surveillance apparatus had not been calibrated to see. The Harkara, working in the gap between what the empire’s perceptual system expected and what was actually moving through its territory. The AIS transponder is the contemporary equivalent of the Mughal gate inspection: a system designed to make movement legible, to capture it within a framework of visibility and control. Switching it off is not evasion in the simple sense. It is the activation of an institutional capacity built for exactly this purpose — the capacity to exist at a different speed, in a different register, than the system designed to contain you.
This is where the Pawar framework diverges most sharply from the standard geopolitical account. The standard account says: India is exploiting a window of opportunity created by the Hormuz crisis to advance its strategic interests. The Pawar account says: India is executing a procedure that was designed long before this crisis, through institutions that do not require crisis to function, because the crisis is not the point. The International North-South Transport Corridor — running from Mumbai through Iran to Russia and onward to Central Asia — was not built as a response to Hormuz. It was built as an alternative to the system that Hormuz anchors. The Rial-Rupee-Dirham settlement mechanism was not invented in March 2026. It has been operational for years, quietly, in the administrative blind spot of the dollar system. The basket was ready. The guards had already grown accustomed to it.
But Pawar’s framework also demands honesty about the gap between the system as designed and the system as it actually functions under stress. And here the picture becomes more complicated. When the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena was sunk by a US submarine on March 4, in waters 35 kilometers from Sri Lanka — returning from joint naval exercises with the Indian fleet — India’s response was delayed, cautious, and ultimately diplomatic rather than military. This was an act of kinetic force conducted inside India’s own declared sphere of maritime interest. The system that was supposed to provide strategic immunity did not provide it in this instance. The Harkara did not reach the ship in time. The basket was not ready for this particular gate.
The tension between the architecture and its stress-testing is not a failure of the Pawar framework. It is exactly what the framework predicts. Pawar was insistent that Shivaji’s genius was not invincibility — it was the construction of systems that could absorb loss and continue functioning. The Maratha state lost battles, lost territory, lost leaders. What it did not lose was the administrative capacity to reconfigure around the loss and continue. What is being tested in March 2026 is not whether India’s alternative topology can prevent all bad outcomes. It is whether it can absorb bad outcomes without the topology collapsing. The IRIS Dena is a data point, not a verdict.
What Pawar understood, and what the current geopolitical moment is making visible, is that sovereignty in the twenty-first century is not primarily territorial. It is not the capacity to hold ground or project force. It is the capacity to maintain a different relationship to the systems of visibility that determine what can be traded, what can be insured, what can be recognized as a legitimate actor in global space. Shivaji’s forts on the Sahyadri peaks were not primarily defensive positions. They were nodes in a topology that could not be controlled from Delhi because Delhi could not see it whole. The INSTC is not primarily a trade route. It is a topology that cannot be sanctioned from Washington because Washington cannot see it whole.
The question that remains open — and Pawar would have insisted that it remain open — is whether a topology can sustain itself as an alternative regime of circulation long enough to achieve the critical mass required for stability. Kanhoji Angre’s system worked for decades and then failed when the British brought sufficient force to bear. Shivaji’s state survived his death and then fragmented a century later under pressures that the administrative genius of its founding could not have fully anticipated. The current Indian architecture faces pressures that Pawar’s historical framework can describe but cannot resolve: the speed at which drone swarms can disrupt nodes is faster than the speed at which any administrative system can recalibrate; the fragility of transit partners along the INSTC route introduces variables that the mandala cannot fully contain; the scarcity of high-end interceptors creates prioritization choices that no doctrine of topological agility can indefinitely defer.
Liza Kin
Berlin, March 26, 2026