Selective Justice, Shattered Empires: Israel, India and the Reckoning of the Global South

Following World War II, a new international order was established, but it was overshadowed by the rhetoric of the international community, which emphasised universal justice, collective security, and economic development. But beneath the sanctioned cries of peace and the rule of law resided an edifice that had nothing to do with equity but the strengthening of power. The international architecture that has emanated since the United Nations to the Bretton Woods institutions was never indifferent. It was then, and still is, a tool in maintaining Western domination and punishing the Global South.
The entire United Nations system is structurally skewed. The veto right, which is only given to five permanent members of the Security Council, all the winners of WWII, exists due to the codification of global inequality. It also guarantees that no matter how heinous the actions of a Western or allied nation, those actions can be vetoed into silence. The ICJ and ICC were established with the preconception of accountability, but their partial application of the same insidiously undermines the sometimes eponymous intent. Seldom do they limit the powerful. Instead, they are moral truncheons on lesser countries, particularly those in the Global South, that think of going against the script of Western hegemony.
There are no secrets to this hypocrisy. Even Western policymakers admit to it. In 1986, the United States was defeated in a court battle over its involvement in Nicaragua, with the court ruling that the United States had been wrong to interfere with the military and facilitate the Contras. The U.S. reacted not by accepting the ascertained verdict but by withdrawing entirely from the Court’s jurisdiction. As is well-known, former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton weighed in to insist that the ICC is dead to us. Justice, within this context, is not a value. It is a privilege not obtained through the observance of law, but rather through loyalty to power.
No country provides such a morbid example of this dynamic as Israel. Established with excessive Western backing in 1948, Israel has developed into a militarised frontier state, a garrison project of the West at the centre of the Arab world. The occupation of the Palestinian territories over decades, the illegal settlements, the frequent bombing of Gaza, and the policies of apartheid have all been captured and denounced by UN agencies, human rights groups, and even the ICJ. In 2004, the ICJ adjudged that the wall in the West Bank constructed by Israel was unlawful and should be demolished. The result? Absolute impunity. The wall doesn’t fade away. The colonies have increased in number. And the bombs they keep on dropping on the besieged Gaza population.
This impunity is not a coincidence. The complex partnership of military support, diplomatic security, and story control is upheld by the United States and supported by essential European partners. Numerous times, U.S. vetoes within the UN Security Council have helped Israel avoid prosecution. Western media, along with think tanks, offer ideological obfuscation, describing actions of Israel as necessary in defence and branding Palestinian resistance as terrorism. It is a simple principle, in the world of international law, that only weak people can have laws enforced.
This is the same global framework of selective justice that the Hindutva regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tried to emulate in India. In an attempt to court the West as a natural ally, India had adopted the Israeli handbook, weaponising its minorities, securitising them and using their backgrounds to demonise their presence in every aspect as it exercised its dominion over Kashmir through a brutal military occupation. Indian leaders boasted of their relationships with Tel Aviv and Washington, fancying themselves belonging to a more civilised bloc protecting democracy against the Muslim world and China. Kashmir was to India what Gaza was to Israel; the Indian media is its Hasbara; and the anticipation was quite visible that the Western immunity will come to India as well.
That delusion was broken back in May 2025.
The 2025 Indo-Pak war was not normal. It was a war of multi-domain warfare and was contested over airspace, cyberspace, narrative space and diplomatic corridors. Whereas India had an exaggerated sense of regional superiority and was banking on the West, Pakistan had an agile and multidimensional strategy that left India wind-blown. The Pakistan army effectively countered the Indian moves; the actual battleground was international opinion. Being supported openly but quietly by China and many in the Islamic world, Pakistan outsmarted India in digital, diplomatic, and economic spheres.
Pakistan. The assembled multidomain counteraction Operation Bunyan Al Marsoos became a case study in a contemporary hybrid war. Its computerised intelligence systems alerted Indian command systems. Its storytelling machinery splits the live data of Indian fake news and massacres across the media of the world. Its foreign policy mobilised unprecedented backing by the OIC, the African Union, as well as other neutral countries in Latin America. The myth of India as the invincible nation broke. So did its Israeli-style impunity dream.
No horsemen came to the rescue of India; the West felt sorry but didn’t ride in to the rescue. Washington did not make ultimatums but platitudes. London and Paris were conservative, fearful of alienating further a China-Pakistan axis they could no longer afford to overlook. Despite all its efforts in trying to court Western favour, India learned what borrowed legitimacy can do. The West is not willing to cede power to sub-imperial partners, but it tolerates them.
And so a new reality began to crystallise. Rhetorical condemnations are no longer sufficient for the Global South. It is planning, plotting, and demanding its share. A new world is emerging, one that no longer relies on the goodwill of the Western world but on the collaboration of equals. This world will see BRICS achieve success comparable to the SCO, and African integrated infrastructure investments will be as effective as the fake reset of the G7 states. Unipolar morality is a fading thing. An era of multipolar responsibility is beginning.
Of course, that does not mean the old order is dead, quite the contrary. The IMF and the World Bank continue serving as mechanisms of financial-based discipline, demanding privatisation, austerity and Western-designed policy platforms in the developing world. The dominance of the dollar is still in place. Western military outposts surround the Asian and African continents. But fissures are opening. The West is no longer accorded unquestioned legitimacy. All this is too hypocritical, it’s justice too partisan, its allies too expendable.
In allying itself to this sinking centre, India has taken the wrong side of history. Rather than gladly identify with the new Global South, where experience, cultural appreciation, and development are becoming the new currency, it betted on empire, delusion, and the expression of prestige. And it lost.
Contrastingly, and ever since the labelling of Pakistan as unstable and being treated as peripheral, the country is rapidly changing. It has done so through its geostrategic positioning, developing relationships with emerging powers, and mastery of the instruments of modern statecraft to become a key hub of the post-Western world. Whether it is undermining Indian disinformation campaigns or stabilising regional corridors, Pakistan is gaining not only relevance but also respect.
The payback has come. Not in fiery speeches, but in re-arrangements of strategy. No, not slogans, but policies. Victims are not the only people to challenge the age of selective justice; those who are on the winning side have also come to play a more intelligent and more challenging game. The West can continue to hold the gavel, yet its moral authority is shattered. The wall of Israel, the annexation of India, the drone wars of America– these are not signs of power anymore. They are shrines to an era of impunity.
And as that age passes over, it is not the empires that will write the next. It is the subsequently oppressed, now emergent Global South that wants justice not as a favour, but as a reality.