India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar has finally got what he wanted but he doesn’t know what to do with it! Even his Vishwaguru, Narendra Modi, has little clue as to what is going on in the jungle of geopolitics as the US-Israel war on Iran rages with no end in sight. Iran has stunned its opponents with its strategic acumen and is poised to win the war simply by not losing it, as explained by most well regarded strategic affairs experts.In one of his profound moments of epiphany, Jaishankar had made a big claim that India would rather take its chances with the ” law of the jungle” as opposed to the rules based world order which seemed to have lost its effectiveness.Jaishankar said this in February 2025 on the sidelines of the annual Munich security conference in a panel discussion coordinated by the Observer Research Foundation(ORF). He was responding to another European diplomat who had argued that some minimum rules based order was needed for smooth global governance otherwise the world would end up with the law of the jungle. At this point India’s foreign minister interjected and said he would rather take his chances with the law of the jungle!It is possible that Jaishankar made this confident assertion then because India had little clue how the King of the jungle would behave subsequently as the newly elected president of the United States. Jaishankar’s espousal of the law of the jungle was perhaps based on the putative personal equation between Modi and Donald Trump which was to dramatically unravel months later. Indeed, if you are blessed by the most powerful King of the jungle, or so Jaishankar might have thought, there is little to worry.However, that was the gravest miscalculation by the Modi-Jaishankar duo as they came to realise once Trump began to bare his fangs and didn’t spare even India after announcing the “liberation day tariffs”. Indeed, Trump brought in the law of the jungle in world trade, upending all existing rules governing world trade and even US’s past commitments under regional and bilateral trade agreements. Contrary to India’s expectation that the King of the jungle would treat her more benignly, the worst treatment was reserved for India.One wonders whether Jaishankar still swears by the law of the jungle as a preferred guide for India to play geo-politics. The external affairs minister had embraced the law of the jungle publicly in Munich in 2025. Ironically, the very next year at the Munich security conference Jaishankar got a rude reality check when US secretary of state Marco Rubio made his infamous speech about America’s intent to recolonise the world without any historical guilt and reduce the global south to client status as had existed until early to mid 20th century. Rubio called upon Europe to join this project and reclaim the colonial past to a rather stunned audience at the Munich conference.I am recalling Marco Rubio at the Munich conference to merely bring home the fact that Rubio was implicitly suggesting the upending of all rules based governance systems to usher in the law of the jungle which Jaishankar said he would happily embrace at the same venue the previous year. Indeed, it was a remarkable coincidence.So the law of the jungle is well and truly here and our Vishwaguru, who maintains a sphinx like silence, doesn’t know what to do with it. India just doesn’t know how to deal with the Mad King of the jungle who is wielding a wrecking ball and swinging it not only across the developing world but on his own allies in the developed world.So how will our dear foreign minister navigate this jungle now?Here is another delicious irony – it was at the recently held Raisina Dialogue, a high profile conference, organised by the ORF and funded by India’s foreign ministry that the US deputy secretary of state publicly declared that the US will never allow India to rise as an economic power like it did China in the past decades. One is tempted to ask Jaishankar whether he had expected such a treatment from a representative of the King of the jungle?The Mad King and the law of the jungle have played havoc with he world in the last 13 months. India has mostly responded with “pragmatic” silence to the illegal war crimes committed in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba etc. The King of the jungle is power drunk and is seeking to replace an orderly hegemony with a devastatingly disorderly one. A new geopolitical vocabulary is being created in this jungle where the Mad King is threatening to bomb nations back to the stone age.The world economy meanwhile is threatened with the prospect of returning to the stone age without necessarily being bombed. Fuel shortage has gripped much of the world which may soon resort to rationing of oil and gas. Fertiliser shortages could make poor and populous countries like India vulnerable to food shortages in due course. The International Energy Agency (IEA) chief, Fatih Birol, has said this oil shock is much worse than the two big oil shocks of the 1970s(1973 &1979). He said in 1973 and 1979 about 5 million barrels each of oil supply went off the market. This time already 12 million barrels are off the market in the first few weeks. More could follow.India is already seeing large urban populations going back to their village due to the shortage of cooking gas. About 800 million of our rural population may be regressing to using firewood. The law of the jungle threatens to push India back several decades, forcing it to rediscover the firewood economy. Some day the opposition in Parliament must seriously ask Jaishankar what has been his experience with the law of the jungle he so happily wanted to embrace!