For more than six years, Alice Loksha Ngaddah bided her time, waiting for an opportunity to escape her abductors.

She had been kidnapped in Nigeria by a splinter group of Boko Haram, one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups.

Her moment to flee arrived in October, when Ms. Loksha, the 3-year-old son she gave birth to in captivity and another abductee, Fayina Ali Akilawus, slipped out of the militants’ camp at dusk. They traveled by donkey, ox cart, boat and car for more than three days until arriving at a military outpost in northeastern Nigeria.

As they neared their destination, the women erupted in praises to Jesus, shouting, “We are really saved,” Ms. Loksha recalled, speaking to The New York Times this week in her only interview since regaining freedom.

When she was abducted, Ms. Loksha became one of the highest-profile of the thousands of people Boko Haram has kidnapped over the past decade. She was a nurse and mother of two, working for UNICEF at a clinic in Rann, Nigeria, an area of intense conflict between the military and Boko Haram. She took the job to earn money for her mother’s dementia care, despite the risks.

After work one day in March 2018, she and several other aid workers went to the military base in Rann to use the Wi-Fi to call their families. Suddenly gunfire erupted, the aid workers hit the ground, and an intense battle unfolded around them. Fighters charged into the room, killing and wounding some of the aid workers.

Ms. Loksha and two midwives were forced into a truck by the terrorists and taken away, driving all night into the bush. She would spend the next six years focused on survival and escape.

The Commander’s Prized Possession

After 11 days of being moved around by their captors, Ms. Loksha and the midwives were brought to Kangaruwa, a camp run by the group that took them, Islamic State West Africa Province, a Boko Haram offshoot.

For the first few months, the insurgents left the women alone. The militants made contact with the aid organizations the women had worked for and the Nigerian government, trying to extract ransoms and the release of imprisoned comrades. When their demands were not met, they became angry and told the women to expect the worst.

“The nation will be surprised,” Ms. Loksha said the fighters told them.

On Sept. 16, Saifura Khorsa, one of the two midwives, felt particularly uneasy. “Maybe they are coming to take us home,” Ms. Loksha remembered her saying. It was the woman’s birthday, so Ms. Loksha tried to lift her spirits by cracking jokes and doing her hair.

Vehicles full of fighters appeared and took Ms. Khorsa away. She was executed that day, Ms. Loksha learned later. The other midwife, Hauwa Mohammed Liman, was killed the following month. Both women were Muslim; the Islamist militants said they deserved to die because they had betrayed their faith by working for the Red Cross.

When Boko Haram emerged in 2009, its leaders openly preached violence against Christians. Its deadly net soon widened to include northern Nigeria’s Muslim majority. The group has abducted and killed thousands of Muslim women, and forcibly “married” some of them to fighters.

Common criminals rather than religious zealots make up the bulk of the group’s ranks these days, said Allen Manasseh, a youth leader at the forefront of a campaign to release Boko Haram captives. “It’s now a criminal enterprise that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with religion,” he said.

Still, Ms. Loksha is convinced that being a Christian is what saved her from the midwives’ fate. Like most abducted Christian women, she was considered an infidel who didn’t know any better.

In captivity, she used her skills as a nurse and midwife to treat her captors’s injuries and deliver babies. Prized for this reason, she was handed over to a senior commander as a sex slave.

Pretending to Be Muslim

Less than a year after her abduction, Ms. Loksha told her captors she would convert to Islam, and took a Muslim name, Halima. “I had to join them because I can’t beat them, so that is what I did,” she said.

She pantomimed the rituals while holding her Christian faith close to her heart, praying in private. “We had to be Muslims when we are there, for us to gain freedom,” she said of herself and other Christian captives.

She was enslaved first by Abu Umar, one of the terrorist group’s top five commanders at the time of her abduction. Giving birth to his son, Mohammed, elevated her status to that of wife.

The commander was stoned to death in 2021 for committing adultery by sleeping with a Muslim abductee. Ms. Loksha was then married to another high-ranking commander, Abu Simak.

Her associations earned her special privileges, like a proper home, adequate food and a modicum of privacy. (When she escaped, she looked healthy and well-fed.) She also persuaded four other enslaved Christian women to embrace fake conversion, trusting them to keep her secret.

“I cannot hide things to you, because you are my sister,” she recalls thinking of the Christian women. “We are one.” All along, she told her captors she was content to live her life as “Auntie Halima.”

In October 2023, when she met Ms. Akilawus, the woman she would eventually escape with, they formed an instant bond. The very first night they met, they held hands and prayed together and talked about their lives and dreams of freedom. “We did not close our eyes till the next day,” Ms. Loksha recalled. “She was brought to me so that we can put heads together.”

Ms. Akilawus, who was captured by Boko Haram in 2020 while traveling by car in Nigeria, had tried to escape three times before meeting Ms. Loksha. She was quickly recaptured each time, jailed for months, chained and severely beaten. “We say it’s only God that will rescue us, because we don’t have anybody,” she told The Times.

Ms. Loksha told the militants she had convinced Ms. Akilawus to convert to Islam. The move allowed the two women to stay together in Ms. Loksha’s straw house and earned her even more trust.

While living together, they slowly began to sell items from the house — curtains, rugs, bits of zinc roofing — to amass money to fund their escape. When they had saved enough, they sought help from a woman from the largely nomadic Fulani ethnic group, who are experts in traversing the bush and have helped other escapees.

In exchange for about $90 — more than most Nigerian workers earn in two months — the woman’s husband surveyed the militants’ property and devised an escape route.

A Perilous Flight

On Oct. 24, just after the 6 p.m. prayers when everyone was sure to be resting, the women slipped out with just two changes of clothing, their rudimentary electronic devices and money. Ms. Loksha gave Mohammed half a dose of diazepam, a sedative, to keep him calm.

The Fulani woman led them to her husband, who was hiding in the bush a three-hour walk from the camp, with a pair of donkeys. They rode through the night for the next two days. When it was clear they had left the bush — and the territory controlled by Boko Haram — they sighed in relief. At a village, the Fulani man handed them off to one of his brothers.

They set off on a three-hour trek on a cow-drawn wooden cart, crossed two rivers and hiked three more hours to Diffa, a town in Niger on Nigeria’s northeast border. Their journey had not yet ended. There was still a two-hour car ride to the Nigerian town of Geidam.

The women burst into prayer as they approached the town. The driver, who was Muslim, kept repeating the word “Sorry,” Ms. Loksha recalled, and drove them straight to the nearest Nigerian military checkpoint.

‘Nowhere Is Safe’

Some women and girls who escape Boko Haram have been raped by Nigerian troops, but Ms. Loksha said the soldiers treated the women with kindness, providing them with good food, clothes and new phones. The military took them to Maiduguri, a city in northeast Nigeria, and handed them over to state government officials last week.

Boko Haram has no overt presence now in Maiduguri, as it did a decade ago, but it is still powerful in the region. A single attack in September left over 170 people dead.

Ms. Loksha believes Boko Haram spies are everywhere in Nigeria, and that the militants will try to stop her from exposing secrets she learned in captivity, such as locations and names. “I know that they may not like to see me alive,” she said. “Nowhere is safe.”

The lives that await both her and Ms. Akilawus are much different from the ones they left behind. Ms. Akilawus was engaged when she was kidnapped; her groom-to-be has long since moved on. Ms. Loksha is 42. Her son, now 13, sat silently as she recently tried to talk to him by video. Her 7-year-old daughter doesn’t remember her at all. Her husband remarried not long after she was taken.

On Wednesday, she was reunited with her sisters, Comfort Shetima and Joy “Kaka” Atigogo, in Maiduguri. Joy flew into Ms. Loksha’s arms, laughing and sobbing while Comfort enveloped them both.

When the sisters broke the news that their mother had died just a few weeks after Ms. Loksha’s abduction, she wailed, “Mama,” and wept, swaying as her friend and younger sister comforted her. Mohammed sat on his Auntie Joy’s lap and wiped away his mother’s tears.

Ms. Loksha’s safety is still uncertain. The military received credible information this week that her captors were looking for her. She said she was prepared for this possibility, and for whatever else might come her way.

“The same God that gave me that courage will be the same God that will lead me further,” she said. “To move on, you forget about the past.”

Apoorva Mandavilli reported from Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Ruth Maclean from Dakar, Senegal.

An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in central Beirut killed at least 11 people on Saturday, the Lebanese Health Ministry said, part of an intensifying Israeli military campaign that appears aimed at pressuring Hezbollah into a cease-fire deal.

The strike was an attempt to assassinate a top Hezbollah military commander, Mohammad Haidar, according to three Israeli defense officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. Hezbollah officials on Saturday afternoon said that none of the group’s leaders were at the site of the airstrike, and later in the day, one of the Israeli officials said Mr. Haidar was not killed.

Over the past week, Israeli ground troops made a concerted push deeper into southern Lebanon while Israel intensified its bombardment of the Dahiya, a cluster of neighborhoods on the southern outskirts of Beirut that are effectively governed by Hezbollah.

The death toll in the latest strike was expected to rise, and at least 63 people were injured, according to the Health Ministry. The strike came just after 4 a.m., jolting Beirut residents awake with thundering explosions that left much of the city enveloped in acrid smoke. It was the third strike this week in central Beirut, an area that had largely been spared since the war between Hezbollah and Israel escalated.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the airstrike hit a multistory building that was believed to house at least 35 people in the Basta neighborhood of Beirut, an area that is home to both Sunni and Shiite Muslims and close to several Western embassies. Hezbollah is a Shiite militant group and Shiite communities in southern and eastern Lebanon have borne the brunt of Israeli attacks over the past few months.

The war in Lebanon has killed more than 3,500 people and forced almost a quarter of the population to flee their homes. Some Shiites who fled the Dahiya have taken refuge in Basta, according to residents of the area.

“There was no prior warning,” Mr. Abiad said of the Basta strike in a phone interview. “It appears there are still bodies under the rubble.”

A crowd of onlookers and rescue workers gathered outside the blast site. Among them were Iman Ismael, a refugee from Syria, and her 10-year-old son, who were waiting for news about four relatives who had lived in the destroyed building.

“They are still missing,” she said. “God, please let them survive.”

The building was just three doors down from another building that Israel bombed last month in an attempt to kill another senior Hezbollah official. Zainab Rummu, 54, said the strike in October had felt like “the end of the world” and forced residents to repair their damaged homes and neighborhood. Now they would have to do it again.

“We thought it was over. No more danger,” she said. “Now where can I go?”

Later on Saturday morning, Israel issued new evacuation warnings for the Dahiya.

The new wave of attacks on Lebanon came as Israel and Hezbollah appeared to be inching toward a cease-fire deal.

An Israeli official said Friday that there was “cautious optimism” about prospects for a truce in negotiations mediated by the United States, though Lebanese officials were less sanguine about a deal. Both Israel and Hezbollah have said they will keep fighting as negotiations go on.

Heavy fighting was reported overnight in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam which the Israeli military has been attempting to encircle in recent days, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. Hezbollah said on Friday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli forces in and around the large town, which lies around three miles from the Israeli border.

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September in response to almost a year of near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel. Hezbollah said the attacks were in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, in Gaza. Both armed groups are back by Iran.

Israel said it was going to war in Lebanon to stop the rockets and to allow tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to return to their homes in northern towns that were evacuated last year. But the rocket attacks have not ceased, and those residents have been unable to return home.

The war has become the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

Euan Ward, Ben Hubbard and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

The day after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia raised the stakes in tensions with the West, many Russians awoke on Friday feeling anxious that the prospect of nuclear war had come slightly closer.

But in Russia’s tightly controlled news media and pro-government social media channels, there were only fawning reactions to the Russian leader’s new round of saber-rattling and promises that Moscow’s enemies would “tremble in fear.”

Mr. Putin announced late Thursday that Russia had launched a new intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine, in response to Kyiv’s first use of U.S. and British missiles against targets inside Russia this week. Russia, he said, also has the right to strike nations “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

In the West, Thursday’s launch of the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile and Mr. Putin’s remarks were perceived as a threat against Ukraine and its allies, and drew widespread condemnation as an escalation. In Russia, the events were billed as an important sign that the Kremlin would enforce its red lines, with the implication that enforcement could include nuclear weapons.

“This topic used to be a taboo in Russia,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, one of the few independent pollsters in Russia. “Within the elites, the consensus is shifting toward talking about it much more openly, and that Russia should make the West understand that it is serious.”

Russians have been largely desensitized to the Kremlin’s frequent bellicose statements and claims of being besieged by the West since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But there are also signs that more Russians have come to accept and even cheer on Mr. Putin’s hawkish stance, accompanied by a steady stream of government and media claims that Ukraine and the West are the aggressors.

A growing number of Russians favor the initiation of peace talks, too, but the number of people who accept the use of nuclear weapons has risen slightly, polls suggest.

Though almost half the Russians surveyed in a poll this year found the use of nuclear weapons “unacceptable,” there has been a slight increase since last year in the number who consider it acceptable, to 34 percent, Mr. Volkov said. He did not discount that after Mr. Putin’s latest speech and the breathless media coverage that followed, that number could rise further.

Support for nuclear force dovetails with support for the Kremlin, Mr. Volkov said. But for many opposition-minded Russians, the use of a nuclear-capable missile still came as a shock.

“Sometimes it feels like I no longer care. You get so apathetic, but the ongoing background noise is one thing and using an ICBM for the first time is something else,” said Olga, 50, a university professor from Moscow, referring to early reports that misidentified the missile as intercontinental.

Olga, who asked that her surname be withheld for fear of repercussions, is strongly antiwar. She said she felt “a little anxious,” though she believes Mr. Putin is bluffing when he threatens to strike targets in the West.

Mr. Putin’s address did not trigger any visible displays of public anxiety in Russia, but the ruble, already battered by a new package of U.S. sanctions on Thursday, dropped further on Friday. The Russian currency on Friday afternoon was trading at its lowest point against the dollar since March 2022.

The threat of expanding the conflict beyond Russia and Ukraine and possibly using nuclear weapons seemed to fall on fertile ground: the apathy and helplessness that have gripped many Russians since the invasion began.

Ksenia A. Sobchak, a prominent media personality whose father was Mr. Putin’s boss in the 1990s, summed up the sentiment on Telegram with gallows humor: “He didn’t say if they will use nukes or not. But do they have to do it right now? Can they at least wait until after the holidays?”

A flagship news show on a state-owned TV channel, Rossiya-1, on Friday morning covered Mr. Putin’s big reveal with gusto, demonstrating the Oreshnik missile’s abilities in a set of sleek graphics. In one, a missile launcher placed on a map of Europe sent projectiles from western Russia to western Europe, reaching “all European capitals.” The host, Olga V. Skabeyeva, boasted, “Even London!”

Ms. Skabeyeva sought to portray Mr. Putin as magnanimous when she noted that Russia was under no obligation to notify the United States ahead of Thursday’s launch, but did so anyway: “We sent a notice to the Americans so that we avoid a Third World War.”

Russian state media, which have always been sensitive about Western press coverage of Russia, also portrayed Mr. Putin’s remarks as a public relations victory. On Friday, a lot of programming was devoted to a detailed press digest, citing news reports from the United States to Saudi Arabia and boasting that the president won front pages around the world.

Rossiya-1 on Friday broadcast a report on social media metrics, bragging that “Oreshnik” trended globally. The state-owned RIA Novosti news agency even published an article based on social media replies to a post by Dmitry A. Medvedev, a former Russian president who gloated over the missile strike. The report suggested that “residents of the West were rushing to offer their apologies” to the Kremlin for Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory.

While Russian media insisted that Mr. Putin was merely responding to Western aggression, some Kremlin-linked figures made it clear that his speech intended to scare the West into withdrawing support from Ukraine.

“Let them tremble in fear,” Andrei V. Kartapolov, who heads the defense committee in the State Duma, the lower parliamentary house, told the Russian news agency Tass on Friday. “We’re fighting for the right cause.”

In popular social media groups typically focused on local news, Russians weighed in on Mr. Putin’s speech, with some condemning his apparent appetite for escalation and others cheering on Russia’s army.

In the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, one resident on a popular Telegram group said Russia “has been set 25 years back in its development — what for?”

In Kursk, which became a frontline city this summer after the Ukrainian army seized swaths of Russian land near the border, some Russians on a popular group on VKontakte, a social network, celebrated the missile attack against Ukraine. Others wondered sarcastically if Mr. Putin would call an evacuation were he to strike nearby — many locals have criticized the government for not evacuating parts of the region as evidence mounted that a Ukrainian attack was imminent.

Meanwhile, Russian supporters of the war rushed to praise the president for upping the stakes in the confrontation with the West. Pro-Kremlin bloggers have been sharing memes showing Mr. Putin as an action hero in a movie poster, alluding to wordplay between “Oreshnik,” the name of the Russian missile, and the word “oreshek,” meaning “nut,” which is used in the Russian title of the American blockbuster “Die Hard.”

“Oreshnik. Premiere in Dnipro, November 21, 2024,” said a mock movie poster shared on a popular pro-war Telegram channel.

Voenkor Kotenok, a popular blogger, praised the attack on Dnipro as “a kind of a rain of fire from the sky that was like a movie for the Ukrainians.” But like some other pro-war commenters, he lamented that the Kremlin had notified the United States shortly before the missile launch.

Russia is “too humane and merciful,” he said. “An enemy is to be killed, not warned.”

After a few days without food, the hunger stops. The body, while weak, “learns how to just function.” That is how Laila Soueif, an Egyptian mathematician and professor, describes her hunger strike, which reached 55 days on Saturday.

She stopped eating on Sept. 29, when it became clear that her son, Alaa Abd El Fattah, one of Egypt’s best known political prisoners, would not be released after serving a five-year sentence.

Egyptian authorities had sent him a written notice that they would not be counting his two years of pretrial detention, an increasingly routine practice in the country. Mr. Abd El Fattah, 43, is now scheduled for release in 2027, although he and his family fear he may be held indefinitely.

His plight is just one example of the crushing campaign against dissent orchestrated by Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, since he came to power in a 2013 military takeover, with tens of thousands of political prisoners now incarcerated, according to rights groups.

Ms. Soueif, 68, said she plans to continue her hunger strike — surviving on water, rehydration salts and sugarless tea and coffee — until he is free.

“I won’t back down and I will be very visible,” Ms. Soueif said in an interview in London on Thursday. “When people ask, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I say, ‘I’m creating a crisis.’”

She had flown to London from Cairo ahead of a Nov. 27 meeting with David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, who she hopes will lean on the Egyptian government to help secure the release of her son, a British and Egyptian dual citizen. But such diplomatic efforts have a mixed rate of success in the past.

Mr. Abd El Fattah came to prominence as one of the most eloquent voices of Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising, which toppled its longtime, authoritarian ruler, Hosni Mubarak. But things did not go the way that liberal revolutionaries had hoped. An Islamist political party took power in Egypt’s first democratic presidential election, and widespread backlash to its rule allowed Mr. el-Sisi to seize power.

Mr. Abdel Fattah chronicled that period, and the authoritarian clampdown that followed, in social media posts, newspaper columns and essays published in 2021 as a collection, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.”

Much of the time, he was writing from prison. First arrested in 2006 for protesting in favor of judicial independence, then in 2011 for an article critical of Egypt’s military, he was detained again from 2013 until March 2019 on charges of organizing an illegal protest. In September that year he was arrested again and sentenced in 2021 to five years for sharing a Facebook post about prison abuses.

While incarcerated, he applied for British citizenship through his mother, who is a dual national. Since then, his family has called on the British government to use its diplomatic and economic ties with Egypt to secure his release.

Mr. Lammy had campaigned for Mr. Abd El Fattah’s release while his party was in opposition, meeting with the family, joining them in a protest outside the Foreign Office and raising the issue of his detention in Parliament. So when Mr. Lammy became foreign secretary in July under a new Labour government, the family hoped he would use his new status to pressure Egypt.

They pointed to Britain’s success in negotiating the 2022 release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen who had been detained by Tehran for six years, though in that case London had the added bargaining chip of a longstanding payment owed to Iran over a failed arms deal.

So far, there has been no progress in her son’s case, Ms. Soueif said. Egyptian authorities did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Britain’s foreign office said in a statement that Mr. Lammy had raised the case with Egypt’s foreign minister “on a number of occasions, most recently on Nov. 14,” adding: “Our priority remains securing consular access to Mr. El-Fattah and his release so he can be reunited with his family.”

In November 2022, Mr. Abd El Fattah, who had already been on hunger strike for months, stopped drinking water as Egypt hosted the United Nations COP 27 climate conference.

During that event, activists called on Egypt to “free Alaa,” and world leaders pushed for his release in meetings with Mr. el-Sisi. But Egypt did not cave. About a week later, Mr. Abd El Fattah resumed eating and drinking after suffering an emotional and physical breakdown.

Western pressure has helped free some other Egyptian political prisoners in recent years, and the authorities have occasionally released prominent detainees in what analysts and opposition politicians say is partly an attempt to clean up Egypt’s international image. (The limited releases were dwarfed by new arrests, rights groups say.)

But diplomats in Cairo say that raising specific cases with Egyptian officials can backfire.

“We have this everlasting dilemma: The Egyptian authorities don’t like to be pressured — don’t like to be pushed,” Ms. Soueif said. “But my position is that they won’t do anything if they’re not pressured and not pushed.”

Ms. Soueif has challenged the idea, which has circulated among some of her son’s supporters, that Mr. el-Sisi is personally opposed to his release. She noted that Mr. el-Sisi had grievances with two other well-known prisoners, who were nevertheless released last year.

That gives her hope that Mr. Abd El Fattah can yet be freed, asserting: “It is doable.”

British diplomats in Cairo have consistently pressed for consular visits and for his release since he gained British citizenship, but with no success. These days, it is even less clear what leverage Britain can exert over Cairo. Egypt is in a stronger position internationally than in 2022.

The war in Gaza, which borders Egypt, has led Western backers such as the United States, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to flood Egypt with aid, seeing Egypt as an indispensable partner in a crisis-wracked region.

This is not Ms. Soueif’s first hunger strike. A decade ago, she and her daughter, Mona, did not eat for 70 days. That was to protest a previous imprisonment of Mr. Abd El Fattah and of Sanaa, her youngest daughter, both of whom were jailed for taking part in separate street protests.

She said she would consider progress on her son’s case as a reason to end her current strike, but she is prepared for the worst.

“If — for this crisis to hit home — it needs me to go as far as falling apart or dying, then that’s what will happen,” she said. “I hope I don’t get there.”

Violent clashes erupted overnight between Sunni and Shiite tribes in northwestern Pakistan, leaving at least 25 people dead and markets, homes and government properties in flames, officials and residents said on Saturday.

The violence occurred in Kurram, a scenic mountainous district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, which borders Afghanistan. It took place in the same area where gunmen ambushed convoys of vehicles on Thursday, killing 42 people, all Shia, despite the protection of security forces.

Pakistan is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, but Kurram’s population of 800,000 is nearly half Shiite Muslim, a dynamic that contributes to tribal and sectarian tensions. Officials and residents said that the violence started on Friday afternoon in parts of the district where Sunni and Shiite groups live close to each other.

Muhammad Shoaib, a resident of a Sunni-populated town where the Shiite convoys came under attack on Thursday, said that hundreds of heavily armed people from the rival sect had attacked the main market on Friday night and set fire to dozens of shops and houses.

“For hours on that night, heavy gunfire was exchanged between both sides, with large weapons being used freely,” said Mr. Shoaib, who on Friday morning had moved his family to stay with relatives in a neighboring district out of fear for their safety.

“We knew that there would be a retaliatory attack,” he said. “It’s a cycle of violence that we have been witnessing and suffering for years now.”

The authorities were still working to restore order and prevent further bloodshed.

Javed ullah Mehsud, a senior district administration official, said that at least 25 people had been killed in the violence. He said clashes were continuing in at least three locations.

“Efforts to restore peace are underway through the deployment of security forces and engagement with local tribal councils,” Mr. Mehsud said. A curfew has been imposed on the main road, and the markets remain closed, with all traffic suspended.

Friday at midday, the victims of Thursday’s deadly attacks were laid to rest as thousands of mourners gathered to pay their respects.

“It is not new for us to bury such a large number of people in one day,” said Mukhtar Hussain, a mourner from Parachinar, a Shia-majority town in Kurram where most of the victims were from. “As Shiites, we are being killed everywhere — in markets, mosques, on roads — everywhere,” he said.

Shiite groups in Pakistan have announced a three-day mourning period for Thursday’s killings and have organized protests in all of Pakistan’s major cities.

Allama Ahmed Iqbal Rizvi, a Shiite leader, said that various militant groups, such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the local affiliate Islamic State affiliate — called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K — had been targeting the Shiite population in Kurram for a long time.

“It is the incompetence of the government and state institutions,” said Mr. Rizvi, addressing a protest after Friday prayers in the port city of Karachi. He complained that they could not protect citizens traveling on the 155-mile road that links Kurram with Peshawar, the provincial capital.

That road, which is where the convoys came under attack, is a lifeline for the district. It had reopened only recently after being closed for three weeks following an ambush on Oct. 12 that left at least 16 dead.

During the closure, Parachinar residents were cut off from essential supplies like food and fuel.

This month, thousands of people from Parachinar staged a peaceful 10-mile march to demand the road’s reopening and security guarantees. The authorities responded by temporarily restoring access and promising government-protected convoys three times a week.

It has been a particularly deadly year in Kurram. In late July, a weeklong clash between Sunni and Shiite communities left 46 dead and hundreds injured. Another bout of violence in September claimed 45 lives and wounded dozens.

Experts attribute the escalation in sectarian conflicts to a complex interplay of factors rooted in the area’s socio-economic and historical context.

Among them are “close proximity to Afghanistan, a significant Shiite population, tensions over land ownership and decades of weak governance under colonial tribal laws,” said Tahmeed Jan, an Islamabad-based researcher who has worked in the area.

“Socio-economic disparities, with Shiite-majority areas often better developed than Sunni-majority regions, which struggle with inadequate infrastructure and lower literacy rates, further exacerbate these tensions,” Mr. Jan said.

He promised salvation for a country “in ruins” — an end to immigration, a civil service stripped of entrenched left-wing opponents, a judiciary purged of meddlesome judges and a news media giving voice to the people instead of elites.

Those campaign pledges — similar to ones made by Donald J. Trump during his successful bid for a second term as U.S. president — helped bring Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his nationalist Law and Justice party to power in Poland in 2015.

More than a year after an election that ended that party’s eight-year rule, its liberal successors are still struggling to undo the “new state apparatus” that Mr. Kaczynski helped put in place and that legal experts say seriously damaged Poland’s legal system.

Unwinding the legacy of populist conservative rule “takes longer than you expect,” said Adam Bodnar, the justice minister at the forefront of the new government’s efforts to reverse Poland’s retreat from liberal democracy under Law and Justice.

That retreat involved the politicization of Poland’s judiciary, a near total ban on abortion, the hijacking of public broadcasting for propaganda and a deep rift with the European Union.

Mr. Bodnar, speaking before the U.S. election, pointed to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary as an example of the tenacity of right-wing populist rule. Future successors to Mr. Orban, in power since 2010 and an ally of Mr. Trump, Mr. Bodnar said, will face formidable obstacles. “I would be very afraid,” he added.

Mr. Kaczynski and Law and Justice are also fans of Mr. Trump, and the party’s legislators chanted his name in Parliament after he was elected again. The current government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who made no secret of his preference for Vice President Kamala Harris, offered the American president-elect polite congratulations.

Mr. Bodnar said he was picking his way cautiously through a legal minefield left by the previous government. Many hazards have yet to be defused but, he added, “We now know exactly where all the mines are.”

When he took office, Mr. Bodnar brought back European Union flags to the Justice Ministry that his hard-line predecessor had banished.

But other changes, particularly the rebuilding of a court system that legal experts say was undermined by the previous government’s political agenda, have lagged, as have efforts by Poland’s coalition government to deliver on election promises to reverse the criminalization of nearly all abortions.

On the issue of immigration, the current government has dropped the inflammatory language of Mr. Kaczynski, who denounced migrants during the 2015 election campaign as carrying “parasites and protozoa.” But it has continued and even strengthened his hard-line stance, with Mr. Tusk announcing that Poland would suspend recognizing asylum requests.

Mr. Bodnar said the biggest obstacle to undoing what he sees as the damage done by Mr. Kaczynski’s party is Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda. Mr. Duda, elected separately, is a supporter of Law and Justice and has veto power over all legislation reversing changes made by Law and Justice when it was in power.

Those changes included the stacking of the Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court with right-wing loyalists, critics say.

“We know that with this president it will not be possible to make significant changes concerning the judiciary,” Mr. Bodnar said, and the only solution was “to wait for a new president” after elections in May.

Parliament is now controlled by a coalition of liberals, traditional conservatives and leftists. When it passed legislation in October to overhaul the constitutional court, Mr. Duda referred it for review — to the tribunal that was being targeted.

And when Mr. Bodnar, who is also prosecutor general, tried to replace the second-most senior official in the prosecutorial system, a holdover from the previous government, the president objected and the same court declared the move unconstitutional.

The setbacks highlighted the hurdles the center-right government has faced in trying to establish its electoral program in face of resistance from judges, prosecutors, state media executives and others appointed by Law and Justice.

Law and Justice left “the whole system wrapped in political ivy that is very, very difficult to remove,” said Jaroslaw Kuisz, the author of a book on the party’s push to take Poland in the same direction as Hungary under Mr. Orban.

“What is happening now is not just a normal change of government,” Mr. Kuisz added, but a “post-populist moment that can only be compared with the post-communist moment” after 1989. That was when Poland’s new democratic government had to rebuild institutions and the rule of law after decades of Communist Party rule.

While Polish Communists mostly adapted to the democratic order, Law and Justice and its appointees are fighting back, Mr. Kuisz said. “They don’t consider themselves defeated.” Mr. Trump’s election, he added, “will boost their energy to resist because they believe they are the avant-garde of history.”

Leading the resistance is Mr. Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman.

“Today, unfortunately, we have to fight for a free Poland again,” Mr. Kaczynski said on Nov. 11 during an Independence Day speech, accusing Mr. Tusk of presiding over “the destruction of the country.”

After Law and Justice lost its parliamentary majority last October, Mr. Kaczynski joined a sit-in at a state broadcaster, TVP, in support of executives and journalists who, facing dismissal from jobs they owed to the previous government, had barricaded themselves into their offices and studios.

They claimed to be defending freedom of speech, an argument that largely fell flat given that the state broadcasting system had been turned into a bullhorn for right-wing propaganda.

Also fighting back hard has been the president of the Constitutional Tribunal, Julia Przylebska, an old friend of Mr. Kaczynski’s. She became president of the 15-member court in 2016 after Law and Justice appointed five new justices in violation of normal procedure. That set off street protests and led the European Court of Justice to rule that the tribunal had not been “established by law.”

The tribunal played a central role in cementing Law and Justice’s agenda, issuing rulings against abortion and the primacy of European Union law.

When Parliament passed resolutions this year demanding that Ms. Przylebska move on, along with other justices whose appointments were tainted by irregularities, she responded by vowing to hang on in a combative video posted on the tribunal’s website. Adding to a morass of uncertainty is a dispute over when her term as tribunal president ends. The government says it ended in 2022.

When the government in March stopped publishing her tribunal’s rulings in the official Legal Gazette, which meant they had no legal force, Ms. Przylebska started publishing them herself on her court’s website, saying that made them valid.

Mr. Bodnar has faced criticism both for moving too quickly and too slowly. The head of the Supreme Court, another tribunal hijacked by Law and Justice, has accused him of “Stalinist methods.” And some supporters of the new government accuse him of being too timid in removing improperly appointed judges.

“We need to cut off all the heads of this dragon at once,” Professor Krystian Markiewicz, the president of Iustitia, an association of judges, said recently.

Of Poland’s 9,000 or so judges, around a third got their positions under a nomination process introduced by Law and Justice that gave politicians a big say.

Only about 100 of the judges selected through Law and Justice’s system have so far been replaced. Parliament passed legislation in April to remove politicians from the selection process, but Mr. Duda, the president, sent the law to the Constitutional Tribunal for review.

“We must be patient, but at the same time determined to make things happen,” Mr. Bodnar said.

Other ministers chose a more radical path. When Mr. Duda blocked efforts to overhaul the state broadcasting system, the culture minister responded by dissolving the legal entities under which state television and radio stations operated.

The maneuver, which skirted and, some believe, violated the law, worked, but it prompted howls of protest from Law and Justice.

The government, Mr. Bodnar said, has been “trapped by different — either institutional or personal — obstacles to bringing the system back to order.”

He said he was making progress but added: “If you have a system that was continuously destroyed day by day for eight years, you cannot rebuild it within one year.”

The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has been using an advanced missile against Israel that was reverse-engineered from an Israeli weapon it captured in a past war, according to Israeli defense officials.

Hezbollah fighters are believed to have seized the original Israeli Spike anti-tank missiles during the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon and shipped them to their main state backer, Iran, for cloning, Israeli and Western defense officials and weapons experts say.

Eighteen years later, Hezbollah is firing the rebranded Almas missiles at Israeli military bases, communication systems and air-defense launchers with enough precision and power to pose a significant challenge for Israeli military forces. The missiles have a range of up to 10 miles and carry advanced guidance seekers to track and lock onto targets.

That Iran and its proxy forces have cloned weapons systems to use against the very adversaries who designed them is not new. Iran, for example, has copied American drones and missiles.

But the Almas missile is an example of an increasing use of Iranian-engineered weapons that is “fundamentally altering regional power dynamics,” according to Mohammed Al-Basha, a Middle East weapons analyst who runs a risk advisory firm based in Virginia.

“What was once a gradual spread of older missile generations has transformed into rapid deployment of cutting-edge technology across active battlefields,” Mr. Al-Basha said this past week.

Almas missiles are among Hezbollah weapons stockpiles that Israeli forces have captured since the start of their invasion of Lebanon about two months ago, said the Israeli defense officials, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

The missiles have stood out as some of the more sophisticated weaponry among a large cache of mostly lower-quality munitions, including Russian-designed Kornet anti-tank missiles. The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that Israeli troops advancing in southern Lebanon were finding large stockpiles of Russian weapons with enhanced Hezbollah’s fighting capacity.

The Almas, which means diamond in Arabic and Persian, is a guided missile that does not need a direct eye-line sight to launch from land vehicles, drones, helicopters and shoulder-fired tubes. It is a so-called top-attack missile — meaning its ballistic trajectory can strike from directly above its targets instead of from the side and hit tanks where they are lightly armored and vulnerable.

The Almas has threatened Israeli units and equipment near Lebanon’s border, Israeli defense officials said.

“It is highly likely that weapons from the current and future Almas family will be deployed across all fronts inhabited by Iranian proxies, and that the missiles will threaten a variety of high-quality targets (not only Israeli) over increasing ranges,” said an April analysis by the Alma Research and Education Center, which studies security issues on Israel’s northern border.

There are at least three known variants of Almas missiles, each upgraded from the last. In June, the Alma researchers in Israel said Hezbollah appeared to be using a fourth, newer generation that, among other improvements, sent clearer images of its flight back to its operators.

The Almas can carry two types of warheads, according to CAT-UXO, a munitions awareness group. One can detonate in two phases, making it easier to penetrate armor. The other is a fuel-air bomb that explodes into a fireball.

The Almas debuted years after the conclusion of the war in Lebanon in 2006. Shortly after the war ended, the Israeli military checked an inventory of equipment it had deployed in Lebanon. Discrepancies emerged among what was taken into Lebanon, what was returned and what was confirmed as destroyed in combat.

It became evident that an entire Spike missile system, including a launcher and several missile units, had most likely been left behind in the field, according to two of the Israeli defense officials. From that moment on, Israel knew there was a significant risk that the weapons would be transferred to Iran, where they could be dismantled and reverse- engineered.

Iran has funded and armed Hezbollah for decades, and the group joined in attacks on Israel in support of its Iran-backed ally in Gaza, Hamas, shortly after Hamas led an attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli intelligence officials say Hezbollah used the Almas sparingly when it fought in the civil war in Syria — also an ally of Iran — which began in 2011. Along with Russia and Iran, Hezbollah contributed its fighters and firepower to shore up the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Hezbollah now manufactures Almas missiles in Lebanon to reduce its reliance on Iranian supply chains, according to the Israeli defense officials. The missiles are also believed to be produced in Iran for Iran’s military.

Weapons experts said the Almas was seen publicly in 2020 during a manufacturer’s delivery of newly produced drones to Iran’s army. The Iranian military unveiled the missile by firing it during a 2021 military exercise.

But it was not until early this year that reports of the Almas being used in combat begin to surface — in attacks on Israel that all appear to have been carried out by Hezbollah — according to researchers from Janes, the defense intelligence firm based in Britain.

In January, Hezbollah released a first-person-view video of a strike on the Israeli naval base at Rosh Hanikra, on the border with Lebanon, saying it had used an Almas missile. Several subsequent videos over the spring also purported to deploy the Almas against Israeli targets.

Some of the missiles appear to have been produced as recently as 2023. The Alma researchers showed smuggling routes through Iraq and Syria that Iran was purportedly using to send weapons to Hezbollah.

The lawmakers had finished a routine assembly vote and were scattering into the Mumbai night.

Nitin Deshmukh, who represented a district 350 miles away, planned to take an overnight train. But first came an invitation to have dinner in the suburbs with a senior official from their party in the Indian state of Maharashtra. They would share a car ride, and Mr. Deshmukh could catch the train from there.

It was all a ruse.

As the car approached its destination, it kept speeding along, and eventually joined a caravan of other vehicles. That, Mr. Deshmukh said, is when he realized he was being kidnapped. The car was heading across state lines, where he would be held in a hotel behind locked gates and later restrained and drugged after trying to flee.

Mr. Deshmukh had become a pawn in what is known as “resort politics,” a longstanding practice unique to India’s rough-and-tumble democracy.

The senior party official in the car with Mr. Deshmukh that night in June 2022 had secretly recruited a group of governing-party lawmakers to try to bring down the state government in Maharashtra. To ensure that they would stick to the plan, the lawmakers were moved to other states and isolated in luxury resorts.

Mr. Deshmukh and at least two other Maharashtra lawmakers, according to their own accounts, were taken against their will. The leaders of the insurrection wanted to make certain that their breakaway faction had a sufficient number of lawmakers to deprive the government of a majority and force it to collapse.

The hidden hand behind the maneuvering, according to several lawmakers with knowledge of the events, was the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In a series of closely contested states, his Bharatiya Janata Party, after failing to win power through elections, has gained effective control through similar episodes in which lawmakers were sent to resort hotels until their government fell.

In Maharashtra, several lawmakers said, some of the defectors had been paid to switch loyalties. Other lawmakers who sided with the B.J.P. had publicly spoken beforehand of coming under withering pressure from investigating agencies controlled by Mr. Modi’s party.

The takeover of state governments is an extreme example of the no-holds-barred quest for total power by the B.J.P. under Mr. Modi. As the country’s most dominant leader in a generation, he is working to entrench a new vision of India, one where the B.J.P. and its Hindu-nationalist ideology reign supreme for decades to come. Deep footholds at the state level are crucial to his mission.

In Maharashtra, the prize for the B.J.P. was as big as any in India: a state of 130 million people that is the country’s financial and entertainment powerhouse.

The machinations caused two of Maharashtra’s important parties to each split in two, pitting family members against one another, and scrambled the state’s political landscape, leaving an opening for a B.J.P.-led coalition to take control. Residents have a favored term for this confusing new state of affairs: kichdi, a mush of a dish in which the rice can’t be told apart from the lentils.

On Saturday, early results of the state’s first election since the breakaway insurrection appeared to reinforce the B.J.P.’s anything-goes approach. A coalition led by the party was on track to win a strong majority to form the new government. Analysts said that two years in charge of government agencies and the state’s rich coffers, in which it expanded welfare programs and infrastructure projects, had put the coalition in such a dominant position in the election that it blew away its opposition.

“Don’t ask about ideology in Maharashtra — the entire politics of the state has changed,” Ajit Pawar, one of the politicians the B.J.P. brought to its side by pressing him to split from his family, acknowledged to an interviewer before the state election. “Everyone wants power here. Ideology has been sidelined for power.”

Once power became everything, Mr. Deshmukh found himself trapped.

By Any Means

Resort politics is such a feared practice that mere rumors can send rival parties running to protect themselves.

In the southern state of Karnataka, home to the cash-rich tech hub of Bengaluru, Mr. Modi’s party brought down the government in 2019 by getting a dozen governing-party lawmakers to flee to a hotel in Mumbai, then controlled by the B.J.P. The defectors remained there until their party leader resigned and the government fell.

In Madhya Pradesh, in central India, the B.J.P. coaxed an opposing senior political leader into resigning from the government in 2020. He brought with him about 20 lawmakers, many of whom decamped to a resort in Bengaluru, a city run by the B.J.P. Madhya Pradesh is now a B.J.P. fortress.

The practice of resort politics goes back decades, to the time when the Congress party, run by the Nehru-Gandhi family, started losing its long dominance of Indian politics and an era of coalition politics began. Often, it was used not to bring down a government, but to keep one intact.

More recently, on at least two occasions, whispers that the B.J.P. was on a poaching hunt led other parties to lock up their own lawmakers in resorts for days, until the threat had dissipated.

The B.J.P. uses its deep pockets to win allies and keep them on board. Equally important is the party’s control over feared national investigating agencies, determining who remains in politics, who profits from its vast riches and who winds up sidelined in a jail cell.

In states like Jharkhand and the capital region, Delhi, where the B.J.P.’s attempts to break smaller parties have not worked, elected leaders have ended up in jail, paralyzing local governance.

Suhas Palshikar, a veteran political scientist based in Pune, said the B.J.P.’s orchestrated fragmentation of politics in Maharashtra fit a pattern in its push for hegemonic control.

“They want to establish state-level governments by whatever means,” he said, “because they know that their overall social and political dominance can sustain only if they have control over the state governments.”

Desperate to Escape

The car ride that delivered Mr. Deshmukh into a weeklong ordeal landed him first at a resort in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, where the prime minister has close to absolute power.

Two dozen rebel members of his party, the Shiv Sena, gathered at a hotel named the Orange Megastructure, a favorite of the B.J.P. official who ran Gujarat.

Thirty-five rooms were booked (some lawmakers had come with their assistants, and at least one with her husband). More than 200 police officers were called in to lock down the hotel. Racks of clothes were wheeled in.

The defecting lawmakers had set off from Mumbai with Mr. Deshmukh and at least two other lawmakers they hoped to bring to their side.

Both of the others tried to escape before they reached the hotel in the diamond-trading city of Surat. One bolted from a car during a traffic jam. After walking for miles, he persuaded a truck driver headed to Mumbai to give him a ride.

“I was sweating, it was raining, I was getting wet,” said the lawmaker, Kailas Patil.

Mr. Deshmukh, 50 — a colorful first-time lawmaker who during an interview with The New York Times took off his shirt and asked a reporter to feel his flexing pecs (“Like a rock,” an aide said) — became a headache to the mutineers only after the group had reached the hotel.

Inside the resort, the breakaway lawmakers issued demands to the Shiv Sena leaders back in Mumbai: They would not return until Uddhav Thackeray, leader of both the party and the state, dissolved his coalition and stepped aside for a new governing coalition with the B.J.P.

Mr. Deshmukh was in touch with Mr. Thackeray, according to his own account, and wanted to leave right away. But the hotel gates were locked, and outside was a wall of police officers. Eknath Shinde, the Shiv Sena leader who had lured Mr. Deshmukh to Surat, showed his temper when Mr. Deshmukh said he would break the window and jump out.

“Shinde got mad and shouted at someone, ‘Bring me the pistol; I will finish myself here,’” Mr. Deshmukh recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, even if you kill me and kill yourself, I am still not staying.’” Mr. Shinde did not answer requests for an interview.

The two men had been brought to this point by months of maneuvering by the B.J.P., propelled by cash and coercion.

The B.J.P. was once an ally of Mr. Thackeray’s father, a cigar-in-hand political cartoonist who had founded the Shiv Sena with an army of Hindu vigilantes.

Mr. Shinde, a onetime auto-rickshaw driver who dresses in immaculate whites, was being groomed as an alternative to Mr. Thackeray, who had been painted as soft and inaccessible by the B.J.P. as he tried to move the Shiv Sena toward the mainstream.

When the B.J.P. began courting Shiv Sena lawmakers, according to several with knowledge of the discussions, some were paid millions of dollars to switch their allegiance. “In cash,” said Arvind Sawant, a Shiv Sena lawmaker in Maharashtra. The figures could not be independently verified.

Many had another powerful incentive to align with the B.J.P.: They were under investigation by the B.J.P.-controlled central government. Before the rebellion, Shiv Sena lawmakers had publicly urged Mr. Thackeray to “patch up” with the B.J.P. so “the harassment” would stop.

B.J.P. leaders, as well as the security officials involved in the Surat episode, declined to discuss details of the case, including allegations of cash payments. C.R. Patil, the B.J.P.’s chief in Gujarat, played down his own role in the episode but acknowledged the party’s contribution. “It wasn’t my doing — it was the party’s,” he said.

Mr. Shinde’s associates denied that Mr. Deshmukh and other lawmakers had been kidnapped. “They weren’t children that we could have thrown in a car and taken by force,” said Bharat Gogawale, a lawmaker and Shinde lieutenant during the coup.

Political Fractures

On the night of the uprising, when Mr. Deshmukh was finally allowed to leave the hotel in the predawn hours, dozens of police officers broke away from a security cordon and followed him in the rain-slicked dark.

But as he waited for a ride promised by leaders of his party trying to save their government, he said, the police tossed him into a vehicle and took him to a government hospital.

“I kept telling the doctors, ‘I am not sick; I am a lawmaker,’” Mr. Deshmukh recalled.

Around 5:30, before the sun came up, Mr. Deshmukh was pinned to the hospital bed, he said, and injected with sedatives.

“Some tears came out of my eyes,” Mr. Deshmukh said. “Then I passed out.”

The next day in the local newspapers, the police in Gujarat — a dry state — were quoted as saying that the lawmaker had been found so drunk and unruly that he had to be taken to the hospital for treatment.

Eventually, he asked Mr. Shinde to let him travel home and calm his wife, who had lodged a missing-person complaint with the police, as well as supporters who were angered by his treatment. If Mr. Shinde let him go, Mr. Deshmukh said, he would rejoin the rebels afterward. But as the plane chartered for him landed, and Mr. Deshmukh saw hundreds of his supporters, he told Mr. Shinde’s men they could either take a hike or get beaten up, according to his own account.

A week into the uprising, after the mutinous faction had hopped from one resort to another across three B.J.P.-run states, Mr. Thackeray finally resigned. He was replaced by Mr. Shinde.

“I don’t want to play these games,” Mr. Thackeray said in a televised statement. The insurgents danced on the tables at a Goa resort.

Not long after, the B.J.P. went after another Maharashtra party, the secular Nationalist Congress Party, getting its No. 2, Ajit Pawar, to split from his aging uncle, who had built the party over decades.

An early verdict on the Maharashtra chaos came this spring, in national parliamentary elections. The B.J.P. lost more than half of its seats in the state. Mr. Pawar, the party’s new ally, fared even worse in the face of a wave of sympathy for his 83-year-old uncle.

But for Mr. Shinde, the chief benefactor of the 2022 rebellion, the results in the general election were promising. His faction won enough seats to keep him as the face of the governing coalition for the state election this week, where he improved in his showing.

Numbers from the campaigning period show how much money and muscle govern Maharashtra’s politics. The country’s election commission said it had conducted seizures worth nearly $80 million during the campaigning — ostensibly meant as bribes for votes. One study found that 60 percent of sitting state lawmakers faced criminal cases.

Through the frenzy of both the national and state elections, Mr. Modi carried out nearly two dozen rallies in Maharashtra, swooping in to pitch himself as the undisputed guarantor of stability and continuity — and the ultimate gatekeeper for government benefits.

Mr. Shinde, in return, bet often and openly on Mr. Modi because he, of all people, knows that the powerful prime minister can turn a loss into a win.

“Modi makes the impossible possible,” Mr. Shinde said at one election rally with Mr. Modi seated onstage.

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting from Surat, India, and New Delhi.