Nighttime provides ideal cover for acts of sabotage in the sleepy fishing villages along the southern shores of Nova Scotia.

Slashed buoys, stolen lobster crates, mysterious fires. These are just some of the acts of vandalism on the wharves where lobster fishers have been locked in battle for more than three decades.

Lobstermen have a simple way of framing the dispute: Think of the ocean’s bounty like a pie. They are asking who should get a piece, and what is the fairest way to divide it between the white Canadians who built the commercial lobster industry, and the Indigenous people who were historically left out.

The federal government, which regulates fisheries, has been reluctant to settle the politically fraught issue, alienating warring fishermen on both sides.

The conflict has created deep ruptures within fishing communities. Criminals have entered the equation, the authorities say, profiting from the illegal fishing and trading of lobsters.

The dispute raises thorny questions about Indigenous rights, economic equity, the conservation of resources and the future of Canada’s lobster industry.

A Bullet Meant as a Warning

Stormy weather muffled the sound of a bullet piercing Geoffrey Jobert’s house.

He woke up, he said, to the damage in November at his home in Clare, a community on the southwest shore of Nova Scotia, along the coast of St. Mary’s Bay, where the waters are especially rich with lobster.

“It’s a warning shot,” Mr. Jobert said of the bullet that ended up tearing into a wall just above an armchair.

Mr. Jobert, 30, operates a family-owned seafood distributor that packs live lobster for export.

He believes he was targeted for ignoring repeated orders over the last year to do business with people in the lobster industry whom he believed had ties to criminals. He said he had received threatening text messages, followed by an in-person visit by two men.

The police have charged the two men with several crimes in connection to his case, including extortion and criminal harassment.

The episode involving Mr. Jobert is part of what the authorities say is a pattern of violence that has rocked the area: unsolved arsons, including of a historic sawmill in June and the torching of a police car one month later, as well as shootings into the homes of other fishermen.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said a criminal organization, with a core group of less than 10 locals, was largely behind the violence.

Their scheme, the authorities say, focuses on buying lobsters that Indigenous fishermen catch in the summer. Harvesting lobsters during the summer is illegal because that’s when they reproduce, but Indigenous fisherman have special permission because of historical treaty rights.

But strict rules prohibit them from selling their haul.

The lobsters eventually wind up in restaurants and stores across the province. Lobster fishers who refuse to cooperate with the criminal group have become targets, the authorities said.

“I was expecting a small, little, quaint village, but I’ve got big city problems,” said Sgt. Jeff LeBlanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who became the local commander in Clare in 2020.

The lobster battle has embroiled Indigenous lobstermen from the Sipekne’katik First Nation after they set up a commercial fishery in Clare to assert what they say are ancestral rights to catch — and sell — lobster all year long.

“We have a right to be here,” said Shelley Paul, a lobster fisher from the Sipekne’katik group, which has also sued Canada’s government over the summer lobster rules.

But criminals posing as lobster dealers, according to locals, started doing business with some of the Indigenous fishermen.

A maritime fishing union, helped by private detectives, has traced illicit lobster shipments — mostly conducted at night — to local businesses, according to a lawsuit filed by the union against several firms.

The union also says government officials have not done enough to target the illicit trade.

“This organized crime group has seen an opportunity and a door opened to possibly exploit and fund their criminal organization with the trade and sale of that seafood, which can be very profitable,” Sgt. LeBlanc said.

But policing unauthorized fishing is a top priority, said Debbie Buott-Matheson, a spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “Enforcement activity is not always visible,” she said.

Jean-Claude Comeau, a machinist who runs a marine hydraulic company in Clare, said the tension in the community had become suffocating.

“Somebody’s going to get killed,” Mr. Comeau said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened.”

Old Problems, New Players

Nova Scotia, a province of just over one million people, is Canada’s top seafood producer, with annual exports valued at 2.6 billion Canadian dollars, or $1.8 billion, largely because of lobsters.

In the 1700s, the Mi’kmaq, an Indigenous group on Canada’s east coast, signed treaties with the British colonial government promising them rights to hunt and fish. For the seasonally nomadic Mi’kmaq, that meant hunting inland during the winter, and moving to the coast to fish in the summer.

Canada did not recognize those rights for decades as various fisheries and regulations were established, including the banning of lobster harvesting during the summer.

The summertime restrictions were successfully challenged in the 1990s in Canada’s highest court by a Mi’kmaq fisherman who had appealed illegal fishing charges.

The Canadian supreme court, in 1999, ruled that treaty rights allowed Indigenous people to fish during the summer and earn a moderate livelihood. But the court never defined what a moderate livelihood meant, leaving that up to the federal government.

The government, however, has only gone as far as granting individual lobster licenses to Indigenous groups allowing them to catch lobsters in the summer, while limiting commercial sales to lobsters harvested during the legally permitted fishing season from November to May.

The piecemeal approach angered Indigenous fisherman who cite ancestral rights to make a living selling summer lobsters, while the non-Indigenous were unhappy because they claim that summer fishing was depleting lobster stocks and hurting their livelihood.

“The government of Canada has basically walked on tippy toes around Indigenous folks from the very beginning,” said Ken Coates, a historian who has studied Indigenous fishing rights. “They have been very, very cautious about enforcing much on the First Nations.”

The Sipekne’katik First Nation opened its commercial fishery in Clare in 2020, pointing to the treaties that predated the formation of Canada to claim a right to catch and sell lobster throughout the year.

Chaos ensued. Commercial fishermen dumped lobster caught by Sipekne’katik back into the ocean. Lobster pounds where they stored their catch were set on fire. The Indigenous fishermen accused their white counterparts of being racist.

But in Clare, some lobster fishers and others involved in the industry say evidence gathered by private investigators strongly suggests that the tribe’s fishery is not following some standard regulations and procedures.

“I can’t really make myself believe that all of that activity is actually legitimate,” said Morley Knight, an industry consultant and a former senior official in the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “If it was, then why do it under the cover of darkness?”

Michelle Glasgow, the chief of the Sipekne’katik group, and the reserve’s lawyers declined to provide responses to written questions.

“The commercial fishermen are sitting back watching their livelihoods be taken out of the water, out of season, and the Canadian government is not doing anything about it,” said Ruth Inniss, a fisheries adviser for the Maritime Fishermen’s Union.

Drama in the Bay

David Pictou, a Mi’kmaq fisherman from Acadia First Nation in Yarmouth, a port town on Nova Scotia’s southern tip, remembers fights breaking out just about every day between white and Indigenous fishers following the Supreme Court ruling.

He believes his tribe has a right to make a living fishing lobster in the summer. But he also wants to avoid the turmoil that has unfolded in St. Mary’s Bay.

“We’re not really involved in the bay, because we know how much drama is up that way,” he said.

Instead, he built a small saltwater tank house in 2019 on his reserve and sells summer lobster he buys from a handful of Indigenous fishermen from his community.

Standing outside the tank house, Mr. Pictou said he knows he could be charged for selling illegally harvested lobsters — but does not care.

“All we’re asking for is let us exercise our treaty right the way we want,” Mr. Pictou said. “I’ve hidden nothing for years because I’m just tired of it.”

The time had come to bend the knee — or at least bend to reality.

A delegation of Russian diplomats arrived last Tuesday in a caravan of white SUVs for a summit in Damascus and an unenviable assignment: lay the groundwork for Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, less than two months after rebels had toppled Moscow’s preferred strongman, Bashar al-Assad.

To do so, the delegation would need to win over a people the Russian military had bombed ruthlessly, helping Mr. al-Assad, for years.

Awaiting them was Ahmed al-Shara, who had survived a decade of Russian airstrikes to emerge as Syria’s new interim leader. He stood in the presidential palace and faced the Kremlin’s envoys for a long-awaited reckoning.

The talks that ensued, the first between Moscow and Damascus since the end of the nearly 14-year war, ended unresolved. But they represented the beginning of potentially drawn-out negotiations about what role, if any, Russia will play in postwar Syria, having lost its bid to keep Mr. al-Assad in power.

The meeting demonstrated the kind of geopolitical horse-trading that has begun in the aftermath of Syria’s civil war — with the potential to remake the Middle East. World powers are jockeying for influence, as Syria’s fledgling leadership tries to win legitimacy, security and aid through disciplined and stony-eyed realpolitik.

“I think the general air in Damascus is, ‘We Syrians don’t need a fight with anyone at this point, including our former enemies,’” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “So de-escalation and pragmatism are the names of the game.”

Still, it was the Russians who were asked to make concessions. Mr. al-Shara emphasized that any new relations with Moscow “must address past mistakes,” and requested compensation for the destruction Russia caused, his government said in a statement.

He also demanded that Moscow hand over Mr. al-Assad and his top associates to face justice, according to two officials in the caretaker government with knowledge of the meeting.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former spy who prizes loyalty, almost certainly would not agree. Asked the day after the meeting whether Mr. al-Shara requested Mr. al-Assad’s extradition, Mr. Putin’s spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. al-Shara otherwise appeared surprisingly amenable to cooperating with Russia, as opposed to Iran, Mr. al-Assad’s other key ally, which the new authorities in Damascus have said is no longer welcome in Syria.

In an interview with the BBC in late December, Mr. al-Shara cited Syria’s “longstanding strategic relations” with Moscow and said he was “not in a hurry to get Russia out of Syria, as some people imagine.”

He noted, in a separate interview with Saudi state television, that Russia has supplied the Syrian military’s arms for decades and provides experts who run Syria’s power plants. The implication: Damascus may need Russia in the future.

“They are absolutely desperate for legitimacy and international support,” Mr. Lister said of Syria’s new leaders. “Causing any big international rupture would be the worst thing they could consider doing.”

Beyond possible deliveries of oil and grain from Russia, what Mr. al-Shara needs is for Moscow not to play spoiler in his effort to reconstruct Syria and build a government, said Hanna Notte, an analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

“This is a country that is now, politically speaking, being built from the ashes,” she said. She pointed out that the Russians are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and could impede Mr. al-Shara in many ways, should they decide not to be “politically benevolent.”

Mr. al-Shara himself has noted Russia is considered the world’s second-most powerful military, and said his newly formed government was not in a position to oppose major powers.

At the meeting, where Russia was represented by its top Middle East envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, neither side appeared to be in a rush to make any big decisions. What the rest of the world, and in particular the United States, European Union, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, demand from Syria’s new leaders could also influence Russia’s fate.

In recent weeks, a flurry of diplomats from those and other countries have arrived in Damascus to meet Mr. al-Shara.

Russia wants to keep its naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus, which dates to the Soviet era. It also seeks to maintain the Hmeimim Air Base outside Latakia, which Moscow has used as a supply and stopover hub for expeditionary operations in Africa. So far, the new Syrian authorities have not said no, and Russia has stayed put, despite moving materiel off the bases.

Syria’s pragmatic rhetoric has been reciprocated in Moscow.

After years of defending the Assad regime on the battlefield and at the United Nations, Russian leaders have spun the loss of their longtime ally as a win and extended an olive branch to the new authorities, whom Moscow had long denounced as terrorists.

“I would call it improvised opportunism,” Ms. Notte said. “It is a pretty remarkable pivot.”

Mr. Putin, speaking in December at his annual news conference, said Russia had won, rather than lost, in Syria, because Moscow had prevented the country from becoming a terrorist enclave. He said he had yet to even see Mr. al-Assad, though he committed to meeting him at some point. It is unclear if they have met since.

The Russian leader offered the use of Russia’s bases to deliver humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, who only weeks before had been weathering Russian airstrikes.

He would keep Russia’s presence there, he said, only if Moscow’s interests coincided with those of the political forces that had taken control.

At the United Nations, the Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said in January that those forces were “behaving quite competently.” The friendship between Russia and Syria, he emphasized, is “not connected to any regime.”

The navy suit and tie Mr. al-Shara wore to the meeting with the Russian envoys belied his past as a Qaeda fighter turned Islamist rebel leader. So did his nonconfrontational rhetoric in the run-up to the talks, and his professed willingness to make nice with former foes, including the United States.

Mr. al-Shara welcomed a top State Department delegation in December, despite having once spent time in Iraq imprisoned by U.S. forces and having been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government with a $10 million bounty. (Washington withdrew the bounty after the talks.)

Mr. al-Shara needs sanctions relief from the United States, as well as Washington’s support on the Security Council, for Syria to begin an economic recovery and access international aid.

The United States also still has troops on the ground, backing Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria that Mr. al-Shara doesn’t control. He has stated his desire to keep the country whole, which would include that territory, where Washington backed local forces to destroy the Islamic State.

European officials have visited Damascus and offered a path to sanctions relief, but have made clear that they would disapprove of the retention of a Russian military presence in the country.

How the Trump administration will approach the question is unclear. In December, as the Assad regime fell, Mr. Trump said on social media that the war in Syria was “not our fight” and that the United States should have nothing to do with it.

The question of Mr. al-Assad’s fate adds to the delicate nature of the negotiations between Moscow and Damascus.

Mr. al-Shara is still trying to establish legitimacy among the Syrian people and disparate Syrian groups, and striking a deal with Russia while it is harboring the strongman who killed so many Syrians could undercut his standing. That is one reason delaying any commitment to Moscow could make sense.

Mr. Lister described the request for Mr. al-Assad as a maximalist opening demand, characteristic of early-stage negotiations.

“It hits the mark in terms of laying down the principle: ‘We may be willing to be pragmatic today, but we have not forgotten history,’” Mr. Lister said. “Russia’s complicity in all manner of war crimes in Syria is not something Syrians will be forgetting anytime soon.”

Inside Syria, Mr. al-Shara is still pursuing remnants of the Assad regime’s force to consolidate control. Moscow could make that task more difficult.

Though the loss of the bases in Syria would dent Russia’s power in the region, Moscow potentially has other options. The Kremlin’s backing of the military leader of eastern Libya could offer an alternative location for a Russian naval base on the Mediterranean. Already, Russia has been using Libyan air bases for flights.

The status of the Russian bases in Syria may not be resolved soon.

“I think that both sides benefit from delaying the negotiations on the fate of the bases,” said Anton Mardasov, a Russian military affairs expert focusing on Syria. “Moscow can thus preserve its image, since it has already managed to hold out as long as possible and not leave immediately after the fall of the Assad regime, and Damascus can for now negotiate the lifting of sanctions.”

In 2017, China watched in awe — and shock — as AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program backed by Google, defeated a Chinese prodigy at a complex board game, Go. The decisive loss to a foreign computer program, which had similarly trounced a South Korean player, was a sort of Sputnik moment for China.

That year, Chinese officials laid out a bold plan to lead the world in A.I. by 2030, pledging billions to companies and researchers focused on the technology. From this fervor emerged DeepSeek, the largely unknown Chinese start-up that upended the technology landscape by creating a powerful A.I. model with far less money than experts had thought possible.

DeepSeek is private, with no apparent state backing, but its success embodies the ambitions of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who has exhorted his country to “occupy the commanding heights” of technology. Mr. Xi wants the Chinese economy to be powered not by old growth engines like debt-fueled real estate and cheap exports, but by the most advanced technologies like A.I., supercomputing and green energy.

For Mr. Xi, this moment helps dent the aura of superiority the United States has held in A.I., a critical field in a fierce superpower rivalry. China has cast itself as a benevolent global partner to developing countries, willing to share its know-how, with Mr. Xi saying that A.I. should not be a “game of rich countries and the wealthy.”

Now, DeepSeek has shown that it might be possible for China to make A.I. cheaper and more accessible for everyone. The question, though, is how the ruling Communist Party manages the rise of a technology that could one day be so disruptive that it could threaten its interests — and its grip on power.

Chinese regulation of A.I. has varied in intensity over the years, depending on where the country assesses its strengths and weaknesses. When the Chinese government was worried it had fallen behind the United States in 2022 after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it took a more hands-off approach that ultimately allowed ventures like DeepSeek and others to thrive.

Now that the pendulum has swung the other way, that confidence in the industry could prove to be a “double-edged sword,” said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese A.I. as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The party’s “core instincts are toward control,” Mr. Sheehan said. “As they regain confidence in China’s A.I. capabilities, they may have a hard time resisting the urge to take a more hands-on approach to these companies.”

As if to underscore that possibility, DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, was invited to a discussion with Premier Li Qiang on Jan. 20, the same day that the company released its latest and most powerful A.I. model, known as R1.

Mr. Liang’s attendance was all the more remarkable considering DeepSeek had not been considered one of China’s so-called A.I. Tigers. That distinction is reserved for high-profile firms like Zhipu AI, a Beijing-based start-up that has received substantial state investment.

DeepSeek is no stranger to the party’s urge to interfere; that may have inadvertently played a role in its eventual success. DeepSeek had originally trained its A.I. models to make bets on the Chinese stock market. But when regulators targeted such behavior, it pivoted in 2023 to advanced A.I. to conform with China’s industrial policy.

Then it stunned the world by rivaling the performance of its American competitors despite using far fewer of the advanced computer chips that are hard for China to obtain — a technological feat that until recently had not been available. At home, Chinese commentators have held up DeepSeek’s achievement as evidence that U.S. restrictions on exports of A.I. chips to China are ultimately futile (even though the company’s founder has said such limits are a major concern).

Even the recent allegations by OpenAI that DeepSeek improperly harvested its data to build its models have not deterred its fans in China, who accuse the San Francisco company of spreading rumors.

“The U.S. technological sanctions on China have left China with no choice but to develop,” said Sun Chenghao, a foreign relations expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, echoing a popular sentiment in China. “We can only rely on ourselves.”

A.I. holds a special place in Mr. Xi’s vision of China’s rise, with its potential to help the country overcome many of its biggest challenges like its shrinking work force. China has used facial recognition and algorithms to supercharge its ability to surveil its people and snuff out dissent. The technology is also factoring into China’s military modernization with autonomous weapons systems and even battlefield strategy.

DeepSeek’s development could also advance China’s geopolitical goals. DeepSeek uses an open source model, meaning anyone can peer under its hood and use its technology, unlike leading American companies that use more expensive proprietary software.

“The low cost and open source nature of DeepSeek’s model bolsters the Chinese government’s narrative that China is the place developing countries can look to for A.I. solutions,” Mr. Sheehan said.

How big a player China becomes on the global stage in A.I. could ultimately depend on how the government decides to balance regulations with the freedom that companies and researchers need to do cutting-edge work that allows them to compete with the United States.

Some analysts like Gregory C. Allen, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former U.S. defense official, said there were most likely no restraints on A.I. development when it comes to China’s military.

“The only thing holding them back is performance,” said Mr. Allen, who in his former job held talks with members of the People’s Liberation Army responsible for assessing the risks of A.I.

The same does not hold true for regulating A.I. in the private sector. The landscape there is dictated by the competing priorities of China’s regulatory agencies, each feeling their way around a technology that many in the world still do not fully understand.

It is clear that the more widely used a technology is, the more the party will want to rein it in. In 2023, just months after ChatGPT set off an investment frenzy over artificial intelligence, China issued rules aimed at controlling what Chinese chatbots say to users, requiring them to reflect “socialist core values” and avoid information that undermines “state power.”

In the case of DeepSeek’s chatbot, this has led to awkward responses to seemingly benign questions like, “Who is Xi Jinping?” Researchers testing its capabilities have found that the bot gives answers that spread Chinese propaganda and even parrot disinformation campaigns.

Some concerns are more existential in nature. A growing chorus of scholars have been sounding the alarm about the potentially catastrophic consequences of losing human control over A.I.

Chief among those voices has been Andrew Yao, a giant in A.I. at Tsinghua University and a recipient of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing. His influence helped establish what China calls the Global AI Governance Initiative, which was introduced by Mr. Xi in 2023 and included a call to always keep A.I. under human control. Last year, the government also called for the enhancement of A.I. governance “on the basis of human decision-making and supervision.”

Ultimately, A.I. in China may only advance as far as the government decides it can mitigate those risks, said Barath Harithas, an expert on A.I. policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“Overregulation and the need to adhere to ‘core socialist values’ could risk neutering A.I.’s potential,” Mr. Harithas said.

High above the millions of Hindu pilgrims walking the grounds of the Maha Kumbh Mela, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India beams down from giant billboards and posters as far as the eye can see. Elsewhere, there are life-size cutouts of the leader, luminous at night, with his hands folded in greeting.

The Maha Kumbh, a spiritual festival widely considered the largest gathering of humanity, is taking place this year in the city of Prayagraj, where the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers meet. Hindus believe that a third, mythical river called the Saraswati joins them there. Throngs of devotees take a dip in the holy waters in the belief that doing so will purge them of sins and grant them salvation.

It is a mesmerizing spectacle. There are ash-smeared monks, naked ascetics, priests with vermilion paste on their foreheads, ordinary pilgrims, tourists with selfie sticks, awe-struck foreigners, entertainers, small vendors and big advertisers. It is also a feat of urban planning, an overnight megalopolis built on land borrowed from the receding Ganges in the state of Uttar Pradesh, with tents, toilets, roads, streetlights and even automated ticket vending machines.

For Mr. Modi and his close ally Yogi Adityanath, the hard-line Hindu monk who is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the Maha Kumbh provides a marketing opportunity like no other. It is a platform to show off India’s achievements — and therefore their own — before a rapt citizenry and a watching world.

The political sensitivity of the event was apparent this past week when 30 pilgrims died and 90 were injured in a stampede, according to official counts. Mr. Adityanath appeared to try to minimize the episode, as it took him nearly 15 hours to acknowledge that people had died and to provide a death toll.

Mr. Modi expressed grief and offered help, but otherwise kept a distance from the tragic news. For him, the Kumbh represents an important opportunity to advertise himself as the man who will transform India into a well-governed, efficient, tech-savvy and business-friendly heavyweight.

A positive picture of the festival also helps Mr. Modi, a Hindu nationalist, to satisfy a desire among his right-wing base to promote a glorious Hindu cultural and religious past.

Mr. Modi “is someone who has mixed religion and politics, religion and state,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author who has followed the rise of the Hindu right as it has sought to uproot the secular foundation laid down by India’s Constitution.

Keenly aware of the importance of image, Mr. Modi has enhanced his power by projecting himself not only as a political leader, but also as the caretaker of Hindu traditions. He is both the prime minister and “the head priest of Hinduism in the entire country” performing rituals familiar to many Hindus in public settings, Mr. Mukhopadhyay said.

Mr. Modi is expected to take his holy dip at the Maha Kumbh on Wednesday, the same day that the capital, New Delhi, holds regional elections. The media spotlight on him that day will spill over to his Bharatiya Janata Party as it contests the election.

Mr. Adityanath has been equally active in seeking political advantage from the spiritual event.

Last month, Mr. Adityanath, who has been seen at times as a potential successor to Mr. Modi, held a special cabinet meeting for state ministers in Prayagraj. There, they announced infrastructure projects and bathed at the confluence of the rivers — yet another sign, Mr. Mukhopadhyay said, of the increasingly blurred lines between religion and state.

A week later, after the stampede, Mr. Adityanath worked to spin the disaster as showcasing the prowess of the Maha Kumbh’s rescue operations.

The Kumbh Mela and other ritual bathing events have been around for centuries. Hindu legend holds that when gods and demons fought over a pitcher, or “kumbh,” of the nectar of immortality, the gods spilled drops in four places — each an Indian city that holds a Kumbh Mela every 12 years.

For decades, the festival was overseen largely by various orders of Hindu monks. But governments have long been facilitators, ensuring that the events are orderly and safe.

Kumbh Mela festivals have steadily increased in size over the decades, from a total attendance of a few million people to hundreds of millions, as better infrastructure and facilities attracted more pilgrims.

The central and state governments earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for this year’s event, called the Maha Kumbh, or “Great” Kumbh, because it coincides with a rare celestial alignment last seen 144 years ago. The festival began in mid-January and will end late this month.

Government involvement is inevitable given the vastness of the pilgrimage, but “people don’t come to the Mela because it’s advertised or promoted by the government,” said Diana L. Eck, a professor emerita at Harvard Divinity School who worked on a 2015 study called, “Kumbh: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City.”

Still, Mr. Adityanath has gone to great lengths to pitch this year’s festival as a tourist event, with Kumbh “experience” packages, luxury tents and efforts to attract celebrity guests. As he made it a P.R.-driven affair, some attendees said he had distracted from the essence of the festival.

“Politicians should do politics and saints should do their religious work,” said Narender Kumar Sahoo, a pilgrim from the state of Madhya Pradesh who runs a grocery store in his village.

The stampede also led to criticism from opposition parties that Mr. Adityanath’s courting of wealthy and influential attendees came at the cost of arrangements for ordinary pilgrims.

Amanda Lucia, a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of California-Riverside, has attended the Kumbh Mela many times. Dr. Lucia recalled being astounded during her first visit to a smaller version of the Kumbh in 1997, boarding a packed train from the Indian city of Varanasi to Prayagraj, where she was forced to sit under a sink for the roughly three-hour journey.

Promotion of the event, both domestically and globally, increased significantly after Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, Dr. Lucia said. In 2019, months before Mr. Modi was elected to a second term, he and Mr. Adityanath upgraded a “half” Kumbh Mela that occurs every six years into a so-called full Kumbh, a move meant to win support for his campaign.

“A lot of people were calling it the ‘government Kumbh’” and complaining that the overtly political ploy had cheapened the event, Dr. Lucia said.

One major change for this year’s Kumbh is its heavy marketing as a cultural and developmental showcase — “The Greatest Show on Earth” for Hinduism — rather than as a religious event. The state has highlighted how revenue from commerce associated with the festival will add to official coffers.

The government of Mr. Adityanath has wowed devotees by showering them with rose petals dropped from helicopters. Billboards and digital displays trumpet the government’s investments in infrastructure. Officials share endless data points, including the number of bathers and foreign tourists, feeding the hype.

State government posters have advertised the Maha Kumbh as “divine, grand, digital” — a modern twist for a country that sees itself as a model of homegrown high-tech innovation.

Digital technology has made it far easier for people to find their way around the temporary city. QR codes provide links to hotels, food, emergency assistance and the Mela administration authorities. Nestled among those offerings is a code with a link to the “achievements” of the state government.

Officials said they were using sophisticated technology powered by artificial intelligence to monitor and manage crowds. At the lost-and-found center, workers have been using facial recognition technology to track missing people.

Private companies have supplied artificial intelligence software that can record specific information like the number of people taking holy dips at a certain hour, said Ashok Gupta, a police inspector overseeing the Integrated Command and Control Center.

The software can also determine the inflow and outflow of people in a certain area and manage the risk of overcrowding by redirecting people, although that system could not stop this week’s stampede.

For many of the millions of pilgrims, however, the marvel of the Maha Kumbh Mela is neither political nor organizational.

Dharmendra Dubey, 28, walked for miles toward the confluence of the rivers, reaching the waters after dark. As he toweled off after his dip, shivering as the temperature hit the low 50s, Mr. Dubey, who works in a private bank, said he felt energized.

Despite the long walk, he said he could go into the cold water again.

“No tiredness now,” Mr. Dubey said. “It’s gone.”

After a week of fighting, rebels backed by Rwanda have wrested almost full control over Goma, a city of two million in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, and the city morgue with the dead. Goma’s residents are beginning to emerge from their hiding places, desperately searching for water and food. And the Congolese military that was supposed to protect them has been vanquished.

On Thursday, in a yard outside Goma’s biggest stadium, rebels with the Rwanda-backed M23 militia loaded more than 1,000 soldiers they had captured into truck beds, where the men stood packed together. Most wore the uniforms they were captured in. Many of them were furious.

But the curses they spat were not directed at their captors; rather, at Felix Tshisekedi, the Congolese president, whom they accused of selling them out, and at the military commanders who had abandoned them. Their commanders, together with government officials, had left behind their vehicles, seen in videos and photographs, and boarded boats in the early hours of Monday morning as M23 arrived in the city, escaping across a moonlit lake while leaving their men to fight alone.

Many of the soldiers in the trucks had fought on, alongside armed groups known locally as the Wazalendo. But no reinforcements had been sent.

“Tshisekedi will pay for this,” one soldier shouted.

“We’ll capture him with our own hands,” another said.

“God will pay him back,” yelled another.

A commander of the 231st infantry battalion of the Congolese Army — known by its French acronym, F.A.R.D.C. — climbed down from the cabin of one of the trucks, where his seniority had earned him a comfortable spot. The captured commander, Lt. Col. John Asegi, explained that they had no choice but to surrender. M23 was taking them somewhere to give them some training, he said, adding that they would now do whatever their new masters commanded.

“If we are sent to fight the F.A.R.D.C.,” he said, “we will fight the F.A.R.D.C.”

As the M23 rebels strode around the yard preparing for the trucks’ departure, they looked more like an army with their rocket-propelled grenades, fatigues and helmets, while the Congolese soldiers looked like a tired, ragtag rebel group.

The rebels, who already control vast tracts of mineral-rich Congo, have said they plan to march to the capital, Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles to the west, and take over the whole country.

The rebels had already handed over to Rwanda hundreds of captured Romanian mercenaries who had been fighting alongside Congolese forces.

Hundreds of civilians stood around the trucks full of soldiers, watching this reversal of roles, and getting a good look at the men who were now in charge. A dozen women and children were crying inconsolably, having just spotted their husbands and fathers among the men in the trucks.

“I don’t know where they’re taking him to,” wept Marie Sifa, who had a baby girl on her back and three other children in tow. She was from Fizi, 270 miles south of Goma, she said, and she lost everything in the attack on Minova last week. They sought shelter in a school, but they could not stay.

“We have been chased out of the school,” Ms. Sifa said, crying as if she were in mourning. “How will I survive? How will I get these children back to Fizi?”

Later on Thursday, a rebel leader, Corneille Nangaa, gave Goma’s citizens a taste of their new reality under the powerful militia — which some experts say counts 6,000 troops in eastern Congo, backed by up to 4,000 Rwandan troops.

“Go back to normal activities,” Mr. Nangaa told Goma’s residents at a two-hour news conference at a local hotel. He was flanked by men in helmets and battle gear.

But the situation in Goma, a city built around black lava streams from a nearby live volcano, is far from normal.

Dead bodies lie in the streets. Stores, supermarkets, and humanitarian agencies’ warehouses have been looted. Cholera is breaking out. People with bullet wounds — those who survived — are finally managing to get to clinics for treatment, only to find a lack of medicine and of surgical staff.

And many families who were split up as they fled have yet to find each other.

Elysée Mopanda lost track of her two children in the chaos. The rebels were holding her husband, a soldier, prisoner. The events of the past week had left her family in ruins.

“I don’t know where to go,” she said.

Wounded, harrowed, hungry, thirsty or lost, many of Goma’s residents are in an extremely precarious situation.

Most vulnerable is Goma’s displaced population, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

For more than a year, people have fled the rebel advance through eastern Congo’s countryside and small towns, seeking refuge in and around Goma, in sprawling, unsanitary camps that are particularly dangerous for women and girls.

As M23 closed in on these camps last week, thousands of people who had been barely surviving there fled the clashes, carrying the little they had on their heads toward Goma, which would itself soon be overtaken.

Three families who fled one of the camps just outside Goma hid in an educational center, surviving on some beans and rice they were given.

Without that kindness, “I don’t know how we would have survived,” said Furaha Kabasele, a 34-year-old mother whose youngest child is only 5 months old.

They did survive this perilous week. But they have no idea what they will do now.

For many, the most pressing need is water. The city’s water supply, as well as its power and internet, was cut during the battle for Goma, and those who had managed to save some watched it dwindle over the week. Those who had no water tried to beg it from those who did, or paid a hawker as much as $5.20 for a jerrycan that usually costs 20 cents.

As the fighting subsided, hundreds of people have ventured to the edge of Lake Kivu to collect water, adding a little chlorine to try to keep waterborne diseases at bay.

One of those fetching water on Thursday morning was Tailor Mukendi, 13, who carried two stained yellow jerrycans to the lakeshore, took off his flip-flops, and plunged into the shimmering lake. As the fighting blazed, his family had run out of water to drink.

“We couldn’t leave the house because of the gunshots and the bombs falling,” he said.

He filled the cans, and struggled to lug them out of the lake.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was traveling to Washington on Sunday for meetings this week with President Trump and senior administration officials at a pivotal moment for the Middle East.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants the wars in the Middle East to end after the October 2023 Hamas-led assault on Israel set off 15 months of devastating conflict in Gaza that also spread to Lebanon. Before boarding his plane on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu made several references to “peace.”

“The decisions we made in the war have already changed the face of the Middle East,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “I believe that we can strengthen security, broaden the circle of peace and achieve a remarkable era of peace through strength,” he added.

Mr. Netanyahu is expected to be the first foreign leader to meet with Mr. Trump since his inauguration last month. The Israeli leader is expected to hold formative discussions with the Trump administration about several crucial regional issues.

Negotiations are supposed to start on Monday for the second phase of the cease-fire deal for Gaza that would turn the temporary truce that came into effect on Jan. 19 into a more permanent cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas and see the release of all the remaining hostages being held there.

Attesting to the fragility of the situation on the ground, an Israeli aircraft on Sunday fired toward a vehicle in Gaza that the military said was advancing north along an unauthorized route instead of the agreed inspection route, breaking days of calm in the Palestinian enclave. It was not immediately clear if the airstrike caused casualties.

In addition, the trial stage of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire for Lebanon is set to expire on Feb. 18, by which time both the Israeli military and Hezbollah are meant to have vacated the southern part of that country.

Overarching issues for the future of the Middle East also remain on the agenda. Those include curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support for armed proxies on Israel’s borders, as well as the possibility of a grand bargain involving formal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a major regional player.

Mr. Netanyahu said from the tarmac on Sunday that the issues to be discussed with Mr. Trump include “victory over Hamas, achieving the release of all our hostages and dealing with the Iranian terror axis in all its components.”

His office said that Mr. Netanyahu is expected to meet with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, on Monday and with Mr. Trump on Tuesday.

Mr. Netanyahu spoke by phone with Mr. Witkoff on Saturday and the two men agreed to start the negotiations for the second phase of the Gaza deal in their meeting on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, suggesting that Mr. Witkoff will play a major role in shuttle diplomacy.

There was no immediate comment from the White House or Mr. Witkoff, who played an important role in brokering the initial, six-week phase of the cease-fire deal for Gaza. In the days before Mr. Trump took office, he worked in coordination with officials from the Biden administration, as well as Qatar and Egypt — the two main countries mediating between Israel and Hamas.

On Sunday, the prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told a news conference in Doha that his government would “continue to work in cooperation with our partners in the Arab Republic of Egypt and the United States to ensure the full implementation of this agreement.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington comes amid a more hopeful atmosphere in Israel and Gaza over the first phase of the cease-fire. That has seen the release over the past two weeks of 13 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. One of the hostages released on Saturday was Keith Siegal, 65, a dual American-Israeli citizen.

Many of the families of released hostages have thanked Mr. Trump and his team for getting the long-awaited deal over the finish line after months of efforts by the Biden administration.

But questions surrounding the next phase remain unresolved. Mr. Netanyahu had vowed publicly and repeatedly to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and to preserve the option of going back to fighting after the initial phase of the deal, if necessary.

The images of gun-toting Hamas militants organizing the handover ceremonies of hostages to the Red Cross have underscored the degree to which the group remains in control in Gaza.

Mr. Witkoff made a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, according to a White House official, aiming to reinforce the cease-fire that has also allowed tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. Mr. Witkoff had also visited Saudi Arabia before meeting Mr. Netanyahu in Israel last week.

Mr. Trump has raised the idea on several occasions that Gazans should be moved en masse to Egypt and Jordan. His suggestion echoes an idea floated in Israel early in the war and the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza.

But on Saturday Egypt and Jordan — along with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries — warned in a joint statement that any plan that encouraged the “transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land” would threaten regional stability and “undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people.”

Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Israel, and Ismaeel Naar from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.