The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is part of China’s larger Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aims to connect Asia through land-based and maritime economic zones. CPEC is an infrastructure project, the backbone of which is a transportation network connecting China to the Pakistani seaports of Gwadar and Karachi located on the Arabian Sea. Paki...
The Doklam standoff between China and India in the remote mountain heights of Bhutan has been under media attention for several weeks. It threatened to escalate into a full scale war between the two Asian giants. The dispute was triggered by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) army personnel who moved into Bhutanese territory to build a road on a thin...
Blessed with an inflated sense of impunity, the all-India Lutyens brigade’s oracular intellectual, Ramachandra Guha, pompously declared after Kannada journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot that, “It is very likely that her murderers came from the same Sangh Parivar from which the murderers of Dabholkar, Pansare and Kalburgi came”. Guha imparted this deep wisdom...
Quite often, two key issues attract and occupy the attention of all “China gazers” and think tanks. One, is China a superpower? Two, how will China behave if it becomes a superpower? Let me state at the outset that China’s is only knocking at the doors of “Regional Power” status. It may take yet another decade to knock at the doors of “Super Power” status. W...
Xi Jinping is a ‘princeling’, the privileged son of a former top leader. Xi’s lineage, links with the military and his grooming in managing crises sets him as a leader capable of steering China’s rise. Born in Beijing in 1953, Xi studied chemical engineering in Tsinghai before joining the Party in 1974. He learned Chinese politics from an early age when his ...
Xi Jinping has, unambiguously, set the grand strategy course for China to traverse. Xi has shifted the goal posts of Hu Jintao’s “Comprehensive National Power (CNP) by 2030 vision to “Dominant Power” status by 2049 whilst perpetuating enduring single party Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. China believes that threat of wars between major powers is low. Hyb...
The US has largely viewed Islamic terrorism as a monolithic threat with varying degrees of extremism distributed among various geographic locations. We have often not adequately appreciated the historical, ideological and geopolitical subtleties underlying Islamic terrorism and, consequently, missed opportunities to enhance our national security by effective...
Famously corrupt and unscrupulous, Monsanto Corporation has now been discovered in covering up the highly toxic effects of the secret additives it combines with glyphosate in Roundup, the world’s most-used herbicide. The IARC, an agency of the World Health Organization, released a report in March, 2015 that declared the chemical glyphosate to be “probably ca...
With due apologies to the departed soul of Gauri Lankesh, a section of the country’s intellectuals and media are adept at conferring ‘sainthood’ and ‘martyrdom’ upon select individuals. They are masters at playing the victimhood card and deriving political mileage from certain unnatural deaths, as they are dexterous in the art of instantaneous cost-benefit a...
Full scale economic war between America and Russia is underway. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said so, and the US administration and the American Congress voted it in with new sanctions. The only question that remains is “who will win?” Here’s a look at the future of US-Russia relations and the ultimate loser in this new type of Cold...
The President of China announced the Belt and Road Initiative (earlier known as One Belt One Road, OBOR) for the first time in 2013 in Kazakhstan which included six main corridors comprising of the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ (SREM) and the ‘21st-Century Maritime Silk Road’ focusing on interconnectivity and economic cooperation between China and Eurasia and ot...
Ironically, Pakistan’s opposition to US and NATO efforts to stabilize Afghanistan through its support of the Taliban and Haqqani insurgents would lead to greater regional instability and, perhaps, create an existential threat to Pakistan itself should Western forces withdraw. In the absence of US and NATO assistance, the Afghan government would fall within t...
The Renuka Choudhury-led Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment & Forests dealt a major blow to the transgenic food crop lobby with its insistence that no genetically modified (GM) crop should be introduced in India unless the bio-safety, socio-economic desirability, and long term effects are evaluated by a...
Continuing his analysis of Donald Trump’s policy in the Greater Middle East, Thierry Meyssan demonstrates that, contrary to current opinion, the US President has not changed his strategy. Breaking with his predecessors, he is attempting to cut off Pakistani support for the jihadists in Afghanistan, just as he did with the role of Saudi Arabia for the jihadis...
The annual BRICS summit in Xiamen – where President Xi Jinping was once mayor – could not intervene in a more incandescent geopolitical context. Once again, it’s essential to keep in mind that the current core of BRICS is “RC”; the Russia-China strategic partnership. So in the Korean peninsula chessboard, RC context – with both nations sharing borders with t...
It would come as no surprise to most readers that slavery has been officially outlawed in pretty much every country of this world. This cruel practice was condemned by the League of Nations in 1926 and then by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, along with pretty much every single human rights group in existence. Never...
An RTI application filed by Bengaluru-based Col. Matthew Thomas, a petitioner in the Right to Privacy case before the Supreme Court, reveals that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), custodian of Aadhaar data, signed contracts with foreign firms giving them “full access” to classified data and personal details of citizens, which they...
The National Democratic Alliance government, on assuming office, and the Defence Minister then as now, have repeatedly expressed the desire to curtail defence expenditure, the perception being that major savings can be effected by cutting out ‘non-operational’ assets and structures. The Shekatkar Committee set up for the purpose was charged ‘to ensure India’...
The White Man enslaved the Brown Man and the Black Man for centuries. The Yellow Man liberated them. This is the true outcome of the Second World War. The Brown Man enslaved for nearly 500 years is free today because the Yellow Man fought the White Man at Port Arthur in 1905 followed by the epic attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Had the Yellow Man not fought ...
Like physical education majors, Army officers often get extra credit when they are able to muster a modicum of intellectual rigor, which could be the case for then Major H.R. McMaster, who wrote “Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam”, the 1997 book highly critical of the Vietnam-era...