In the 1960s, scientists warned us about an approaching Ice Age. As this failed to catch the public imagination, the new clarion call was rebranded as Global Warming. Because the dire forecasts of cataclysmic oceanic rising and concomitant rising of Earth’s temperatures failed to materialise as predicted, precipitating derisive mirth within the more analytic...
A learned member of the five-judge Bench (not Constitution Bench) wisely collated the evidence regarding Sri Ram’s birthplace and appended it to the Supreme Court’s verdict of November 9, 2019, granting the disputed site to Ramlalla Virajman. The 116-page addendum highlights the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s gigantic efforts to collect every scrap of evidence to...
The China government statistical agency just released economic data showing the poorest GDP growth in almost 30 years for China. The problem goes far deeper than recent effects of the US-China trade war or the impact of calamities such as African Swine Fever that have decimated the nation’s pig herds. The underlying far more serious problem is an emerging...
India refused to be part of its neighbourhood mega-trading bloc, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in in its present form as its demands were not met. That does not mean it has to forgo its Act East Policy. Joining a trade bloc is only one of the ways of fostering regional integration. India remains engaged with ASEAN and its other institut...
On October, 31, as the Diwali festivities culminated, our nation embarked on a historic and path breaking transformation. The state of Jammu and Kashmir emerged in a new Avatar as two Union Territories. The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir comprises 22 districts including areas of Muzaffarabad and Mirpur. The Union Territory of Ladakh comprises two distr...
Protests in Lebanon have evolved into more than a fight against failed and corrupt government that has long stymied development in the Middle East and North Africa. The protests constitute a rare demand for political and social structures that emphasize national rather than ethnic or sectarian religious identities in a world in which civilizational leaders w...
Over the past century, the United Kingdom and then the United States have successively courted all states and faith groups in the Middle East. They have fuelled confessional conflicts in such a way as to make themselves indispensable, according to the old principle of “Divide and conquer”. President Trump was elected three years ago with the plan to end the...
An unfriendly relationship between Tehran and Moscow in the past years was to the benefit of the United States because Iran was the only deterrent that prevented Russia from getting a foothold in the Middle East, which would have threatened US interests in the region. However, recently the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran have fostered clo...
On 31 October 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated at her residence on Safdarjung Road, New Delhi, by her bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, who belonged to the Sikh community. The killing was in reaction to Operation Blue Star wherein Sikh militants were flushed out of Sri Harmandir Sahib, the most sacred shrine of the Sikhs. The badl...
BC stands for NEO’s Banned Classic. This article was originally published by our journal on 27.11.14. For some reason, this article is missing from Google search results. Since this article remains pretty relevant to those geopolitical events that are taking place on the geopolitical stage today, we deem it possible to present it to our readers once again. S...
It’s a time that only happens once or twice a century. A new world order is emerging. All previous references disappear. Those who were doomed to grieve triumph, while those who ruled are thrown into hell. The official statements and interpretations made by journalists clearly no longer correspond to the events that follow one another. Commentators must chan...
Most people are now aware that Pakistan has occupied areas it calls Azad Kashmir (occupied Jammu) and the districts of Gilgit and Baltistan (once called Northern Areas). However, few know that Pakistan is in illegal occupation of the northern districts of Gilgit-Baltistan because of a coup by British officer Major William Brown, who was in-charge of the nort...
Turkey’s ambassador to China, Emin Onen, didn’t mince his words this week [Oct. 23-Ed] when he took his Chinese hosts to task for failing to support Turkey’s military campaign against a Kurdish militia in Syria. Speaking in Turkish through a translator at a news conference at his Beijing embassy, Mr. Onen implicitly put China on the spot by calling on it to ...
When the US president tweeted about withdrawing from Syria and letting Turkey move its forces in to take control of areas hitherto under Kurdish control, Donald Trump was probably thinking of Turkey as more of a ‘NATO-ally’ allowing him to fulfill his promise of ending America’s “useless wars” in the Middle East. Little did he seem to know, as the turn of ev...
It is interesting to note where the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore sits amid the shifting poles of global power between East and West. Once a British colony, the tiny island nation has since served as a barometer indicating the ebb and flow of Western influence over Asia, and now, the ups and downs of China’s emergence as a regional and global power...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to shun single-use plastic in his Independence Day address, reiterated at the 14th Conference of Parties (COP14) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (September 9, 2019), could fail to tackle the scale of the plastic menace unless scientists and entrepreneurs join the fight. Previously, in April 2011, Delhi...
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way: “It’s a quadruple win. The US performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syr...
Contrary to popular belief, Rojava is not a state for the Kurdish people, but a French fantasy of the interwar period. The aim was to create a rump state with Kurds equivalent to Greater Israel, which was being considered with Jews. This colonial objective was reactivated by Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron including the ethnic cleansing of the region...
The unanimous international community multiplies its condemnation of the military offensive in Rojava and watches helplessly as tens of thousands of Kurds flee, pursued by the Turkish army. However, no one intervenes, considering that a massacre may be the only possible way to restore peace, given the inextricable situation created by France and the crimes a...
Turkey, like much of the Middle East, is discovering that what goes around comes around. Not only because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have miscalculated the fallout of what may prove to be a foolhardy intervention in Syria and neglected alternative options that could have strengthened Turkey’s position without sparking the ire of much of the in...