The alleged suicide of Jeffrey Epstein has become one of the few things the currently very divided US population can broadly agree on. Epstein and his network of friends were so high profile that this alleged sex predator is highly unlikely to have committed suicide. At the very least he was assisted, while someone intentionally turned a blind eye to protect...
Slavery had some good aspects for those chaps who had it rather good. A colonial setup is the next best thing to slavery, and it also holds its attraction for people who knew how to place themselves just below the sahibs and above the run-of-the-mill natives. The Hong Kong revolt is the mutiny of wannabe house niggers who feel that the gap between them and t...
Defense Minister Rajnath Singh has announced that India might reconsider its nuclear doctrine of no first use. Since the Modi government is not in the nature of engaging in empty talk without serious study, we can assume that a major decision has been reached by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his cabinet. This was the case with the triple talaq bill and re...
The situation in Jammu and Kashmir has been more or less stable since the legislative process for reorganisation of the state and necessary amendments to Article 370 were approved by an overwhelming majority in Parliament. No untoward incident of violence has been reported in the state. The Eid celebrations went off in a peaceful manner and people are coming...
Daring Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, has killed a sacred cow, called Article 370 of the Constitution, enshrining the autonomy of Kashmir. The consequences could be dire, including the fourth India-Pakistan war, but not necessarily so. It could also be a successful scheme. Apparently, Narendra Modi had been encouraged by his success in recent el...
The Sri Lanka government had been a divided house due to a schism between the President and the Prime Minister ever since President Sirisena made an abortive attempt to remove Prime Minister Wickremesinghe from the government in October 2018. Apparently this has resulted in lack of coordination between the ministries and different arms of the government. Thi...
Gruesome serial suicide attacks by local radical Islamic outfit, National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), targeting three churches and three luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019 in Sri Lanka, killing 258 people and injuring over 500, has left the country in disarray. People were shocked when they came to know that the government failed to prevent the attack...
As an activist in the field of right of information, 25 July 2019 is a red letter day, the day that the first amendment to the Right to Information Act, 2005 cleared the last hurdle in the Rajya Sabha. After approval by the President of India it is now law. Before proceeding further, let us understand what these amendments are. Firstly, sections 13(1) and (5...
Russia, backed by China, hoping to exploit mounting doubts in the Gulf about the reliability of the United States as the region’s sole security guarantor, is proposing a radical overhaul of the security architecture in an area that is home to massive oil and gas reserves and some of the world’s most strategic waterways. Chinese backing for Russia’s proposed ...
Though three months have passed since the Jihadi terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday on April 21, Sri Lanka does not seem to have rectified the aberrations that led to the attacks, despite getting information on the impending attacks 12 days earlier. The Parliamentary select committee inquiry into the attacks has revealed damage done to national security appa...
China and Russia are as much allies as they are rivals. A joint Tajik-Chinese military exercise in a Tajik region bordering on China’s troubled north-western region of Xinjiang suggests that increased Chinese-Russian military cooperation has not eroded gradually mounting rivalry in Central Asia, long viewed by Moscow as its backyard. The exercise, the second...
A fortnight after the Modi Government defanged Article 370, scrapped its illegal appendage, Article 35A, and split the northern State into the Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir, Islamabad is groping for a coherent response. In May 1998, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee stunned the world by testing five nuclear devices (Pokhran-II)...
Following the revocation of Article 370, Kashmir has become an integral part of India. Mr. Amit Shah has expressed the goal of recovering the rest of the territory of occupied Jammu and Kashmir, as well as Aksai Chin now held by China. This presents both challenges and opportunities as POK has two distinct entities, Azad Kashmir and the northern area known a...
The new Karnataka government under B.S. Yediyurappa has ordered the Kannada Culture Department to stop celebrating Tipu Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan that the State has been observing for the past few years, in November. The order has not raised any ripples in the state, barring statements by former chief minister Siddaramaiah who initiated...
August 5, 2019 will be etched in history. The abolition of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir State and its bifurcation into two Union Territories (Jammu and Kashmir with a legislature and Ladakh without one) is India’s Berlin Wall moment. As with the demolition of the Babri structure, India will not be the same again. The centre’s action has generated ...
This new reality is particularly visible in the Middle-East where countries like the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia (this is the so-called “Axis of Kindness”) are currently only capable of deploying a military capable of massacring civilians or destroy the infrastructure of a country, but which cannot be used effectively against the two real regional ...
“Missing the forest for the trees” is an apt metaphor if we take a look at most commentary describing the past twenty years or so. This period has been remarkable in the number of genuinely tectonic changes the international system has undergone. It all began during what I think of as the “Kristallnacht of international law,” 30 August September 1995, when t...
After three years of relative withdrawal from the international scene, Turkey has specified its direction. While still remaining a member of the Atlantic Alliance and its integrated command structure, it intends to express its independence. It will not receive orders either from the Atlantic Alliance or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. On the int...
Russia is meticulously advancing Eurasian chessboard moves that should be observed in conjunction, as Moscow proposes to the Global South an approach diametrically opposed to Western sanctions, threats and economic war. Here are three recent examples. Ten days ago, via a document officially approved by the United Nations, the Russian Foreign Ministry advance...
With the reorganisation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir done and irrevocable, all eyes are on the possible fallout, more so from Pakistan. The neighbouring country has partially recovered from the shock to rustle up a response, however incoherent and disjointed. In the initial stages came the tweets: “CCC on Kashmir situation at GHQ. Forum fully...
In the early 1980s, the leftists organized protests, waving red flags outside central government offices in West Bengal and Kerala, against the introduction of computers in banks and institutions, which they designated as a capitalist evil and a bourgeois conspiracy to rob the proletariat. Three decades later, in 2004, the then Marxist chief minister of West...
In memory of the people who perished in the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I ask all the friends of the Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative to hold a one-minute silent prayer and to light a candle to remember the victims and to pray for the realization of lasting world peace, free from the weapons of mass destruction. On 6...
The integration of South Asia remains a distant dream. Pakistan seems to be the only irritant in the way of consolidation in the region. The bitterness between India and Pakistan has stalled the process in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Islamabad has denied India access to another SAARC country, Afghanistan. But Iran which is n...
Climate change, much like war, could prove to be a geopolitical and commercial gold mine. At least, that is the take of DP World, Dubai’s global port operator, and Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. DP World is partnering with the fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to create an all-year round maritime sea route from Europe to Asia through the Arcti...
Former Mumbai police commissioner and director general of police, Gujarat and Punjab, Julio Ribeiro, recently expressed unhappiness with the Bharatiya Janata Party for inducing 10 Congress MLAs to its side in Goa, deviating from its political philosophy and ethics. Recalling his friendship with Ms. Laxmi Kanta Chawla and Hit Abhilashi in terrorism-afflicted ...
The recovery of M-24 sniper rifles suggests that now Pakistan army riflemen are engaged in the terror war in Kashmir. This could be the reason behind the movement of a large contingent of 35,000 troops by the Indian Government. This has potential to escalate into a full...
In Myanmar, China’s BRI faces a different set of problems. The Myanmar government is under pressure from the international community for its poor handling of the Rohingya crisis. What particularly hurts Naypyitaw is repeated attacks from the United Nations on the issue. Yanghee Lee, the U.N. independent expert on human rights in Myanmar, said in late June th...
With the four-decade-long rapid rise of China as a world power beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the first two decades of this millennium, after decades of virtual political and economic stagnations under Chairman Mao Zedong, it became essential for China to develop a new and wide-ranging strategy to sustain what it has achieved and make long-ter...
The call by Dr. K. Krishnasamy, chief of Puthiya Thamizhagam Party, to get the Pallar community out of the Scheduled Caste list and rename them as ‘Devendra Kula Vellalar’ has not roused mixed feelings among the Pallar community members, but is causing outrage among the numerically large and historically vibrant Vellalar community for unfairly claiming...
China’s infrastructure and energy driven US$ 1 trillion Belt and Road initiative involves risky bets across a swath of land populated by often illiberal or autocratic governments exercising power without independent checks and balances. Seeking to reduce risk, China is bumping up against the limits of its own long-standing foreign and defence policy principl...