Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hopes for mobilizing foreign direct investments (FDIs) for bolstering growth and job creation may meet its first casualty if the South Korean steel major POSCO takes a firm stand on withdrawing from its proposed project in Odisha. The main reason for this sorry episode would be not providing mining lease on out-of-turn basis in...
Secularism in Kashmir was not allowed to take root and hence failed to emerge in the true sense. Religious ideas, attitudes and practices have fundamentally altered the atmospherics and political culture of Kashmir, resulting in the brute display of might. Its end implied a process of religionisation of the society to serve Muslim purposes. It has lit fires ...
When Arvind Kejriwal rode back to the Chief Ministers office with a thumping 67 seats of 70 exactly one year after having previously resigned from the same, it was much observed and appreciated as the dawn of a new beginning. A new calmer and more sensible Kejriwal had seemingly emerged and was seen advocating a policy of coordination with the...
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S Faizi
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28 May 2015
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When a piece of legislation unanimously passed by a State legislature in deference to massive public demand is sent to the Centre for Presidential assent and is held up by the Union Home Ministry for long four years, without even passing it on to the President, it represents a subversion of the Constitutional process and raises worrying questions about the C...
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Hari Om
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27 May 2015
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Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on May 15 – apart from making an unambiguous declaration that the proposed AIIMS will be established only in Kashmir and the ongoing artificial lake project over River Tawi in Jammu was not technically and economically viable and could be shelved – made some very serious political statements while talkin...
A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sp...
All the actors in the “wider Near East” are waiting anxiously to know what Washington and Teheran have decided for their future. Since no-one knows, and in order to ensure their own survival, everyone has to imagine hypotheses and prepare for sudden changes in the situation. In this article, Thierry Meyssan explains his...
We are at the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That victory did not usher in an era of universal peace. Rather, it introduced a new constellation of powers and a complex balance among them. Europe’s great powers and empires declined, and the United States and the Soviet Union replaced them, performing an old dance to new musical instrum...
Hardly had the controversy over Mother Teresa subsided than author PB Lomeo opened a new chapter, raising serious questions about the functioning of the church within Christian society. In a book titled, Unteshwari Mata ka Mahant, Lomeo discussed the life of Father Anthony Fernandes of the Society of Jesus, (SJ), who devoted decades of his life to increase t...
Econ 101: What is Privatisation? What is Deregulation? What is Self-regulation? What is Economics of Fools?
Answer: Capitalism for the 99% and Socialism for the rest: Where profits and benefits are privatised for the 1%, whilst costs and austerities are socialised for the...
The régime of Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt is in the process of collapse and the life of his prime hostage, kidnapped legitimate President Morsi, is in play. Ever since the total failure on the February 6th call by his media hounds for the Egyptian people to attend another mass rally, in a repeat of the June 30 media fantasy which set out the PR cover for t...
Continuing tensions over Ukraine notwithstanding, including a US-led boycott of the Victory Day Parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Germany’s surrender in World War II, Russia under President Vladimir Putin has retrieved much of its eminence as a great power and even managed a handsome recovery of its sanction-hit rouble. By tweaking its West-centri...
It took a gentle but artful communicator to nail the lies and distortions about the predominantly Hindu history of India, its faith, culture, indeed the entire gamut of this ancient civilisation, by the academic discourse of the Western world. That the West’s Christian ethos (including its Catholic, Protestant and Secular manifestations) is at the root of th...
US President Barack Obama had a number of awkward encounters with Latin American and Caribbean leaders at the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) summit in Jamaica and the Summit of the Americas in Panama. Present in Jamaica were leaders like Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit. Skerrit had denounced Obama’s policy of sanctions against Do...
The twin-pronged attack – oil price war/raid on the ruble – aimed at destroying the Russian economy and place it into a form of Western natural resource vassalage has failed. Natural resources were also essentially the reason for reducing Iran to a Western vassalage. That never had anything to do with Tehran developing a nuclear weapon, which was banned by b...
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Hari Om
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16 May 2015
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The Bharatiya Janata Party is perhaps the only political party in the country that has never hesitated to appreciate the viewpoints of other political parties in order to bring them on board so that it could form or run its government with their “conditional” support. Students of Indian politics are fully aware of the activities of the BJP between 1996 and 2...
As the BJP completes a year in power, there is increasing pressure on the government to deliver on the economy. Though the government is steadily progressing on the promises committed in the BJP manifesto, there are attempts to create confusion on the ground, particularly among the urban middle classes, regarding the direction of the...
Alexander the Blessed needed an extra year to finish the war with Turkey, train already drafted recruits, and deploy at the Western border against Napoleon not 200 thousand, but half a million-strong army, which would not have bothered to retreat into the heart of the...
Today [May 9] is truly a historical day. For the first time ever, the West has boycotted the Victory Day Parade in Moscow and, also for the first time ever, Chinese forces have marched on the Beautiful Square, (“Red” square is a mistranslation – the “Red Square” ought be called the “Beautiful Square”) with the Russians. I believe that this is a...
China still remains a difficult neighbour for India to tackle. Apart from border dispute the concerns over growing trade deficit with China and resolving the water issue of trans-boundary rivers, particularly the Brahmaputra, remains a formidable challenge. To offset the huge trade imbalance, India has sought more Chinese investments. Prime Minister Narendra...
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Hari Om
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11 May 2015
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6 Comments
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Should the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continue to remain part of the establishment in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) or should it come out and play the role of an effective and responsible opposition as it used to till March 1, when it entered into a post-poll alliance with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to “break the jinx” in the Muslim-majority State and...
‘What the left needs is an account of how the suffering we experience in our personal lives stems from capitalist values, and to replace this system with one built on values of love and...
Once again, a black man innocent of any crime is dead, a city torn by outbursts of anger, but the nation hopefully pushed to acting on a reality. America has many serious problems, high among them de-humanized race relations. But none of those problems are removed from the political economics that make us a nation under the control of minority wealth in a sy...
“In the West, most look at the war in Ukraine as simply a battle between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government. But the truth on the ground is now far more complex, particularly when it comes to the volunteer battalions fighting on the side of Ukraine,” according to Marcin Mamon. [1] What the Polish filmmaker is talking about is the so-call...
Is the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)/ Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) /Islamic State (IS) /Al-Dawlah Al-Islamiyah fe Al-Iraq wa Al-Sham (DAISH/DAESH) active in post-EuroMaidan Ukraine? The answer is not exact. In other words, the answer is both yes and...
The United Kingdom is going to the polls on Thursday. Elections electrify the countries in which they are held, but in most cases they make little difference. In this case, the election is a bit more important. Whether Labour or the Tories win makes some difference, but not all that much. What makes this election significant is that in Scotland, 45 percent o...
The dramatic death (suicide /accident /conspiracy) of Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat, a farmer from Rajasthan, at the Aam Aadmi Party’s rally in Delhi on April 22, has important lessons for the ruling parties at the Centre and the State. The AAP ostensibly turned to populism to shift attention from the infighting that led to the expulsion of senior advocate Prasha...
During his recent visit to India, President Ashraf Ghani gave enough indications that New Delhi need not be unnecessarily worried over his reaching out to Pakistan or China. What he intends is to make Afghanistan “a hub” of economic activity that connects South Asia with Central Asia and beyond, so that in all practical senses it becomes the real “Heart of A...
Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote on April 5 that this month [April] may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system. His comments refer to the circumstances surrounding China’s launch of a new venture, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Wary of China’s growing a...
From Lima, Peru, to Paris, what India’s role will be in the global debate on climate change and emissions
The Union minister for environment and forests, Prakash Javadekar, addressing the first meeting of the environment ministers of BRICS in Moscow, said that India, by launching various campaigns, including, “Fresh Air, My Birthright”, “Save Water, Save En...
India has rightly played its role as a friendly neighbour by reaching out to Nepal immediately after the terrible earthquake with an intensity of 7.9 on the Richter scale struck the Himalayan nation. Indian teams for search and rescue operations reached Nepal first, and so far India has sent 10 teams of the National Disaster Response Force, each team consist...