A deal betweenIran and the P-5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plusGermany) was reached Saturday night [Nov 23]. The Iranians agreed to certain limitations on their nuclearprogram while the P-5+1 agreed to remove certain economic sanctions. The nextnegotiation, scheduled for six months from now depending on both sides’adher
Kerala,the only wholly literate State in India, is proving itself to be a lesseducated one. For the last couple of months, the main concern of a section of Keralasociety is about the potential danger facing farmers and people in general dueto implementation of the Gadgil/ Kasthurirangan proposals to save Western Ghats.Unfortunately, poor people are
Sri Lanka PresidentRajapaksa spent around SL Rs 14.8 billion (as stated in parliament by the Opposition),imported 54 Mercedes Benz cars for guests use, and a lot of time and energy tomake a success of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meet (CHOGM) 2013 hostedin Colombo. The 2013Summit had all the razzmatazz that goes with such occasions. T
The eruption of the Syrian conflict early in 2011 heraldedthe demise of Turkey’s officially pronounced strategy of “Zero Problems withNeighbors,” but more importantly, it revealed a “hidden agenda” in Turkishforeign policy under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What Sreeram Chaulia, the Dean of the Jindal School ofInterna
India’s has all along failed in its diplomacy towards China. The Indiandiplomats are doing a great disservice to the nation by not asserting theJohnson Line in the northern sector and McMahon Line in the eastern sectordrawn by the British colonials as India’s boundary line. In fact, afterIndependence the official map of the country recognizes these
At the end ofthe Commonwealth Heads of Government Meet (CHOGM) in Colombo on November 17,Sri Lanka President Rajapaksa is probably a happy man having seen through the prestigiousevent despite global media focus on Sri Lanka’s alleged war crimes issue andits fallout. Whether the international community agrees or not, his supporterswould claim his st
“It is no measure of health to be well adjustedto a profoundly sick society” - Jiddu Krishnamurti, Asian Indian philosopher Last weekend, I talked my two grandsons intojoining me to watch “The Fifth Estate”,the new feature film about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. The movieis being marketed as an “action thriller” and is reportedly
Ever since German andJapanese surviving leaders were prosecuted after WorldWar II at Nurembergand Tokyo, there has been a wide abyss separating the drive for criminalaccountability on the part of those who commit crimes against peace, crimesagainst humanity, war crimes from the realities of world politics. The law issupposed to push toward consiste
As students, both girls and boys, are being arrested andgiven long prison sentences for displaying the yellow Raba’a sign of theEgyptian anti-coup movement with its four raised fingers, and sportsmen arebeing suspended and penalised for briefly making the Raba’a sign on TV duringtheir games, the Junta leader, Abdel-Fattah Sissi, is having his
The talks betweenIran and the Western powers have ended but have not failed. They will reconvenenext week. That in itself is a dramatic change from the past, when such talks invariablybegan in failure. In my book The Next Decade, I argued that the United States and Iran would move toward strategicalignment, and I think that is what we are seeingtak
This Saturday, November 16, the Egypt International CrimesInvestigation Team (EICI) of solicitors Irvine, Thanvi, Natas (ITN) instructedby Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), and represented by their partnerTayab Ali, announced the beginning of the formal stages of the prosecution of aspecific list of persons in Egypt accused of murder,
If the prime ministerial hopeful of onepolitical party is greeted with chants of his rival’s name at a venue honouringanother legend, surely a point is being made. That this should happen in aState ruled by the Congress makes the issue personal to the individuals inquestion. The nation has been unusually patient with the Congress dynasty’s ‘prince’
In his recent booktitled, Chanakya’s New Manifesto: ToResolve the Crisis within India, Pavan Varma comes up with an absurd theorywhich seeks to stereotype the Hindu religion and millions of its followers as morallyloose and ‘corruption friendly.’ Varma writes, “At least in Hinduism, there isno binding or universal code of conduct that gives unequiv
The Democratic Republic of Nepal goesto polls on 19th November to elect yet another Constituent Assembly with thehope of a Constitution to govern this nation of 29 million. Given the internaland external pressures from various genuine or fake stakeholders, polling isunlikely to be peaceful. Even if an assembly does get elected, drafting aConstituti
Escalating his confrontation with the SoniaGandhi-led United Progressive Alliance coalition and Congress party a notchhigher to encompass his bid for power at the Centre in 2014, Gujarat ChiefMinister Narendra Modi has accused the Manmohan Singh regime of failure toprotect the nation internally and externally. Pointing out that the fightagainst Mao
TheNew York Times (November 2) ran a long article based on NSA documentsreleased by Edward Snowden. One of the lines that most caught my attentionconcerned “Sigint” – Signals intelligence, the term used for electronicintercepts. The document stated: “Sigint professionals must hold the moral highground, even as terrorists or dictators seek to exploi
The astounding disclosures of whistleblowerEdward Snowden about the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s massive datamining effort to access millions of communications of even friendly nationshave sent shock waves across the world. It has exposed thevulnerabilities of increasingly networked electronic communications despitegreat progress in se
Even as PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh was finding it hard to make up his mind over attendingthe Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting in Colombo (it is now known hewill send Salman Khurshid instead - ed), China is making the best use of thesituation to strengthen its presence in Sri Lanka. China’s intention isobvious: profit from India’s discomf
What we want is not a united Arabia but adisunited Arabia split into principalities under our suzerainty - 1st Earl of Crewe,Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies (1914) His Majesty’s Government view with favor theestablishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and willuse their best endeavors to facilitate the ach
The five-day trip of Indian Prime MinisterManmohan Singh to Moscow, and the simultaneous visit to Beijing by RussianPrime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, indicate a realization among the three Eurasianpowers of the urgency to set aside, if not overcome, the niggling issues thathave prevented these three large nations from more closely coordinating theira
The boundaries of the Asian continent are ill-definedand often not naturally traced. Conventionally Asia begins at Istanbul and onthe isthmus of Suez in the south but Russia can be said to be part of to it, asGumilev argued and from that perspective Europe also belongs in it. Asia cannothence be conceived without taking into account the hybrid conc
The UnitedAndhra Pradesh and Telangana agitations share a common feature. In bothmovements the 16.2 per cent scheduled caste (SC) and 6.6 per cent scheduletribe (ST) followed by 45 per cent backward caste (BC) of the total state populationare the worst victims. The per capita income of the deprived section is alsomuch lower than the 22 per cent pop
In declaring Narendra Modi as its primeministerial candidate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership ofRajnath Singh did well to keep out of the pit that would’ve been created had itfallen back on LK Advani’s formula of “collective leadership”. That policy wasa disaster. More interestingly, Advani did not accept this formula for hims
How The G20 Saga Began: The unraveling of the global financial network and tradingsystem since the onset of the global financial crisis that began in New York inmid-2007 has continued for more than five years with no end in sight, despitecoordinated, extended monetary easing by many central banks of major economiesaround the world to shore up a ser
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Hari Om
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06 Nov 2013
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In August 1947, almostall the 560-odd princely States, which were not part of the partition plan,acceded to the Indian Dominion as per the constitutional law on the subject.Today, no one can readily name all the princely States which acceded to India.For, the people of any of those princely States, barring those of Jammu &Kashmir, have not even
As a conglomerate of once-impressive ideological and regional stalwarts (some still formidable in their respective States) met in the capital to explore the contours of a possible Third Front alliance for the 2014 general elections, one noted the visceral hatred for the Gujarat Chief Minister across large parts of the political spectrum and associated fellow...
KarenHudesis a graduate of Yale Law School and she worked in the legal department of theWorld Bank for more than 20 years. In fact, when she was fired for blowing thewhistle on corruption inside the World Bank, she held the position of SeniorCounsel. She was in a unique position to see exactly how the global elite rulethe world, and the information
Prime MinisterManmohan Singh is facing a Shakespearean dilemma on the issue of attendingthe Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in Colombo thismonth. This is not surprising as there are strong political and strategicreasons, both for and against, in connection with the Colombo summit. Dr ManmohanSingh is facing strong