In an earlier piece the reasons for India’s firm stand on the Doklam standoff were explored. It must be acknowledged that this misadventure by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has created an atmosphere of suspicion and enormous distrust between China and India. The million dollar question that lingers on is the impact of the standoff on the complete spectr...
On September 13, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage presented Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, a religious hardliner and then Director of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with a list of non-negotiable demands that Pakistan: Stop al Qaeda operatives at your border, interc...
My last speech was about different UN Bodies and Conventions petitioning for their intervention to aid the safe recovery of missing persons in Pakistan; today I am here to update and clarify what concrete results we have achieved towards our goals along with issues that have yet to be resolved. The Pakistan Government should affirm its commitment to end...
Donald Trump has chosen the wrong career. His flamboyant style would make him a popular and much loved Kabuki actor. The Japanese call it aragoto, literally a “rough business” style of heroic drama, featuring a big bold warrior with red and black makeup and a huge sword. The warrior trumps up to the scene with thundering strides and shouts his sky-rending Sh...
So Shyam Saran has written a book that has again started a cacophony of opinions on demilitarization of #Siachen! Sharing some thoughts of my own, to add to that cacophony. Firstly, the battlefield is NOT Siachen. It is the Saltoro Ridge further to the west of the glacier. This is a fact which needs to be put on...
The implementation of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) raises many questions. Is it only an economic corridor as promised by China and Pakistan? Or has it another purpose? Will it bring the promised free trade, prosperity and development to Balochistan and the other nations in the artificially constructed State of Pakistan? The answer is...
The world has never ever been closer to a nuke strike by a tiny but belligerent nation publicly admonishing and challenging the surviving super power. Will the eccentric, unpredictable and flamboyant young leader of North Korea decide to cross the rubicon? Will the strike be deliberate or by an error, time alone will tell. But one thing is certain: US...
While accepting billions of American dollars in military and economic aid, Pakistan has been slowly bleeding the US to death in Afghanistan through its support of the Taliban, Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups. It is Pakistan’s role to force the US and NATO out of Afghanistan to pave the way for regional dominance of its closest ally, China. China ...
Rohingya refugee exodus from Myanmar and their illegal immigration into India through Bangladesh is ongoing and real. A Chinese source stated “It’s fair to say that Myanmar is a heaven for saints who rebel and a graveyard for those who govern.” At the monks’ behest, the military crackdown is...
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...
The report of the Renuka Chowdhary-led Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests has given a boost to the efforts of myriad environmentalists, scientists, votaries of native seeds, and activists for a GM-free India. Titled, ‘Genetically Modified Crops And Its Impact On Environment’ the report emphasises the darker si...