The Joe Biden administration has been widely criticized for its response after declassifying an intelligence report that found Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for an operation to “kill or capture” the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that the administration would not sanction the crown prince directly, despite the […]
Former President Donald Trump was acquitted on 13 February 2021 by the US Senate following an impeachment trial on charges of inciting a deadly riot on 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol. The voting was: guilty 57 and not guilty 43. However, 67 votes, two-thirds majority of the 100-member senate, were needed for conviction. […]
Just when I thought I had witnessed the ultimate in political hypocrisy at the end of Donald Trump’s historic and depressing impeachment trial, Sheikh Hasina – the Prime Minister of Bangladesh – has restored my faith that South Asian politicians can match any politician anywhere on the hypocrisy chart. And surely, on this hypocrisy chart, […]
For a rich and powerful Saudi prince who is used to being the center of attention and fawned over as he sits in his fabulously opulent palaces, it is likely that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s teeth were grinding when he received word last night that he was being “downgraded” by US President Joe Biden. […]
Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old climate activist and the granddaughter of a farmer is the new target, hitting bullseye though is no longer even a formality. Disha has been remanded to police custody for five days over a toolkit linked to Greta Thunberg. That Disha has been booked for sedition for editing a publicly available Google […]
The borders between Delhi and that of two adjoining states, by all accounts, resemble a conflict zone with fencing, barricades, coils of barbed wire, iron spikes cemented to the ground and scores of security personnel manning them. All of it was erected by the government to keep away protesting farmers from the Indian capital. For […]
In 2012, I co-authored a piece with Dan Twining in the Washington Post warning that the Obama administration’s decision to lift the investment ban on Myanmar was going too far, too soon—and that the United States would come to regret handing away all its leverage while Myanmar’s military still had so much control over the country. That day […]
If any independent survey or referendum is conducted in Bangladesh today, over 80% of Bangladeshis will vote for restoring normal relations with Pakistan. I came to this conclusion seeing the sentiment of the readers ventilated on the comment box of a report captioned “New air of relations between Dhaka-Islamabad, Imran Khan can make any announcement” […]
If the impressive victory in the non-Hindi and culturally rich state of Assam in 2016 was a kind of semi-final for the Bhartiya Janta party (BJP), the assembly election of West Bengal in 2021, is the decisive final for the party. Make no mistake: this is BJP’s most historic and radical experiment with Hindutva politics […]
On January 6, 2021, people around the world were stunned seeing how theUS Congress was being vandalized hours after attending a rally that wasaddressed among others by President Donald Trump. Exactly a week later,Trump, accused of encouraging the insurrection at the US Capitol, wasimpeached for a second time, becoming the only American president to have […]