Indian legislators woke up in the new year to two realizations. First, the annual winter session of parliament, from which they should just have been emerging, had not taken place at all. And, second, New Delhi’s magnificent parliament complex, a tourist attraction since it was built in 1927, had been turned into a construction site. […]
Election fever is heating up in West Bengal as the eastern Indian state steadily nears its tryst with voters in a few months. With the Bharatiya Janata Party going hammer and tongs against the incumbent Trinamul Congress and the state’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee, a new twist in the tale is the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul […]
“The national state is too small a unit today and small states can have no independent existence.” (J.Nehru, The Discovery of India, London, 1956). “…the small national state is doomed. It may survive as a cultural, autonomous area but not as an independent political unit.” The Discovery of India.) Such statements are in clear contravention […]
The year 2020 has come to an end. It has been an incredibly harsh year, the world is not only facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, but also a collapsing global economy, an increasing number of armed conflicts, political instability, and many popular protest movements in different parts of the world. The pandemic-enforced global lockdowns have however […]
Abiy Ahmed became the Prime Minister of Ethiopia in April 2018. After only 18 months in office, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019. He was given this honor for achieving peace and resolving the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea. Prime Minister Abiy’s effort to bring a swift end to more than two […]
This is an appraisal of Islamophobia, mainly in the West, and the so-called Westophobia among Muslims from a different viewpoint. I believe that since all wars are “trade wars”, the ideological conflicts between Islam and Western civilizations are primarily motivated by economic reasons, so they are “trade wars” by other means! I have mainly cited […]
One foreign policy area where President-elect Joe Biden and Donald Trump are more or less on the same page, is Afghanistan. Bluntly put, both want a US pullout of troops as soon as is realistically possible. The war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001 and has cost the Department of Defense and US State Department […]
In a corner of a Hindu-majority India lies a Muslim-majority district, Kishanganj. In India’s politics, Kishanganj has a rich history. It was from here that a journalist friend of Rajiv Gandhi, MJ Akbar, had won a seat in India’s parliament in 1989. Akbar is today a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which […]
I got to know Joe Biden when I was a combatant commander, first at the US. Southern Command and then most deeply in my four years at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Once, at a dinner hosted by America’s NATO ambassador in Brussels, I watched the then-vice president meet with ambassadors and foreign ministers from […]
Joe Biden winning the US Presidential election in a tightly fought race is being celebrated by the liberal world. The hope is that the change of the administration in the world’s most powerful country will help to restrain the populist-nationalist leaders in other countries and there will be possible revival of the liberal world order, […]