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 […]
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 […]