Mahinda Rajapaksa did not end the ceasefire agreement immediately on coming to power; but he promoted an aggressive, explicitly nationalist strategy for ending the conflict. It set off a new cycle of violence and retaliation – including attacks on security forces, extra-judicial killings, suicide bombings and military action. This left the peace talks with n...
India and Sri Lanka enjoy close political, cultural and religious links. Tamils in India with their linguistic, cultural, and family ties have always been sympathetic to the Sri Lanka Tamils’ struggle. The 1983 pogrom against the Tamils in Sri Lanka came as a rude shock to the people of India. Tamil Nadu received thousands of Tamil refugees including militan...
The US-led global war against Islamic terrorism, launched in the wake of Al Qaeda jihadi terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, seems to be never ending. More and more nations across the globe in Africa, Asia and Europe are getting involved in the war against Islamic terrorist groups with only marginal success, particularly after the rise of the I...
China is moving on multiple fronts to pre-empt in the short-term Uighur foreign fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq from reasserting themselves in Central Asia and longer term prevent the emergence of an ever more vocal Diaspora like what Tibetans have achieved. The multi-pronged Chinese approach involves weaving Afghanistan more firmly into the fabric of China’...
Stepped up Saudi efforts to forge close diplomatic, economic and cultural ties to Shia-majority Iraq in a bid to counter significant Iranian influence in the country appear to be paying off. The Saudi initiative demonstrates the kingdom’s ability to engage rather than exclusively pursue a muscular, assertive and confrontational policy towards the Islamic rep...
One reason it’s so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is of course the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a ha...
With slight disappointment the public regarded the field. Just a minute ago, two knights were converging in fearsome joust, their spears pointing forth, plumage blowing, horses galloping, ladies out waving their handkerchiefs to their champions, – and now we see they have passed each other, both firmly in the saddle, plumage unruffled, spears unbloodied, hor...
The Russian concerns, however exaggerated they may be, cannot be brushed aside. Indeed, the Islamic State has already shown its fangs in Afghanistan. ISKP has claimed responsibility for some of the recent terrorist attacks, among other things. In April 2015 a suicide attack was carried out on the Kabul Bank that killed more than 30 people. Condemned by the T...
Facing the seemingly unstoppable wave of violence, President Ashraf Ghani has consistently condemned the attacks. In something of a departure, however, on Feb. 28, while inaugurating the second meeting of the Kabul Process for Peace and Security Cooperation in Kabul, President Ghani made concrete proposals for peace talks with the Taliban. For the first time...
As China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project has begun to make its presence felt in the region around Afghanistan, the country has experienced massive bloodletting in recent months, largely a result of the fragmentation of the Taliban. The group’s actions have neither a common goal nor adequate muscle to put together a nationwide movement, and no single fact...
A statement from the Chief of the Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa said on April 12 that “engineered protests” would not be allowed to reverse the gains of counterterrorism operations and cautioned the nation against forgetting the sacrifices of “real heroes”. He, without naming the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), blamed it as something which was not indige...
Bangladesh, in a twist of irony, is looking to Saudi Arabia to fund a $ 1 billion plan to build hundreds of mosques and religious centres to counter militant Islam that for much of the past decade traced its roots to ultra-conservative strands of the faith promoted by a multi-billion dollar Saudi campaign. The Bangladeshi plan constitutes the first effort by...
There’s a cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the face aspect to a Saudi plan to turn Qatar into an island by digging a 60-kilometre ocean channel through the two countries’ land border that would accommodate a nuclear waste heap as well as a military base. If implemented, the channel would signal the kingdom’s belief that relations between the world’s only two Wa...
Opponents of genetically modified crops received a boost when the Delhi High Court upheld the Indian Patent Act, which states that seeds and life forms cannot be patented, and the Protection of Plant Varieties & Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001, which biotechnology multinationals have tried to undermine, and ruled that key plant genetic material cannot be patented....
Washington’s recent trade actions are aimed foursquare at China, not at the EU or other trade partners. However, the aim is not to reduce China exports to the US. The aim is a fundamental opening up of the Chinese economy to the Washington free market liberal reforms that China has steadfastly resisted. In a sense, it is a new version of the Anglo-American O...
President Trump is so pissed off by the Stormy affair that he is likely to prefer a good old war to another humiliation. This suits his enemies and friends (though not his voters) to a tee. He has a choice of doing a difficult manly act that needs all his courage, but which one? Should he put the well-being of his country at stake and brave Russian missiles,...
It’s remarkable that the Euro and the Eurozone currency grouping haven’t fallen apart until now. Greece could have done it in 2010 but it was avoided by extraordinary acts of the Euro governments and European Central Bank. Now those actions are coming back to haunt especially Germany who stands poised to become the “sugar daddy” of the debt-bloated southern ...
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has dazzled international media and public opinion by lifting some restrictions on women’s rights, holding out hope for the abolishment of others, and a vow to return the kingdom to a vague form of moderate Islam that many believe is defined by the social reforms he has already implemented and his curbing of the powers ...
When the British Foreign Ministry announced on April 3, 2018 that there was in fact no evidence of a chemical weapon of any origin in the real or imagined incident in Salisbury, we entered a new realm of unreality. Simply put, not only did British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson make the whole thing up, as leaders of Britain’s Labor Party are crying from the ...
Relations between India and China can best be described as tenuous, beset with mutual suspicion and distrust. A quick review of the relations between the two countries over the last six decades or so shows that India had been contending with an ever-increasing trajectory of belligerence and threats to its economic interests and territorial integrity. China h...
Two headlines this month beg the question US officials have been grappling with for more than a decade: Will the real Pakistan stand up, please? Pakistan’s The News reported that the government had designated Islamabad as a pilot project to regulate Friday prayer sermons in the city’s 1,003 mosques, of which only 86 are state-controlled, in a bid to curb hat...
Rama the observing ego, or Atman, is given his name to signify his enjoyment in getting to experience the world through the body he resides in. The Sanskrit root “rama” means to play and enjoy. This is the divine component in each individual and He also is simultaneously the Paramatman, the Universal Consciousness. The very fact that he is all “human” is bec...
‘We are what we eat’. Actually, it is a lot more complicated than that. It has been estimated that we come into contact with some 37,000 chemicals throughout our lives, many of which are ingested or absorbed without our knowledge. And, although there is some understanding about the impact some of these individually have on our health, nobody knows what effec...
Debilitating hostility between Saudi Arabia and Iran is about lots of things, not least who will have the upper hand in a swath of land stretching from Central Asia to the Atlantic coast of Africa. While attention is focused on ensuring that continued containment of Iran ensures that Saudi Arabia has a leg up, geopolitics is but one side of the equation. Nat...
The leader of the Baloch Republican Party (BRP) has issued statements in serious breach of the Baloch nationalist narrative and presented the world at large with an inaccurate understanding of Baloch history. Balochistan had been a loosely knit tribal confederacy for centuries with major political activity and discussion being centered in and around Kalat ...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is probably happy to see leaders of foreign governments, one after the other, making a beeline to New Delhi because it indicates increasing recognition of India as an important global player. Modi has partly succeeded in managing India’s strategic influence from being overwhelmed by China’s increasing power play in South Asia...
One certain prediction we can all make about the “War on Terror” with great confidence is that it is not going to end any time soon, or even dramatically subside. Terrorism today poses a direct threat to the security of all of us, and to international stability and prosperity. It is a persistent global threat that knows no borders, nationality or religion an...
Rescuing the antiquity of Indian civilisation from the biblical mythology of Max Mueller, rubbishing the well-orchestrated history-as-dogma of the Aryan invasion and proving the existence of river Saraswati, excavating and resurrecting the still unknown past, and restoring the once handsome architectural marvels that have fallen victim to time or...
Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi won a second term virtually unchallenged in what is widely seen as a flawed election. The run-up to the poll, including a soccer protest, suggests, however, that it will take more than a democratic whitewash to get a grip on simmering discontent. The protest in early March signalled that militant soccer...
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may be seeking to revert his kingdom to an unspecified form of moderate Islam, but erasing the impact of 40 years of global funding of ultra-conservative, intolerant strands of the faith is unlikely to be eradicated by decree. Not only because ultra-conservatism has taken root in numerous Muslim countries and communit...