China appears to be shifting gears in its multi-billion dollar Belt and Road initiative. Long projected as driven by economics and the benefit of infrastructure linkages, China appears to be increasingly adding a security component to the initiative against the backdrop of President Xi Jinping positioning of his country as a superpower rather than a developi...
As American motorists complain of rising gasoline prices, the Trump Administration and the oil and banking interests behind it are smiling on their way to the proverbial bank. If we look at seeming disparate events in Iran, in Venezuela and now in Libya, it becomes clear there is a coherent strategy to promote disruption in key oil flows to the immediate adv...
I may be laughed out even before I answer the question. However, I grew up in a family conditioned by Gandhian thoughts, when my father - a small town doctor - actively took part in the freedom struggle and was even imprisoned. I carried some of the Gandhian ideas and values when I served for nearly three decades in the army. I found some of his ideas useful...
The rising trade tensions between the US and its major trading partners, particularly China and the European Union, have been making news for some time now. It may be recalled that the US imposed tariff on imports of Chinese goods worth $200 billion and had also threatened to impose tariffs on cars imported from the EU. But the European Commission led by...
A spike in oil prices as a result of a temporary halt in shipments through the strategic Bab el Mandeb strait may be short-lived, but the impact on Yemen’s three-year-old forgotten war is likely to put the devastating conflict on the front burner. The halt following a Saudi assertion that Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had attacked two Saudi oil tankers ...
The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was established in 1968 as a centrally funded university, to be a premier national university. It claims to be India’s top university, though it does not specify on what grounds. In the United States where this writer taught for over twenty years, JNU graduates are not given high standing when being considered for admiss...
Like an orange hurricane, President Trump made a stormy visit to the Old World. Usually American presidents’ visits to Europe present photo opportunities and vows of eternal love and friendship. Not this time. Since the Mongol invasion, not many visitors from outside shook Europe like he did. The US President has finally emerged from the cage built by his po...
As Pakistan goes to the polls tomorrow (July 25), it appears that the blurring lines between mufti and mullah will converge further, to the detriment of its struggling democracy. The economic crisis, aggravated by unserviceable debts from infrastructure related to the China- Pakistan Economic Corridor, could trigger a complete meltdown, which a bailout from ...
A virulently anti-Shiite, Saudi-backed candidate for parliament in Pakistan’s July 25 election symbolizes the country’s effort to reconcile contradictory policy objectives in an all but impossible attempt to keep domestic forces and foreign allies happy. Ramzan Mengal’s candidacy highlights Pakistan’s convoluted relationship to Islamic militants at a time th...
Thierry Meyssan does not accept the story of the beginning of hostilities in Gulf as presented by the Western and Gulf Press over the last seven years. He is therefore returning to these events to examine them in the light of certain elements which have become known since then. As in all science, political science moves closer to the truth by questioning its...
After having observed Donald Trump’s historical references (the constitutional compromise of 1789, the examples of Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon) and the way in which his partisans perceive his politics, Thierry Meyssan here analyses his anti-imperialist actions. The US President is not interested in taking a step back, but on the contrary, abandoning the...
Even fifty years after independence, it is unfortunate but true that Indians continue to view themselves and their history through colonial glasses. The education system for the most part continues to be based on the Macaulayite model. This is especially so in subjects like history, which include long discredited theories like the Aryan invasion and the Arya...
The Supreme Court of India in its recent judgement on a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Shanti Bhushan (TOI July 7th 2018) has reiterated, for the third time in eight months, that the Chief Justice of India (CJI) will have sole authority on allocating cases in the top court. The judgement, although it pertains to the internal administration of the ...
A United Arab Emirates-backed Saudi effort to wrest control from Jordan of Islam’s holy places in Jerusalem signals a sharper, more overt edge to Saudi religious diplomacy and the kingdom’s quest for regional hegemony that risks deepening divides in the Muslim world. The effort also serves to support Donald J. Trump’s plan for a resolution of the Israeli-Pal...
Drugs constitute the highest volume of business in the global black market. The Geneva-based UN Office of Drugs and Crime has estimated that the Afghan opium/heroin trade is worth some $60 billion a year. It also estimated the overall street value of all forms of mind altering drugs to be $500 billion. It backed away from that figure under challenge but much...
Oxfam announced in January this year that a new billionaire had been created every two days in 2017. It turned out to be a serious undercount. London’s Sunday Times reported in May that one had appeared every day — or rather, every 0.97 days. Some other startling facts about the worlds’ super-rich: All the world’s 2,754 billionaires together now have $9.2 t...
Increased Pakistani dependence on China to help it avert resorting to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to avoid a financial and economic crisis, spotlights fears that the terms of Chinese investment in massive Belt and Road-related projects would not pass international muster. Concerns that China’s US $50 billion-plus investment in Pakistani infrastruct...
The veteran scholar of Indo-Jewish studies, Professor Nathan Katz, records that during his visit in 1984 to the Kochi synagogue in Kerala, a Jewish lady, Sarah Cohen, made some touchy remarks to his wife about the chanting of prayers at a Hindu temple nearby. Professor Katz observed that the commingling of Hebrew and Sanskrit prayers is more a harmony than a...
Iran, in the latest of a series of incidents on its western and south-eastern borders, said it had disbanded a Pakistan-based cell of ant-Shiite militants in a clash this week on the Iranian side of the border. The clash, shrouded in mystery like similar past incidents in the ethnic Baloch province of Sistan and Baluchistan, and Kurdish areas in the West, oc...
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted a military drill in Southwest Tibet on June 25 to test civilian-military integration and logistic support in high altitudes. Beyond the military dimensions of the exercise, it has connotations on India-China relations and on President Xi Jinping’s process of consolidating his power through civil-military integ...
Tomorrow [June 26], we commemorate the International Day of Torture: commemorating the victims of cruel torture around the world, and we come here to discuss the victims of the Enforced Disappearances. All deprived nations in Pakistan, but especially about the startling rise in numbers in the Pashtun areas and in Balochistan, from where every day we receive ...
India’s foreign policy has its task cut out - to ensure the safety of the Hindu-Sikh community within Afghanistan or its safe repatriation to India (or migration elsewhere) with full citizenship and rehabilitation. In a positive move, New Delhi has issued long-term visas to members of Afghanistan’s Sikh and Hindu communities and offered them the right to...
If the notion that history repeats itself is accurate, it is nowhere truer than in the Middle East where the international community, caught by surprise by the 2011 popular Arab revolts, has reverted to opting for political stability as opposed to sustainability, ignoring the undercurrents of change wracking the Middle East. Major powers do so at their peril...
Helsinki after Singapore! The summit Trump-Putin will hopefully take place this month in the Finnish capital, after being delayed and delayed for ages. We had expected the two strong men to meet right away after Trump’s historic election, but the summit didn’t take place, for Trump had been besieged by Mueller’s Gestapo and accused of being a Russian agent. ...
Iran’s Indian-back port of Chabahar, inaugurated months before the United States re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic republic, is where Asia and the Middle East’s multiple political conflicts and commercial rivalries collide. Chabahar was destined to become a player in geopolitical and economic manoeuvring between China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi A...
The current mass exodus of people from Central America to the United States, with the daily headline-grabbing stories of numerous children involuntarily separated from their parents, means it’s time to remind my readers once again of one of the primary causes of these periodic mass migrations. Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point ...
An anti-Pakistan demonstration was staged by activists of the Pashtun Takhafuz Movement (PTM) outside the UN headquarters in New York on Friday, June 29, 2018, to protest against the Pakistani security establishment for its direct and indirect involvement in human rights abuses against the suppressed ethnic Pashtuns. The state-sponsored terrorism on both sid...
Embattled former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak was the main loser in May’s election upset that returned Mahathir Mohamad to power as his country’s anti-corruption crusader. Yet, Mr. Razak is not the only one who may be paying the price for allegedly non-transparent and unaccountable governance. So is Saudi Arabia with a Saudi company having played a k...
The rise of China and India as major economic powers and their close relations with Russia adjoining Europe could make the Eurasian zone, along with Southeast and East Asia, a motor for development in the coming decades. Both India and China have done very well in maintaining, and even upgrading, their relations with these two areas of future prosperity. In...
In April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi flew to Wuhan, China, to have a two-day, informal one-on-one summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping [April 27-28]. The objective of the two leaders was to repair and re-energize stuttering Sino-India relations. Following that informal summit - although much of the content of their deliberation remains confident...
Two news items in the recent past caught the attention of many. They deserve closer scrutiny since it provides good insights into a thriving business in India. It is indeed representative of a deep and well entrenched industry that has prospered by profligate peddling of false narratives in India. The first was observations made by none other than the...