It’s another election season in the country. I have heard it being described as the dance of democracy. But the reality is far from it. It is my belief that party-based democracy has failed in this country. Can the Presidential system, as in the US, work in our context? No guarantee, there. But can’t we think afresh, keeping in mind the lessons we have learn...
In another article, details were given of the North Korean leader’s visit to Vietnam, which mentioned that Kim Jong-un’s special train passed through Chinese territory without making any long stops on the way back to North Korea. Despite earlier predictions, there was no meeting held between the leaders of North Korea and China. However, we will examine what...
All (silk) roads do lead to Rome, as this Saturday Chinese President Xi Jinping and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will sign a memorandum to adhere to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Afterward, Xi becomes a magnanimous version of The Sicilian, visiting the port of Palermo, with Beijing intent on investing in local infrastructure...
It is commonly believed in the United States that the country has no Grand Strategy since the end of the Cold War. A Grand Strategy is a vision of the world that one seeks to impose, and that all administrations must respect. So, even if you lose in one particular theatre of war, the fight continues in others, and finally ends in triumph. At the end of the S...
Pakistan observes its Republic Day on March 23, every year. Also known as Pakistan Day, it commemorates the Lahore Resolution that paved the way for adoption of the first Constitution of the country which gave to it an Islamic character. Technically speaking, commemoration of this day does not stand to order since the said Constitution of 1956 was abrogated ...
Are we missing the wood for the trees by focusing on China putting a “technical hold” on the listing of Masood Azhar, chief of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), as an international terrorist under the UN sanctions regime? It would seem so because China’s response was not unexpected; it had been taking the same stance for the last decade. And it is Pakis...
Given the degree of consciousness control suffered by people under the domain of privately owned political media and its stress on individual consumption, the very notion of social behaviour, let alone socialism, can provoke outbursts of fear and loathing as the current idiocy over the term clearly shows. Fear that wealth will be taken away from people who d...
Facing China’s irresistible rise all across the chessboard, and under relentless US pressure, the not exactly democratic EU leadership is on a backbreaking exercise to position itself between a geopolitical/geoeconomic rock and a hard place. The 28-member EU holds a crucial meeting next week in Brussels where it may adopt a 10-point action plan detailing, in...
In a report dated 1 March 2019, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) attests to the fact that there were never any prohibited chemical substances in Douma (Syria) during the attack of 7 April 2018. The reprisal tripartite bombing (United States, France, United Kingdom) was therefore unjustified. This scandal is exactly identical to...
On January 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised farmers to double their income by 2022, but the government has already lost half of this time. The BJP cannot hope to form the new government in Delhi without reclaiming the farmer-dense states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, in the soon-to-be-held Parliamentary elections, which went to th...
A police raid on a Kazakh group documenting the plight of Kazakhs and Uyghurs caught in a brutal crackdown in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang is about more than a government seeking to please Beijing in the hope that it improves the lot of its ethnic kin while preserving diplomatic and economic relations. Amid suspicions that the raid on the offic...
When Turkish vice-president Fuat Oktay and foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu became this weekend the first high-level foreign government delegation to travel to Christchurch they were doing more than expressing solidarity with New Zealand’s grieving Muslim community. Messrs. Oktay and Cavusoglu were planting Turkey’s flag far and wide in a global effort to e...
Declining to release Kuldip Nayar’s posthumously published On Leaders and Icons: from Jinnah to Modi, Manmohan Singh informed the veteran journalist’s wife that on perusing the book, “I found a reference on page 172 that during my Prime Ministership, government files will go to Sonia Gandhi’s house. This statement is not true and Kuldip did not check with me...
For the first time since war broke out in Syria in 2011, Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has travelled to Iran [Feb. 26] to meet Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. President Assad had only travelled outside of Syria on two other occasions during the war – both times to Russia. The significance of the trip cannot be u...
This past week (4 March 2019) saw the first anniversary of the incident in Salisbury, England, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia became ill in a public space in the centre of town. Within a very short time (12th March) and before evidence could possibly have been adduced, United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May was mak...
Donald J. Trump’s hitherto failed ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran, as well as for that matter North Korea, begs the question what the US president’s true objectives are and what options he is left with should the policy ultimately fail. In the case of North Korea, it remains to be seen whether the country’s reported rebuilding of a rocket launch site aft...
The Kazakh government, in defense of Kazakh and by implication Central Asian behind-closed-doors diplomacy towards China in the face of mounting domestic pressure, has offered a rare public account of its ability to improve conditions for its ethnic kin caught in a crackdown on Turkic Muslims in the north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang. Kazakhstan’s de...
India has shown to the world that it is able manage sanitation and waste disposal programme on a large scale. The test for this was in large traffic and crowd management cleanliness at the recently concluded conclave of religious gathering, Kumbh Mela, at Prayagraj in the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. The Kumbh mela attracts millions of pilgrims fr...
President Maithripala Sirisena is reported to be seriously examining the implications of withdrawing from the US-backed UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution Sri Lanka had co-sponsored in September 2015. By co-sponsoring the resolution, Sri Lanka was committed to set up a tribunal with international participation to investigate allegations of war crimes...
A Turkish-Chinese spat as a result of Turkish criticism of China’s crackdown on Turkic Muslims in its strategic but troubled north-western province of Xinjiang complicates efforts by Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states to at best deal quietly behind closed doors with the plight of their citizens and ethnic kin in the People’s Republic. China’s threat t...
We can all agree I think that US foreign policy must be changed and that to achieve that the mind – not to mention the heart and soul – of the American public must be changed. But what do you think is the main barrier to achieving such a change in the American mind? Each of you I’m sure has met many people who support American foreign policy, with whom you’v...
The dance of Shiva on the night of Maha Shivaratri is perhaps the best-conceived idea of the ancient Vedic wisdom of how the cosmos moves. Our existence just being part of the smallest of the smallest fraction of the entire cosmos hypothesized by modern science, the scientists know how difficult it is to acquire a bird’s eye view of the entire cosmos. Intere...
Saudi plans to become a major gas exporter within a decade raise questions about what the real goal of the kingdom’s policy, and by extension that of the United States, is towards Iran. Officially both Saudi Arabia and the US, which last year withdrew from the 2015 international accord that curbs the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and imposed harsh econo...
One of the founding principles of the UNO is that all states and all people are free, equal and independent. This is the major difference with the League of Nations which preceded it. The League always refused to recognise the equality of peoples in order to allow the system of colonisation to continue. Each state has a voice equal to all the others. Consequ...
With IAF pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman back home from Pakistan and receiving a hero’s welcome, tempers have cooled down somewhat between India and its neighbour which were on the brink of a confrontation. These relations entered a potential conflict zone after 12 IAF Mirage 2000s carried out a carefully crafted mission to destroy the largest Jais...
When Portuguese shops reached the Malabar coast in 1498, Vasco da Gama’s messenger was asked by Tunisian merchants who conversed in Spanish: “The devil take you, what brought you here?” the Muslim merchants asked. “We came to look for Christians and spices”, replied the Portuguese. Six years before this event at Malabar coast, in 1492, King Ferdinand and...
Opposition parties and their choirboys are understandably unenthusiastic about post-Pulwama developments, especially the prompt return of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, because a regime that seemed doomed in the forthcoming general elections will now enjoy the incumbent’s advantage. While it would be premature to state that the Bharatiya Janata Party u...
China’s credits to various countries along its much-discussed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the most ambitious infrastructure undertaking in history, have recently been criticized for drawing poor countries into a debt trap by extending huge credits. Myanmar is often cited, as well as Sri Lanka. Malaysia and Pakistan are renegotiating multi-billion-dollar ...
Since the 1960s uproar over the dangers of widespread agriculture use of the weed killer, DDT, no other herbicide or agriculture chemical has stirred as much widespread opposition as glyphosate. Glyphosate is the main and only publicly disclosed ingredient in the world-leading herbicide, Roundup from Monsanto/Bayer. With fierce opposition from many EU member...
The Westerners who joined the ranks of the jihadists may be tried for the atrocities they have committed, but that does not make them traitors. President Donald Trump has asked Western allies to repatriate their jihadists imprisoned by the Syrian Democratic Forces and bring them to trial in their own countries. The United Kingdom has refused to do so, while ...
The Indian Air Force (IAF) strike in early hours of 26 February 2019 on terror training bases deep inside Pakistan that killed over 350 terrorists has made us all speechless. It has certainly made the Pakistanis speechless because not even in their wildest dreams did they imagine India would attempt this. The continuous stream of rattled mumblings - from the...