Many years ago, Pakistan analyst Khaled Ahmed identified some nations as not having a foreign policy. Export-oriented economies, according to his thesis, chose not to have a clearly defined foreign policy. On issues of controversy, they lay low rather than commit to a side. Ahmed named Singapore and South Korea as his examples. For them, […]
In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Narasimha Rao government reworked India’s dysfunctional economic and foreign policies to improve India’s abysmal terms of trade with the rest of the world. The latest global financial crisis seems to have shaken the United States’ global dominance and is forcing India to revisit its […]
When nations become strong and their companies begin to spread business to other countries, interests are bound to either collide or come together. For decades, it was the turn of the Western multinationals to face political wrath in faraway countries. Remember India threw out Coca Cola and IBM? Now it is the turn of Chinese and […]
The growing focus of Indian companies, including government ones, on emerging markets across Asia and Africa, and the attendant political risks of doing business in a dynamic policy regime—a problem that several Western multinationals have encountered in India—has highlighted a new challenge for New Delhi: protecting the overseas investments of Indian firms. Earlier this week, […]
Early in his first term, Obama wasn’t especially warm towards India. However, he soon visited India, hosted Manmohan Singh as the first foreign leader at the White House, and advocated a permanent seat for India on the United Nations Security Council. Obama has since tried to rope India, along with Japan, into a hedge against […]
India is caught in an ugly societal whodunit: Although the per capita gross domestic product for the country’s 1.2 billion people has almost doubled over the past decade, to $838, malnutrition and hunger are still rampant, especially among children. A months-long series of investigative reports by Bloomberg News highlights that India’s failure to adequately feed its […]
IT IS hard to feel particularly sorry at the hanging of Ajmal Kasab, in Pune, India, early on November 21st. He was the sole surviving gunman from a 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, in which Pakistani infiltrators killed at least 166 people during a prolonged and traumatising rampage in the city. The assault on ordinary residents […]
Kasab, the world came to call him, “the butcher”: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. For millions of Indians, the man caught on closed circuit television cameras as he walked […]
Many commentators, both in the US and India, do not believe that President Barack Obama’s victory and his second-term foreign policy will lead to any surprises to US-India relations. They see more of the same. They should be proven wrong. Yes, the last four years have been a period of consolidation in India-US relations. They […]
Pervez Musharraf was on the verge of a major accord with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before things turned sour for him at home in 2007. He says the Indian premier shouldn’t now visit his country without the assurance of a resolution to pending disputes. The General hasn’t changed much since his hey days. But he […]
looking beyond borders 