As India and Pakistan celebrate their twin 70th birthdays this August, the frontier post of Wagah reflects the profound dysfunction in their relations. On its side Pakistan has built a multi-tiered amphitheatre for the boisterous crowds that come to watch the show. The Indians, no less rowdy, have gone one better with a half-stadium for […]
How did India and Pakistan arrive at this equilibrium? The answer starts, of course, in Kashmir, which has always been the primary point of contention between the two countries. Unfortunately, the Kashmir question is unlikely to be answered soon. While territorial disputes between states are usually bitter and persistent – states usually perceive competition over […]
The legacy of tension has persisted for nearly seven decades, but one thing people on both sides of the India-Pakistan border have shared is the memory of partition’s trauma. Now, though, people who were children in 1947 are in their seventies and eighties, meaning that these common memories are fading. Read Here – The Atlantic
Pakistan was born on the top deck of a London bus. Or on a walk along the Thames – different witnesses, different stories. What’s more certain, is the time: the early 1930s; and the place where that place-name was first committed to paper: a modest boarding house at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Read Here […]
How many Indian Prime Ministers have been born in independent India? If you said “none so far,” you’re right. Read Here – The Diplomat
No, it’s not the potential handshake between U.S. president Barack Obama and Iran‘s new president Hassan Rowhani (which didn’t ultimately pan out)—it’s the meeting of Pakistan‘s new prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India‘s outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh that’s set to take place this weekend following this week’s United Nations General Assembly activity. Read Here […]
It’s a nationalist myth that Indian independence was won by militant Congress direct action and that partition was the inevitable price exacted by a pro-Muslim colonial power determined to divide and rule. On the contrary, effective independence was implicit in the progressive constitutional reforms introduced by the Raj in 1909 and 1919, well before Gandhi […]
In the last two years India and Pakistan have managed to rebuild ties after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks struck a devestating blow to bilateral relations between the two countries. However, the escalation of tensions over the latest incident on the Line of Control (LoC) threatens this normalization of ties. In 2012, after much discussion and deliberation, both countries […]
looking beyond borders 