Fearing The Obvious

About one year in office, (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi has moved into the unchartered water of social cleavage issues. Some of his policies arouse people’s concerns about his and the BJP’s position on communal and caste issues. Divisive policies are likely to open the Pandora’s Box of social cleavage in India, the resulted controversies of […]

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Surrounded By Democracy

(The change in Sri Lanka) marks the third big Asian election in the last 12 months in which voters have installed a new leader: first in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi thumped the incumbent Congress Party; then Indonesia, where Joko Widodo, an outsider, won over voters with his record of competence as governor of […]

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The Strange Case Of Manmohan Singh

In the abstract, it’s hard to imagine a situation under which a leader retires after a decade-long tenure under which more than 137 million people were lifted out of poverty and be generally considered a disappointing failure, but that’s exactly the situation facing Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who officially announced today, as had been widely expected, that […]

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India’s Credibility Crisis

As on a battlefield, so in the marketplace — a war to defend the economy is not won by the deployment of superior armoury but by the cleverness and credibility of one’s strategy and tactics. In a crisis, economic policymakers are like generals in war time. Their reputation is won not by the superiority of […]

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The Two K’s – Kashmir And Kalashnikov

It was not the lethality of the AK that India feared, for it had a million-strong army to counter it. It was the psychological change that the assault rifle unleashed everywhere it went. AK stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova, and 47 denotes 1947, the year of its adoption by the Soviet military. The assault rifle made […]

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