Is India being increasingly cut out of Afghanistan despite years of sustained engagement and considerable investment in the war-torn country? Is it the way the cookie crumbles? China is moving in and the Americans are moving out while the British mess around the edges. The big gamer and gainer is Pakistan and its military intelligence establishment. […]
…the optimism was diluted by the strong sense of disappointment at the failure to make any breakthrough on the proposed Teesta water-sharing agreement. The presence of Mamata Banerjee alongside Modi had encouraged people to believe that, following what many saw as a very successful visit by her to Dhaka earlier in the year, the heart […]
The importance of Modi’s visit to Israel cannot be underestimated. Modi will become the first sitting Indian Prime Minister to visit the country. His visit will also come after a decade of relative political neglect from the Congress-led UPA government. Various UPA ministers visited Israel over the last decade, including a very symbolic visit in […]
In expanding maritime connectivity and cooperation with Dhaka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has begun to devote the kind of strategic attention the Bay of Bengal has long deserved. While the waters to India’s east have steadily gained salience in China’s calculus, New Delhi’s interest in the bay has tended to be limited and episodic. Read […]
Saudi nationalism can be defined as the idea of a single identity that acts as the social glue across the divisions within the kingdom. The Saudi historian Abd Allah Al Uthayman said it best: “In the first circle, I am a son of the Arabian peninsula. The regions of the peninsula were united under the […]
The conflict between Russia, Ukraine and the West is at once the world’s most significant geopolitical problem, and its most solvable. What is now needed is energetic engagement from Asia. India is just the country to lead this charge, and such Indian leadership could be the turning point that gives New Delhi the confidence it […]
Americans bought almost $1 out of every $5 worth of goods that China exported in May, the highest share since August 2010. While Chinese shipments to trading partners including Japan, Europe and South Korea tumbled last month from a year ago, those to the U.S. climbed 7.8 percent. That helped make America the destination for 18.8 […]
The reasons for the escalating Indian rhetoric against Pakistan are not far to find. First, India is frustrated that Pakistan has not wilted under the pressure New Delhi hoped to generate by cutting off talks and ‘isolating’ Pakistan by its ‘terrorism’ accusations. On the contrary, Pakistan has evolved a more normal relationship with the US, […]
Digital wars are being fought in many theatres around the world – and in many forms. In the light of the Snowden revelations, citizens who guard their privacy may already feel that it has been occupied by a hostile force. But on Thursday, the Obama administration conceded that the US federal government had itself fallen […]
The appointment of a former Director, Intelligence Bureau as envoy for Af-Pak and West Asia indicates that the Modi government is looking at the entire Islamic world to India’s West through an intelligence-security prism and not a diplomatic-cultural construct. Modi’s Pakistan policy is conditioned by a similar mind-set of talking but not negotiating, while building […]
