Pakistan appeared to be treading toward an uncertain political terrain on Tuesday as arrest orders were issued for a sitting prime minister in a corruption case and a populist cleric called for the government’s resignation leading tens of thousands of protesters into the federal capital. During the early hours of Tuesday, the Pakistani-Canadian chief of the Tehrik-i-Minhajul Quran (TMQ), […]
NARENDRA MODI, the burly chief minister of Gujarat, is on a roll. On December 20th he won a third successive state election. Though the tally for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fell slightly, from 117 seats in 2007 to 115, his victory was emphatic, a triumph more for Mr Modi than for his party. Nobody […]
Indian democracy is governed by cold hard calculation, not hype or mere moralism. It does not offer the comfort of unalloyed virtue or simple ideological shibboleths. It is not swept up in waves where power rolls on unchallenged. Even amidst great triumphs, there are reminders of the fragility of power. Both the BJP and the […]
Few people are happier to see 2012 end than Hu Jintao, Yoshihiko Noda or Lee Myung Bak. It was a rocky year for the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea, who leave office with legacies in tatters. Gripes about President Hu doing little about China’s biggest challenges outnumbered the accolades. Noda’s premiership ended as ingloriously as those of the […]
SOUTH KOREA has elected Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, as president for the coming five years. The candidate is from the same party, the Saenuri party, as the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who set South Korea on the path of break-neck development, seizing power in 1961 and […]
A FORMER prime minister, who resigned in 2007 after a shambolic first year in office, and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which two years later was hounded out of the governing role that it had taken as its birthright, are both headed for a remarkable return to power. In the hours after midnight it became […]
BANGLADESH suffered a violent birth. In the last days of 1971 the country then called East Pakistan was engulfed by torture, rape, mass-killing and other acts of genocide. The main perpetrators were Pakistani troops bent on preventing secession from “West Pakistan”. But the army had the support of many of East Pakistan’s fundamentalist groups, including […]
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when the Arab (and Persian) world was set to reach a new age of political modernity, discussions erupted mostly between the factions backing “Arabism” and “Islamism,” respectively. Sati al-Husri (1880-1967), the father of Arabist ideology, believed that Islamism was not able to guarantee national unity because of the […]
India‘s Gujarat state will hold a potentially game-changing vote on Thursday that could help decide whether Chief Minister Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, becomes India’s next prime minister. If, as many polls predict, Modi wins a fourth term as chief minister of the state, he is expected to project himself as […]
Not again! Just 13 months ago, European heads of state and government joined forces to usher Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi into retirement. Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy marshalled all of their persuasive powers to clear they way for a reform government in Rome under the leadership of Mario Monti. Now, with Prime […]
looking beyond borders 