A COUNTRY which was clocking a growth rate a shade above 5pc per annum for most of its history is now finding that this rate has dropped to below 4pc. It gives the impression that this is the new equilibrium rate that we may have to live with for some time. What explains this lacklustre […]
2015 marks an often overlooked anniversary, the 250th anniversary of the start of de jure British rule over India. The history of 18th century South Asia is a complicated whirlwind of competing powers and conflicting interests. By 1707, when the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, died, his empire controlled most of South Asia, but was also teetering due […]
Pakistan’s only “federal” political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), suffered a blow to its solar plexus when Asim Hussain was arrested in Karachi for corruption on August 26. An old schoolfellow of and personal physician to PPP boss Asif Ali Zardari, Hussain was federal petroleum minister in the PPP government till 2013… Ominously, August was […]
Five years ago, Myanmar’s ruling junta under General Than Shwe began a cautious but promising move away from a nearly five-decade old military dictatorship, loosening control, opening the country’s economy, and releasing political prisoners, as well as Aung San Suu Kyi, an opposition leader and chairman of the National League for Democracy (NLD), from house arrest. […]
The meeting everybody wanted did not happen. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi left for home without meeting his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif. The two leaders lived in the same hotel — the Waldorf Astoria — during the 70th UN General Assembly. Twice, they shared a room and used the same podium to address a summit meeting […]
The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once called the epoch stretching from the French Revolution of 1789 to World War I’s outbreak in 1914 as the “long 19th century.” A little over a decade ago, people began to speculate about an emerging “Asian century,” driven by an unstoppable China and enabled by America’s supposed inevitable […]
Recent developments in the South China Sea have lumbered U.S. strategic planners with a number of pressing quandaries. Should the United States send warships through sea lanes claimed by China as territorial waters? How can Washington signal resolve and reassurance to its allies in the region without unduly antagonizing China’s political and military leaders? What […]
We may be entering a period in which India’s tighter embrace of the United States brings Russia closer to Pakistan, and Russia’s bolstering of ties with Pakistan brings India closer to the United States. Read Here – The National Interest
If political infighting in the Communist Party were to result in political instability in China, its foreign policy would become less predictable and more governed by appeals to an aggressive nationalism that is already on the rise within the population at large. That would be a bad outcome for the United States and for China’s […]
While a secure Kabul rarely means a stable Afghanistan, an insecure Kabul inevitably signals a deeply unstable nation. Kabul’s violent summer pales compared to the surrounding provinces, especially in the south. As Western nations increasingly focus elsewhere, the battle for Afghanistan rages on. Read Here – Quartz
looking beyond borders 