Russia And India: A 21st Century Decline

As strategic relations go, few countries can match the enduring partnership that India and Russia have shared since the 1960s. For close to half a century Russia has been New Delhi’s foremost military supplier. In fact, defense trade became the raison d’être for strategic relations between the two nations – particularly in the post-Cold War […]

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Delhi To Dhaka, With Hope

The talk of the town in Dhaka is the forthcoming visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 6. The enthusiasm generated by the impending trip is rare and can only be compared with that experienced during the visit of Indira Gandhi in 1972. She was welcomed effusively because of the support she gave Bangladesh […]

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Is It The End Of Road For India’s Congress?

Without the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty—virtually synonymous with the party since 1969, when Indira Gandhi led a band of loyalists out of the original Congress that helped India win independence from Britain some two decades earlier—Indian politics will likely become less feudal and more meritocratic. And Asia’s third largest economy may finally junk the last vestiges of […]

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India’s Tryst With Destiny

Modi is a hypnotic orator who, as one corporate executive after another has said, offers the best model of governance in a country rife with corruption and red tape. His actions in February 2002 have led him to be compared with Adolf Hitler, while his obsession with management details have led him to be compared […]

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The Ghost of 1984 Still Haunts India

The anti-Sikh riots of 1984 still haunt the ruling Indian National Congress. Almost three decades ago around 3,000 minority Sikhs were killed, allegedly at the instigation of local Congress leaders in Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, on October […]

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Mauritius, Central to India’s Security Interests

When President Pranab Mukherjee lands in Mauritius on Monday, he will be buttressing a relationship with an Indian Ocean nation that is so central to India’s security interests that it went to the extent of planning military intervention to ensure an Indian-origin Prime Minister remained in power there. The Top Secret ‘Operation Lal Dora’ — […]

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The Ghosts Of Khalistan

The recent assassination attempt on Lieutenant-General Kuldip Singh Brar in London is a grim reminder that the ghosts of the Punjab insurgency are still with us so many years after the last shots were fired. Indira Gandhi’s decision to send troops into the Golden Temple in June 1984 — troops Gen. Brar commanded — set […]

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