BrahMos Among Deals Putin Inks With India

Months of speculation about the possible development of an air-launched version of the Indo-Russian BrahMos supersonic cruise missile finally came to a head, with India and Russia announcing they had signed a co-development deal, with plans for a test-fire within six months. The deal was made public a day before Russian President Vladimir Putin was scheduled to arrive in […]

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In India, a Dangerous and Divisive Technocrat

Last week, Narendra Modi, a deeply polarizing Indian politician, led his party to a third consecutive election victory in the western state of Gujarat, which he has led for more than a decade. Though regional contests in the country are usually of little interest to outsiders, Mr. Modi’s win is significant because it sets him up as […]

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India, Asean Closer to Critical Trade Pacts

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have concluded negotiations for a free trade agreement (FTA) in services and investments. The background work clears the way for greater economic and political integration between India and the bloc of 10 countries that accounts for a GDP of about […]

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The Warped History And Geography Of NonAlignment 2.0

In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Narasimha Rao government reworked India’s dysfunctional economic and foreign policies to improve India’s abysmal terms of trade with the rest of the world. The latest global financial crisis seems to have shaken the United States’ global dominance and is forcing India to revisit its […]

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The Bipartisan Consensus in Washington About Expanding Ties With India May Be Good For New Delhi, But it’s Turned the Election Into a Snoozer.

Indeed, enthusiasm for India in Washington may wax or wane over the next four years, but arguably this will depend less on who occupies the White House than on who occupies the prime minister’s residence at 7 Race Course Road. Over the past two years, faced with a global slowdown and a lack of reforms, […]

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India’s Reforms of Decade Must Work Now or Die

Sitting in the study of the prime ministerial bungalow in New Delhi, surrounded by manicured lawns and palm trees, Indian leader Manmohan Singh and his soon-to-be finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram pored over plans late into the evening to stem a growing sense of crisis. Singh, the 80-year-old soft-spoken architect of the country’s economic opening two […]

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Rejigged Again

AS WITH comedy, timing matters when delivering a political punchline. On October 28th India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, at last reshuffled his cabinet. It was long overdue, made necessary by the departure in September of a coalition ally, and more generally by the growing sense, over several months, of a government adrift: dominated by aged […]

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