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 […]
This foreign policy crisis is of India’s own making. Inability to put its own house in order has shattered the notion of India as an emerging global power. In the last five years, the government in New Delhi decimated economic potential, scaring domestic and foreign investors, and making the county hostile to private investment. The […]
A well-staged visit to the Forbidden City; adoring crowd, a fawning host in the form of Premier Li Keqiang; a rare opportunity to address the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party: a departure from protocol in breaking bread with a retired leader; half a step forward in keeping the disputed border quiet. Prime […]
With Indian Prime Minister Singh due to meet President Obama in Washington on September 27, hopes are modest for what the two leaders can agree or achieve together. Against a backdrop of damaged global governance, with both leaders suffering serious credibility deficits at home or abroad, it hardly seems an auspicious time to reinvigorate relations between […]
A rupee in free fall; a terrifyingly wide current-account deficit; a corrupt, stagnant bureaucracy: In 1991, then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh helped to rescue India’s economy from that near-death experience with a slew of liberalizing reforms, setting the stage for two decades of growth. Today, facing a similar, if less existential, crisis as India’s prime minister, Singh may well be the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
looking beyond borders 