The road to Jaffna from Colombo hugs the western coast of Sri Lanka. Palms stand sentinel, a lagoon shimmers for miles under a deep blue sky, the sea an invisible presence resonating in the dry, salty wind. The road runs smooth, oblivious to the wounds of a war that took thousands of lives, displaced lakhs […]
Their presence at the G-7 summit at Ise-Shima, Japan, last week was hardly noticed in India. But among the six leaders of the developing world present in the outreach session were Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, and Maithripala Sirisena, president of Sri Lanka. Read Here – The Indian Express
An Islamic philosopher in Karachi, an ideologue who provides violent ideas to some of Pakistan’s fiercest extremist groups, once told me that there are two kinds of history: dead and living. “Dead history is something on a shelf or in a museum,” he said. “Living history is part of your consciousness, something in your blood […]
Far from the South China Sea’s unfolding turbulence, the calmer waters of the Indian Ocean are witnessing a more subtle geopolitical power play, in which China is losing its leverage over Sri Lanka to the United States. The shift comes amid a raging domestic debate in the strategically located island nation over the investigation of atrocities […]
The fundamental issue is that – be it Nepal, Maldives, or Sri Lanka – the obsession with China’s growing influence in the region has warped the Indian thinking, which in turn prevents Indian diplomacy from coming on its own to realize its full potential. Read Here – Asia Times
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 […]
India’s maritime diplomacy is most often associated with its naval outreach to East Asia. With an increase in naval ship visits to South East Asia in recent years, and attendant media speculation over New Delhi’s supposed Pacific ambitions, the impression has been created that East Asia remains the ultimate destination of the Indian Navy’s diplomatic […]
A long-awaited report by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been delivered to the Sri Lankan government. The report, a result of a U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution passed on Sri Lanka in March 2014, deals largely with abuses by government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers that […]
From a seeming personal fad of the PM, Buddhism has begun to acquire an unprecedented weight in India’s Asian policy. In his address to the parliament of Mongolia in June this year, Modi went beyond the notion of promoting India’s soft power to highlight the importance of Buddhism in dealing with the contemporary political challenges […]
Buried under billions of dollars of Chinese debt, Colombo has little option but to go along, albeit at a pace slower than earlier. After all, Chinese money did prop up the war-battered economy and created jobs, and did help the government in ending the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Chinese know […]
looking beyond borders 