Gen. Xu Qiliang, Vice Chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, met with visiting Major Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, Chief of Staff of Iranian Armed Forces in Beijing on Sept. 11,2019. The frank remarks to the media this week by Iran’s ambassador to India Ali Chegeni on the dismal state of his country’s relations with India …
Continue reading “Iran laments Indian apathy to cooperation”
Red carpet welcome: Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, accompanied by Chinese President Xi Jinping, reviews an honour guard at the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, July 22, 2019 The entire myth that India is engaged in some sort of “competition” with China for regional influence gets exposed badly this week …
Continue reading “Belt and Road takes a leap forward to the Gulf”
A Taliban delegation led by Abdul Ghani Baradar (centre) visited China recently, according to Beijing. The announcement in Washington on Wednesday regarding Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’ visit to the United States cannot but be noted as a watershed event in regional politics. At its most obvious level, the announcement coincides with the news coming out …
Continue reading “Trump’s volte-face on Pakistan is a moment of truth for India”
The Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s recent official visit to China on July 1-6 highlights a new template in regional politics — the rise of Bangladesh as regional power. Last year Bangladesh outstripped India as the fastest growing economy in South Asia — at 7.3%. Hasina has set the compass to navigate her country to …
(Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping to meet at Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, Bishkek, June 13-14.) When India applied for SCO membership or when observers like myself felt elated when India was finally admitted into the grouping in 2017, no one could have foreseen that the grouping held such potential in …
Continue reading “SCO summit: Inflection point for Indian diplomacy”
(Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, Beijing, May 17, 2019.) The unannounced overnight visit by Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to Pakistan on Thursday can be seen at the very minimum as forming part of a diplomatic campaign in the backdrop of the war clouds building …
(Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the informal summit in Wuhan, China, April 2019) The first Chinese commentaries have appeared on the outcome of the general elections in India. The timing is important, since the counting of votes is yet to take place in India. Yet, Chinese commentaries have presumed that …
The tunnel vision of Indian strategic analysts with regard to China’s Belt and Road Initiative has become the mainstream opinion in the country, inevitably. This is unfortunate because it is a flawed assumption basically to conclude that the tiny slice one sees through the tunnel is the whole world. The Indian analysts have made Sri …
Continue reading “China’s Belt and Road is increasingly popular”
(Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, May 14, 2019.) The visit to China by the President of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena underscores how inextricably the internal developments in the island country are connected to the geopolitics of the South Asian region. …
(Venue of the Leaders’ Roundtable Summit at the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation meet, Beijing, April 25-27, 2019) India’s absence from the recently concluded second summit meeting of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on April 25-27 was more a topic of animated discussion in our country — that we “rejected” …
