Palestinian children play outside their dwelling in al-Eizariya town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the background. “I believe the security situation will improve (in J&K), it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and you …
Continue reading “The ballad of India’s Kashmir and Israel’s Palestine”
(File photo of S. Jaishankar who took over as India’s External Affairs Minister) This is the season for political gossiping and for tossing hypotheses into the air. Most of them perish, while a handful may survive. The election fever has subsided except amongst a clutch of irreconcilables who won’t accept defeat. But they forget that …
Continue reading “Modi turns foreign policy as tool of national strategies”
(PM Modi met Imran Khan on Dec. 11, 2015 at New Delhi. File photo.) It is no big secret that the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is a damp squib. The impression becomes unavoidable that the decision to invite the little-known BIMSTEC leaders to PM Narendra Modi’s inaugural ceremony …
Continue reading “New India expects Pak obedience, not camaraderie”
Through the looking glass of a staunchly ‘secular-minded’ Malayali — a dirty word in the current idiom when triumphalist cultural nationalism is on the march — the Indian election results evoke mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is the wave of fear, anxiety, despair raging in the mind as one surveys the dismal national …
(Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Argentina, November 29, 2018) The state visit on February 19-20 by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to India at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an unusual event insofar as it was not scheduled through the diplomatic channel. …
(Congress President Rahul Gandhi (R) and CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury) The prospect of an electoral adjustment between the Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal for the 2019 poll does not come as surprise but it has a refreshing look of realism and pragmatism, nonetheless. The top leaderships of …
The portions relating to the regional security scenario in South Asia in the report titled “Worldwide Threat Assessment” by the US intelligence community presented to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in Washington on January 29 make grim reading. The overall security scenario is bleak, especially in India-Pakistan relations. The past trend of regional …
(Sabarimala temple) The op-Ed in today’s Indian Express by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Sabarimala aftermath, will make Malayalis sit up and think. The salients of the column are three: Being a country that professes constitutional rule and primacy to rule of law, a mobilization to damn the authority of the Supreme Court is a dangerous …
