Category : Premium

NEW DELHI: The British government is coming out with a report next month that is expected to detail key shifts in defence, foreign affairs and development policy. More interesting, the review is likely to outline a refreshed approach to India as the UK plots its return to “east of Suez”. East of Suez refers to […]Read More

NEW DELHI: Lonely Planet describes Sittwe, the capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, as a city that “sits in an incredible spot where the wide, tidal Kaladan river kisses the big, fat Bay of Bengal.” The Sittwe deep water port is part of the ambitious Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project to link the Indian mainland to […]Read More

NEW DELHI: Here’s the issue with India-Russia relations: since much of it is tied to defence which is largely under the radar and, therefore, cannot be talked about openly or in any great detail, an impression may gain ground that all’s not well. “This is far from the case,” says P.S. Raghavan, former ambassador to Russia […]Read More

NEW DELHI: Meet Dr Mumin Chen, deputy representative at the Taiwan Representative Office in Delhi. He’s a former academic from Taiwan’s National Chung Hsing University and is regarded as among the foremost India specialists in Taiwan. There’s something else. During his academic avatar in 2014, he had authored a paper on the India-China border dispute […]Read More

NEW DELHI: In the long history of the India-China boundary dispute, a few incidents remain a landmark. The 1962 war is the biggest of them all; the 1967 clash at Nathu La in Sikkim is another. But another episode of a bloody encounter between Indian and Chinese soldiers that happened in Arunachal Pradesh in 1975 is […]Read More

PUNE: In our lifetime, perhaps the most consequential development is the rise of China. It is already the world’s second largest economy; with a GDP of USD 14 trillion it is already two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy and is expected to overtake the latter in this decade. It is also the world’s largest trading […]Read More

ZURICH: The United States is losing in Afghanistan because it lied to itself. Its war against the Taliban was never driven by a vision of fighting terrorism through nation-building, even though that was what policy debates implied. Rather, the conflict was a two-level engagement: an instinctive reprisal against Al Qaeda to exact vengeance for 9/11, […]Read More

NEW DELHI: With a little over two months to go before elections in the United States, India’s window for a quick and limited trade deal is closing. Senior officials in Delhi were not hopeful that a deal could be concluded before the November 3 election, which means negotiations can resume only after the new president […]Read More

ZURICH: If the name ‘China’ were deleted from ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’ (CPEC), nobody except terrorism-watchers would pay attention to the country that remains. CPEC is projected by Islamabad as a ‘game-changer’ but it might only be a Pakistani reputation-laundering exercise that although strategically important is economically less than crucial to Beijing. The corridor provides a […]Read More

The last obstacle to direct dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban were removed after the Loya Jirga called by President Ashraf Ghani, called for the release of ‘hard core’ Taliban prisoners. Their release had become a sticking point, the government insisting it would not let them go since they were responsible for the deaths […]Read More