Category : West Asia

NEW DELHI: Next year will mark the 73rd anniversary of India and Turkey establishing diplomatic relations. It’s not clear if either side will be in any mood to celebrate that officially. Bilateral relations have been going through a difficult phase ever since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took umbrage when the Indian government reworked its constitutional […]Read More

NEW DELHI: Iran’s newly appointed foreign minister Hossain Amir-Abdollahian flies into Delhi later this month on a two-fold mission: to sound out South Block on Afghanistan and figure out the space for cooperation, and to get the bilateral relationship back on track. Afghanistan first: Tehran has been disappointed by the faces on the Taliban interim […]Read More

NEW DELHI: The first ever naval exercise between India and Saudi Arabia in the western Indian Ocean, is also a delicate balancing act by Delhi given the historic and strategic rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran. But the exercise also reflects South Block’s concerns over the Red Sea, a little over 4000-km from Indian shores littered […]Read More

NEW DELHI: What are the takeaways from External Affairs Minister’s S Jaishankar’s visit to Iran for the swearing-in of new President Ebrahim Raisi? Iran has been engaged with Afghanistan for at over 15 years and analysts say the ground realities today are far different from the 1990s. For one, the Shia-Sunni divide between Iran and […]Read More

NEW DELHI: Many things are not what they seem, perhaps more so in the high-stakes game of modern diplomacy where seemingly unconnected events combine to transform the strategic landscape. Let’s begin with External Affairs Minister Jaishankar’s just concluded visit to Russia. Some of the media focus and commentary saw great virtue in Jaishankar stopping off […]Read More