The Indian government does well to streamline visas for business and employment Without doubt, India must reform its visa regime and be more welcoming to foreigners who wish to visit, live and work in the country. In the September 2009 issue of Pragati Salil Tripathi calls for the Indian government to relax its atavistic, paranoid ...
q ...
Only intra-party democracy will help the party bounce back They are writing the BJP’s political obituary. And unless the BJP shows the vision, wisdom and determination that it has been lacking for the last several years, that obituary will be called for. Yet Indian politics will be adrift without a strong national counter-force to the ...
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter, as they don’t say these days Those of us who first started reading Pakistani newspapers in the late 1990s—Jai Ho internet!—will remember that in ‘Held Kashmir’, ‘mujahids’ frequently used to ‘embrace martyrdom’ or ‘shahadat’, often while carrying out ‘fidayeen’ attacks on the Indian army. So it is amusing ...
The geopolitical implications of Xuanzang’s round-trip The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s journey to India and back is well-known (see Samanth Subramanian’s review of Mishi Saran’s book in Pragati). What is not so well-known is that his trip led, unintentionally, to a diplomatic spat between the China and India that ultimately resulted in the first Chinese ...
KPS Gill makes several good points on Naxalism. And one bad one Tehelka’s Harinder Baweja uses KPS Gill’s shoulder to fire a salvo against the central government-led counter-insurgency operation targeting the Naxalites. Mr Gill makes several good points: among others, that the Naxalites run the biggest extortion mafia in the country, that the corrupt state ...
Putting public information online The Right to Information (RTI) is a powerful tool that can improve governance. While it has been used to some degree of success, the procedure involved in filing and following up on an RTI application is inconvenient, even daunting. Furthermore there are few avenues to capture the externalities from the information ...
Complicated, the matter is One more country has joined the queue. “We have heard,” said Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, “that certain officials in Pakistan cooperate with main agents of these terrorist attacks in the eastern part of the country.” The Iranian government summoned the Pakistani charge d’affaires in Teheran and protested against the use of ...
Nuclear weapons are doing what high mountains once did As K M Panikkar noted, while India developed a sophisticated framework of inter-state relations within the natural frontiers of the subcontinent it “lacked interest in the balance of power outside its own national frontiers”. Arrian, the ancient Greek writer, contended that Indian kings refrained from expanding ...
The costly refusal to see beyond itself and the subcontinent An extract from Sardar K M Panikkar’s Annual Day address to the Indian School of International Studies on 13 February 1961: The study of international relations is fundamentally a study of power relationships. This, of course, has to be interpreted in terms not only of ...