Meet INI bloggers We’re trying to get many of the INI bloggers, readers & friends together for an informal get-together in New Delhi in December. The venue & time are subject to change so please confirm your attendance beforehand. If you’d like to come, let us know. It’s a private event and Chatham House rule ...
India cannot be competent in internal security without being competent in overall governance “If 26/11 is not to become another one in an endless series of fatalities,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes “we need to keep asking the question: how can a people who have much to be proud of, be endowed with a state that ...
Maritime territorialism is a bad idea—but it might signal something worse Rory Medcalf, over at the Lowy Interpreter flags a very important issue (via NRA). He draws attention to a media report that suggests China is considering maritime territorialism in the Gulf of Aden where navies from as many as 40 countries are engaged in ...
We are building a top-notch think tank. We’ve been working on this initiative for some time now, and it’s a good time to share a little more about what we want to do. Our vision The Takshashila Institution—an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organisation—contributes towards building the intellectual foundations of an India that has global interests. The ...
Democracy cannot operate without sunlight Y P Rajesh in the Indian Express on Mumbai’s unanswered questions: 26/11 deserved an inquiry commission on the lines of the US commission that probed 9/11 and went on to blame the FBI and the CIA for intelligence failures. Particularly since the failures in India involved central and state, civilian ...
The world doesn’t become bipolar by wishing that it is Zbigniew Brzezinski, like many others who came of age during the Cold War, believes that a bipolar world is much easier for the United States to ‘manage’ than a multipolar one. That might even be correct. The problem is—the world is not bipolar—even in the ...
India must expand its intelligence capacity in Western countries Until US authorities arrested David Coleman Headley/Dawood Gilani and Tahawwur Hussain Rana no public account of India’s investigations into the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai even mentioned the Chicago connection. It is highly likely that Indian investigators had no clue as to Headley and Rana’s existence, leave ...
What attracts women? INI’s resident military affairs expert (no, no pun intended) sends in an article with the following bit highlighted: Young women who don’t join the army have another important role to play. They may opt to marry army officers and encourage their female friends to follow suit. If pretty young women in large ...
A 250-fold improvement in obfuscation In Superfreakonomics, the sequel to their first book, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write that in the United Kingdom, Muslim names “would turn out to be one of the strongest demographic markers for the algorithm” to identify people who might be terrorists. A person with neither a first or last ...
Joint India-US planning is a must given the asymmetric risks of snatch operations The only interesting new thing in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker report on the issue of the security of Pakistan’s crown jewels is that a US nuclear emergency response team was activated recently but asked to stand down before it landed in Pakistan. ...