Getting Saudi Arabia to take responsibility for Pakistan’s actions is in India’s interests At a recent conference in Abu Dhabi on emerging powers and the Middle East, one of the arguments I made was that a stable Afghanistan requires a balance of two distinct sets of powers—India-Iran-Russia on the one hand, and China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia on ...
The four states of power and principle Tweet ...
Bucks for tales “But honestly, how many of us get excited about editorials?” asks Madhu Rao. (Chances are, if you are reading this, you are one of them. But read on.) In his email, Mr Rao says that INDImag is an out-of-pocket non-profit initiative (sound familiar?) “to get people who love story telling to come ...
The mutual popularity of India and United States Results from Gallup’s latest Country Favourability poll (linkthanks Rohit Pradhan) show that India continues to be among the most popular countries in the United States. There’s been a slight decline in percentage of respondents who rated India positively—from 69% in 2008 to 66% in 2010—but this is ...
Talks will call the bluffs in Rawalpindi, Islamabad & Washington The sudden and unexplained manner in which the UPA government offered to resume talks with Pakistan has injected a lot of confusion in the public discourse. The confusion—and the political & strategic costs arising from it—must be blamed on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. A move ...
Understanding the Saudi Arabian position on sanctions on Iran Just what did the Saudi foreign minister mean when he refused to back international sanctions on Iran “because we are closer to the threat (and therefore an ) need immediate resolution rather than gradual resolution”? Riyadh’s position is surprising not least because, as it transpired at ...
Why a lamb was sacrificed The New York Times, which broke the story of the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, supposedly second only to Mullah Mohammed Omar in the Taliban firmament, says that it was the result of a joint US-Pakistani operation in Karachi last week. The news was kept secret in order to ...
“Failure of governance is as much a failure of the government as it is of the governed to be engaged” In today’s Mint V Anantha Nageswaran and I renew our call for citizens to set aside civic apathy. That leaves the middle class as the key catalyst for change. But it is focused on inflation ...
The implications of terror-on-tap A few remarks on yesterday’s terrorist attack on Pune (and an attempt to summarise the discussions over email, twitter & telephone). There were two bombs. The one that went off was an improvised explosive device (IED) likely to be using ammonium-nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) with an RDX booster. The other was ...
And a question for Washington Pune was attacked today, days after days after a top leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba named Pune as a target city at a public rally the Pakistani authorities permitted him to address (linkthanks @offstumped). (And yet, a significant element of Maharashtra’s law enforcement machinery was not engaged in securing the state ...