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 military [...]
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 their [...]
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 military power [...]
Is there a method to its cartographical inconsistency?
In defence of its editorial policy on the maps it publishes alongside its articles, in September 2007 the Economist wrote “we use maps not to portray the world as it ought to be, or even as we would like it to be, but as it is.” Reassuring readers [...]
…and India doesn’t even realise that it has been had
Did anyone notice how China’s support for the India-US nuclear deal has been matched by its backward movement on settling the border dispute? While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came away with a “Chinese nod for him to underwrite India’s independent foreign policy”—as the Indian Express put [...]
Be more like India
How should India respond to China’s building of road, rail and communications infrastructure in areas adjoining the unresolved Himalayan border? Excerpt from an article in the July 2007 issue of Pragati:
Clearly then, there is an urgent need for India to review the way in which it engages China.
Meanwhile, the Indian government [...]
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