The controversy over a new book by Chinese intellectuals arguing for China to adopt a strong nationalist-realist posture in its foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed in India. Yet the issue is important: not merely for what the authors argue but also for the response the book has received from other thinkers and opinion makers [...]
Regarding the precedents of international intervention that were set in the 1990s
You write that despite the precedents set in the 1990s, “the concept of humanitarian intervention has lost momentum”, mainly due to the US invasion of Iraq.
Likewise, the title of your op-ed, “The end of intervention” suggests that the 90s were a sort of golden [...]
Issue Contents
PERSPECTIVE
The New Jihadis
Local manifestations of a global pattern
Nitin Pai
Getting human rights right
Are human rights activists playing into the hands of
terrorists?
Sandeep Balakrishna, Salil Tripathi & Rohit Pradhan
Towards a cultural liberalism
Governments must stop siding with intolerant mobs
Jayakrishnan Nair
FILTER
A survey of think-tanks
Feline counter-terrorism; Measuring up against international human rights standards; On what makes foreign policy tick; Assessing [...]
Because it is not for them to provide solutions
By Salil Tripathi
[Background: This is Salil's response to the criticism that "human rights folks, at least in India, are terribly context insensitive. In practice, you can't even talk about enjoying human rights (as opposed to possessing them) unless the state is capable of maintaining rule of [...]
Amnesty International sounds like Al Qaeda
Mukul Sharma, of Amnesty International, does the Amnesty International thing in the Hindu. Terror must be countered with justice he writes, which is all very fine. But Mr Sharma is also against special laws that can used to bring terrorists to justice. All he has to say is:
The only way [...]
Can “human rights” activists be far behind?
We know the routine. ‘Concerned citizens’ write open letters and petitions on the pretext of condemning “cowardly acts of violence”. Once the obligatory boilerplate is dispensed with, they come to the point—that it is the state and its agencies that are really at fault. We’ve seen this in the [...]
Intervention and sovereignty
Benedict XVI probably gets to address the United Nations by virtue of being the head of the Vatican state. Not because he is a Pope. But when he speaks of “the action of the international community and its institutions . . . should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation [...]
The UN Human Rights Council is out-of-control
If you thought that the UN Human Rights Council was a farce, think again. It is an out-of-control outfit that has come to become a handmaiden of states that are the worst abusers of human rights.
You have read about its upside down sense of priorities. You have seen how [...]
Asma Jehangir’s mistakes…and why India should not suffer the insult of being audited by the UN Human Rights Council
Asma Jehangir, the brave human rights activist from Pakistan, is the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. She was in New Delhi recently to “study the situation with regard to freedom [...]
The useless (to the Tibetans) charade of visiting the Dalai Lama
“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out about Chinese repression in China and Tibet” Nancy Pelosi said, “we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world”.
She may not be exaggerating. But the issue is [...]
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