On this week’s terrorist attack on Srinagar
“Barring that it took place around the corner from the offices of Srinagar-based television stations,” writes The Hindu in today’s editorial, “there was little to distinguish the incident from dozens of similar fire engagements that regularly take place in the State.”
During the course of the attack, the Pakistani [...]
A fisking of Barbara Crossette’s piece in Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy’s online editors invited me to rebut Barbara Crossette’s piece on India being the baddest boy of global governance. You can see the published version on their website. This is the original draft.
Making room for India
Contrary to Barbara Crossette, India does the global governance thing
According to [...]
And can we not get distracted please!
At a time when the astute businessmen running the Times of India are exploiting (via Oh, Teri!) the quintessentially Indian tendency to allow hope to triumph over experience, it is all the more important not to lose sight of reality. At the core of one of the most significant [...]
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 to [...]
The United States has set the rules of good behaviour for Pakistan. It has assigned indicators to measure progress. The devil lies in between
There is a deluge of ‘analyses’ of the Kerry-Lugar bill in the Pakistani commentariat: barring some exceptions, you will find high polemic, rhetoric, idiom, metaphor and bravado. There is little by way [...]
The next time one of its publications claims editorial independence, it’ll be a little less credible.
Pearson, the company that owns the Economist, Financial Times and fDi Magazine—an offshoot of the latter—can no longer credibly claim that its publications enjoy editorial independence. It just showed that the proprietors of the company can overrule the decisions of [...]
Chetan Bhagat uses sophisms to advance an argument for surrender
So how many cliched sophisms can you squeeze into one 900-word op-ed piece? Chetan Bhagat manages to do five. More than a defence of the prime minister as it announces itself to be, his op-ed in Hindustan Times (linkthanks Rohit Pradhan) is merely a series of [...]
China’s ‘institutes for strategic studies’
The website that first published the provocative article had the domain name www.iiss.cn—when that site was up it redirected to chinaiiss.org. In addition there is chinaiiss.com and at least one other site with IISS in it. They do not have anything remotely to do with the London-based International Institute of Strategic [...]
The Indian media should discard its paranoid, defensive attitude towards foreign affairs
There’s something paradoxical about the Indian media’s attitude towards foreign affairs in general, and India-US relations in particular. On the one hand, Indian journalists have extremely sensitive tilt detectors that capture the subtlest of shifts in statements coming from Washington. On the other, they [...]
China must be given a taste of India’s swing power
“Indian politicians these days,” says today’s editorial in the Chinese Communist Party-linked Global Times, “seem to think their country would be doing China a huge favor simply by not joining the “ring around China” established by the US and Japan. India’s growing power would have a [...]
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