The challenges to India’s growth come more from the stalled economic liberalisation process than from the Af-Pak situation
Yesterday, Sarika Malhotra, a journalist from Financial Express asked me for my views on the regional security situation and the impact on investment. Here’s the exchange:
How do you think concerns regarding terrorism and political violence in AfPak, India, [...]
It’s not the ranking, it’s the change in the score
In 2005, when Foreign Policy magazine first published a failed state index, The Acorn argued that “rankings by themselves do not convey as much information as the direction of their change. How countries change their position, even by this imperfect measure, will be the thing to [...]
Prachanda’s actions isolate the Maoists
The question of the induction of the Maoist insurgents into the Nepalese army—a force they spent a decade fighting—has boiled over into, what else, a crisis.
Pushpa Kamal “Prachanda” Dahal, the Maoist prime minister, would like them to be absorbed immediately. Others, not least the army chief, thinks otherwise. That’s why the [...]
Where India yields, China will step in.
Quite often, the alarm and indignation comes from a sense of entitlement. Surely, the argument goes, India’s size and geographical location entitles it to a pre-eminent maritime status in the Indian Ocean, so how dare China intrude and construct a “string of pearls” around India?
To be sure, the emergence [...]
Competition in zero-sum games, co-operation in positive-sum games
My op-ed in today’s Mint is a synthesis of several posts and discussions on this blog. Many of you might rightly say that it is stating the obvious. But sometimes the obvious has to be stated as well (and the need to do so is not always so [...]
Should India really bother?
Let’s consider one narrative: India is opposed to the LTTE, but can’t support the Sri Lanka army because of a number of reasons—mostly having to do with domestic politics, but also perhaps for strategic reasons. So when Pakistan becomes a big supplier of small arms to Colombo, should India really worry?
Rather than [...]
Truth and reconciliation elude the victims of the 1971 mass murders
Thirty eight years ago this day, the Pakistani army’s tanks moved in to Dacca (now Dhaka), the capital of East Pakistan, as part of the General Yahya Khan-led junta’s plan to bring the autonomy-seeking province to heel. “We have to sort them out” said Colonel [...]
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