PM Modi was not off the mark when he said last year, ‘…. that if Sardar Patel was the first PM of India there would not have been a Jammu and Kashmir problem.’ Napoleon once called history “a fable mutually agreed upon”. What we call history is sometimes a popular myth that is politically and […]
JAMMU AND KASHMIR Aditya Raj Kaul (ARK): It’s been a year since the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A from Jammu & Kashmir. Has the landmark decision really brought in any change for the common masses on ground? Ram Madhav (RM): Yes. A lot of changes. The common masses of J&K are no longer at the mercy […]
By destroying everything between the individual and the state, neo-liberals have signed their own death warrant Two historic events which took place around the same time towards the end of 18th century made the US and France the motherships of liberalism in the world. The first was the making of the American constitution that came […]
Liberalism is an idea with a history of close to five centuries. It got institutionalised in the 18th century through two historic incidents – making of the American Constitution in 1788 and the French Revolution in 1789. These two historical incidents which happened around the same time but 6000 km apart, led to the evolution of […]
Jaishankar described the Tokyo Quad meet as ‘consultations’. It needs more than China to become a regional institution. It is important to recall the history of the Quad because alliances have to be formed on agendas, not emotions. From the outset, the US projected and China perceived the Quadrilateral security grouping of US, Japan, Australia and India as the ‘Asian NATO’. […]
War is considered not something to run away from, but to be waged in order to restore the glory of the righteous. War is back. Armenia and Azerbaijan are at war. There is talk of it on the Sino-Indian LAC. Elsewhere, the Chinese navy is wrathful at the American and Japanese naval vessels loitering on […]
On January 30, 1948, the flag of the United Nations Organisation was lowered to half-mast. For the first time, the UN had set aside a day’s session to honour the man just murdered in Delhi. “Not the head of a state, a general or a king, but a lone man who without an army, riches, […]
Capturing the foreign policy vision, direction and action of a 1.3 billion people-strong country like India in just around 200 pages is an astoundingly difficult task that Dr Jaishankar, India’s current Foreign Minister accomplishes with considerable aplomb. The illustrious son of an equally, if not more, illustrious father – one of India’s doyens of strategic […]
Making a ‘Moral Man’ has been the quest of the philosophers for centuries. Some believed that God and religion can achieve that; some believed in man’s ability for reason. In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon finds man’s moral virtue to be just to “fear God and keep his commandments”. But the later […]
“What do I think of western civilisation? I think it would be a good idea” – This famous quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi may sound a bit condescending. But many share this scepticism and condescension about the west; that its lifestyle and value system is not worth calling a civilisation. It is not fully true. […]
