India and China are two big neighbours. Both are fast developing nations with global ambitions. The challenge lies in managing this competition in a healthy manner and not allowing it to lead to confrontation. Nations are products of their histories. China had a ‘century of humiliation’ from which it came out in the middle of […]
Articles
Ram: A Universal Deity
Ram’s greatest qualities that made him Maryada Purushottam were manifest not when he was in Ayodhya, the centre of power, but when in exile in the forests. It is said that there won’t be a village in India without a Ram temple. Ram is a universal deity, “treasured as the common property of every Hindu […]
Polls part of process to hand over power to people
Gupkaris sound dubious sometimes. The senior leader Farooq Abdullah had stirred a hornet’s nest recently by hinting that the Kashmiris were looking at China as their redeemer. Insisting that China “never accepted” the revocation of Art 370, Farooq told India Today TV that “They (the Chinese) said till you restore Article 370, we won’t stop”. […]
Modi – The Redeemer in Bihar
Bihar is a politically complex state. Between 1960 and 1990, the state had seen 23 Chief Ministers and 5 spells of President’s rule. Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi brought some stability. Together they ruled for 12 years between 1990 and 2005 with three spells of President rule in between. For a state […]
What India looks for is an America that brings with it many allies
In India, some believe that Biden-Harris would be bad news for US-India relations. It must be understood that US-India ties stand on a mutually beneficial bipartisan and strong footing. But what India looks for is an America that brings with it many allies. In American constitutional history, there were at least two occasions in the […]
Sardar Patel and the Kashmir question
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 […]
The Liberal Waterloo
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 […]
Quad must be built on agendas, not emotions. Can’t afford to become another NATO
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 and Peace
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 […]
Gandhi’s true legacy could help address the democracy deficit in today’s world
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, […]