India-Iran Joint Commission meeting co-chaired by Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif (L) and Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar (R), Tehran, December 22, 2019 Sometimes a crisis is needed to judge the efficacy of a country’s regional policies. The US-Iran confrontation is one such moment for Delhi. In retrospect, the India-US meeting of foreign and defence ministers …
An unsung hero of US-India nuclear deal
Biographies stand apart as literary genre for three reasons. One, they are a branch of history and yet are literary works in their own right. Two, biography is a craft rather than art where general rules of testing evidence apply. Three, importantly, reading a biography can be an intensely personal journey as it holds the …
Putin’s Russia, twenty years on
Twenty years ago, on December 31, 2019, resigning Russian President Boris Yeltsin (R) tapped then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (L) to be his successor. When I left Moscow after completing my second assignment in the Embassy at the end of 1989, I never imagined that I was leaving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for …