Through the looking glass of a staunchly ‘secular-minded’ Malayali — a dirty word in the current idiom when triumphalist cultural nationalism is on the march — the Indian election results evoke mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is the wave of fear, anxiety, despair raging in the mind as one surveys the dismal national …
India reengages Pakistan — albeit informally
(Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan — Sushma Swaraj (R) and Shah Mehmood Qureshi (L) — met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Council’s FMs conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, May 22, 2019) The two-day meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on May 21-22 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, assumes importance …
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China hails Modi victory. This is why.
(Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the informal summit in Wuhan, China, April 2019) The first Chinese commentaries have appeared on the outcome of the general elections in India. The timing is important, since the counting of votes is yet to take place in India. Yet, Chinese commentaries have presumed that …
China’s Belt and Road is increasingly popular
The tunnel vision of Indian strategic analysts with regard to China’s Belt and Road Initiative has become the mainstream opinion in the country, inevitably. This is unfortunate because it is a flawed assumption basically to conclude that the tiny slice one sees through the tunnel is the whole world. The Indian analysts have made Sri …
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China extends helping hand to Sri Lanka
(Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, May 14, 2019.) The visit to China by the President of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena underscores how inextricably the internal developments in the island country are connected to the geopolitics of the South Asian region. …
India’s betrayal of Iran is only the beginning
The sudden visit to New Delhi by the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif for a meeting on May 14 with the outgoing External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in the dying days of the Modi government underscores dramatically how much Tehran has been traumatised by the Indian decision under American pressure to summarily stop all …
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Mayawati demolishes Modi’s aura
(Dalit supporters of Mayawati at a massive rally in Lucknow, UP. File photo.) The tumultuous 2-month long campaign for the general election is drawing to a close. The scathing remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political persona by the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) Mayawati has taken the election campaign to a stunning …
US, Russia engage on Venezuela
(Government supporters throng streets if Caracas after the failure of the US-backed coup attempt, Venezuela, May 1, 2019) The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked last Thursday in Moscow that no contacts between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are expected at the G20 summit in Japan on June 28-29. “An encounter is …
Iran circles wagons as Trump’s B Team beats war drum
(Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani addressing the cabinet meeting, Tehran, May 8, 2019) If there can be a lethal game of Russian roulette in international politics, this is it — what just began on May 8, the first anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal of July 2015. Iran exercised “strategic patience” …
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Iran to even the nuclear score with US
It is going to be 30 years in another six months since the USS Abraham Lincoln, named in honour of the 16th US President, was commissioned on Nov.11, 1989 as the 5th Nimitz-class aircraft carrier of the American Navy. Now, as it leaves Croatia and heads toward the Persian Gulf, the carrier would have mixed …