For the record
In an op-ed in Indian Express, Nitin Pai and I argue in favor India’s intervention in Afghanistan, and address some of the concerns our previous article in Pragati had raised,
The government of President Hamid Karzai and members of the erstwhile Northern Alliance have long argued for India to scale up its involvement in [...]
Pray, where do the figures come from?
Leave aside the wooly-headed conclusions for a minute or the nonsense about India owing something to Pakistan. What is particularly remarkable about Rajmohan Gandhi’s op-ed in The Hindustan Times is the amazing confidence with which he marshals figures bereft of any actual empirical work,
But the violent extremists who blast [...]
Towards a better polity
By Harsh Gupta
The BJP is the only party which can be both truly nationalist and truly liberal – and while it has many defects it is much closer to those ideals, compared to other parties. The other parties are pseudo-secular and throwback leftists- these communal socialists believe in vote banks and socially [...]
Ideas for an ideas industry
In our op-ed in Livemint, Sushant K. Singh and I argue that India must develop a culture of independent think tanks in order to improve the level of policy discourse,
The abysmal state of policy debate in India is a direct result of the limited number of independent think tanks. A thriving [...]
The Indian government knows it. But it can hardly afford to tell the Indian people, especially in an election year, that it is essentially powerless to punish the perpetrators of an attack ofMumbai’s scale. Therefore, its entire outraged is designed to serve one and only purpose: Extract any concession from Pakistan so that it can claim before the people of India that it did better than the previously equally incompetent government
What are India’s strategic goals vis-a-vis Pakistan?:
a) Is it prevention of another Mumbai type attack on Indian soil?
b) Is it punishing the perpetrators of Mumbai attacks including those in the ISI-Army establishment?
c) Is it transformation of Pakistan into a modern democratic nation-state?
d) Is it encircling Pakistan via a ”coalition of democracies” ensuring that the Army-ISI [...]
Update: The encounters continue. Just insane.
Update: 81 confirmed dead including 7 foreigners.
Update: Taj encounter is still going on.
Update: CNN-IBN is reporting that there is firing in Ramada hotel. Unconfirmed.
Update: CNN international had a security analyst who claimed that lives of hostages might be in danger because the Indian government would like to control the situation [...]
A question of power
Echoing Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, Amit Varma asks,
1] Frame an argument, or even your position on the subject, that states why Kashmir should remain part of India.
2] Then replace the word ‘India’ with ‘the British empire’, and ‘Kashmir’ with ‘India’.[link]
Now, the secession argument is terribly complex. Taken to its logical conclusion, what [...]
They may not be like us
Evan Osnos takes an interesting looks at the ”angry youth in China”, the future of democracy and what happened to the spirit of Tiananmen rebellion,
The date, we both knew, was June 4th, nineteen years since soldiers put down the Tiananmen uprising. The overseas Chinese students’ bulletin board had been alive [...]
BJP faces a leadership crisis
After the virtual retirement of Atal Bihari Vajpayee from active politics, L.K Advani is, by some distance, BJP’s tallest leader. A master politician who rescued the party from electoral irrelevance, Advani’s position as the party strategist is unchallenged. But has Mr Advani–BJP’s prime ministerial candidate–emerged as a statesman? At least on [...]
