(photo credit: english.sina.com) You don’t have to say you are sorry. Japan took half a century to sort of apologise to Korea for its war crimes. The US has never apologized to the Vietnamese for napalming them. You can lie with impunity. The US and the UK lied about Saddam Hussain’s arsenal of chemical and nuclear […]

Read More 20 Attributes of “Great” Powers

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org) Samson, the mythical Israeli, who was born with the strength to rip apart a lion with his bare hands, loses it all, when Delilah, an unreliable female “partner”, in whom he confides that the source of his strength lay in his long hair, cuts them off, in exchange for “blood money” from […]

Read More Do South Asian politicians learn from Samson?

(photocredit: unrealtimes.com) In inimitable style, Prime Minister Modi freed the nation from the “stifling” control of the Planning Commission (PC) on August 15-India’s Independence Day.  Not many are likely to mourn its passing. But bureaucracies dislike a power vacuum and it is not clear who inherits the mantle of work the Commission used to do. […]

Read More A new National Development Council: PM Modi could keep the bird in hand and still net two more from the bush.

(photo credit: Times of India) The Economist, a venerable English newspaper, can be excused for being confused about why India kicked the WTO bucket on July 31st. But it is a mystery why the Economist expects nations to behave rationally, when it knows full well that individuals don’t. Humans fear losing more than they like […]

Read More Why the Economist misread India’s incentives at the WTO

(photocredit: ndtv.com) Secretary Chuck Hagel’s whirl-wind India visit, ending August 9, highlights the tight rope India needs to walk, whilst enlarging its defence establishment’s collaborative engagement with the external world. The opening up of defence production to the private sector, including foreign direct investment, is a sensible, hard-headed, no-brainer, business decision given India’s current volume […]

Read More Can India choose its defence challenges?

 (Photo credit: Oneindia)   .Neo-liberal public intellectuals and foreign service babus in Lutyens Delhi are not happy with PM Modi’s “South Asia First” policy. For long, the managerial incentive was to hobnob with the “sahib log (people)” of the G 20. A predominantly rich country club, in which India is the poorest member. After all, […]

Read More Hiccups in India’s new external engagement framework