Passionate About India

The resounding victory of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the recently held Duma elections was a sort of a referendum for Putin and his style of functioning for the last eight years. Putin, undoubtedly, has emerged a victor. His anointment of Dmitri Medvedev as the new Presidential candidate in next year’s elections also makes sure that the legacy of Putin and his policies are here to stay. This might be good news for Russia – and many of its allies – but certainly not for the US. With the disintegration of USSR in 1990s and the subsequent end to the Cold War, the world had gone through a dichotomy of feelings – relief on one hand, and paranoia on the other. Relief, because the end of the Cold War meant a virtual annihilation of a possible nuclear clash between the two giants (US and USSR). The sense of paranoia however persisted as the end of Cold War also meant that the world became unipolar with the US emerging as the sole superpower and entering into prolonged of war-monger...

Forbes billionaires’ list featured the names of 36 Indian businessmen, with an accumulated worth of a staggering USD 191 billion (that is, almost 20% of what the entire Indian population earned for the same year). In fact, of these 36, three of the names also appeared in the top 20 of the global rich! The only other economy that outscored India was the United States of America with five billionaires. In fact, India is the only Asian economy to have so many billionaires in that list; and next to it is Japan with 24!! While the Indian media – mainly consisting of half /ill educated people and middlemen with negligible intelligence and analytical skills – go ga ga over the same, and the masses get carried away with excitement, taking it to be an achievement, it’s time to reveal some gruesome truth about our billionaire industrialists. After Independence, our industrialists were given a monopolistic market to operate upon, thanks to the bureaucratic system of bribery-driven work culture we...

What is the expected outcome, when you have a haughty cowboy President, an arrogant administration and a seemingly stooge in the form of a Supreme Court? Well, no prizes for guessing, you get some blindly dictatorial American laws for the globe. In fact, this time, President Bush and his ‘Administration’ have surpassed all the limits of deforming any civilised society by claiming that they can ‘kidnap’ any foreigner, if they are wanted for crimes in the United States of America. What more, they have the sanction of their Supreme Court as well. In fact, till now it was assumed that American law permits kidnapping only of terror suspects under ‘extraordinary redemption’, but recently it was made clear that the US can kidnap ‘anyone’ who is a criminal in the eyes of America. For that matter, even ‘extraordinary redemption’ is in itself unlawful. On top of this, kidnapping ‘anyone’ who is a criminal in the eyes of America, is a crime without doubt, at least in a civilised and working democ...

Since the declaration of the state of emergency by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, the world has been much divided between those who have been advocating that only a dictatorial military regime can save Pakistan from becoming a failed state and those who claim that only democracy can revive Pakistan. This debate, no doubt, would persist for some time to come, but the issue at large is whether such dictatorial regimes eventually succeed in resurrecting a failing state. For most of the time in the 20th century, many such regimes, especially in Africa, came on the pretext of saving their countries from disaster. However noble their intentions might have been in the beginning, their sustained stay at the helm of affairs, eventually proved disastrous for their respective countries. To start with, let’s take the example of Sudan. Incidentally, this country has also been given the rank of numero uno in the recent ranking of failed states by The Foreign Policy magazine. Omar Hass...

It is a well known fact that the Americans heavily invested in the Mujahideen forces in Afghanistan against the USSR. It is also a well known fact that after the war was over and the American objective of ousting the Russian army was served, they dumped the Mujahideens, which finally resulted in the emergence of Osama. Eventually, when the American funding stopped, these armed Mujahideens turned their heat on the Americans, finally culminating into 9/11. And now the US government has decided to extend military training beyond the Pakistani Army, to their paramilitary forces. This decision could not have come at a worse time as Pakistan is already reeling under tremendous internal political and civil crises, which is getting more complicated by the day. And add to it the inability of the intelligence as well as the law enforcement agencies to prevent the spate of suicide attacks by the fundamentalists, the last thing that Pakistan needed now was more number of people getting professiona...

A few days back, at the fourth International Conference on Federalism, the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, voiced his concerns over the dangers posed by narrow political interests (on account of regional politics) that are coming in the way of the larger national interest. No doubt, our honourable Prime Minister has learnt the harsh realities of coalition politics the hard way, which was evident from his speech. In fact, a classic metaphor of such coalition compulsions was evident in the manner the Centre has been handling the Nandigram issue. The Centre’s stance amply vindicates its sheer helplessness on account of its dependence on CPI(M). All that the Centre did was to send one battalion of CRPF from Dhanbad...And that’s it! As the CPI(M) cadres continued with their victory procession and made sure that the entire Nandigram was reconverted into a red bastion, the CRPF contingent was kept strangled at Tamluk. The reason why something like this happened is no secret, as it is all ...

On November 3, 2007, it was as if history was repeating in Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf once again imposed emergency in Pakistan – suspended the constitution, dismissed the Pakistan Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhury, along with seven other judges (this being the second time in his tenure as a President), ordered troops to seize the equipment of independent television stations and also ordered for some popular leaders’ house arrest! Sequence of events beginning March 9, 2007, (with the arrest of Iftikar Chaudhury, followed by Lal Masjid siege on July 10, 2007, Supreme Court reinstating Justice Chaudhury, challenging Musharraf’s power on July 20, 2007, Nawaz Sharif’s arrest at Islamabad airport, after his eight-year exile, killing of 139 people in Benazir Bhutto’s procession in Karachi), indicated that a state of emergency in Pakistan was on the cards. In fact, for more than half of the period, since Pakistan separated from India and became an independent state, it has been under p...