/Tag: foreign policy

A Tendulkar Trophy


The Telegraph

Following the well-attended (and incident-free) one-day series between India and Pakistan—the first since the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008—the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Zaka Ashraf, suggested that the two countries play each other regularly, for what might be called the ‘Jinnah-Gandhi’ Trophy. Reading this, I remembered a similar proposal being made, decades ago, [...]

KASHMIR PAST AND PRESENT


Hindustan Times

Sorting out some papers, I came across an old essay in an obscure periodical on a topic of contemporary relevance. Published in December 1973 in the Sarvodaya journal Bhoodan-Yagya, it was written (in Hindi) by Chandi Prasad Bhatt, the pioneer of the Chipko Andolan and, arguably, of modern Indian environmentalism itself. I have known Bhatt for [...]

THE GLOBALIZING GERONTOCRACY


Hindustan Times

In the sixty years since Independence, there have been three periods in which India has faced serious challenges in the sphere of foreign policy. In the late 1940s, we were being asked to take sides in the Cold War, then about to get hot. Then, in the early 1970s, the crisis in East Pakistan forced us [...]

NO GLOATING


SCAPEGOATING

Every year, in November, the American magazine Newsweek departs from its focus on current events to publish a special number which examines national and regional trends that cannot be slotted within the weekly cycle of news. Writing in the last such issue, the editor of a Delhi newspaper (not this one) wrote that ‘Indian foreign policy [...]

RECALLING AN EARLIER FAILURE


The Telegraph

On my first trip to New York—back in the mid 1980s—I made a visit to the United Nations, an institution then held in somewhat higher esteem than it is now. In the plaza outside a demonstration was in progress. The protesters were Afghan men, their nationality manifest in their dress—they wore flowing pyjamas, a long loose [...]

LOVE AND HATE BEFORE THE AGE OF BUSH


The Telegraph

For most of its career as an independent nation, India has not had the happiest relations with the United States. In the words of the historian Denis Kux, these have been two ‘estranged democracies’. The causes of the estrangement were various—America’s enchantment with India’s enemy, Pakistan; India’s affection for America’s enemy, the Soviet Union; the self-righteousness [...]