If an opportunity arises where an Indian agent is arrested in their country, Pakistan would make every effort to milk the situation and create an international hue and cry.
Is Kulbhushan Jadhav an Indian agent?
Dawood Ibrahim, India and Pakistan
Dawood Ibrahim staying in Pakistan is an open secret and Indian intelligence agencies who tried to bump him off in mid-2000 and bring him back in 2013 are aware of all his activities and movements since a very long time.
Collapsing credibility of Western media: An opportunity for India
In his first six months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown considerable interest in foreign affairs. A multimedia outfit with a strong foreign affairs team, would raise Indian prestige enormously. And this, surely is the right time to start.
Caliphate opposed to Shia apostasy and, eventually to Sunni monarchies
The expanding Shia-Sunni conflict in the Muslim world is exposing vast gaps in popular understanding of the schism. For example when Zaine El Abedine Ben Ali, the Tunisian strongman was ousted, people thought a Shia dictator had fallen. From this they extrapolated that the Arab Spring was an anti-Shia plot.
Why is the world in grip of jehadist menace?
On the Muslim world’s centre stage, the Nayef-Brzezinski duet roped in Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq for a mass production of Mujahideen in Afghanistan. These would fight the Soviets and be a bulwark against Shia Iran. Zia would help Arabize Pakistani Islam and wrench it from India’s composite culture.
Iraq Hostage Crisis: Diplomacy and INS Vikramaditya
The present hostage crisis, therefore should be accordingly dealt with. One cannot intervene in a sovereign state without invitation, as it has long-term consequences, specially in context of West Asia where long term energy imperatives are involved. Nevertheless, a mix of diplomacy backed by demonstration of military muscle (not intervention) can achieve the desired results. What good is INS Vikrmaditya for, if it cannot support Indian diplomacy at this critical period and that too in the region.
India’s diversity is engineered
For those who watched the oath taking ceremony in the Lok Sabha recently, there was some great learning to ponder. The lesson questions the very basis of politics of linguistic chauvinism, and in the larger perspective the hackneyed ‘unity in diversity’ argument. If one were to intently hear the oath uttered by different Members, there was no feeling of any primal difference in Hindi, Bengali, Gurumukhi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Maithli, and the mother of all these languages Sanskrit. There were members, who opted for the Urdu language, which to the ears and sensibilities was nothing but Hindi. Urdu language acquires sectarian and communal colours only when some people insist on Arabic script as the medium of its propagation.
Was Pakistan behind Godhra attack?
The scorching of passengers in railway compartments at Godhra railway station on 27 February 2002 and the riots that the carnage triggered has so far been analysed only through the communal and political prisms. All commissions and inquiries have been confined to ‘immediate causes’. Security analysts were amiss in ignoring the external machinations responsible for the carnage. The prevailing geopolitical environment was hardly factored in appraisal of the situation. The security discourse in this country has still not sensitized itself to the entire realm of proxy war, the type of war in which Pakistan has few equals.
Part of the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report on the India-China war of 1962
A section of the confidential Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, which has been lying with the Defence Ministry for over 50 years now, has now been put online by Australian journalist Neville Maxwell. The report was a result of the government inquiry into the humiliating defeat at the hands of China in the 1962 border war. You can read the report here.