With the recent spike in terrorist activities in Kashmir, it looks like the ‘good times’ ushered by the abrogation of Article 370 are over. It was an optimistic three-year phase that speculated about all that was bright in the future of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh: people empowerment, equity and fairness, comprehensive development, a three-tier system […]

The Afghanistan Factor Afghanistan stands to be one of the biggest influences in the rise of Islamism in Central Asia. The Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979, is the other one. But while Iran remains an inspiration mostly among the Tajik people who are the only non-Turkic ethnic group in the region, the Afghan jihad […]

  The three characteristics that make Fergana stand out are that this patch is where the borders of Tajikistan Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan meet (the valley spreads in all three countries); this is the most populated area in central Asia; and this valley has a historic Islamist character – Turko-Uzbeg invader Babur was from Fergana, as […]

How is the world responding to China’s newly unleashed Wolf Warrior diplomacy? To be honest, the West, which is just about waking up to this phenomenon now has so far been ‘shocked’ or ‘surprised’, but to the smaller and weaker neighbours of China, this nature of projection has resulted in a certain amount of stress […]

This final week of May 2022 is quite significant. There is a WEF summit going on in Davos, while Tokyo just witnessed the formation of a new economic bloc that has 12 countries – one that is being called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework or IPEC. This summit was held on May 23 and was attended […]

The conventional thinking among the Indian population, those that are aware of the behemoth named CPEC, is that it is China’s way of encircling India by debt-trapping Pakistan into a project that Pakistan does not have the financial capacity to absorb. And they would be partially correct in assuming so. An infrastructural project of that […]

After turning barely a couple of pages under its new leadership, Afghanistan is in the news again. This time there brews trouble across several sectors. On April 18, a barrage of rockets were fired into Uzbekistan. While the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISKP) claimed responsibility for that, and through their official news agency Amaq […]

  Is Russia in trouble? It is. In a manner of speaking, Vladimir Putin, till the start of 2022 had about him all the signs of a master strategist and a ruthlessly efficient man – a leader that had clear portions of the kind of boldness that China lacked, or the intelligence that the West […]

  There was a social media post made sometime during the onset of the Russian attack on Ukraine that went largely unnoticed. It provided an opinion about how sanctions would not hurt the Russians much because of the way the Russian economy is skewed – their foreign reserves and resilience etc. Social media and the […]

The recent developments in Afghanistan present a pressing question to the Indian establishment: How far, if we do, can we trust the US administration? There has been a drastic shift of stance from Trump to Biden in a fashion that looks like it predicates on the “woke” ideology of the constituents that elected the key […]