Global affairs

Global affairs

Thank You, Donald Trump! (And you too, Fox News)

Today, Americans are terrified of a pandemic virus whose infection rate has spiked up again. With just four percent of the world’s population, the US already has a quarter of the world’s Covid-19 deaths.

4y ago

Pompeo-Espar visit to India: China and beyond

China loomed large over the in-person visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark T Esper to New Delhi on October 26-27.

4y ago

Racism in America: Police Chokehold is Not the Issue

The American project was founded on rank hypocrisies. On the one hand, President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the stirring words in the Declaration of Independence that upheld “these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”, did not free his own slaves (not even Sally Hemings, who bore him six children).

4y ago

Trump is Not Down Yet

Think about this, almost half of Americans thinks he’s handling this pandemic swimmingly according to a recent CNN poll that puts him closer to 45 percent.

5y ago

Covid-19 In India: Road ahead for the world’s largest quarantine

“Extraordinary times require extraordinary solutions”—that is how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi summed up the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic during a video conference on March 30 with the heads of all of India’s embassies and high commissions across the globe.

5y ago

West First policies expose myths

As the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic shifts from China to the developed West, all too many rich countries are acting selfishly, invoking the “national interest”, by banning exports of vital medical supplies.

5y ago

Biden, Sanders, or Trump: US policy towards the Gulf will change regardless

The fight in this week’s Democratic primaries may have been about who confronts Donald J Trump in November’s US presidential election, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden.

5y ago

Iran and the USA don’t have to be enemies

The contradict-ion couldn’t be more striking.

5y ago

A risky gamble

An official Turkish visit to the troubled northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang to assess reports of a brutal crackdown on the region’s Turkic Muslims could shape Turkey’s challenge to conservative Gulf

5y ago

Modi’s budget for 2019-20: ‘Gaon, garib and kisan’

Any government in an elected parliamentary democracy invariably seeks to strike a balance in its annual budget between the imperatives of politics and the pressing needs of the economy.

5y ago

After the Hong Kong protests, what next?

The old order is broken. No less than Russian President Putin has declared the Neoliberal order “obsolete”.

5y ago

Kushner’s $50-billion irony of the century

Jared Kushner, the US president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, recently unveiled in Manama an economic proposal to settle the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict. He billed it as the “opportunity of the century”.

5y ago

The contagion effect of NRC in Nagaland

When the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam began two years ago, it was expected to have a contagion effect in the rest of northeast India where identity politics has always been pronounced. The first sign of that has come in the public domain with the government in Assam’s next-door neighbour, Nagaland, having announced a move to draw up a digital database of all indigenous inhabitants of the state.

5y ago

Power play in the Indian Ocean

Sri Lanka and Maldives, by their mere locations, are of geostrategic significance in relation to east-west sea trade to and from South Asia. While Sri Lanka lies close to India’s south-east, Maldives is located 400km south-west of India. The latter has 26 atolls and over 1,000 islands covering a huge maritime area stretching 750km from north to south. They are significant for China, India and US, who are all jostling for strategic positions in the Indian Ocean.

5y ago

Trade war dominates G20 Summit

The 14th summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies was held at the International Exhibition Center,

5y ago

Morsi’s end perhaps lay in his beginning

On June 17, 2019, Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president, died inside a glass cage, in an Egyptian courtroom, during the course of an espionage trial. The 67-year-old former president apparently suffered for a full 20 minutes before

5y ago

India-US tariff tiff goes beyond trade

It has finally happened. The trade conflict between India and the United States has broken out as New Delhi ended its almost year-long wait for a negotiated settlement and came up with a retaliatory step imposing higher tariffs on import of 28 high-value agricultural items from the US with effect from June 16. It was in June last year that the US set off the conflict by hiking the duties on import of goods from India including steel and aluminium.

5y ago

Sudan’s lone journey towards democracy

On the morning of June 3, the world woke up to the news of a harrowing, bloody crackdown on peaceful civilian protesters on the streets of Khartoum by the RSF (Rapid Support Forces, a newfangled name of the notorious Janjaweed militia)—under the command of the infamous Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, the mastermind behind the genocide in Darfur. The fault of the protesters? Demand for a civilian transitional governing body, following the fall of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president of 30 years.

5y ago