India’s commitment to ‘All Alignment’ has added credibility to the view that the Quad has no relation to security. This is in contrast to AUKUS, which is entirely about security, and which it would be beneficial to the Quad members to integrate into a more formalised and capable alliance. There has been a swift …
China’s Tech Crackdown: Why Now?
China’s recent crackdown on its tech giants brings to fore memories of Chen Yun’s ‘bird in a cage’ proposition from the years post the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The debate on whether China pursues socialism with Chinese characteristics or whether it is appropriate to call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics has been a long one …
Xi recreating 1930s Europe, this time in Asia
In the praxis of Xi Jinping Thought, he is the sun of the solar system represented by the CCP. The party is itself the sun in the solar system of national life in the PRC, while the geopolitical focus of Xi is to make the country he leads the sun around which all other major …
The Henan Floods 2021 and China’s Narrative Creation
Disasters have had a long tumultuous relationship with China, be they natural or humanmade. Of late the line between natural and humanmade disasters has been blurring with examples ranging from the outbreak of Coronavirus in 2019 which still plagues the world; to the floods in Henan this year. In all these cases, because of the …
Afghanistan Crisis Needs Unified Response from Diverse Powers
It was a French philosopher who wrote that “we are never contemporaneous with the present”. The past lingers, even the distant past lingers in the frame, while the present is being considered. When tectonic changes take place in geopolitical plates that affect major changes, if policymakers allow conclusions valid in the past to affect the …
Widen the Elbow-Room with the North East
If there is a veritable Achilles Heel in India then it is truly the 22 Km long Siliguri corridor that connects the North East to the rest of India. In his book Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, John W. Garver writes thus: The Chumbi Valley points south towards the Siliguri corridor. The …
Envisaging India and EU Partnership in the Indo-Pacific
The India-EU Leaders’ Meeting held on May 8, 2021 marked a historic development in India’s relationship with the European Union (EU). The developments represent a significant corrective to New Delhi’s strategic dogma and the strategic shift of the EU towards the Indo-Pacific region. The Bi-polar Cold War dynamics and the North-South divide had prevented Delhi …
Questions on Covid-19: What China Needs to Answer
Since last year I have been writing that the origin of the Chinese Virus was from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). It is not a zoonotic transmission from bats to humans in the Wild Life Market at Wuhan – a hypothesis peddled by China. Firstly, virologists need to study the method of such …
France’s Counterterrorism Strategy and Cooperation with India
Introduction India and France have maintained close and friendly relations till date. Apart from the traditional fields of cooperation such as defence, India and France are increasingly engaged in newer areas of cooperation such as counterterrorism, climate change, sustainable development, nuclear energy, and now COVID-19 response, among others. With both the countries supporting a …
India and Global Governance: Lessons from the International COVID-19 Response
For a world order firmly founded on sovereignty of individual states, big and small, the term “global governance” is an idealistic dream at best or simply a misnomer. It is a shadow global government, which seeks to be an international process of consensus building without any erosion of sovereignty of the individual states. The surrender …