India

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While the Middle East has a powerful claim on the world's attention (or at least Washington's), the world has no shortage of potentially explosive hotspots. Whether it's conflictin...(full article)

When two Swedish economists set out to examine whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist, they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to fin...(full article)

Fresh off a three-week standoff over their disputed border, the Line of Actual Control (LAC), China and India are taking steps to repair their relationship and possibly set it on...(full article)

Last year, suspected insurgents in Northeast India Manipur abducted three teenage boys. Despite a missing persons complaint and a police search, they were never found. In Mani...(full article)

The right to watch pornography is not an absolute freedom, as other infinitely more precious freedoms are not either. If denied pornography, Indian men will survive....(full article)

Most Recent Articles

India Must Not Bow to the Dragon - Kanwal Sibal, Daily Mail

The preparatory work for our minister's Beijing visit should have involved a comprehensive internal analysis of why the Ladakh face-off occurred and produced a brief for frank disc...

Does Upsetting China Matter? - Kerry Brown, CNN

Reports suggesting that India withdrew from a planned naval exercise with the United States last month out of fears it might upset Beijing are only the latest reason to grapple w...

Is Sharif's Win Really Good News for India? - Praveen Swami, Firstpost

For a decade, Prime Minister Singh worked towards a seamless South Asia, believing trade and people-to-people contact it will pave the way for a durable peace. The dream is a pleas...

China's Expanding 'Core Interests' Are a Threat - Times of India

Border incidents have happened hundreds of times and are bound to recur. While seeking a settlement through diplomacy, India's military preparedness has to be bolstered by the leve...

India and China Locked in Global Rivalry - Louise Watt, Associated Press

While the recent troop standoff in a remote Himalayan desert spotlights a long-running border dispute between China and India, the two emerging giants are engaged in a rivalry for ...

China and India's Dangerous Game - Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic

China and the United States have the world's most important bilateral relationship. But the runner-up is surely China and India. After all, the two countries have a combined popu...

China's Great India Folly - James Holmes, The Naval Diplomat

One hopes China has genuinely reconsidered picking a fight with India, a great power with which it shares a long land frontier. Beijing has created headaches aplenty for itself t...

The World's Most Dangerous Border - Ratner & Sullivan, Foreign Policy

The night before Beijing released its biennial defense white paper in mid-April, avowing that it would not "engage in military expansion," roughly 30 Chinese troops marched 12 mile...

China Embarrasses India in Standoff - R. Hariharan, Indian Defence Review

Merely by sending a platoon of their troops to camp 19 km (upgraded after 10 days from 10 km reported earlier) inside our territory on February 15 near Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) along ...

China's Borders Are Heating Up - Peter Lee, Asia Times

Two Chinese territorial disputes - one high in the Himalayas with India, the other with Japan involving similarly uninhabitable islands - indicate two different paths concerning As...

Shinzo Abe the Bold - C. Raja Mohan, The Indian Express

As Delhi watches Tokyo's outreach to Russia and the Middle East, one can only hope some of Abe's audacity will rub off on Manmohan Singh, who plans to visit Tokyo at the end of thi...

Could India and China Go to War? - Banyan

SO FAR it is a matter of a few military tents, a handful of shivering soldiers and a disagreement over a remote and never-demarcated line in the Himalayas. Yet a lengthening stand-...

Can Rahul Gandhi Run India? Can Anybody? - James Traub, FP

The India that we know today, the India not of somnambulant water buffaloes and clangorous temples and broken telephones, but of high-tech firms and social entrepreneurs and new ci...

China Pushes U.S., India Closer Together - Evan Montgomery, Diplomat

While there were many reasons for the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy to mend fences, perhaps the most important reason was the one that few offici...

Tensions Rising on China-India Border - Tao Duanfang, Economic Observer

On April 15th, India announced that an "intrusion" of around 50 Chinese military personnel had crossed onto the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh, and set up a te...

India-China Border Row a Potential Powder Keg - Manoj Joshi, The Hindu

2013 is not 1962 and the Indian media and politicians should not behave as though it was, by needlessly raising the decibel level and trying to push the government to adopt a hawki...

India Is Drowning in Excrement - Joanne Manaster, Scientific American

I have talked to many many people who have experienced India, I’ve read numerous books (fiction and non-fiction), and watched many documentaries, TV shows, and fictional movies a...

India's Rise Refutes International Economists - Kyle Smith, Forbes

The triumph of the great free-market liberalization that took place in India in 1991 is stunning, an advancement for human well-being that is one of the greatest stories ever tol...

Why China Is Moving on India's Borders - Pravin Sawhney, Times of India

All these moves have culminated in the present tent pitching by Chinese border guards near DBO as part of their grand strategy of 'strategic encirclement.' India, by underplaying t...

Delhi Can't Ignore China's Maritime Rise - C. Raja Mohan, Indian Express

As China's lone aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, gets ready to sail in blue waters this year, Asia and the world must come to terms with Beijing's emerging capabilities to project m...

Bangladesh's Quest for Justice - Shashi Tharoor, Project Syndicate

The sea of humanity besieging the Shahbag area in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, for the last two months, has had an unusual demand – unusual, at least, for the Indian subco...

China's Dangerous India-Pak Nuclear Game - Harsh Pant, Japan Times

The nonproliferation regime is in crisis with North Korea’s defiance and Iran’s continuation of its nuclear program despite opposition from the international community. Yet whi...

India Races to Space While Indians Starve - Lindsay Hughes, Australian

As their aspirations grow, India and China are reaching for the moon and beyond. Their space race is part of a jostling for regional influence and prestige as well as the technolog...

India-Pakistan: Business First - Manjeet Kripalani, The Diplomat

The road to reconciliation between India and Pakistan is likely to be a long one. But perhaps economic compulsions can overtake political ones....

India and Pakistan's Mandela - Rafia Zakaria, Philosophistan

Jinnah did not live, and Pakistan continues to battle the conundrums of unanswered questions left by the untimely departure of the first man with the plan. The Indian readers, who ...

World's Megacities Move East - Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox, New Geography

The fastest-growing megacities over the past decade have been primarily in the developing world. Karachi, Pakistan, has led the growth charge, with a remarkable 80% expansion in it...

Where Virginity Is for Sale in India - Joanna Sugden, India Real Time

In Koppal, an impoverished district in Karnataka, virginity is for sale. When girls dedicated in local temples under the illegal devadasi system hit puberty, their virginity is au...

Common Ground Between India and the NRA - Deccan Chronicle

The UN overwhelmingly passed the landmark Arms Trade Treaty earlier this week with the avowed intention of preventing the sale of conventional weapons to countries guilty of human ...

The West Is Fomenting Chaos in Asia - George Kerevan, The Scotsman

China's leaders -- even though many are technocrats educated in America's leading universities -- are just as much beholden to domestic opinion as President Obama. Washington and B...

The Most Dangerous Countries for Tourists - Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

The recent assaults in Brazil and India have raised questions about those countries' safety records. Here are the places where travelers should actually be wary....

The Woman Who Set Fire to India - Shoma Chaudhury, Newsweek

One horrible night, innocent victims, devastated families—and a country seething with rage and violence, stuck between feudal hierarchies and the modern economy....

How Powerful Dynasties Still Rule India - Patrick de Jacquelot, Les Echos

In the private sector as in politics, a small group of influential dynasties still rule the country. Being on the outside, makes a play on power virtually impossible....

What Naipaul Got Right & Wrong About India - Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg

In 1990, Naipaul was perfectly placed to describe the magnitude and vitality of India’s experiment with democracy, if not foresee the paradoxical result of its success: fragmenta...

Pipeline Politics in South Asia Getting Murkier - Harsh Pant, Japan Times

India's interests in the relationship with Iran have never been strictly commercial. After Pakistan and Iran signed their pipeline deal in 2009, India indicated that it was willing...

BRICS Summits Are So Last Decade - Ruchir Sharma, Times of India

One or two of the BRICS may continue to grow rapidly, but it is unlikely that they all will. New stars will replace the fallen. In a tough global economy, each nation needs to be u...

BRIC by Brick - The Hindu

Apart from doing the best on the growth rate front, China is the only BRICS country with a huge current account surplus and has accumulated a massive amount of foreign exchange res...

Why India Is a Global Model - Dipankar Gupta, Times of India

It is not the politest thing to do, but it has to be done. We need to drop Brics, or at least not take it too seriously, and step out on our own. Brazil, Russia, China and South Af...

BRICS Expose the West's Hypocrisy - William Pesek, Bloomberg

The richest nations can stew about this turn of events, as those on the periphery of the world economic system start seeing themselves as the core. Or developed countries can look ...

Singh and Xi: A Political Mismatch? - C. Raja Mohan, The Indian Express

India media is always tempted to hype up the brief encounters between Indian prime ministers and leaders of other countries in multilateral conferences in distant lands. Such meeti...

Assad's Absurd Appeal to BRICS - The National

The Syrian dictator's letter did not explain how tens of thousands of dead civilians, women and children among them, qualify as agents of terrorism. And the idea of Brazil or South...

India's Politics of Cynicism - Hartosh Singh Bal, New York Times

I was talking last week to a senior official from the Congress Party in one of the capital’s colonial bungalows that are a much-envied perk of power when news arrived that ...

Why India Isn't (Yet) a Great Power - The Economist

NOBODY doubts that China has joined the ranks of the great powers: the idea of a G2 with America is mooted, albeit prematurely. India is often spoken of in the same breath as China...

Why India Lets Men Rape Their Wives - Preetika Rana, India Real Time

Under Indian law, marital rape is not a crime. This places India in the company of a handful of countries, including China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia....

BRICS Nothing But a Chinese Front Group - Harsh Pant, Yale Global

The fascination with BRICS is partly an offshoot of the discussion on the emerging so-called post-American world. Many commentators argue multipolarity is likely to be the norm. Ye...

Is India Safe for Foreign Women? - Margherita Stancati, India Real Time

A friend recently got in touch with me for travel advice on India. She is thinking of spending a few weeks here in the summer and wanted tips on must-sees and must-avoids. She also...

Mumbai's Evolving Urban Form

The continuing dispersion of international metropolitan areas is illustrated by recently released 2011 Census of India preliminary data for the Mumbai "larger" metropolitan area...

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