2019

by Apratim Mukarji
Every commentator on Afghanistan goes back to the year 1989, even though they are talking about today’s developments. That year, with the Soviet occupation Army driven out of Afghanistan and the hapless country and its people abandoned to the unfolding depredations of tribal-enmity-driven mujahideen militias at each other’s throat for the spoils of power, the Americans withdrew to the safety of their far-away home. This sordid history is now about to be repeated in the (…)

No Indian Prime Minister would ever have visited the host country of an international summit to which he was invited within the week twice—one to attend the conference and a previous one just four days before to ensure the event wouldn’t embarrass him. That was what PM Modi did during the recent G-7 summit at Biarritz, France, apprehending that the crisis in J&K might figure for discussion at the exclusive gathering of the leaders of the seven industrial countries.
The situation around (…)

by Mahendra Ved
Cutting through the maze of triumphal justification and angry opposition to the structural, legal, constitutional and political changes pertaining to Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, there is no doubt that it has garnered widespread support in the rest of India.
Kashmir has shaped independent India’s troubled psyche and any firm resolution would, and has, caught the popular imagination. This is akin to the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government’s nuclear tests, but closer to the (…)

Recently there was disturbing news that the seven accused in rioting which led to the lynching of Subodh Kumar Singh in Buland-shahr—the policeman who was also investi-gating Mohammad Akhlaq’s lynching—were out on bail and received a hero’s reception.
The accused were garlanded and also had a tumultuous party hosted in their honour, the video of which is doing the rounds on social media. Earlier, when Shambhu Singh Raigar had killed a Muslim marble trader in Rajasthan and filmed the (…)

by M.P. Nathanael
Perhaps for the first time in the history of election campaigning in our country, the success of the security forces in various operations against terrorists and even Pakistani soldiers and airmen across the borders was exploited to the hilt to garner the votes of the citizens. The sacrifices of our men in the paramilitary as well as the Defence Services were ostensibly drummed up to promote the courage and decisiveness of the political masters to over-shadow their (…)

MUSINGS
Why were several prominent parliamen-tarians from the Opposition political parties denied entry into the Kashmir Valley? So that they don’t get to hear the human cries, those appeals to be set free from the caged settings, from the clampdown, from the ongoing barbarity unleashed on the hapless residents of the Valley... Together with that, these parliame-ntarians don’t even get to know the whereabouts of their political colleagues in the Valley, who have been formally arrested or (…)

MEDIA
A major television channel owned by the country’s second biggest news conglomerate has announced it is launching a campaign to expose foreign agencies working in India, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Al Jazeera for their reporting of the situation in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley in the after-math of the reading down of Article 370 and the end of Article 35A. The foreign TV channels, the anchor said, were factually wrong, misleading, had an agenda, and were (…)

Addressing the National Urban Development Summit in Gurgaon recently, Minister of State Rao Inderjit Singh lamented that China has been able to grow faster than India, which is “handicapped” being a “democracy”.
If the recent events in Hong Kong and Kashmir are anything to go by, the Minister’s claims are patently not true.
Just as the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed a “special status” in India, Hong Kong has formally been a part of China, but with special provisions to its (…)

by Mustafa Khan
To protect democracy in India it is necessary to prepare for a long drawn out war of which the context of 2019 election in West Bengal is an example of a battle only. However the NCP leader got a wrong import of it as if it requires martial training and military preparation as the RSS did in the tribal invasion in Kashmir in 1948. Sharad Pawar also wants training cadres like the RSS to fight elections. Wielding batons and practicing guns as it was the instance in BJP leader (…)

by B. Vivekanandan
As the Kashmir issue has been made a flash-point of India-Pakistan relationship, which has stimulated a voluntary offer from the US President Donald Trump to become a mediator of it, and in the context of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s threat that Pakistan would go to any extent for Kashmir, including raising the issue in the UN General Assembly and other international fora, it is imperative to go back to the basics of the Kashmir issue to understand it in the correct (…)