PAKISTAN Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s announcement to retire on November 29 was a lead story in his country’s media. Some newspapers had bannered it. Opposition leader Syed Khurshid Shah welcomed the statement. In fact, there has been relief all…
INDIA’S interests would have been served better if Sardar Patel, in place of Jawaharlal Nehru, had been the country’s prime minister. This hypothetical possibility had been voiced by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as a poll campaign for the Bhartiya…
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has asked the Jamaat-Ulma Hind, representing the Muslims, to list four or five steps he should announce to win their confidence. The Jamaat has rightly…
Zubin Mehta, before leaving for Srinagar to conduct his orchestra, said: “There will be no violence.” German Ambassador Michael Steiner, who facilitated the concert, said at Srinagar that the world was watching Kashmir. Both observations have a ring of truth.…
IT was heartening to watch debates on poverty on national television channels, particularly the English ones. Elitist in approach, they seldom deliberate privations of the common man. Likewise, the English press is reluctant to carry news or write-ups on poverty…
IT is an open secret that the army in Pakistan is a peg or two higher than the civilian apparatus. But I saw chinks in its armoury when a commission report was leaked. That the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) could…
IN the penultimate year of nearly one-decade rule by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, I find the biggest casualty is the people’s confidence in political parties, particularly the ruling Congress. In fact, the public is so exasperated that it has…
IT was an emotional expression, that of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, after winning at the polls in Pakistan. By inviting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at his oath-taking ceremony he fulfilled the desire to strike real friendship with India. But it…
BELIEVE it or not, the Supreme Court gave the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) an opportunity to be independent in one of the matters before it, asking the agency why it was not independent. Yet the CBI failed to grab…
UNTIL recently, one refrain of a song in praise of slum dwellers was on most Indian lips. The refrain, Jai Ho-Jai Ho, had attracted so much attention that it fetched an Oscar Award. What the song conveyed was how those…
It is boisterous, even maverick. Pakistan thy name is uncertainty. Yet, it is strange that whenever it is posed with pressing problems before elections, the country has always surprisingly found solutions to them. This time it has chosen an interim…
WHEN Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav said last month that elections for parliament were possible in September, he was not indulging in sensationalism. He had been sounded out by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president M. Karunanidhi that he was…
STRANGE, there was no meeting or seminar to remember Bhagat Singh, who still lives in the memory of every Indian. I was still in a primary school when the revolutionary Bhagat Singh was hanged 82 years ago, to be precise…
ONE top Indian foreign ministry official asked me the other day: “What has people-to-people contact achieved so far?” It is difficult to quantify its achievement but it has sustained hope that the two countries will one day normalise their relations…
I believe even the views of Nagas’s Gandhi, AZ Phizo, had undergone a change some time before he died in London in 1990 — I was then India’s High Commissioner to the UK. Phizo told his old comrade-in-arms, Khodao-Yanthan, who…
The military is bad enough. But India’s intractability is worse. It is hurting those who want to have contacts with people across the border. Rubbed on the wrong side are the liberal elements: lawyers, doctors, artists and human rights activists.…
When Benazir Bhutto was in the wilderness, she convened at Karachi a meeting of the opposition leaders from South Asia. India was represented by former Prime Minister V P Singh. What emerged from the meeting was the resolve of opposition…
India celebrates January 26 as the Republic Day because it adopted on that day in 1950 the constitution, which converted the country into a republic. The republicisation of India is, by no means, an ordinary achievement. But the real significance…
It was never anybody’s case that New Delhi should not have released the three terrorists when it was the only option to save the lives of more than 150 passengers and the crew of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane. The…
Nothing changes in Guwahati. Neither the lazy scene nor the over pushed Assamese. Whenever I return to the city – I have been doing so for the last 40 years – I find the reecho of the same problems and…
It was no ordinary meeting. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was in the chair, flanked by Home Minister L K Advani and Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. The National Committee for the 50th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s martyrdom…
The round of accusations and counter-accusations is more or less over. Now is the time to determine the truth. Let us wear wigs and act as judges. The case before us is that of Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat’s dismissal from the…
OFFICIAL business in Parliament is punctuated every Friday, after Question Hour, with private business. On that day, the members, selected through a ballot, either pilot a bill or a resolution they fancy. When placed before the house, the bill or…
THE electoral campaign has been practically reduced to Atal Bihari Vajpayee versus Sonia Gandhi. In a way, it is between the Bhartiya Janta Party and Congress. True, regional parties are there, trying to hold their territory. But the real fight…
She would rather beg in the streets of Delhi than join politics. This was not the best of expression in defence of Sonia Gandhi. Still Mohammed Younus, who behaves like a member of the Nehru-Indira Gandhi family, used it when…
I have visited all the four southern states, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the last few days. There is no dramatic turn of event. No person of any consequence has left Congress or joined the Bhartiya Janata…
The split of Janata Dal once again underlines the new reality of Indian politics: anti-centralism. Whatever its nomenclature, Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal is a regional party confined to Bihar. New Delhi seems to understand the message it gives.…
