Home & Away

India built the Zaranj-Delaram road connecting Afghanistan to Iran in 2008. Four years later, India is being courted to replicate the successful project to connect Afghanistan to its other Central Asian neighbours Turkmenistan, Tajikistan etc. India is returning to centerstage in Afghanistan. Two years after being relegated to the sidelines, India is clawing her way back to relevance. As the US prepares to draw down in Afghanistan, India is emerging as Afghanistan’s key ally. The tide turned decisively with the first trilateral meeting between Afghanistan, India and US in New York last week. Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister led the proceedings. For the first time, Indian, US and Afghan officials sat together to discuss Afghanistan’s future. The meetings, held at the Afghan mission in NY, were totally under the radar and didn’t attract the attention of Pakistan, which is very wary of the trilateral arrangement. In an unpublicised statement which laid out the co...

Julia Gillard is a woman with that rare attribute, “spunk”, and its not because she attacked sexism with courage and conviction. Or because she responded with the perfect riposte after a shoe malfunction. Its because the Australian prime minister, here this week on a state visit, has assiduously courted India with not a lot to show for it yet, and come back for more. And that’s why India needs to grow up and look at Australia differently. It needed courage to overturn decades of non-proliferation theology to agree to uranium sales to India, which she did last December. Her predecessor, the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd, would not. This week Australia and India agreed to start negotiations on a nuclear agreement with safeguards and other bells and whistles. It will be a long time before India actually buys the yellowcake, but it removed the political mistrust that had persisted. Gillard need not have visited __ its actually the turn of the Indian prime minister to go there __ but s...

Manmohan Singh bemoans its absence. In the halcyon days of his first term, Singh, attempting to change the strategic outlook of this giant nation, was often heard complaining plaintively, “we must develop a strategic culture in this country.” The prime minister joins a large number of Indian intellectuals who decry our apparent lack of ability to plot out India’s “strategic thought” or even plan a “grand strategy”. To a casual observer, India’s actions __ or lack thereof __ appear to be often a result of who the government spoke to last, or based on adhoc considerations that undermine India’s interests. What makes this outlook interesting is that foreign scholars or analysts writing about India, seem equally clear that India does have a vibrant strategic culture. Many of us would agree with George Tanham who wrote in his seminal RAND study on Indian strategic thought __  “(India) is an extraordinarily complex and diverse society, and Indian elites show little evidence of hav...