Articles

Sohrabuddin case

Beware of half truths — because you may be holding the wrong half. After having seen and read so much about the Sohrabuddin episode in the last five years, one might believe one knows it all. Sohrabuddin is now cast as an innocent victim of police excess.

“When Jammu and Kashmir was blockaded a couple of years ago the matter kept the Government and media preoccupied for months. Manipur has been blockaded for at least a month and a half, without any respite-people are starving, there are no medicines-but there has been no concern shown by either.

Pakistan’s military leadership may consider Havana statement a dividend for the terror attacks in India

Hyderabad blasts were waiting to happen; why they weren’t prevented is a longer story of deliberate diversion.

For nations, it matters what happens to them; but the course of their history is often determined less by what happened and more by how they reacted. What is happening to India on the terrorist front is bad, but what is worse is the way we are reacting to it.

THE ENEMIES, both within and without, use bullets and bombs, not to kill people. They are collateral damages. The real objective is to subdue the enemy by breaking its will and dictating its terms of peace.

So far as emigrants go, according to the governor of Assam, 6,000 enter the state everyday. ULFA did start in 1979 as a violent movement to drive away foreigners who threatened their lands, jobs, culture, language and political voice.

But that ULFA has died. In its new incarnation it is a handmaid of those who it had vowed to fight to the finish.

A small island of shopkeepers dominated the largest part of the world for the longest period with Genghis Khan, the brute, being a distant runner-up. The two, separated by several centuries, had nothing in common except their genius for innovation.

Instead of an episodic response, we need stronger laws and proactive intelligence backed by political will

The country’s internal security environment, which suffered steady deterioration during UPA’s earlier five-year rule, continues to remain a cause of serious concern. Now that the government is no more fettered by pulls and pressures of coalition partners, which its apologists claimed prevented it from decisive actions in the past, it is regrettable that the situation is showing no signs of abatement.

Whatever the mode of engagement — war or diplomacy — nations interact to maximise their national interest. In adverse conditions, like defeat in war, they work to minimise their losses. The icing of ideology, morality, justice, global and human interest is often just trappings added to lend legitimacy and acceptability to what they mostly lack. The degree of success in furthering one’s national interests is determined by a nation’s comprehensive state power and the will and vision of its leadership to exercise it.

Nirupama Rao with Pakistani Foreign Secretary

Government’s recent decision to seek talks with Pakistan, contrary to its own commitment to the nation that it will engage in this exercise only if the latter provides satisfaction in bringing to book the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, is a counterproductive option with the following negative implications