Despite the development of science and technology, the magnitude of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunami, tornado, storms, floods and drought does not seem to have taken any respite. All the nations of the world continue to be plagued by su
After a keenly contested Presidential election, the result of which came under a serious cloud when Dr Ashraf Ghani Ahmedzai surprised the odds-on favourite Dr Abdullah Abdullah by crossing the half-way mark, it looked as though the all-important pol
The past three months since the Narendra Modi-led NDA government assumed office in India have been momentous in terms of defining, inter alia, a new era of Indo-Nepal relations. The pace at which events have unfolded has been unprecedented. Starting
A theatre of the absurd is on display in Islamabad with the street-fighters of Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri breaching the barricades to storm the Parliament and lay siege to the Prime Minister’s House. The denouement of this clear collapse of state
The Pakistan High Commissioner (HC) should not have met the Hurriyat leaders when he was asked by the Indian Foreign Secretary not to do so. Diplomatic norms obliged him to take this request communicated at such high level seriously and failure to do
The decision to call off the scheduled Foreign Secretary level talks with Pakistan appears to have taken many by surprise, and left many in India quite unhappy. They seem to be unable to understand that a meeting between the Pakistan High Commissione
A few months before the 1999 military coup, a monthly newsmagazine in Pakistan carried a cover story titled ‘Creeping Coup’. In his second stint as Prime Minister from 1996-99, Nawaz Sharif had started involving the military in all sorts of thing
Introduction Termed as a “goodwill visit”, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj led her first international visit to Bangladesh on 25 June accompanied by Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh and other senior officials. The visit marked th
The worst fears about Afghanistan appear to be coming true. For more than a year now, there was a virtual consensus, not just in the international community but also within Afghanistan, that the future of the country was critically dependent on a cre
Introduction Bangladesh was born in 1971 premised on a secular and democratic ethos as paragraph 2 of the preamble of the first constitution of Bangladesh which was adopted on November 4, 1972 accepted ‘nationalism’, ‘socialism’, �