Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a proposed grouping that is centered around ten members of ASEAN and includes the format of ASEAN +6, which includes China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. ASEAN already has
Vice President Joe Biden was in India for four days in July, visiting Delhi and Mumbai. The visit got less than the usual level of media exposure than high-level visits from the US normally attract. This was effectively the second visit at this level
The recommencement of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis on 29 July 2013 was long overdue and marked the culmination of six rounds of shuttle diplomacy in the region over the past six months by John Kerry, US Secretary of State holding mul
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, readers of a nationalist newspaper, Sovetskaya Rossiya [Soviet Russia] were exposed to a full-page article by one Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacher at the Leningrad Technology Institute. The article appeared in
In a development that could very well upset India’s geo-strategic apple cart, China is making deft and vigorous moves to woo Iran to accept its offer of US$80-million to upgrade the Chabahar port located on the coast of Gulf of Oman, off the Strait
The dominant impulse of India’s Look East Policy (LEP) that was launched in 1992 was economic and cultural, the objective being to reintegrate India economically and culturally with our civilisational neighbours of South East (SE) Asia. In December
On July 17, 2013, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) finally approved the army’s proposal for raising a Strike Corps for the mountains. Though the approval came after considerable delay, it is a pragmatic move that will send an appropriate mes
Space exploration, once a preserve of the advanced industrialized countries, is no more being viewed as an area of esoteric research involving a huge investment and complex technological systems. Indeed, space technology has now become an indispensab
Doubts persist both in India and the United States on the substance of their strategic partnership. High-sounding declarations about the partnership being one of the defining ones of the 21st century, or one between “natural allies,” have not era
China constitutes by far our most difficult diplomatic challenge as its rise impacts us directly in view of its territorial claims on us, the unsettled Tibetan situation, the potential impact of China’s upstream river projects, its “more precious