The fall of Panjshir after the Pakistan Army’s midnight operation with choppers and drones marks a sad turn in the resistance movement in Afghanistan. In the absence of any material or moral support from world powers, the Panjshiri resistance forces could not hold on to their capital. Still, they vowed to continue their fight against […]
The Taliban may appear powerful today but their greatest weakness is that the Afghans, including a majority of Pashtuns, are not with them. They remember the cruel Taliban rule in 1996-2001 when women were subjected to inhuman atrocities, the country’s cultural heritage like the Bamiyan Buddhas was destroyed, music was banned and political opponents and […]
Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University in the USA, is a recognized authority on authoritarian ideologies and their ability to undermine and nibble away at democracies. He has authored several books, the recent being a short educative essay titled “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”. In his book “The […]
Fascists are known for blatant distortion of history. Communists are one step ahead. They not only distort history with impunity but blame their opponents as fascists. Stalin blamed Jews as fascists. Brezhnev called the entire capitalist West as fascist. In India, the nationalists are fascists for them. Talking of distorting history, Stalin demanded that 1941 […]
Three major partitions happened in the world in the second half of the 1940s. Germany was partitioned into the Eastern and Western blocs in 1945, followed by India into Hindustan and Pakistan in 1947. Finally, Israel was created by partitioning Palestine in 1948. Germany’s partition was temporary. The Berlin Wall, constructed in the early 1960s […]
India needs to be wary of the new authoritarianism creeping across the world DISASTERS, NATURAL OR MANMADE, have consequences. A hundred years ago, a pandemic came riding on the devastation caused by World War I, leading to the destabilisation of the world order of the new nation-states. The Great Depression of the 1930s had added […]
Text of Shri Ram Madhav’s Address at a webinar organised by India Foundation in collaboration with Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, Embassy of India in Seoul; Department of Indian Studies, Busan University of Foreign Studies; and College of Buddhism, Dongguk University, Seoul on “India-Republic of Korea: Aspects of Public Diplomacy” on August 11, 2021 India’s proactive Ambassador […]
Several years ago, when we were initiating dialogue with the PDP to explore the possibility of forming a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir, I had the occasion to talk with a senior leader of that party. In response to my statement that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was keen on the progress and development of […]
Most of the important leaders have exhorted that the measure of a society’s progress can be gauged from the way it treats its women. Swami Vivekananda was pained looking at the discrimination women faced in India when “the Vedanta declares that one and the same conscious self is present in all beings”. Gandhi took serious […]
China now has teeth to fulfill its longstanding desire to reunify Taiwan Authoritarians have a common trait—legacy-seeking. The reunification of Taiwan is one such legacy successive leaders of China since Mao have been seeking. “If we can’t reunify China the right away, we will do it in a century; if not in a century, then […]
