Sunday Posts

China and India stepped back from the brink, at least for the moment. But the flare-up in June - and indeed the ongoing tensions - has strained relationships and nudged India closer to the United States. But, not many people in India would readily buy the argument that India should become a member of the Quad (a grouping of United States, Japan, India and Australia for the control of Indo-Pacific) to face-off China. For them, it really means Indian lives and India's prosperity are put in the line for containing China. Despite all the public outrage at China's misbehaviour and even with all the forthcoming bollywood fare trashing China, that would be a hard sell in India. Indian leaders, despite their almost pagan love for spectacles, are realists. Even though they sell to the public India's impending great power status, they are well aware of the constraints that India's divided polity, widespread poverty and lack of productive manpower impose. For all the transformativ...

War and geopolitics are not my focus, invested as I am in the history of universities and the role of intellectuals in society. But a combination of factors, the recent India-Pakistan skirmish, the Indian government's revisionist and critical stance on Nehru and my own interest in historical interactions between India and China, have led me to look closely on the Sino-Indian war of 1962. This is very much a work in progress, as I have compiled a reading list and started working through it, but one thing is clear to me right at this initial stage: The history of war has huge contemporary significance, particularly for India, and this should indeed be studied better there.  For example, this war weakened Nehru politically at home and in the world stage: There is no denying the truth in Mountbatten's comment that had Nehru died in 1958, he would have possibly gone down in history as one of the greatest statesmen ever. The war also changed, I shall argue, India's position...

It seems that the Chinese economy is coming to a screeching halt! If the latest growth figures indicate a trend, it seems that all that public debt/investment-fuelled growth on steroids that China enjoyed for over three decades is now due for a payback time, and there is little to show for it. Now, one has to pronounce judgements on this with caution. The collapse of China has been predicted and proved decisively wrong, before. China is not a fragile twentieth-century variety of a nation, as some in Eastern Europe were, but millennia-old civilization with a distinctive culture and polity: It is unlikely to wither away for the lack of growth. Besides, it is fair to assume that the Chinese leadership were long preparing for such a possibility. China had, over the last two decades at least, a curse of the surplus - it was hoarding up US Dollars as it did not know what to do with the huge trade imbalance in its favour - and it has been steadily exporting that surplus in the for...

Is Donald Trump mad? That's the question that popped out in my mind as I engaged with the very unlikely New York Times piece When The Leader of the Free World is an Ugly American ,which argues that Trump's Foreign Policy approach is consistent - contrary to the claims made by the Foreign Policy establishment in America and elsewhere - with the longstanding American approach that put the American national interest above everything else. It is powerfully argued, and maintains that the Liberal commentators may be getting fooled by their own rhetoric of globalism. Can this indeed be right that there is method in Trump's madness, or what is portrayed as madness? Indeed, it is rather easy to convince myself that Trump is mad if I look at Facebook. A number of Facebook posts confirm a number of psychologists said so. Indeed, we are at a time of implosion of Facebook itself, proving that it may be just showing you what you already believe. So, more you click on posts t...