The Tokyo Olympic Games are over, and the Japanese people and government have heaved a sigh of relief that the spectacle passed without a major Covid-19 outbreak in the athletes’ village or another disaster. Here …
Articles by: "Shashi Tharoor"
It’s rare for a public opinion survey to shake established perceptions of a country in the way a recent Pew Research Center study of religion in India has done. The revelations in Pew’s comprehensive survey, …
Recent conciliatory moves by India’s nationalist government on its western flank have rightly aroused global interest. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s calculus appears relatively simple. Faced with continued Chinese aggression on India’s northern frontier and …
The late head of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, was fond of boasting that when Afghanistan’s history came to be written, it would record that the ISI, with the help …
It is humbling when a columnist must retract his words soon after penning them. Just two months ago, after India rushed millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines to over 60 countries, I praised the country’s …
A flurry of assaults on freedom of the press in recent months has raised troubling questions about the state of India’s democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India has long had a free and often …
As countries scramble to secure Covid-19 vaccines, ugly expressions like ‘vaccine race’ and ‘vaccine nationalism’ have entered the global lexicon. But, at a time when global cooperation in sharing vaccines is minimal, and the World …
Until recently, the last time Myanmar’s military supervised a general election whose outcome it didn’t like was back in 1990. On that occasion, a military junta refused to recognise the results, arrested the democratically elected …
Indian legislators woke up in the new year to two realisations. First, the annual winter session of parliament, from which they should just have been emerging, had not taken place at all. And, second, New …
As if the raging Covid-19 pandemic, a spluttering economy, record-high unemployment and massive farmers’ protests besieging the country’s capital weren’t enough, India’s ruling Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now incited a new crisis: a …
Beyond the major headlines surrounding the US presidential election, a little-noticed development is attracting attention both in India and among American campaign strategists. The rising influence of the Indian-American community in the United States—though barely …
On 24 October, the United Nations will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its founding in 1945, when the historic UN Charter entered into force. Sadly, the organisation will do so at a time when multilateralism …