|
|
|
:: India Perspectives |
For a change, let's listen to him
I was just six years old when I had the first 'darshan' of Mahatma Gandhi. I cannot really say that I talked to him, but it was a rare and unique experience. I belong to Nagpur and Gandhiji's Sabarmati Ashram was just 80 km from there. Gandhiji used to travel by train in a third class compartment. That day my mother sent me and my cousin to the railway station to receive my uncle. The train was coming from Mumbai via Nagpur to Howrah.
'Why not India (to mediate with LTTE)? I trust neighbours, if they are ready. I think they know LTTE's mentality'
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa walks the talk with Shekhar Gupta.
* My guest this week, in Colombo's presidential palace, is one of the most unassuming men to become a head of state. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, welcome to Walk the Talk. A wonderful setting, in the shade of a banyan tree that's nearly 200 years old.
Let's Get Real
When CIA and MI6 operatives descended on Tripoli, Libya, on December 12, 2003 they were astonished at the amount of documentation they recovered on Pakistan's clandestine nuclear assistance to Colonel Gaddafi's regime. The documents recovered included designs of nuclear weapons and other data stuffed into a bag of Pakistani scientist A Q Khan's favourite tailors in Rawalpindi. The nuclear weapons designs were all Chinese.
Is it the end of the road for Musharraf?
Did Pakistan's embattled military President Pervez Musharraf get an equally blunt message from a visiting senior US official like the one he got from another American six years ago? That was the question being asked as US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher ended a two-day visit to Islamabad after what analysts see essentially as a balancing act between a general who has toed the US line and politicians seeking restoration of democracy.
An occasion for India to think big
The strategic community in India should rise above getting bogged down in contentious issues on the eve of the Prime Minister's visit to China.
Pakistani plot with an American twist: three dictators, three lost political generations
Of the four generals who robbed Pakistanis of democracy, Zia-ul-Haq was the most 'successful'. His hold on power was total and lasted nearly a decade. Musharraf is a close second, now in his ninth year. Ayub-who elevated himself to Field Marshall-is a not-very-distant third. Now can you spot a crucial similarity between them? Or rather, the one critical factor that enabled them to rule with an iron hand, destroying Pakistan's fledgling institutions and preventing others from coming up, and serially annihilating three successive generations of politicians?
|
|
