IDR Blog
Maqbool Bhat: Pakistan’s perfidy and a lost cause
Maqbool Bhat a resident of Trehgam in Kupwara District of Kashmir was hanged to death in Tihar Jail on 11 Feb 1984 on charges of committing a double murder. Bhat entered the political arena of Kashmir with an ideology of Jammu and Kashmir existing as an independent state. To further his political agenda he founded the Jammu Kashmir Liberation...
Boundary of division and contention: Pashtun psyche must be addressed
A border that was a product colonial jealousy and insecurity, the Durand Line divided what can be claimed as one of the world’s largest ethnic tribes, the Pashtuns, into two separate nation-states, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they compete for political prominence today. In the late 1880s, the Amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, started...
Tempering Saudi-Iran rivalry and the role of Pakistan
The ongoing crisis in the Middle East has got more complex with the revival of Saudi-Iran tensions. While tensions have simmered between these two nations for long, what caused their lingering enmity to snowball into a face off were Iran’s alleged support to Syria’s Bashar al Assad regime, Saudi airstrikes on Houthi rebels in...
Is it necessary to talk to Pakistan?
The conventional wisdom is that India must keep talking to Pakistan even if there are terrorist outrages by the supposedly non-state actors operating from the sovereign precincts of Pakistan. The believed-to-be ‘hardliner’ Narendra Modi, too, has accepted this line although he said before the last general election that a dialogue cannot...
Recalling the 1st International Fleet Review: When PM Vajpayee's leadership stood out
Until the turn of the century, a Fleet Review by the President of India had always been deemed as a local affair, meant to be conducted in-house by the Indian Navy (IN). Even though IN warships had participated in various International Fleet Reviews in other countries, the idea of India conducting such an international event had never...