Tag Archives: Line of Control

The current calm in tensions between both the neighbors at this point in time provides an opportunity for soul searching for both India and Pakistan. India must ask the question why Kashmiris feel so deeply alienated and are ready to die. Pakistan must ask the question whether the militants allegedly operating from its soil have become an albatross around its neck. Pakistan also needs to ask how these militants and proscribed groups are undermining the Kashmiris’ just cause.

India needs subtle strategies to contain and counter “threats” from Pakistan. The jingoistic and threatening rhetoric in a section of Indian media in response to each “provocation” from Pakistan does India no good. India’s power ought to be felt by its adversaries and not flaunted.

For many in her hometown of Swat and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the significance of a Pashtun girl wining the Nobel is clear. To them it is an historic event from which Malala Yousafzai has emerged, perhaps somewhat incongruously, as mythical a figure as Malalai of Maiwand, the Pashtun folk hero who rallied Pashtun fighters against the British troops during the second Anglo-Afghan War.

Two questions have increasingly taken centre-stage in discussions about what might happen in Afghanistan after United States withdrawal in 2014. One, if it will become a proxy battlefield for India and Pakistan, the two big South Asian rivals, and two, if anything can be done to prevent this. William Dalrymple, for instance, wrote in an essay for Brookings Institution this …

  Media in India and Pakistan is carefully welcoming the September 29 meeting between Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Dr Manmohan Singh in New York. The guarded optimism in newspaper editorials is touching the limits of skepticism. A review of the editorials of leading dailies of the two countries reveals some identical views on the summit outcome. Newspapers on either …