On 5 August, the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fulfilled a founding ambition and repeated election promise: they ended Kashmir’s unique status in India’s federal structure by scrapping Article 370 of the Constitution. (more…)
Ramesh Thakur
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The US Killed INF, Russia Buried It, China Will Not Disinter It (Australian Outlook 8-8-19)
The end of the first disarmament agreement of the nuclear age will almost certainly be accompanied by American pressure on allies to host US intermediate range missiles. (more…)
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India’s Bad Bet in Kashmir (Project Syndicate 7-8-19)
The combination of surging Hindu nationalism in India, Kashmiri grievances against India’s government, Pakistan-backed jihadist groups waging hybrid warfare in Indian Kashmir, the new normal of India’s retaliatory military strikes on Pakistan, and growing nuclear stockpiles has turned Kashmir into a tinderbox. India’s decision to withdraw Kashmir’s special status threatens to be the spark that ignites it.
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The cup that slipped: Here are some cricket lessons my country of citizenship can teach my country of origin (Times of India 3-8-19)
As an Indian, after the semi-final loss in the Cricket World Cup, an old refrain from a 1948 song entered my head: ‘Ek dil ke tukde hazaar huye’ (one heart shattered into a thousand shards). As a Kiwi, after the final’s loss, came the second line: ‘Koyi yahan gira, koyi wahan gira’ (some fell hither, some thither). Yes, a match for the ages! But oh, aren’t the ICC geniuses who chose the worst possible option for deciding the championship in case of a tie certifiably stupid? England’s triumph – their first World Cup victory – had its beginnings immediately after their disastrous match against NZ in Wellington four years ago. They consciously modelled a future team around NZ’s spirit of adventure; chose captain, coach, team and tactics accordingly; and honed the skills and players over four long years of preparation. Does the BCCI have the wisdom, will and wit to do the same and begin preparing now for 2023 – when India hosts the championship – or will it retreat into familiar alibis and procrastination? (more…)
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Boris Johnson’s Reticence on UK Ambassador was Responsible and Mature.
Johnson’s judicious refusal to be baited will give him the political space to begin repairing bruised relations with the White House and its tweet-prone cantankerous occupant. (more…)
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Professor White, the bomb can endanger but not defend Australia.
Nuclear weapons have dubious operational utility and discarding treaty obligations would leave the stench of hypocrisy. (more…)
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Trump’s strategic incoherence on India policy Part 2
In an editorial to mark Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent visit, The Times of India alluded to US policy incoherence in urging Washington to make up its mind between dealing with India as an ally or a frenemy. Earlier, in February Washington broke from its traditional non-committal stance on India–Pakistan skirmishes to side openly with India’s narrative on the Pulwama militant attack and retaliatory missile strikes on Balakot. This was followed by the successful pressure on China to lift its hold on designating Pakistan-based Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. (more…)
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Trump’s strategic incoherence on India policy Part 1
The distance from hubris to delusion is short and the Trump administration is bent on covering it in a sprint in its India policy. Diffuse reciprocity is the diplomatic glue that holds international relationships together. A healthy and long-lasting bilateral relationship rests upon a history of shared interests and values that embody common expectations, reciprocity, and equivalence of benefits across different domains rather than equal benefits in every single sector individually. (more…)
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Trump’s disdain for Japan is insulting and high-risk
In his forays abroad, US President Donald Trump increasingly resembles a bull carrying his own china shop on his back, to be set down for wrecking at diplomatic confabs. At the moment a grave crisis seems imminent with regard to Iran. As former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer notes, soon Trump will come to a fork in the road to Tehran where he must choose between: a diplomatic climbdown on his impossible demands; or a war with Iran with regional and long-term consequences far worse than the terrible damage wrought by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Either will hurt Trump’s standing with his base, the only constituency he seems to care about.
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Folau saga: when employers and sponsors become the thought police
Like Paul Collins, I am destined for Israel Folau’s version of hell on multiple counts of sin. Indeed I will be even deeper in it since I have repeatedly, over several decades, refused to embrace the love and salvation offered by Jesus Christ despite countless missionaries and proselytisers pleading with me to do so and renounce my Hindu heathenism. Given the contrasting pictures painted of heaven and hell, I look forward to sharing hell’s pleasures with Paul while the devout enjoy the tedium of life in heaven.
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Modi vs who? The question needed a clear answer in a quasi-presidential contest (The Times of India)
No Bihari political scientist can possibly understate the importance of caste and religion in shaping the electoral contest. However, there is one other factor that is of growing importance. In all parliamentary democracies across the world, including Australia, power is being centralised in the office of the PM. PMs, including Narendra Modi, increasingly resemble and act like presidents more than the textbook ‘first among equals’ (primus inter pares). This also turns general elections in parliamentary democracies into quasi-presidential contests. (more…)
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Press freedoms: ‘No one is above the law’ is a slogan, not a policy
On the one hand, Australia lacks media protections of the type found in the US and Europe that enshrine free speech in human rights charters. On the other hand, we may well have more national-security and anti-terror laws than any other Western democracy, with around 70 passed or amended since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The resulting repressive legal regime gives the executive wide-ranging powers to hide any damaging or embarrassing information by classifying it as secret, and simultaneously to criminalise investigative journalism.
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Tiananmen anniversary revisited
Readers of my generation will recall the horror story told to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on 10 October 1990 by a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl. ‘Nayirah’ claimed to have witnessed invading Iraqi troops storming a Kuwaiti hospital, ripping 15 babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor. On 19 December 1990, an 84-page report by Amnesty International concluded: ‘300 premature babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were then looted’. The Amnesty story and Nayirah’s testimony were widely circulated around the world and used as a powerful mobilising tool by the George H. Bush administration to drum up public and Congressional support for a resolution to grant the president authorization to use force in Kuwait.
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India’s 2019 elections
In the most polarising, toxic elections in India’s history, the voter turnout of (67.1% (604 million) was the highest ever. Fierce social media wars contributed to the nastiness. It is hard to say whether political discourse was coarsened more by PM Narendra Modi or his opponents.
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Labor must look in the mirror
In foreshadowing Donald Trump’s victory six months before the 2016 election, I had written: ‘Of all the candidates in both parties, Trump’s appeal seems to reach the broadest and deepest with respect to region, class, education and income… They are looking for an in-your-face champion who will stick it to the snobs (elites) and scolds (political correctness warriors)’. Labor was guilty of the same mindset as Hillary Clinton’s disastrous comment on the basket of deplorables and reflected a similar hubris. The same hubris was obvious in Bill Shorten’s response that asking for costings of climate action policies was dumb.
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Killing them softly with sanctions
For three years Washington has been consumed by charges of Russian interference in the last US presidential election. In the latest sign that the Trump administration doesn’t do irony, on Tuesday Vice President Mike Pence threatened Venezuelan judges with unspecified consequences if they refused to back opposition leader Juan Gaidó, while lifting sanctions on a general who broke with President Nicolás Maduro. Thus Washington proclaims the right to choose other countries’ leaders and to reward and punish military officers and judges who genuflect and object to US diktat.
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Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 2)
By framing the choice as a binary one, most Australian analysts typically explain the threat from China as including its challenge to the rules-based international order. This has been true, for example, of several recent defence and foreign policy white papers. A major advantage of framing Australia’s foreign policy dilemma as three-dimensional is that it allows us to grasp how threats to our interests and values along the third dimension can come from both China and the US. Thus in 2013 China rejected the ruling of the international arbitration court in its maritime territorial dispute with the Philippines. (more…)
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Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 1)
RAMESH THAKUR. Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 1)
As China–US tensions rise, Australia’s dilemma is almost always debated in terms of the competing gravitational pulls between China as its most important trading partner and the US as its ultimate security guarantor. This depiction of Australia’s primary current foreign policy dilemma as a binary choice is false. In reality, Australia’s dilemma is not two but three dimensional: trade,security and a rules-based order.
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Who Will Bell the Sydney Airport Security Madness?
Is it possible that pranksters with a perverse sense of humour are in charge of security procedures at Sydney International Airport? Perhaps they are trying to test the limits of traveller tolerance. If so, they might be close to succeeding with me. I am slowly approaching the tipping point where either I will break and risk a confrontation or else I will abandon international travel, at least via Sydney. I say this as someone of reasonable intelligence and exceptionally wide international travel experience as a frequent traveller – and therefore someone who is very heavily invested in safe flights.
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New Zealand’s Loss of Innocence (Project Syndicate, 17 March 2019)
Like the assassination of Olof Palme in Sweden in 1986, the 9/11 attacks in the US, and the murderous rampage of Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011, March 15 will mark the day New Zealand lost its innocence and entered the age of postmodern mass terror. Fortunately, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response has so far been pitch perfect. (more…)
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India’s General Election: A Preview
This article previews India’s forthcoming general election on three dimensions. First, I describe India’s election machinery and logistics, something that Australia could learn a lot from if it were not for the embedded subconscious racism that rejects the very possibility of an advanced white democracy learning from a poor Asian developing country. Second, I outline the issues that are likely to dominate the campaign over the next two months. And finally, I look at the state of play at the moment with regard to the prospects of the two competing coalitions.
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India’s Trifecta of Failure (Project Syndicate).
With a general election approaching, India’s government is planning a further extension of caste-based quotas in schools and public-sector jobs. This is typical of the two main parties’ tendency to choose the path of least political resistance and defer deep reforms.
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Trump-Kim summitry a work in progress (Japan Times, 1 March 2019)
CANBERRA – The cameras are gone, the lights have dimmed, the scribes have filed their reports and returned home and Hanoi has faded from host of a potentially life-and-death summit to being merely the capital of a booming Southeast Asian country. Attention will now turn fully to the simmering crisis in Kashmir. (more…)
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What’s next in India and Pakistan flareup ( Interview on NPR)
NPR’s Steve Inskeep speaks with Ramesh Thakur of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University about the latest conflict between India and Pakistan.
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Thinking aloud: Imagine if the reservations mania extended to the selection of Team India (The Times of India).
In 1990 British politician Norman Tebbit proclaimed his cricket loyalty test: In a match between England and their country of origin, whom did immigrants support? Alas, like most Indians in Australia and England, I would comprehensively fail the Tebbit test. (more…)
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Reasons for cautious optimism in Hanoi (The Japan Times).
Americans seem to be afflicted by a curious historical amnesia. The facts are indisputable. The number of non-nuclear countries to have been attacked and invaded by the United States since 1945 is legion. Conversely, not one country with the bomb has been attacked. This equation, more than any other, drives the decision-making calculus of countries fearful of U.S. aggression. Kim may be paranoid about U.S. military strikes. The cause of his paranoia lies not in any internal psychoses, but in the history of belligerent U.S. militarism. (more…)
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Being The Australian means never having to say sorry
For a paper that is quick to moralise about the failings of competitors, critics and ideological opponents, The Australian seems remarkably reluctant to admit to any errors, shortcomings or moral failings of its own. (more…)