COLUMNIST: HARI SUD
Abroad View
Hari Sud studied chemical engineering at the University of Punjab in Chandigarh and the University of Missouri. He worked for Canadian Industries Ltd. from 1975 to 1995, moving from chemical engineer to capital program manager to vice president. In 1995 he switched to a Canadian bank, rising to vice president of transaction processing. He retired in 2004, though he occasionally serves as a banking consultant. He is married with two sons, both doctors. Writing is his hobby.
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July 01, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — The rapid increase in oil prices and the rise in metal and mineral demand worldwide have made the Russians overconfident as their annual cash income has grown fourfold. The Russians have become somewhat politically belligerent and are reneging on earlier deals they feel are not in their best interest.
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June 24, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Punjab is India’s granary – there is no other granary like it anywhere in the world. A small area in the northwest, it is irrigated by three rivers from the Himalayas. In the crop year 2007-08, Punjab has produced 27 million tons of food grain on less than 1 million hectares of land.
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June 17, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — It is unlikely that the planned massive pipeline from Iran to India will be built in the next ten years. The same is true for the pipeline from Central Asia to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in the last five years, Central Asia has emerged as a new reservoir of oil and gas.
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June 10, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — There is nothing more important for the 300-400 million middle-class people in India than relief from daily power outages. The United States agrees that India should use less coal and more atomic power to generate electricity. Hence the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal was negotiated.
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June 03, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Democracy has begun to prevail in Pakistan, but politicians in the newly elected government have little in common except the desire to get rid of Musharraf. The United States has been working hard behind the scenes to keep Musharraf in power. It is high time for this to change.
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May 27, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Politics are forcing India to choose between the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal that would boost nuclear energy production or a pipeline that would carry natural gas from Iran through Pakistan. Both plans have strong political opponents; but India needs power and needs it now.
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May 20, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — It is possible that inflation in India, which has climbed to 7.61 percent, could bring down the existing government. Elections are due at the end of the year, and inflation is the number one election issue. If this government cannot control it in the next three months, it may not survive.
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May 13, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Is there any end to Chinese ambitions in Asia? China wishes to dominate Asia with blockades, blockages, military diplomacy and political Machiavellism. Its plan to divert the River Brahmaputra from Tibet toward China’s northeast, blocking water to 100 million people in India, could lead to war.
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May 06, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — In recent months, hedge funds, pension funds and other group investment vehicles, which strive for maximum return in minimum time, have turned the commodity market upside down. Recent price rises of all commodities including food grains are a testament to their manipulation.
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April 29, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Hail the Myanmar junta for finally balancing its relationship with India. Previously it had played favorites with China by giving it oil and gas contracts in the Bay of Bengal. But with the recently finalized Kaladan-Sittwe river transportation project, Myanmar has balanced the odds in India's favor.
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April 22, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Three billion people in Asia are the rice guzzlers of the world and they are facing a supply shortage. The long-term prognosis is not good. Until the world refocuses on increasing its food grain output and controlling the population, supply shortages, followed by food riots, are going to be the norm.
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April 15, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — With Tibetan and Uighur nationalists on the warpath in China and unending firefights in Pakistan's wild, wild west, India can have a bit of a respite. China may threaten India over disputed land and Pakistan may raise temperatures in Kashmir, but both have headaches at home to worry about.
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April 08, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Demand for copper, zinc, aluminum, nickel and all other nonferrous metals has scaled new heights in the last four years. Prices have sky-rocketed and traders are turning in huge profits. This demand for 12 years has been driven by China and now also, in the last four years, by India.
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April 01, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — With Tibet and its neighboring Sichuan province in turmoil, India finds itself in a diplomatic logjam regarding China's crackdown on monks and protesters. It would appear that India is afraid of China both diplomatically and economically. But somebody must stand up for the Tibetans in their hour of need.
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March 25, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — The peace along India's northeastern border with China has been disturbed in the last five years by the aggressive buildup of roads and military infrastructure on the China side, as well as the recent completion of a rail line to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
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March 18, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Rising wheat prices in the international market have outstripped oil price increases in the past year. Oil prices have increased 80 percent over the year; wheat prices have tripled. Wheat was US$4 a bushel a year ago; it is averaging $14 a bushel now, impacting importing nations like China and India.
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March 11, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — With US$1.4 trillion in cash reserves, 70 percent held by the United States, China has great clout over the United States. The withdrawal of this money would send U.S. financial markets into a tizzy. If nothing is done about the U.S.-China trade imbalance, these reserves will one day rival the U.S. budget.
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March 04, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — China's building of a port in Pakistan, its extra-polite friendship with the rulers of Myanmar and now its offer to Iran to pick up gas from Pakistan if India shows a lack of interest, is all part of the country's quest for energy to feed its export economy.
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February 26, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Elections in Pakistan with a new man in charge would not make a difference. In a clever move Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader in Afghanistan, is arousing the Pashtun tribes in the border areas, in an effort to take these areas away from Pakistan.
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February 19, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Will the Left Front intransigence on the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal force a midterm poll in India? The answer is yes. It has reached that stage. Whereas India needs nuclear power to power itself into prosperity in next 30 years and come out of nuclear isolation, Communists and fellow travelers are hell bent on sabotaging that effort. Their reasons – U.S. is a bigger evil than shortage of electric power.
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February 14, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — The longest election process and probably the most colorful one in recent U.S. history is underway. Republicans look set to lose, and Democrats are by habit protectionists. This may translate into a fresh look at all the country's trade deals and potentially major impact on China and India.
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February 12, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — The world's need for textiles, especially high-end cotton textiles, knitwear and hosiery, is unending. Today China is in the lead in supplying this market, thanks to the U.S. quota system. But India is surging ahead to close the gap, especially in the cotton market.
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February 05, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — The United States is heading toward recession. This is no longer conjecture -- the threat is real. It will impact first Canada then Europe and the rest of the world. Neither India nor China is immune to this worldwide financial crisis.
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January 22, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — In a nutshell, India and China will have to live together in Asia with only two simplified provisions: to drop the unnecessary border row between them and to not step on each other's toes. Without these, there is no future for a strong India-China relationship.
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January 15, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Benazir Bhutto's teenage son has been appointed to run her political party and ultimately grab power in Pakistan. Sonia Gandhi in India is working overtime to appoint her son as heir apparent. It is back to medieval times in South Asia as power is being transferred within the family.
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January 08, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Pakistan must be pulled away from its current slide toward fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism. Could India and Pakistan set up an economic partnership, similar to that between the United States and Canada, that would ensure prosperity for both?
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January 03, 2008Toronto, ON, Canada — Whereas the stock exchange is like a deluxe train moving at a regular pace, the commodity exchange is a freight train rushing through at breakneck speed. Commodities are facing a meteoric rise in prices based on demand that will not slow down.
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December 27, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — China has been the darling of the West, showered with praise for the massive economic strides it has made. Until recently, the West has turned a blind eye to the falsified statistics China has routinely produced to impress the world.
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December 18, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — The Y2K software problem will go down in history as a world event; it dramatically changed India. This software glitch led to the emergence of India as a future economic powerhouse, and to the country becoming a highly educated talent pool for the world.
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December 12, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — At $100 a barrel, oil is unaffordable for growing economies like China and India. China imported 44 percent of its oil, worth about $45 billion, in 2005. At that time oil prices hovered around $70 a barrel. At $100 a barrel in 2007 it is expected that China's import bill will surpass $60 billion.
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December 05, 2007Toronto, Canada — The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has opposed the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, viewing it as part of a U.S.
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November 27, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — Every mortgage, every loan advanced by a U.S. bank, every International Monetary Fund or World Bank advance to the rest of the world, is related to China.
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November 20, 2007Toronto, Canada — Like it or not, the nuclear technology clandestinely acquired by Pakistan under the very noses of the U.S. Reagan administration has become today's greatest security challenge.If any of its critical components, such as U-235 or plutonium, falls into al-
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November 13, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — After a lot of internal and external pressure, it appears that Pakistan might hold general elections in January next year. This turnaround came after the United States expressed its disgust at the imposition of emergency/martial law, which was blamed on j
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November 06, 2007Toronto, Canada — A combined 2.4 billion human beings in China and India are close to running out of food supplies and agricultural land to grow food. Water resources, which nurture the land, are becoming a victim of manmade disasters.
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October 30, 2007TORONTO, Canada — That former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto survived the recent attempt on her life is a miracle. But 140 of her supporters were not so lucky on Oct.
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October 24, 2007Toronto, Canada — A successful invasion of India by China is the China watcher's pipedream. They always envision that China could unleash its army of 2.5 million men on India and conquer it.
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October 16, 2007TORONTO, Canada — It is China's greatest dilemma today - the country has $1 trillion dollars in cash reserves collected over the last 20 years, but only one place to store such a huge amount. That is in U.S.
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October 10, 2007Toronto, Canada — July 1, 1991 was a fateful day for India after independence. It was on this day that India reached zero foreign exchange reserves, with mounting debt.
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October 03, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — It is unbelievable that Benazir Bhutto, champion of democracy and bitter critic of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, is now cozying up to him -- not for the welfare of the people, but out of personal ambition to be prime minister for
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September 26, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — If the flow of Middle East oil to China is squeezed, the Chinese economy will come to a grinding halt. Today China imports 32 percent of its oil needs.
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September 18, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — The recent visit to India by Japan's prime minister was mainly to set the stage for bigger and better things to come in the next two to five years. Japan has grown weary of China's growth trajectory.
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September 11, 2007TORONTO, Canada — The goal of a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council has eluded India for the last 60 years.
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September 07, 2007Toronto, Canada — The summer and fall of 2036 marked an all-around calm. In India, the War Cabinet continued to function without a hitch.
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September 05, 2007Toronto, Canada — The winter of 2035-36 was a time of preparation for both the Indian and the Chinese armies in the snowy expanses of the Himalayan Mountains. The Chinese had a longstanding claim in the eastern Himalayan region, where they had staged a lightening strike in
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September 04, 2007Toronto, Canada — As the year 2030 began, trade rivalry in the Indian Ocean was playing out in the form of a cat and a mouse game between China and India. At times, China had the advantage, at other times the same applied to India.
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August 28, 2007Toronto, Canada — Blame it on Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, or his later successors; India's foreign and economic policies have had a distinct communist flavor. Perhaps this was in line with Nehru's beliefs or perhaps he was caught in a Cold War tr
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August 21, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — It is no surprise to find mega prosperity alongside slums in Indian cities. Cows have not vanished from the roads, although they are far fewer than twenty years ago.
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August 14, 2007Toronto, Canada — As India becomes the third or fourth economic power in the world in the next 20 to 30 years, it will have to turn its attention toward the fractured state of politics in the Indian Ocean states. Today, African nations bordering the Indian Ocean are in a s
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August 07, 2007Toronto, Canada — Between 1988 and 1990, when Benazir Bhutto was in power in Pakistan, the dreaded Inter-Service Intelligence dusted off an earlier plan to snatch Kashmir from India by force. A huge number of religious fanatics that had fought against the Soviets in Afghan
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July 31, 2007Toronto, Canada — There is a paradigm shift underway in the economic order of the world. The two most populous countries in Asia will soon become the second and third economic powers of the world.
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July 25, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — For the past decade, U.S. leaders have been privately considering China as a rival.
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July 18, 2007Toronto, ON, Canada — When the G-8 powers met in Germany recently, India, Brazil, China and South Africa were invited to watch from the sidelines. They were asked to listen to what the big bosses had decided, as the G-8 Communiqué was issued even before these countries' heads
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June 26, 2007Toronto, Canada — With China's rapid development, militarily as well as economically, it is apparent that the country will come into conflict with the United States, probably sooner rather than later. Economically, China has made tremendous progress in the last 20 years, b
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June 07, 2007Toronto, Canada — Mohajirs in Pakistan are Muslim immigrants from Uttar Pradesh, India, who made Karachi their home. They have been fighting continuously to gain political power, often violently, but never succeeded.
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May 29, 2007Toronto, Canada — The British deserve to be complimented for integrating all the ethnically diverse but culturally similar principalities in the South Asian subcontinent into one nation. Today we call it India.
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May 22, 2007TORONTO, Canada — The winding down of the Kashmir conflict and Pakistan's rising internal political problems are probable signs of the military withdrawing from its political office and marching to their barracks. This also raises the expectations of a civilian government
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May 15, 2007TORONTO, Canada — The reliability of China's economic statistics has repeatedly come into question in light of wild data the country has published -- such as US$65 billion received in foreign direct investment, 11 percent growth, and gross domestic product of US$2.5 trilli
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May 08, 2007Toronto, Canada — U.S. President George W.
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May 08, 2007TORONTO, Canada — U.S. President George W.
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May 01, 2007Toronto, Canada — With the conclusion of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Delhi in April, another fruitless round of conferencing is over. Nobody gained anything.
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April 24, 2007Toronto, Canada — Smartly dressed information technology consultants from India, a large community of very prosperous émigré Indians in the United States and Europe, and positive media reports about the Indian economy in recent years are changing Western stereotypes about
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April 18, 2007Toronto, Canada — Muslims are not to be blamed for mismanaging India's economy from 1200 AD onwards. On the contrary, they allowed it to prosper.
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April 18, 2007Toronto, Canada — India was never poor throughout the known history of mankind. It has been lush and green, with adequate administrative skills, technology to provide clothing and land to provide food.
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April 10, 2007Toronto, Canada — If the India-U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation deal fails, that is bad news for Indian industry and agriculture.
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April 04, 2007Toronto, Canada — The unfolding prosperity and growth of disposable income in both urban and rural India will ultimately translate into greater acquisition of material goods. These goods will find their way into people's homes only if adequate steps are taken to position r
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April 03, 2007Toronto, Canada — A tourist of Indian origin arrives in India in late winter. She is here to shop for her forthcoming wedding.
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March 28, 2007Toronto, Canada — There are solid reasons for corporate participation in India's second Green Revolution, which aims to boost agriculture and strengthen the economy. First, it may be difficult to find a triumvirate like Indira Gandhi and the two agriculture experts who gua
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March 27, 2007Toronto, Canada — India has launched its second Green Revolution with the aim of producing 400 million tons of food grain per year, almost double the 214 million tons expected in 2006-2007. It is unlikely to happen tomorrow or next year, but it may be possible by 2020.