COLUMNIST: M.D. NALAPAT
Future Present
Professor M.D. Nalapat is director of the School of Geopolitics at Manipal University in Manipal, India. A gold medalist in economics from Bombay University, Professor Nalapat's original theories include the India-China-Russia Trilateral Alliance (1983); Wahabbism as the main security threat of the future (1992); "Indutva," or Indians as composites of Muslim, Hindu and Christian civilizations (1995); the concept of the proxy nuclear state (1999); the need in student curricula for a "horizontal" (rather than the traditional "vertical" or graded) view of different societies (2001); and the concept of an "Asian NATO" ( 2002). Dr. Nalapat is also a UNESCO Peace Chair, Senior Associate of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Board Member of the India-China-America Institute and Associate of the United Services Institution of India.
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June 23, 2008Manipal, India — Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe represents the other side of apartheid. Zimbabwean whites have been as marginalized and dispossessed as blacks were in South Africa. But the country’s people realize that reverse apartheid has made their economic situation worse, not better.
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June 11, 2008Manipal, India — If the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) gets signed between Iraq and the U.S., it could elevate the insurgency in Iraq due to concessions made to the U.S. forces stationed there. This could turn Iraq into Gaza where the effects of democracy in a polity suffused with anger at their military have done more harm than good.
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May 19, 2008Manipal, India — The al-Sabah family in Kuwait has promoted a moderate version of Islam, allowing alternative houses of worship and refusing to discriminate against Shiites or women. But in the past four years there has been a perceptible change in the chemistry of the state.
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May 14, 2008Manipal, India — Despite the efforts of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to ensure a majority for his Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and the Pakistan People’s Party in last February’s general election, it failed. Now Nawaz Sharif has pulled out of the coalition government. Pakistan is headed for exciting days.
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May 07, 2008Manipal, India — U.S. policies often affect the globe, and hence the global interest in U.S. politics. The election to the U.S. presidency of Barack Obama would signal the true conclusion of the revolution begun by President Abraham Lincoln -- that human beings are one, no matter what their color.
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April 14, 2008Manipal, India — China's leaders are unlikely to heed the incessant calls of the United States and the European Union, now joined by India, to talk with the Dalai Lama. Fortunately for Beijing, the Dalai Lama has from the start been yoked to non-violence. But will the unrest in Tibet spread within China?
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March 17, 2008Manipal, India — U.S. policies have brought profits to the administration's favored companies but recession for everyone else, thanks to the cost of its wars and the get-rich schemes of U.S. banks. The country has also lost its moral authority by ignoring human rights abuses in places like China, where Tibetan protests are now telling a fuller tale.
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March 10, 2008Manipal, India — Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi made the worst call of his political career by calling a general election a full year before it was due, believing that international economic uncertainty was likely to send the economy southwards and ethnic tensions were at risk of escaping from the band-aid applied to them.
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March 03, 2008Manipal, India — General David Petraeus, top U.S. commander in Iraq, has unintentionally enabled Iraq and Iran to set aside the poisonous legacy of the 1980s Saddam-Khomeini conflict and enter into a potentially robust alliance that may challenge U.S. interests in the region.
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February 21, 2008Manipal, India — After the Feb. 18 "peaceful" general elections in Pakistan, where "moderate" candidates overwhelmingly trounced their "extremist" rivals, most commentators agree that the country's slide into chaos will decelerate and may even be reversed.
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February 08, 2008Manipal, India — Six months ago, when Harvard China-watcher Roderick MacFarquahar spoke to friends in India of the likelihood that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States, no one took him seriously. After Iowa, such reactions ceased. If Obama breaches the ethnic ceiling, the world will shift.
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January 31, 2008Manipal, India — Manmohan Singh, India's present prime minister, was brought back from Geneva to India as economic advisor to the government in 1990, to help accelerate economic reforms. When Singh took formal power in 2004 the middle class had high expectations. Nearly four years on, these hopes have died, together with the reforms.
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January 16, 2008Manipal, India — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned Wednesday from a four-day visit to Beijing that even his spinmeisters could not categorize as a success. Singh had expected Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to follow through on the promise of "nuclear cooperation" made during a 2005 visit to New Delhi. It didn't happen.
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December 31, 2007Manipal, India — On Nov. 7 this columnist wrote that Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto's election plans were likely to fail "if she survives." The skepticism over her longevity was because of the threat she represented to both the Punjabi component in the Pakistan army and to the continuation of the military's monopoly over state power.
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December 26, 2007Manipal, India — Central policy in India has long discriminated against the Hindu majority within the country. This has led to a Hindu backlash across India, especially in Gujarat state, where the predominantly Hindu BJP Party's Narendra Modi was re-elected this week despite a concerted effort to oust him.
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December 19, 2007Manipal, India — Throughout the European Union, and increasingly in the United States and Australia, immigration is being directed on racial grounds, with preference given to immigrants of European origin. This is despite the reality that an immigrant from Chennai or Hyderabad in India is far more likely to add immediate economic value to a society than migrants from Tirana, Bucharest or Sofia, to take just three examples.
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December 12, 2007Dubai, United Arab Emirates — If gold statues of George W. Bush have yet to sprout up across the Middle East, it is not because his contribution to the region's economy is not recognized. The 2003 occupation of Iraq crippled the already-gasping oil industry in that country, thus more than trebling international oil prices.
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December 06, 2007Manipal, India — Like the Pakistan army, which has jihad as its official motto, the rulers of Malaysia claim to represent the "moderate" face of Islam. However, ever since former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad introduced Wahabbism Lite into Malaysia in 1981, the practic
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November 28, 2007Manipal, India — Thanks largely to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who shared with his leftwing British friends a dislike of the Yanks, the geopolitically senseless alienation between the United States and India continued for five decades after India's ind
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November 21, 2007Tehran, Iran — Less than 20 percent of Muslims worldwide follow Shiite Islam. It's about the same number as the Wahabbis -- a sect that has always been regarded by mainstream religious scholars as being outside the Muslim faith.
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November 14, 2007Tehran, Iran — While Sonia Gandhi prefers the European Union, Manmohan Singh's favorite country is the United States. Both as India's finance minister from 1992-96 and from 2004 onwards as prime minister, Singh has been open in his belief that a Washington-set agenda is
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November 07, 2007Manipal, India — Since the 1980s, about six years after Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq took control from Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, the Pakistan army has been less a symbol of national unity than an instrument to ensure the supremacy of the Punjabi element in all reaches of Pakistan soci
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November 01, 2007MANIPAL, India — U.S. diplomats have lorded it over the world's "Untermenschen," or inferior people, for so long that the latter have come to regard even the more obvious and offensive forms of condescension and patronizing behavior as a compliment.
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October 23, 2007Manipal, India — Four years before Chinese President Hu Jintao took over as both head of state and, more importantly in China, head of the Communist Party, this observer of his country had deduced that he was on a steady ascent to full power. Even in 1998 it was clear tha
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October 08, 2007Manipal, India — Over the past weeks, there has been a rising drumbeat of criticism from both sides of the Atlantic about the generals in Myanmar. After considerable behind-the-scenes U.S.-EU pressure, there have been bleats from the two biggest neighbors of that country,
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September 26, 2007Manipal, India — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has this in common with U.S. President George W.
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September 18, 2007Manipal, India — In 1999 this columnist put forward the theory of a "proxy nuclear state," a country that has had nuclear capability grafted onto it by an outside power. Thus far, China has developed two such states -- North Korea (to harry Japan) and Pakistan (to contain
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September 10, 2007Manipal, India — Perhaps as a consequence of having carried out the threat to write his own history -- made in response to Stalin's 1943 retort that "history would be the judge" of the failure of the Allies to challenge the Wehrmacht on European soil -- Winston Churchill
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September 03, 2007Manipal, India — If protecting the homeland is among the primary responsibilities of a government, attempting to change the distribution of power within another country may not always be congruent with such an objective. Given the state of conflict between Israel and th
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August 27, 2007Manipal, India — Military strategists in India raise their blood pressure levels by pointing to China's "encirclement" of the country through an archipelago of military and intelligence assets around the periphery of the world's only billion-plus democracy. The reality, h
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August 20, 2007Manipal, India — If we take away the near-automatic, and usually fallacious, identification of a country with its government, and use the views within an elected Parliament as a better guide to opinion, then there is a majority against the George W. Bush-Manmohan Singh nu
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August 13, 2007Manipal, India — Although it would be a tad unfair to compare him to a confidence trickster, Pakistan's army-appointed President Pervez Musharraf has survived by convincing a series of patrons to back him, only to let them down later. After the dour but straightforward
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August 06, 2007Manipal, India — Not every teacher of the language would find that the numerous versions that pass for English in India have much in common with Shakespeare. For example, Mumbaikars (Bombayites, to the unwary) pronounce "snack" as "snake," terrifying friends from abroad w
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July 23, 2007Manipal, India — Unlike in the West, where couples meet, mate and then decide on marriage, in India it is parents, family and friends that substitute for Cupid. Not accidentally, few such pairings are driven by romantic considerations.
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July 16, 2007Manipal, India — What do you get when you cross Wahabbism and Khomeinism? The "W-K virus" -- a set of mutually reinforcing creeds that promote religious supremacy, the notion that the followers of a particular faith are superior to the rest.
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July 09, 2007Manipal, India — India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has several times publicly complimented his country on "not having a single member of al-Qaida despite having the second largest Muslim population in the world." India, with 156 million Muslims, is beaten only by Indo
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July 02, 2007Manipal, India — In 1971, following the Indian army's defeat of Pakistan in Bangladesh and the capture of 93,000 prisoners of war, an opportunity was given to the Pakistani politicians to roll back the army's control over civilian life by curbing its powers and making it
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June 25, 2007Manipal, India — A year ago, when the government of India invited all major political formations in Nepal to an "offer you can't refuse" conference in New Delhi, a sympathetic New Delhi forced through a "democratic" alliance of eight parties that would take over effective
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June 18, 2007Manipal, India — By granting itself a patent on individual freedom combined with democratic elections, the West has persuaded itself that it is seen as a benign entity in the rest of the world -- almost all of which decades ago was occupied and governed by European countr
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June 11, 2007Manipal, India — The European Union and the United States can be understood, if not excused, for holding the view that a "fair" deal is one that involves the other side making 95 percent of the concessions. For nearly five centuries, the European peoples have first led an
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June 04, 2007Manipal, India — Zimbabwe is a textbook example of how to run a country to the ground. Although the white settlers who took over huge tracts of farmland did not do so with the consent of the original inhabitants, the fact remains that they put it to much better use than i
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May 28, 2007Manipal, India — A millenium ago, when Muslim armies began succeeding in defeating their Hindu rivals, such victories came despite the latter's greater opulence. A contributory factor was caste.
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May 21, 2007MANIPAL, India — Terrorists must be fought on both the military and monetary fronts. As long as funds continue to flow into their hands, terrorists will continue to survive assaults on them, to recruit new zealots and rebuild their infrastructure.
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May 14, 2007MANIPAL, India — Martyrdom comes easily to the Shiites, who have been taught its virtues since childhood. Fortunately for the world, this powerful group within the Muslim faith has thus far not joined the Wahabbis in their ongoing crusade against the West.
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May 07, 2007MANIPAL, India — A smiling U.S. President George W.
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April 30, 2007Tehran, Iran — If we strip away the verbiage, during the 1990s only three countries in the Middle East publicly supported those Palestinians who see violence as the way to win back the land lost since 1948 to Israel. These were Iraq, Syria and Iran.
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April 23, 2007Manipal, India — There are two distinguishing characteristics of U.S. foreign policy.
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April 16, 2007Manipal, India — Conventional wisdom, as expressed by oped pundits, has it that George W. Bush is the first U.S.
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April 09, 2007Manipal, India — Although most international commentators spoke of the Congress Paraty's victory in the 2004 Indian elections as the "revolt of the poor," in reality it was the result of defeating their BJP-led rivals in every major city in India bar Bangalore. Rather tha
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April 02, 2007Manipal, India — If Asia is rising once again, much of the credit goes to the body of knowledge that originated in Western societies. This columnist is himself a beneficiary of the education provided in India by Christian missionaries who set up schools and colleges acros
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March 26, 2007Manipal, India — Although the U.S. State Department considers the Wahabbi sect to be engaged in "purifying" the Muslim faith, in fact what Mohammad ibn Abdul Wahab created three centuries ago was an entirely new faith, used thereafter to uproot the Sufi-suffused Islam tha
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March 12, 2007Manipal, India — India has been at the business end of jihadi-funded insurgency since 1981, the year in which Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began to organize a "Khalistan" movement that would in a couple of years launch a terror campaign in India's Punjab S
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March 08, 2007Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity.
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February 14, 2007Manipal, India — The foreign ministers of the three giants of the Asian landmass -- Russia, China and India -- will meet Feb. 14 in New Delhi to advance an old proposal for a Trilateral Global Alliance that would effectively exclude the West from a position of superiority