Foreign Policy – Lok Panchayat

Can New Delhi learn to stop worrying and test the bomb?

Less than an hour before meeting Xi Jinping, US President Trump ordered the US Department of Defence to resume nuclear testing after 33 years. In 2025, the options are clear for New Delhi: adhere to a self-imposed ban on nuclear weapons testing even as rival powers continue to test their weapons, or New Delhi can declare it is has no reason to halt its nuclear weapons program at a time when the Americans have expressed their intent to conduct their own tests, and even more importantly, have admitted that powers hostile to India have been testing their weapons while we have not.

The Anti-Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama has announced his succession, setting alarm bells ringing in Beijing. Read to find out why the next Dalai Lama may face his very own Chinese duplicate.

Poison people and make billions

When it comes to narcotics, America has one border problem and India has two. Stuck between the Golden Crescent of Af-Pak & Iran and the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, two of the deadliest drug-producing regions of the world. The hostile states of China and Pakistan are actively directing the drug trade against India as part of their destabilisation efforts against the largest democratic nation on earth. To turn the tide before the rot sets in, New Delhi needs to take executive action exceeding recent US presidential decrees designating drug producers and smugglers as terrorists and possibly freeing up US enforcement agencies and the US military to treat them in the same manner.

Nuclear Pakistan: The house that China built

China spoon-fed the Pakistanis blueprints and technical training leading up to Pakistan's first nuclear weapons tests, largely with an eye to putting India in a chokehold within the region. In strategic, hard-power terms, when the CCP began building up its criminal nuclear regime all those decades ago, it could not have conceived of a better outcome.

What India Can Learn from ASEAN

Asia’s future depends on equitable relations between all rising powers, and in this context the India-ASEAN partnership is key. Through a framework of mutual cooperation that can in time be enlarged to include the rest of South Asia, India and ASEAN can constitute the pivot of unity that will help counteract the destabilising effects of belligerent powers in the region.

The Dangerous Lie of the Global Indian

Western intellectuals and academics of Indian-origin, who are engaging Indian audiences with greater frequency constitute the spear’s edge of the diaspora’s engagement with India. The final outcome is a muddling of India’s interests with the interests of the diaspora and its host countries.

The threat of a Western-aligned intellectual establishment

Renowned international affairs scholar C Raja Mohan writes in Foreign Policy magazine’s Spring 2023 edition: “The West has an interest in a stronger India that can counter growing Chinese and Russian influence…

What’s killing India’s nuclear scientists?

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the architect of India’s nuclear program, died in a plane crash over the Swiss Alps in January 1966 while travelling to London. He had been a vociferous advocate of the testing of nuclear explosives, especial- ly in the aftermath of the first Chinese nuclear test in October 1964.