The arrest of David Coleman Headley alias Daood Gilani by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in mid-October has focused attention in India on the transnational nature of the Islamist terrorist networks. Indian media is full of revelations from the ongoing investigation into the activities and connections of the...

Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh of India could not have chosen the time and place better for sending the very public message to Pakistan. On Thursday when he made the conditional offer for talks with Pakistan from the embattled Kashmir valley, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state was just...

The Indian State is getting mobilized to take on the resurgent left radicalism of a section of the population. Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has described the Maoist upsurge in roughly 40 per cent of the country's land mass 'the gravest threat to India's security.' His hyper-active Minister for Home...

Indian Space Research Organization shone this week, after a few months of that sinking feeling into the darkness of despair. In the early part of the week it conducted a copybook launch of a constellation of nine satellites, including the country's own oceanic remote sensing satellite, Oceansat 2. In the...

The fortnight had been tumultuous. A series of stories by an Indian news agency about Chinese military intrusions into what is claimed to be Indian territory inflamed the news circles. Soon the television news channels began yelping with a threat from China, magnified hundredfold. Official denials from New Delhi fell...

India witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of grief this week. The popular Andhra Pradesh state Chief Minister, YS Rajashekhar Reddy, was killed in a helicopter crash on Tuesday, 2 September. The charred remains of his body, along with those of two co-passengers and two pilots, were found by an Indian Air...

The 'truth' relativists would have had a field day in India in the past week. Midway through the week, an explosion took place in the news realm that shook the nation. A top defense scientist of the country, now retired from government, Dr Krishnamachari Santhanam told an audience of experts...

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man who gave birth to Pakistan on 14 August, 1947, a day before India got its own independence is a much reviled man in this part of the great divide. He is denigrated in the Indian history books as the man who worked on the fault...

Even if India could stave off the worst influences of the global economic meltdown, it still could not halt at its borders the spread of the newest pandemic of flu virus, the H1N1. Called the Swine Flu, for a while it seemed that it could be contained at the entrepots...

For the third week in succession, Indian polity was enthralled by a foreign policy issue -- a rare happenstance by any standards. The former external affairs minister and the current Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee took note of the unusual development in a speech in Parliament this week. He told his...

India's elite have quaint apprehensions about their US counterparts. On the one hand, the former covet the material well-being of the US elite, seek the latter's globe girdling influence and power, and model themselves in their light. On the other, though they seek closer bonding with the USA, they are...

This was a week the Indian chatterati were animated by spectacles taking place in foreign lands. The week began with the happy images of the first ever Indian armed forces contingent taking part on the Bastille Day parade in Paris, and the week ended in an uproar when the government...

India's Union budget has left most people perplexed. Delivered by the new Finance Minister of the second United Progressive Alliance government, it seems to have been constrained by the political necessities of the government than its desires. A lot of people had thought that the budget after the last general...

A lifetime of a nation is often punctuated with trials by fire. India's one such test was on 6 December, 1992. It had seemed that fateful day that India's whole social fabric was being torn asunder by a group of marauding religious Hindu radicals.

Heeding a call given by...

As the mercury touched one hundred degrees, India began its monsoon watch. Scorched people sought respite in the seasonal rains that cools down the earth and provides an economic stimulus, without which much of India's growth would remain stunted. The whole of last week, the monsoon story dominated the front...

For the past week, the headlines in Indian newspapers have been dominated by the news of a nondescript rural town called Lalgarh. Situated on the edge of south-western Bengal, the little-known Lalgarh raised a banner of revolt. They had initially revolted against the state government of West Bengal led by...

Failure has no patrons. In India for the past fornight, the parties of the right and the left are trying to come to grips with their defeat in the 15th general elections. The unambivalent nature of the Congress Party's victory has left little wiggle room for the leadership of the...

On Saturday morning, three of the four main newspapers of New Delhi front-paged the story of the Indian economy performing better than expected in these tough times. The country's yearend (2008-09) growth rate was estimated to be 6.7 per cent as opposed to 6.5 per cent that most in government...

Indian media's search for a new knight in shining armor has found a recruit in Rahul Gandhi. The fourth generation scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is the latest toast of the town in New Delhi. The credit for the Congress Party's modest, but impressive performance in the Hindi-speaking heartland of...

When a global crisis went knocking at the doors of India, the people of the country chose to uphold the status quo. The Congress Party's subliminal message of "inclusive (economic) growth" trumped all others in striking a chord with the electorate. And close to 400 million electors who voted in...