Ruddhi Phadke

The Indian Defence Minister’s casual remark on Sindh exposes Pakistan’s deepest fault-lines far more than it wounds India India and Pakistan do not need tanks to provoke each other when a sentence can admirably perform that function. That salvo was recently delivered by Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh at a public event. Quoting stalwart Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani, Singh mused that “borders may change” and that Sindh might one day “return” to India. Pakistan...

An airport detention in Shanghai revives Beijing’s territorial obsessions and tests a fragile thaw with India. China is back to its old tricks claiming land that never belonged to them. They have long said that the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh belongs to them. Last week they detained an Indian from Arunachal Pradesh because her passport mentioned her place of birth. Just when a thaw appeared to set in, China has provoked India once again, this time by targeting an Indian citizen in...

Washington’s threat of military action over Nigeria’s spiralling violence reveals as much about American power as it does about Africa’s most turbulent giant. Nigeria is reeling. Schoolgirls are vanishing from dormitories in the dead of night; worshippers singing hymns are being dragged into forests while entire communities brace for the next set of gunmen to arrive. Into this turmoil barrels an extraordinary threat from Washington with President Donald Trump declaring that the United States...