Beijing’s renewed claims over the Shaksgam Valley lay bare how quiet coercion is redrawing the India-China-Pakistan frontier. A barren tract of ice and rock high in the eastern Karakoram has again re-emerged as a geopolitical fault line at one of Asia’s most volatile junctions. China’s recent reassertion of its claim over the Shaksgam Valley, coupled with fresh justifications for infrastructure development there, has revived an old dispute that India insists is neither settle

A nascent Pakistan–Saudi–Turkey security pact is reshaping West Asia and narrowing India’s room for manoeuvre. Even before the ink on the recent Pakistan–Saudi Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement was dry, its implications were already reverberating across the region.  The pact, treating an attack on one as an attack on both, in language reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5, was Riyadh’s boldest bet yet that its future security no longer lies solely under an American umbrella. The d

An unelected regime, rising fundamentalism and great-power meddling have pushed India-Bangladesh ties to their coldest point in decades. Foreign policy is rarely forged in the chancelleries alone. It rests on sturdier foundations: a government’s legitimacy, public consent and a coherent sense of economic and military purpose. When those pillars weaken, diplomacy becomes reactive and neighbours feel the tremors. Bangladesh today offers a cautionary tale. Its interim administra

As Washington weaponizes oil, India must relearn the art of energy self-preservation. India’s energy dilemma has become a case study in the geopolitics of double standards. The country imports more than four-fifths of the crude oil it consumes, making energy security not a technocratic concern but a strategic one. But the global oil market is no longer governed merely by prices and supply curves. It is shaped by sanctions, exemptions, waivers and political discretion, often a

Venezuela’s long crisis lays bare American coercion in geopolitics, leaving countries like India paying the bill. Venezuela has been in almost permanent political crisis since Nicolás Maduro secured a second six-year presidential term in May 2018. The election, organised by a pliant National Electoral Council (CNE), was widely condemned. Leading opposition candidates were barred, jailed or driven into exile; the judiciary and electoral machinery were bent to executive will; t

Miscast as a religious controversy, the Lt. Kamalesan affair underscores the non-negotiable primacy of military discipline in the Indian Armed Forces. AI generated image The controversy surrounding Lieutenant Kamalesan has been framed by its loudest critics as a test of religious freedom. It is nothing of the sort. At heart it is a reminder of an older, sterner truth: armies function by suppressing difference, not by celebrating it. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which up

The Supreme Court’s ruling on an officer’s dismissal affirms a hard truth about military service in a plural republic. The recent dismissal of Lieutenant Samuel Kamalesan from the Indian Army has become a minor culture war in uniform. The case has been framed by its critics as a test of India’s secular soul, and by its defenders as a necessary assertion of military discipline. The question at the heart of this affair is how far can personal conscience travel inside an institu

From Gwadar to Mauritius, China’s ‘research’ ships are forcing a reckoning with India in the Indian Ocean. Recently, satellite and AIS data revealed the familiar choreography of four Chinese ‘research’ ships - Lan Hai 101, Lan Hai 201, Shen Hai Yi Hao and Shi Yan 6 - fanning out across waters that India and its partners consider strategically intimate. While Beijing insisted these were benign scientific missions, the hardware bolted to their decks suggests otherwise. The miss

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.

More than 100 Red rebels surrender in central India Naxals arrive to surrender their weapons before police in Gondia district, on Friday. Pic: PTI Gondia (Maharashtra) : As the Centre’s deadline to crush Maoism by March 2026 approaches, the Red brigade suffered another setback with 11 Maoists laying down arms in Gondia district.   This has taken the count of surrenders to over 100 during this week in central India - with the CPI (Maoist) networks seen to be crumbling in Mahar

As GPS spoofing spreads across the world’s airspace, aviation must learn to navigate without its most trusted guide. The Global Positioning System (GPS), the workhorse of global navigation, was never built for a world where invisible enemies could quietly seize its signals. Yet that is precisely the world aviation now inhabits. In recent months, pilots approaching Delhi’s airport have reported troubling anomalies wherein aircraft veer off expected tracks, instruments disagree

A system glitch and suspected spoofing incident at India’s busiest airport lay bare the fragility of modern aviation. Modern aviation depends on signals so precise they leave no room for mischief. Yet, recently, Delhi’s skies briefly slipped into something close to chaos when a critical system failure compounded by suspected GPS spoofing forced controllers at India’s busiest airport to navigate blind. Nearly 800 flights were delayed, radar screens lost vital data and pilots w

The Delhi blast lays bare how India’s educated elite are falling for online indoctrination and Pakistan-backed networks. Dr Umar Nabi Dr Shaheen Sayeed Dr Muzammil Ganai The deadly car blast near Delhi’s Red Fort that killed thirteen and injured more than thirty has definitively forced India to confront the unsettling truth that terrorism is no longer confined to the disenfranchised or the desperate. I

Amid the wreckage of a cancelled U.S.-Russia summit, India’s quiet diplomacy could yet make it the world’s most plausible broker of peace in ending a grinding conflict. The Budapest summit that was to be held last month was meant to be a moment of hope. The meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin promised to make one more attempt at ending the devastating war in Ukraine. Instead, it became another casualty of distrust. In the weeks before the sch

For India, securing the Teesta is about weathering the geopolitical tides shaping the future of South Asia. Few rivers in South Asia have carried as much political significance as the Teesta. Rising from the snowfields of the Himalayas and coursing through the narrow valleys of Sikkim and northern West Bengal before spilling into Bangladesh, the 414-kilometre river sustains millions of farmers, powers turbines, and nourishes fragile ecosystems. Yet, for decades, it has also b

As Pakistan and China dive deeper into undersea warfare, India’s ambitions remain stranded by delay, indecision, and the dead weight of bureaucracy. India’s undersea fleet is showing its age. Of the 17 conventional submarines currently in service, most are over three decades old - creaking veterans that are fast approaching retirement. The Navy’s three nuclear-powered boats offer some relief, and the six new Scorpene-class submarines, built with French help at Mazagon Dock in

From Bhabha’s sketches in wartime Bombay to Kudankulam’s glowing domes, India’s atomic journey has embodied persistence, ingenuity and purpose. India’s nuclear odyssey began with an idea of peace, not war. Whereas the West’s atomic pursuits in the mid-20th century were rooted in weapons, India’s pioneers saw in nuclear energy the promise of national progress. In 1944, Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear programme, had envisioned a self-reliant nation built

Each one of us knew instantly, every time a martyr passed us, that it could have been any one of us instead.   It was early July 1999. In the harsh mountains of Ladakh, the Indian Army had already fought many battles to evict enemy intrusions across the Line of Control. After initial setbacks due to underestimating the enemy’s preparedness for a prolonged campaign, our units were making steady progress, securing one ridge at a time and pushing the enemy back toward the LC. On

America’s renewed embrace of Pakistan may be aimed at countering China, but it risks reviving ghosts that may return to haunt the US....

While India has made big strides in defence self-reliance, a truly ‘Atmanirbhar’ military machine remains elusive. India likes to see...