As Turkey grows closer to Pakistan and the Mediterranean gains geopolitical weight, India has discovered an unlikely but useful partner in Cyprus. In diplomacy, small states frequently become the hinges upon which larger geopolitical doors swing. Cyprus, a divided island in the eastern Mediterranean with barely 1.3 million people, is increasingly acquiring such importance. India, whose foreign policy has traditionally looked east towards Asia or west towards the Gulf, now app

On the night of May 7, 2025, the Indian Air Force executed a military operation that lasted exactly 23 minutes. In that time, it struck nine targets across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir with precision munitions, satellite-guided weapons, and loitering drones. The Indian Air Force bypassed and jammed Pakistan's Chinese-supplied air defence systems, completing the mission in just 23 minutes, demonstrating India's technological edge. Within 48 hours, satellite imagery w

While India’s gamble has yet to choke Pakistan’s flows a year after the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, the move has redrawn the rules and weaponised water diplomacy. One year has passed since the Pahalgam terror attack, an event that triggered a wave of fierce anti-Pakistan sentiment across the nation. In its immediate aftermath, India suspended the Indus Water Treaty (IWT), long regarded as one of the most successful examples of international cooperation, despite deca

India’s security battle is no longer confined to contested borders but spans supply chains, trade routes and political narratives. When Indians think of national security, the mind still conjures the familiar tableau of a jawan on vigil on n a wind-swept ridge, guarding a distant frontier. But for a country of India’s scale and ambition, its security today far outgrown the trench and the checkpoint. The country’s security now sprawls across markets and media, rivers and route

When sections of India’s self-anointed ‘liberal’ media cheer Pakistan’s fleeting diplomatic theatre, they reveal less about geopolitics than about their own reflexes. There is a peculiar reflex that grips a section of India’s self-styled ‘liberal’ media whenever the world tilts even slightly against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government. It is not analysis, not even contrarianism in the noble sense, but a barely concealed thrill - an instinct to diminish India’s

Nirupama Menon Rao’s diplomacy of denial collides with the ugly reality of Pakistan’s history of sponsored terror against India. There is a particular kind of Indian diplomat – one who is retired, refined, erudite and reliably detached from consequence - who resurfaces from time to time with the same prescription to mend bridges with Pakistan. This prescription advocates restraint, dialogue and a fresh process to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. Nirupama Menon Rao has

Our country’s conduct in the 1971 War with Pakistan offers several lessons at a time when the principles of peaceful coexistence and a rules-based global order are in freefall. History shows that any war in the Middle East has a way of expanding beyond its declared aims. The ongoing confrontation involving the U.S.-Israel and Iran, now stretching into its second month, has already outgrown its immediate theatre, unsettling energy markets, rattling allies and inviting a famili