Shashi Tharoor

In the weeks since the Taliban’s theocratic terrorists returned to power in Kabul, the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women and girls, have been subjected to unimaginable suffering as the world’s attention turns to other issues. But many other countries, and especially India, have reason to worry.

The Tokyo Olympic Games are over, and the Japanese people and government have heaved a sigh of relief that the spectacle passed without a major Covid-19 outbreak in the athletes’ village or other disasters.

It is rare for a public-opinion survey to shake established perceptions of a country in the way a recent Pew Research Center study of religion in India has done. The revelations in Pew’s comprehensive survey, based on interviews with 30,000 adults in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020, have astonished many.

The late head of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, was fond of boasting that when Afghanistan’s history came to be written,

A flurry of assaults on freedom of the press in recent months has raised troubling questions about the state of India’s democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As countries scramble to secure Covid-19 vaccines, ugly expressions like “vaccine race” and “vaccine nationalism” have entered the global lexicon.

Until recently, the last time Myanmar’s military supervised a general election whose outcome it didn’t like was back in 1990.

Indian legislators woke up in the new year to two realisations. First, the annual winter session of parliament, from which they should just have been emerging, had not taken place at all. And, second, New Delhi’s magnificent parliament complex, a tourist attraction since it was built in 1927, had been turned into a construction site.

After a nearly six-month hiatus, the Indian parliament will reconvene in mid-September at a time of deepening national crisis. But I fear that it may be unable to hold the country’s failing government to account.

As India prepares to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of its independence on August 15, a growing number of Indians are coming to believe that the battle to preserve the essence of the country born in 1947 is already lost. Many commentators have concluded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has already, in effect, inaugurated a “second republic” by upending the key assumptions of the first.

After last month’s clash in the Ladakh region’s Galwan Valley killed 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops, the two countries are settling in for a prolonged standoff on their disputed Himalayan frontier, even amid reports of a disengagement at the site of their recent clash.

As India’s 1.3 billion people struggle to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the country’s 28 states stands head and shoulders above the rest.

March 12 marked the 90th anniversary of one of the most momentous events in India’s nationalist struggle: the start of the Dandi March,

After India launched far-reaching economic reforms in 1991, its stature in the world rose steadily.

It’s a question I hear increasingly these days. International news media report on repression in Kashmir, mounting Hindu chauvinism, widespread protests against new laws, assaults on women, and more.

At a time when India’s major national priority ought to be cratering economic growth, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has instead plunged the country into a new political crisis of its own making.

After eight years of deliberations, India’s Supreme Court has issued a verdict that settles one of the most protracted inter-religious conflicts in the country’s turbulent history. The Court’s decision couldn’t have come at a better time.

Until recently, Indians had gotten used to taking economic growth for granted. After a decade of annual growth averaging over 9 percent, India’s economy weathered the post-2008 worldwide recession and grew at a still impressive rate of 7 percent until 2014-15. Nothing, it seemed, could stop the gravy train from rolling on.

Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, it has been keeping a tight lid on the pressure cooker, to borrow your metaphor. What are the most immediate risks you foresee?

Amid much fanfare, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has completed a hundred days of its second term. Despite his government’s poor record, Modi remains immensely popular personally. This does not bode well for Indian democracy.