The draft final list of citizens in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam is out. But the controversy over the fraught exercise continues. A little over four million people—mostly Bengali Muslims and some Hindus—have gone missing from the list, leaving them staring at an uncertain future and all sorts of anxiety.

The “second democratic transition” in Pakistan was marred with pre-poll suicide attacks which killed three contestants as well as scores of their supporters especially in Quetta.

With multiple Middle Eastern disputes threatening to spill out of control,

In his very first media interaction after the election in Pakistan, flamboyant former cricketer Imran Khan, who appears well-positioned to become the country's newest prime minister,

Amidst all the acrimony about the extent to which what took place on Wednesday was actually democratic, it is worth dwelling at least briefly on the most important element of the electoral exercise—the “demos” or people themselves.

In the recently concluded NATO summit, Afghanistan yet again surfaced as the boiling pot that witnessed off-beat power play in the last few years.

In keeping with predictions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi easily defeated the first opposition-sponsored no-confidence motion that he faced in his four-year tenure on the floor of the Lok Sabha, the lower House Parliament.

A virulently anti-Shiite, Saudi-backed candidate for parliament in Pakistan's July 25 election symbolises the country's effort to reconcile contradictory policy objectives in an all but impossible attempt to keep domestic forces and foreign allies happy.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faced the first no-confidence motion on the floor of Parliament by the combined opposition yesterday (July 20).

The July 1995 attack on the UN-declared “safe area” in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb forces is a reminder of the incalculable losses suffered by the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Caves capture the imagination like no other feature of the natural world, perhaps because they tap into our deepest, atavistic fears of darkness—and our insatiable curiosity for the unknown.

A seventeenth-century English satirist, Tom Brown, penned a doggerel about the Dean of Christ Church, one of the most prominent colleges, then as now, at Oxford. It went: I do not like thee, Dr Fell

Iran, in the latest of a series of incidents on its western and south-eastern borders, said it had disbanded a Pakistan-based cell of anti-Shiite militants in a clash this week on the Iranian side of the border.

Cruising at a speed of 307 km/h, the bullet train ride from Shanghai to Beijing was smooth as silk—there was no klik klik sound typical of conventional trains as the wheels hit the short gaps between rails that we are all too familiar with on our all-too-typical trains. The only slight movement one feels on the Chinese version of the bullet train is when the turbulent wake of a passing bullet train makes the train squeeze against the air envelope of the opposing train.

India is in for a testing time for conducting its complex relations with the United States. This was clearly brought out by US' inability made public on June 27 to hold the crucial dialogue at the level of foreign and defence ministers in the first week of July in Washington and seek a rescheduling of the events.

If the notion that history repeats itself is accurate, it is nowhere truer than in the Middle East where the international community, caught by surprise by the 2011 popular Arab revolts, has reverted to opting for political stability as opposed to sustainability, ignoring the undercurrents of change wracking the Middle East. Major powers do so at their peril.

There is an ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”—interesting as opposed to blessed periods of peace and tranquillity. In this sense, Europe is certainly interesting these days. Its cracks are beginning to multiply and widen ominously.

Yahya Staquf, a diminutive, soft-spoken leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim movement, and Indonesian president Joko Widodo's advisor on religious affairs,

Power politics makes strange bedfellows. But perhaps none stranger than the coming together of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and People's Democratic Party (PDP) in the terrorism-hit state of Jammu and Kashmir. After a little more than three years of uneasy co-existence, the alliance is in tatters. There is no popularly elected government in the state now under the rule of the federal BJP government.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on February 8 announced the start of a preliminary investigation into a complaint by a Filipino lawyer and two lawmakers which accuse President Rodrigo Duterte and his government of crimes against humanity.