Comment & Briefs

There are no properly functioning Asian security institutions or regimes to regulate Asia’s nuclear politics and has to rely on global institutions and regimes for regulation of its nuclear politics and management of nuclear order. Treaties like the NPT are struggling to provide stability in the world as in Asia.

Jeeram Ghati area is part of the Maoist's annual Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign. 2014 is a significant year on two counts: one, it is the tenth year of formation of CPI (Maoist) that requires a show of its strength and lethal prowess, and two, that general elections, scheduled in April-May, need to be disrupted. It, therefore, does pose a serious challenge to the security forces in the immediate future.

The recommendations of a committee set up in 2009 to review the delegated powers were accepted by the Defence Minister in December 2010 but soon thereafter these were held in abeyance because of the perceived fear that there was a large scale misuse of the delegated powers and that implementation of committee’s recommendations would result in excessive delegation of powers.

The reasons for abstention go far beyond the immediate issue at hand and are enveloped in deep Chinese strategic interests. The Chinese leadership is adamant that there can be no dilution of the concept of the principle of non-violation of the territorial integrity of nation states in the international system.

Putin seems to have concluded that Russia must draw the line at Ukraine. The EU bid to sign trade agreement with Ukraine in December drew Russia’s ire and now Russia has moved to make Crimea its part thus changing the borders in Europe once again and deepening the distrust between Russia and the West at a time when serious issues like Syria, Iran and Afghanistan are yet to be resolved.

The West will be compelled by their own threats to impose economic sanctions against Russia. But Russia is no Iraq or Iran and may very well retaliate against Western companies, for example, Exxon Mobile is active in Russia and there are 6,000 German companies in Russia.

It is difficult to understand why the MoD should bind itself by asking for request for information (RFI) that cannot be compared across all the proposals. What would constitute ‘capability’ and ‘requisite infrastructure’ to license produce the aircraft is a matter of subjective interpretation and therefore, it would become difficult for MoD to assess whether the information provided by a bidder establishes that he/she has the requisite capability/infrastructure.

Myanmar and India have followed separate political paths only to find it converging in recent times. Myanmar’s other neighbour China has had a much larger footprint in the country. India has to calibrate its engagement with Myanmar to not just effectively implement its Look East policy but also manage the contiguous border regions of Northeast India given the ground realities.

Since China has now become an important location for international sports events, sportspersons from Arunachal Pradesh, who want to participate in such events, are not able to do so because of the Chinese practice of issuing stapled visas. This category of sportspersons should be issued regular Chinese visa to enable them to participate.

On Feb 14, 2014, MoD issued an office memorandum about operationalization of a Offsets Facilitation Cell. This is the perhaps the first positive step in a long time and the MoD needs to be complimented for it. However, absence of an operating procedure, clarity about the exact nature of mandate and guidelines for those who will man the cell could turn out to be a bane for this wonderful initiative.