India-China Ties: Between Personalities and Principles President Xi Jinping’s visit to India is a new opportunity for infusing momentum in the bilateral relations. Economic dealings would be one aspect of the talks; but neither country can afford to bypass the sensitive security and strategic issues that dog their efforts to bring peace and stability. Jagannath P. Panda | September 05, 2014 | Issue Brief
Nawaz wins this round as army loses plot If Nawaz Sharif now plays his cards well - improves governance, makes his politics more responsive and inclusive, reaches out to opposition and his constituency, doesn’t remain aloof and keeps the parliament and political parties as his back – he could well change the power equations for good. Sushant Sareen | September 05, 2014 | IDSA Comments
Abbott and Modi’s Historic Opportunity As the Australian PM visits India, the future of the two countries relations hinges not so much on their strategic cooperation in the international sphere, as on how meaningfully can Australia help India deal with its enormous human development challenges, including poverty alleviation. Ashutosh Misra | September 04, 2014 | IDSA Comments
India-Japan Relations: New Times, Renewed Expectations The biggest takeaway for India from Prime Minister Modi’s visit is Abe’s assurance of $33.5 billion public and private investment and financing including ODA, doubling Japanese FDI and the number of companies in India over the coming five years. Titli Basu | September 04, 2014 | IDSA Comments
Japan’s white paper on defence: An overview The dominant challenges for Japan apart from China remain North Korea. The document expresses concerns on the launching of multiple ballistic missiles towards the Sea of Japan along with the possibility, for the first time, that the North Koreans may have acquired nuclear warheads. Naval Jagota | September 01, 2014 | IDSA Comments
India’s Revised Defence FDI Policy Under the earlier policy, the foreign portfolio investment in Indian defence industry was either banned, or capped at an arbitrary level for certain companies, causing a lot of dissatisfaction among several listed Indian companies which had pleaded their genuine helplessness in controlling such investments given their nature of flow. Laxman Kumar Behera | September 01, 2014 | IDSA Comments
Kautilya: The True Founder of Economics by Balbir Singh Sihag Kautilya: The True Founder of Economics is a unique contribution to the subject of Kautilya’s Arthashastra (KA). Arthashastradiscusses at length governance, diplomacy, military science and political economy.1 However, never has such a strong case been presented for Kautilya’s inclusion in the economic community. Given the degree of quantitative sophistication that economic science has achieved in the 21st century, it is all the more difficult to introduce abstractions of Kautilyan thought within the modern economic framework. Divya Malhotra | September 2014 | Strategic Analysis
China and the Environment: The Green Revolution by Sam Geall (ed.) Propelled by its rapid economic growth, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is undergoing multitudes of transitions simultaneously. These transitions are substantially transforming state–society relations in China. The conventional wisdom about China in the reform era has been that the Communist Party of China’s (CPC’s) legitimacy to rule comes from its continued economic performance; in other words, the Chinese people will not bother with the kind of regime they have if they are well fed and their economic aspirations are taken care of. Avinash Godbole | September 2014 | Strategic Analysis
India at Risk: Mistakes, Misconceptions and Misadventures of Security Policy by Jaswant Singh This is Jaswant Singh’s eleventh known book, and here he keeps his focus on experiences rather than rhetoric to deal with the complex design of India’s security challenges. While relying judiciously on first-hand experiences, the author justifies his long eventful overtures in public life and also as an avid researcher, who has spent decades participating in and observing India’s security establishment from close quarters. Atul K. Thakur | September 2014 | Strategic Analysis
Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia by Michael Krepon and Julia Thompson (eds.) Ever since India and Pakistan went overtly nuclear in 1998, a plethora of studies by scholars, both from the subcontinent and outside, have pondered the issues of ‘deterrence stability’ and ‘escalation control’ in South Asia. While the majority of them extrapolated the Cold War type of scenario to the South Asian nuclear discourse, the book under review stands out—for not attributing ‘the primary dangers … to a lack of professionalism on the part of those responsible for nuclear stewardship’ (p. 9). Sitakanta Mishra | September 2014 | Strategic Analysis
