By offering to augment its $1.3 billion assistance to Afghanistan, India has sent out a clear signal that it remains a player in the beleaguered nation's reconstruction process. India will not be deterred by the efforts of Pakistan and a section of the world community to isolate it. The offer was made during President Hamid Karzai's brief visit to New Delhi, on April 26–27, 2010. The timing was significant. Karzai was flying further east to Thimphu, Bhutan, to attend the 16th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The Indian prime minister, Dr.

• Mahendra Ved |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Sixty years for a human being may mean looking back, 1 taking stock of things and preparing to retire from active life. But for a nation it means more than just looking back to the path traversed. It involves looking to the future with confidence. Sixty years of India–China relations raises the significant question whether the two Asian giants could look to their bilateral relations with confidence.

• Abanti Bhattacharya |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

The SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) summit is often described as being a mere photo opportunity for south Asian leaders who should actually be using the comatose organisation to reinvent regional cooperation in a globalised world. Such pessimism is inevitable if one takes stock of the progress that SAARC has made over the period of time. There exists a SAARC convention to deal with all issues that have a certain salience in the regional context.

• Smruti S. Pattanaik |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Rivers are more than what Samuel T. Coleridge poetically expressed in Kubla Khan: ‘meandering with mazy motion’ and falling into the ‘sunless sea’. Rivers are life-givers, carrying a mystic and sacred quality about them. That they are oft described as being ‘mighty’—the mighty Amazon; the mighty Nile; the mighty Brahamaputra; the mighty Murray; the mighty Mississippi and Missouri—is hardly mystifying. Civilizations have grown around it and flourished. In contemporary politics the salience of rivers cannot be overlooked both in terms of being drivers of cooperation and conflict.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Acertain element of planning is inherent in every human activity. Any decision or action that one takes anticipates consequences, sometimes immediate and sometimes distant. That is why St. Augustine has described the future as a present expectation. Viewed in this perspective, planning of some kind is a hallmark of human activity and in recent decades considerable attention has been given to organise and systematise it with a view to grappling with the ever-growing complexities of life.

• K. P. Misra |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Ali Ahmed |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Medha Bisht |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Gunjan Singh |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Shamshad A. Khan |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Ashok K. Behuria |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis