The United States reassured India that its plan to withdraw its military forces from Afghanistan by 2014 did not mean it was totally abandoning the war-torn country. In a meeting between the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, the former reassured the latter that withdrawal will […]
Suspicion about “Love Jihad” — an alleged Islamist plot to increase the share of Muslims in the population by incentivizing Muslim men to marry outside the community — is probably the result of the overall paranoia and religious tension in South India, US Consul General Andrew Simkin told his government in February last year. However, […]
Muslims in China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) are increasingly becoming more aware of their Isamic heritage, thanks to more liberal policies followed by the Chinese government in the last three decades, according to an on-the-ground report from David Brown, the Consul General of Chengdu in Sichuan, a province adjoining the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). However, […]
The hard-line Deobandi school of Islam has the support of only around 20% of India’s 16-18 crore Muslims and most Indian Muslims prefer Sufi flavored versions, Timothy Roemer, the then Ambassador to India, told Farah Pandit before her first visit to India as Obama’s Administration’s ‘Special Representative to Muslim Communities.’ In a thorough analysis of […]
US officials worried that the Union Government’s move to absorb private universities into the Government system and force its own curriculum on them is likely to dent India’s ability to churn out graduates whose training is in line with the needs of modern industries like IT, according to a 2010 cable leaked by Wikileaks. Education […]
US politician and Obama’s first ambassador Timothy Roemer, a keen observer of demographic trends, rather dramatically describes the changes taking place in the Indian state of Punjab due to immigration from Eastern India and Bangladesh. Based on his interaction with social and political leaders from the state, Roemer also noted that the Islamic religion — […]
Home Minister P Chidambaram’s assent to the formation of a Telangana state in December 2009 showed the Congress party as “weak and feeble.. easily bullied and intimidated by threats,” the then US ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer wrote to Washington on the next day. The Congress Party came was being portrayed as “weak and spineless, […]
While it has always been known that talks between Chinese and US officials are not always cordial, the stormy nature of some of these meetings is revealed in cable written by US embassy in Beijing in October 2007. The cable described the unusually aggressive and blunt feedback from the then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi […]
In this age of super-charged discussions and rallies against corruption, it is perhaps instructive to look back five years when scams were not the stuff of daily news. Hearing the innovative ways in which people rationalized corruption, the then US Consul for Chennai David Hopper wondered if Indians really objected to it at a deep […]
The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) tried to prevent the emergence of Nepal as a republic in 2008 as it wanted to retain it as the World’s last ‘Hindu Kingdom’, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) felt. Krishna Mahara, a member of the Maoist Central Committee of Nepal expressed the fear in a letter written to […]
Is the famed ‘Kerala Model’ of development — characterized by high government spending on health and education — unsustainable in the long run? Even the state’s then ruling Communists were not sure it was, according to a detailed report of a visit by US officials to the South Indian state in late 2007. The visit […]
The coming to power of Mayawati, India’s most powerful Dalit leader, in Uttar Pradesh has instilled fear in the minds of criminals and improved law and order, the US embassy to India felt after a review at the end of 100 days of her rule in UP in 2007. While she may not be “up […]
Singapore consciously cultivates its relationship with India as a way to counter-balance China’s growing influence in South East Asia, according to a cable written by American ambassador to the city-state, Franklin Lavin in 2004. According to Lavin’s reading of the country’s new “India fever”, Singapore does not want China to dominate South East Asia and […]
India’s slow moving bureaucracy and legal system came out as its biggest disadvantage relative to China, executives of American firms in Bangalore told a visiting Senator in 2007. The cumbersome nature of carrying out development work, including slow moving legal challenges and overall decision making, was keeping India back from developing critical infrastructure like roads, […]
Pakistan felt it was unfair to give India a higher status than itself at Climate Change negotiations despite having less to lose from it, according to US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson. Writing from Islamabad shortly after the Copenhagen round of Climate Change negotiations petered out, Patterson noted that the mood in Islamabad was particularly […]
Spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravishankar has expressed his reservations about the Government’s political judgement and called its actions arrogant and out of touch. “It is unimaginable that a popular movement is being blocked like this,” Ravishankar, one of the founding members of the India Against Corruption alliance, said. “So many blunders are being committed. The […]
Despite the US’ official stand favoring an expansion of the UN Security Council, new diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks show how it was doing everything it could to delay or mould the reform process to its ends. According to them, the US delegation to the United Nations worked out a clear strategy to delay or […]
The Americans saw India as the biggest stumbling block in their attempts to achieve a compromise over the expansion of the UN Security Council to include new members. In diplomatic cables dating from 2007 — when the negotiations started gathering pace — to 2010, the US delegation to the UN variously characterised India as an […]
UN negotiations are often dull, drab and devoid of drama. However, occasionally, like on September 15, 2008, they become the stage for high drama that can give any Hollywood potboiler a run for its money. The following incident, which may aptly be characterized as an all out diplomatic war, happened between two opposing groups of […]
Two years before Japan, India, Brazil and Germany forced a showdown over admitting the four of them to the permanent member club of the UN Security Council, the Japanese had secretly approached the US with a proposal to admit just two new members. Going by the clues in the subsequent US diplomatic cables leaked by […]
