We’ve all heard of newspapers coming out with April Fool’s stories, but a cable leaked by Wikileaks reveals that even the dour diplomats have a funny bone they let out once in a year. The cable, reproduced in entirety below, was authored by the American Embassy in charge Steven White on April 1, 2008 and […]
Despite humoring the US concerns on Iran when discussing matters like nuclear proliferation, India very much continued to be a ‘behind-the-scenes’ friend to Iran and Myanmar, according to the latest US cables leaked by Wikileaks. According to the late 2006 cable sent from USA’s Finnish embassy in Helsinki, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh was very […]
The latest release by whisleblower organization Wikileaks — prisoner stories from the Guantenamo Bay has shed light into the role played by Pakistan in training Taliban militants. Wikileaks started releasing hundreds of prisoner files from the controversial prison set up by the US after it started its attack on Afghanistan ten years ago. “Detainee attended […]
The Gauntanamo prison records released by the whistleblower site Wikileaks has thrown light on an aborted “parallel” 9/11 attack in Asia that was supposed to take place at the same time as the US attack. According to the records of the prisoner Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahab, an alleged member of al-Qaida and former Usama Bin […]
Wikileaks release of more than 700 top secret prisoner records from the Guantanamo Prison off the Southern Coast of the US gives a unique picture of how a terrorist is made. The prison papers give detailed and often engaging history of terrorists — what their backgrounds were, how they ended up being ‘radicalized,’ how they […]
This is the second part of the biographies gleaned from the Guantanamo prison records leaked by Wikileaks today. They show, up and close, how many young men decided to take up arms for their religion, how they were facilitated by religious teachers etc.. However, it must be remembered that the histories are largely based on […]
Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chawan flatly blamed ‘outsiders’ for “instigating” trouble at Jaitapur, the site of a proposed Nuclear plant by French company Areva. Chawan said the dangers from the 10,000 megawatt nuclear plant have been exaggerated by those with vested interests and those who are ideologically opposed to all nuclear power. “The agitations are […]
Darjeeling born and Harvard educated Tibetan leader Lobsang Sangey has become the new Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile. The result for the elections of the 15th Parliament in exile was announced today in Dharamshala, the capital of the Tibetan government in exile. . For the first time the role of the prime […]
Three years after the riots of 2002, Michael S Owen, the US Consul General in Mumbai, gave a vivid description of Gujarat reminding readers of Akira Kurosawa’s classic, Rashomon. While NGOs and minority representatives insisted the presence of a ‘communalizing’ government, business leaders and government officials portrayed a picture of normalcy and harmony. In the […]
India’s old-world and “capacity-constrained” bureaucracy is the biggest impediment to improving relations its relationship with the US, US embassy officials told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a briefing paper prepared for her July 2009 visit. According to the Peter Burleigh, the in-charge of the American Embassy in New Delhi, even as the defence forces […]
India looked with suspicion at China’s establishment of Naval bases along the African coast in the name of fighting pirates, and felt the US climbdown over the USS ‘Impeccable’ incident of 2008 was unhelpful. The USS Impeccable, an unarmed surveillance ship of the US Navy, was repeatedly harassed by Chinese naval and other ships and […]
Indian Government had lost all hope of ever seeing the Indo-Iranian gas pipeline come into existence, but kept up the pretense of negotiations to keep Muslims and the Left happy, according to a US assessment. According to a cable sent in early 2007, the ministry of petroleum and natural gas headed by Murli Deora (described […]
In 2005 immediately after his visit to Pakistan Senior Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leader,Lal Krishna Advani’s was on the verge of being sidelined,actually he was pushed to the corner. The reason was his charitable remarks on Jinnah in which he described him a secular leader. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh(RSS),the parent organization of the BJP, reacted […]
Yet another Wikileaks cable focusing on the personality of Rahul Gandhi has the potential to stir trouble for the grand old party of India. Showing the distance traveled by Rahul Gandhi in five years, the cable expressed widespread disappointment at the young Gandhi’s political and social skills in 2005. Known to be an introvert, the […]
The US ambassador David Mulford criticised the Congress government for making its bureaucracy more “difficult to deal with” than it was during the Vajpayee years. Mulford, who felt that “the Nehru dynasty needs to become more like the Tata dynasty,” criticised Manmohan government’s “Brezhnev-era controls on its people of which Indira Gandhi would have approved.” […]
Watch out of Pranab Mukherjee’s Bengali accent — this was the warning from the US embassy Delhi to their headquarters in Washington just before the then defence minister was to visit the country. The detailed biography of Pranab Mukherjee, India’s current finance minister, also reveals the man behind the persona and comments on his tiff […]
The US embassy, which had generally proven itself a capable and astute observer of Indian politics, proved just how disconnected the embassy officials were in their assessment of Narendra Modi. In cables sent immediately after the US refused visa to the Gujarat Chief minister in 2005, the embassy is shown to be in touch with […]
The Americans considered the hijacking of the IC-814 to Kandahar and the subsequent release of Islamic Terrorists “an ignominious decision, and defeat” on the part of India, according to new cables released by Wikileaks. The cable also shows that in 2005, the Indian external affairs ministry did not mind putting stress on the relations between […]
The Mumbai Consultate and New Delhi embassy of the US Government were extremely concerned at the use of an ‘American’ hotel in Dubai for the “brazen” wedding of Dawood Ibrahim in late 2005. The US officials in India asked for action against the US-based Hyatt group for letting the wedding take place at the hotel […]
Naxalism in India is unlikely to abate any time soon because the Indian government is not willing to take the tough steps to address the concerns of the poor and the marginalized, wrote the then US ambassador David Mulford in a 2005 cable released by Wikileaks. “Indian economic development has missed large portions of the […]
