Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India

The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, highlights the dangers of self-deception in the name of ‘realism’ The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, tells a story drawn from an older Polish novel by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability. Europe is about to be overrun by a Sino-Mongolian army that dominates from… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India

Modi in Israel: A diplomatic embrace that will cost India dear

India’s ‘strategic autonomy’ looks more like opportunism, as Modi balances Israel, Iran, and the US while eroding trust in the Global South Bharat Bhushan Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second visit to Tel Aviv, at a time when United States-Iran tensions are high, sends a signal that India has chosen to plant itself firmly in the US-Israeli camp. Modi minced… Read More Modi in Israel: A diplomatic embrace that will cost India dear

Naravane Exposé Reveals Delhi Runs on Narrative

Without alignment between military capability, strategic doctrine and civilian decision-making, India’s deterrence posture will remain asymmetric and operationally hollow. What remains really indispensable is political honesty. The suppression of Naravane’s memoir itself has become emblematic of this failure. A government unwilling to level with parliament or the public about how close India came to escalation… Read More Naravane Exposé Reveals Delhi Runs on Narrative

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

NB: Adam Tooze is a brilliant historian, capable of weaving together different elements of global events. including anti-colonial rebellions, ideological impulses of rulers and ruled alike, and the behaviour of financial markets as a means of understanding complex geopolitical phenomena like the rise to preeminence of the American polity during and after the Great War… Read More The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada / कनाडा के PM ने खोल दी सबकी पोल, पश्चिम के देशों को ही लताड़ा, दुनिया भर में है चर्चा

NB: Not for decades has there been an honest and statesmanlike speech by a political leader. This one is one such, and is an exposure of the gruesome hypocrisy of those who claim to lead the world, not least our very own self-proclaimed vishwagurus and performance artists. The English poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936) remarked… Read More Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada / कनाडा के PM ने खोल दी सबकी पोल, पश्चिम के देशों को ही लताड़ा, दुनिया भर में है चर्चा

Moment of reckoning

Lessons from the first year of Donald Trump’s second term The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable… Read More Moment of reckoning

Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start

The US president has been quite clear that Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Greenland are in his sights. We must believe him… When the Soviet Union collapsed, US elites convinced themselves they were militarily invincible and that their economic model marked the endpoint of human development. That hubris led directly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and… Read More Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start

Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing

Opinion by Anne Applebaum In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at… Read More Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing