Pakistan’s Kashmir Affairs minister Manzoor Ahmad Wattoo tells KUNAL MAJUMDER the Indo-Pak dialogue should restart PM Manmohan Singh said India is not afraid of the K-word and will talk to […]
Tag: India
ON 4 JULY, 2008, a car laden with explosives rammed into the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing around 60 people. As the news spread, Col (retired) Ravindra N Kharbanda, who […]
Alexander Stubb is one of the most vocal and active foreign ministers at the European Union (EU) headquarters in Brussels. In his maiden trip to India, the 42-year-old Foreign Minister of Finland speaks to Kunal Majumder on the need of Europe to look beyond the US, his skepticism of the G20 and India’s role in Afghanistan.
When Matti Vanhanen took over as Finland’s Prime Minister in 2003, there was just the Nokia mobile handset that had a presence in India. For the rest, Finnish investment was concentrated elsewhere. This was one of Vanhanen’s major challenges, and he soon set in motion a process that would correct the imbalance. Today, though the total bilateral trade stands at just around $1 billion, R&D collaborations are mushrooming across sectors, including telecom, transport and cleantech. Vanhanen tells KUNAL MAJUMDER he expects the Indo- Finnish trade to grow by 15-17 percent annually
The defeat of Khalida Zia and her allies in the recently concluded Bangladesh elections once again proved that majority of Bengalis – either in West Bengali or Bangladesh – don’t believe in mixing religion with politics. Many in the community still have not been able to forget or forgive the division of Bengal on the basis of religion 61 years back. In 1971, the Bengali-speaking people rejected the fanatical philosophies of Pakistan and created their own motherland with help of India. Of course, many Bengalis would have wanted it to be a part of India. But that’s another story!
As columnist Deb Mukharji puts it, there were two key issues in the Bangladesh election this time. One was religion or as Zia and her Islamist friends called ‘the protection of Islam’. The second issue, as promoted by Sheikh Hasina and her allies, was development and poverty eradication. Victory of Hasina and allies with a two third majority gives a clear indication about the preference of the Bangladeshi people.