K Natwar Singh wore many hats as he straddled the worlds of diplomacy, politics and writing but what remained consistent across decades was his sharp-wit and plainspeaking.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday said cricket and diplomacy between India and Pakistan should be kept separate and the game should allowed to remain a game.
'No prime minister of India is averse to normalise relations with Pakistan, if it is possible to do so without altering our fundamental position on Jammu and Kashmir,' notes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
Criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy, Congress leader Manish Tewari has said his 14 months of diplomacy, including meetings with US President Barack Obama, has yielded "zero" results for India.
There is growing acceptance of the idea in the international community that engaging the Taliban government is a far better approach than ostracising it, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'Congrats to our team @USUN for their work in negotiating JEM's Masood Azhar's #UN designation as a terrorist,' Pompeo tweeted.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi is not the only one to support Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 'cricket diplomacy' in inviting Pakistan President Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to visit India and watch Wednesday's semi-final game between India and Pakistan at Mohali.
The American, Russian and Chinese reactions to the Uri attack indicates how tough it will be for India to 'isolate' Pakistan internationally,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
It seems in the geopolitics of the 21st century, we can see the subcontinent acting as one geopolitical entity to secure its economic interests. Key to this transformation is a strong India that is pre-eminent but not dominant, notes Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
India's approach of "cohesive diplomacy" has "forced" Pakistan to admit that its soil was used for launching the Mumbai attacks, Home Minister P Chidamabaram said on Monday and asked Islamabad to complete its probe and punish all the guilty.
It's a strategic approach in which the country's military and defence mechanisms evolve continuously in tandem with emerging threats. The new strategy anticipates events and prepares to counter those proactively.
Former External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh passed away on Saturday night after a prolonged illness, family sources said. He was 93.
India and Indians can ignore Pakistan, but that cannot be said of other nations in the neighbourhood, where New Delhi's 'Neighbourhood First' policy constantly reverberates. Four of the eight SAARC member-nations are Muslim -- Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives. The rulers decide the nation's India or anti-India policy in the first two, and street-opinion contributes to the same in the latter two, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
The visit to Pakistan will be mainly to position the India brand in that country.
Rajnath said that after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, it is Modi who has raised dignity of India in front of the world.
US refrained to make any comment on India's decision to not to attend the SAARC Summit in Islamabad.
'Young IFS officers today would take it for granted that they represent a major country with strengths and capabilities.' 'They will be aware that India is seen as one of the 10 significant countries in the world and therefore their voice will be heard whether on climate change or regime change,' says Ambassador B S Prakash.
The failure of our diplomatic offensive against Pakistan after the 26/11 attacks rests in part on our faulty tactics, says Satish Chandra.
Times have changed, situations have changed, but the basic nature of superpower geo-politics remains the same and so also India's diplomacy -- call it non-alignment, strategic autonomy or neutrality; it all depends on the time scale, notes Rup Narayan Das.
'As events at Kargil and Pakistan's continued support to terror activities in India prove, Pakistan has always felt that the break-up/destruction of India was within its capability,' notes Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
The civilian leadership informed the military authorities that Sharif's hour-long meeting with Jindal was a part of back-channel diplomacy. And Jindal had the backing of some important Indian officials for the meeting to defuse ongoing tension between the two countries, the report said.
Because of his proximity to Indira Gandhi, he was able to intervene directly at the level of the PMO, which he did in the days leading up to the partition of Pakistan in 1971 when he transferred crucial information about Pakistan's moves via information handed to him by an East Pakistani diplomat in Poland where he was posted.
The National Security Strategy document should flag all major issues concerning security strategy and provide guidelines to concerned departments to work out suitable action plans. Since the global and regional geopolitical canvas is dynamic, the NSS document should be deliberated at length before formulation and should be reviewed periodically, recommends Commodore Venugopal Menon (retd).
Cricket might be Greek to the Americans, but they still support cricket diplomacy between arch rivals India and Pakistan. "We are for cricket. We don't understand it, but we like it," State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said while replying to a query on the resumption of cricket ties between India and Pakistan.
This may be in line with Russia's private military company, Wagner Group, which was controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin. The group used the infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces.
Reports (not denied by India) that the USA had 'for the first time provided real-time details to their Indian counterparts on the Chinese positions and force strength in advance of a PLA incursion' into Tawang at the LAC in December 2022, helping India thwart China's expansionist designs, show how operationally effective the USA-India friendship has become on the ground. A engaging excerpt from Sreeram Chaulia's must-read new book, Friends: India's Closest Strategic Partners.
India and Pakistan are once again preparing to face off on the cricket field, playing their first series since 2008, when already brittle relations were shattered by the Mumbai attacks.
China on Thursday told Pakistan's new Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif that it will always put its "all-weather ally" as a priority in its neighbourhood diplomacy as it praised his commitment to promote the USD 60 billion CPEC initiative.
Alamgir said that even after the fall of the Hasina government following a people's uprising, the 'Indian establishment is yet to reach out to BNP, even though China, the US, the UK, and Pakistan have already done so.'
"We are of the view that the upcoming meeting between the President and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over lunch will contribute towards achieving the President's vision to promote intra-regional peace and prosperity in this part of the world," Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit told a weekly news briefing.
'I am not minimising either the seriousness or the complex nature of the current situation.' 'Naturally, we have to do what it takes to secure our borders.' 'We are talking to the Chinese, both through military channels and diplomatic ones.'
'In fact, they work in tandem.' 'When it comes to finding a solution, this must be predicated on honouring all agreements and understandings.' 'And not attempting to alter the status quo unilaterally.'
'There is a view that there is a Pakistan angle to this.' 'Pakistan has a large presence in Qatar and would want India to be blacklisted.'
'China did not expect India to show such strategic resolve in defending its territorial integrity.'
Talking to some 80-plus Congressmen in a closed-door meeting at Jaipur on the sidelines of the party's Chintan Shivir, Dr Singh reportedly said that India should not be sentimental in diplomacy and use wisdom.
The prime ministers of India and Pakistan will mix with Bollywood stars and thousands of fans as the two rivals square off in a World Cup cricket semi-final on Wednesday in the wake of high profile peace talks between the two nations.
The trend is expected to continue in 2007.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Thursday presented a cream-coloured south silk sari to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who in return gifted the famous Bangladeshi Jamdani sari to the visiting Indian leader.
'Indian diplomacy in West Asia under the present government has been a success story -- and with Saudi Arabia in particular,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
