The Last Open Pulpit: Kashmir’s Friday Sermon Row and the Kashmiri Muslim Fight Over Preserving the Right to Exist
For many Kashmiri Muslims, Friday is the one hour of the week that still belongs to them. The mosque fills, the imam stands, and a community that has had little say over its own affairs hears its fears and its faith spoken aloud by someone it trusts. When the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board…
Beijing’s Non-Recognition of the Union Territory of Ladakh: India–China Cartographic Contestation Deepens
China says it has never recognised the Union Territory of Ladakh and has called India’s decision to standardise 28 place names there “illegal and invalid”. Beijing’s foreign ministry responded on 13 October, eleven days after India’s Ministry of Home Affairs placed the names on official Survey of India maps. India’s Standardisation of 28 Place…
Afghanistan’s Terrorism Ecosystem: How Taliban Rule Is Sustaining a Regional Security Threat
Five years after the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Afghanistan remains a significant base of operations, sanctuary and networking for multiple terrorist organisations. The central security problem is not that the Taliban command every militant group operating from Afghan territory. Rather, Afghanistan has developed into a terrorism ecosystem base: a Taliban-controlled territorial…
The Politics of Erasure: Institutional Audits, Banned Books, and the Suppression of Dissent in Indian-Occupied Kashmir
An unprecedented ideological and administrative purge is unfolding across Indian-occupied Kashmir, threatening the foundations of intellectual autonomy and historical preservation. Recent data tabled in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly reveals that authorities have scrutinized a staggering 2,181,582 books and publications across college libraries, public repositories, and educational institutions. Under the official guise of eliminating…
Weaponizing the Dead: Why Burial Denial Marks a Dangerous Shift in India
Amid the constant noise and near normalising of persecution against religious minorities in India, why does the denial of burial to Christians by villagers in Chhattisgarh—and in pockets elsewhere— stir anger, not just in the wider Christian community but also from ordinary Hindus and Judges on the benches of the Supreme Court? This is…
Papering Over the Fissures: The Illusion of Consensus in an Expanded BRICS
The eighteenth BRICS summit closed in New Delhi with a joint declaration in hand, a result that India’s government has presented as a diplomatic triumph. Given that two earlier ministerial meetings this year had failed to produce any agreed text at all, the achievement is not trivial. Yet a closer reading of the New…
Sanctioning the Sangh: USCIRF, the RSS, and the Limits of US-India Strategic Partnership
The diplomatic standoff between Washington’s independent monitoring mechanisms, local US political leadership, and New Delhi’s foreign policy apparatus reached an unprecedented threshold as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Chief (Sarsanghchalak) Mohan Bhagwat commenced his multi-nation tour across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Centred on a 29 August address at New York’s Madison…
The Kashmir case: Why the Instrument of Accession was Kept Secret until 2016
For decades, researchers visiting the National Archives of India in New Delhi could consult the Instruments of Accession signed by the rulers of princely states that joined India after the end of British rule in 1947. The documents were there, available for scholars to examine. There was, however, one conspicuous exception: Jammu and Kashmir.…
The Gulf Slips Away: How the Makkah Pact Ended India’s Decade of Gulf Diplomacy
The formalisation of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on 7 August 2026 marks a pivotal structural shift in the security architecture of West Asia and South Asia. Signed in the holy city of Makkah by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the trilateral…
July Revolution: Beyond Hopes and Disappointments
Two years after the student-led people’s uprising dismantled the fifteen-year autocracy of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh finds itself navigating the complex realities of structural recalibration. The euphoric aftermath of August 2024, baptized by its architects as the “July Revolution”, promised an immediate democratic renaissance. Yet as the initial revolutionary dust settles across the streets of…
