Category: Comparative Politics

• Institutionalizing the BCIM: The Next Steps

  What institutions does BCIM need at the Track-1 level for achieving greater integration and coordination of mutually beneficial activities across borders? Is transnational governance is the ultimate goal? Will sub-national governments in the 4 countries be actively involved?

• Regional Connectivity: The Gaps ‘on the Ground’

  Despite the end of the Cold War and the rapid expansion of regionalism the world over, regional connectivity in the sub-region involving Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) has little to show by way of progress.

• China in 2011: Through the Indian Looking Glass

  Isn’t China, like India, a country of over a billion people? Who but Indians can really grasp the incredible complexities and myriad problems of a billion people living under one flag?

• Emerging Regional Architectures in Asia

  In the case of Russia-India-China trilateral, the domestic political orientation of each country contributes fundamentally to its perceptions and views of the objectives and functions of regional organizations.

• Grand Old Parties: The Chinese Communist Party and the Congress (I)

  Most Indian political parties are non-democratic organizations functioning in a democracy. If a communist party in an authoritarian state realizes the need to innovate and hold intra-party elections, to choose the best leaders to put before the people, how much more must Indian political parties?

• Learning Chinese, Understanding China

  A presentation, I made at the Department of Chinese Language, Foreign Languages Wing, Army Education Corps Training College and Centre in Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh in early July 2011.

• Indian Democracy’s China Responsibility

  The business of inspiring China and the Chinese is not one of the United States and Americans alone. India and Indians too, can step in. But let us not be caught being hypocritical or taking short-cuts, for the Chinese are watching.

• Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute: Provinces/States as Ice-Breakers

  The solution to both the political and economic discontent of Chinese provinces and Indian states as well as the unresolved boundary dispute between the two countries could be to allow their provinces greater freedom to interact with each other in terms of people-to-people and economic contacts

• China and the Arab Revolutions

  Rather than concentrate all power in one person or even in a select few, the Chinese Communist Party sought to increase its membership – to some 80 million, now – and to draft into its ranks, the educated and the talented. These select are allowed the freedom to be frank and critical to the rulers,…