Forum on India-Pakistan

Shaking off a colonial power is never easy and rarely results in anything one might call a clean break. With the waning of Western domination, stretching from the 18th century exploits of the East India Company, with buccaneering Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, through the somewhat more civilized heights of the post-Mutiny British Raj, the…

Peace talks between India and Pakistan tend to collapse in spectacular failure. Every attempt at peace during the last 15 years deteriorated within months into explosive military crises over Kashmir in 1990, 1999, and 2002. India and Pakistan are again attempting peace, and have been doing so since May 2003 with a minimum of violence and…

On September 24, 2004 the new Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York; it was the first meeting of the two leaders. The South Asian media were keen to observe even the tiniest signals. Will the two leaders interact well? Will they establish a good…

I was six years old when Pakistan was so turbulently born.  Six obviously is a difficult age to try to comprehend major national and international events even when they create extreme upheavals in a child’s life. Still, I could sense the rising tensions around me. We already had just moved to Delhi when it was decided…

I was born in the united province of British India (now called Utter Pradesh) which was the center of Muslim civilization in South Asia. Muslims comprised 14% of  the population but their influence was greater than numbers imply. The province contained a core of Muslim landowners, a strong Muslim middle class and among its Muslim-oriented educational…

There was a sideshow at the Agra Summit that told its own story about Kashmir.  In the lobby of the Moghul Sheraton Hotel journalists from both countries gathered from dawn to dusk awaiting news from the summiteers who met not just in another hotel but behind doors so completely closed that even titbits of news…