National Affairs

Riti S, Team PB7 Dwarhat though a non-descript small town along the serpentine road, amidst cedar and pine trees, is a heart-captivating destination in the Kumaon hills with numerous ancient temples and mind blowing sightseeing tourist destinations to explore, relax and rejuvenate and the newly constructed Kumaon Public School for the service personnel’s children. It is also the recruiting ground ...

|By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)| We have had three five star Marshals- late Field Marshal KM Cariappa known as an  Officer and a Gentleman, late  Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw famous for  soldiering with dignity and Arjan Singh  the first and the only officer to have been elevated to Marshal of the Indian Air Force who died on Saturday, 16 September 2017. I have had no interaction with the ...

[By Sarah Gandee] In the minutes before the clock struck midnight on August 14-15 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, made a now-hallowed speech to the nation on the eve of its independence: Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny … At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist] In India, Dalits are killed over and over again. Every single day. Beaten, tortured, murdered, raped, stripped and paraded naked through the streets of their villages and towns, forced to drink urine, eat human excreta, humiliated in the most inhuman ways every single day in India. And with total impunity in most cases. These ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – A number of seemingly unrelated controversies in India actually have one important element in common: They all relate to criminal offenses codified by India’s British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century that India has proved unable or unwilling to outgrow. The problematic features of the British-drafted Indian Penal Code include the prohibition of “sedition,” ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore, Pakistan, on Christmas Day brought his hyperkinetic year of global diplomacy to a headline-grabbing close. It also raised serious questions about the direction of the highly fraught relationship between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Since Modi took office in May 2014, India-Pakistan relations have experienced more ups ...

Vijay Diwas (Victory Day) is commemorated every year on 16th December in India as it marks its military victory over Pakistan in 1971 during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The end of the war resulted in the unilateral surrender of the Pakistan Army and subsequent secession of East Pakistan into Bangladesh. This day, however, does not merely mark the celebration of ...

A successful meeting in Bangkok between National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan has paved the way for Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue between the two countries. [By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: Happymon Jacob has done for years what National Security Adviser Ajit Kumar Doval, his counterpart in Pakistan Nasir Janjua and Indian and Pakistan Foreign Secretaries S Jaishankar and Aizaz Ahmad ...

The United Nations calls child marriage a ‘violation’. Yet, despite its near total worldwide illegality, it continues to thrive in many areas of the developing world, writes Kevin Childs | New Internationalist Recently, an interesting hashtag has been trending on Twitter. #TheStrengthToSayNo campaign is a joint initiative between Penguin Books and BetterIndia.com, and is inspired by the life story of ...

[Karl Linden] How is it possible that 2.4 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities in 2015? While many westerners use their bathroom time as “me time,“ 40% of the world’s population may be pooping outdoors, in an unsanitary latrine, or in a plastic bag and launching flying toilets to dispose of their waste. The environmental impact of the ...