COLUMNIST: SUSENJIT GUHA
Brain Storm
Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer based in Kolkata, India. He has a colorful and varied background, having worked as an accountant, run his own export business and served as a consultant to companies seeking government contracts on supplying minerals and other materials to Bangladesh. He has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent. He is an independent thinker on global issues and international affairs, and his opinion pieces are published in The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle in India. He can be contacted at squha60@yahoo.com.
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October 20, 2009Kolkata, India — The deadly suicide bomb attack in Iran on Sunday has triggered another round of the blame game with Pakistan, the alleged mastermind and villain. The incident also makes it more difficult for the United States, seen as Pakistan’s supporter, to kick start negotiations with Iran.
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September 16, 2009Kolkata, India — Frequent incursions into India by Chinese troops are not only about territory that China considers disputed, but also about ideology the Chinese are not comfortable with. While India is aiming for a top slot in Asia economically, China – way ahead in the race – also has expansionism embedded in its ambitions.
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September 04, 2009Kolkata, India — Mounting allegations of vote rigging in Afghanistan’s general elections and rising U.S. troop casualties, despite a doubling of the troops last year, are eroding public confidence in the United States in the country’s role in Afghanistan. Many fear it could turn into another Vietnam.
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August 18, 2009Kolkata, India — U.S. President Barack Obama greeted the people of India on the country's Independence Day by saying that a vibrant and promising India has a natural friend in the United States. But this rhetoric doesn’t suggest that the United States supports a larger role for India in South Asian affairs.
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July 21, 2009Kolkata, India — As official Chinese reports continue to paint the Uighur Muslim minority as villains in the recent rioting in Urumqi city in the northwest region of Xinjiang, one wonders whether a communist government or the majority Han Chinese are intolerant of ethnicity.
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June 15, 2009Kolkata, India — If the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama wants to know why anti-Americanism keeps brewing in different parts of the world, it should take a hard look at the dangerous Afghanistan-Pakistan policy it is toying with, at the expense of India, and the inevitable fallout that might result.
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May 11, 2009Kolkata, India — The world has been unable to pressure the Sri Lankan government to agree to a ceasefire with rebel Tamil forces, despite 50,000 civilians trapped in the war zone. Sri Lanka and other nations marred by conflicts can be dismissive of global pressure because of covert moral and logistic support lent by China.
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March 03, 2009Kolkata, India — Not since its bloody birth in 1971 has Bangladesh seen such a gory event unfold as last week’s slaying of army officers by the Bangladesh Rifles in Dhaka. It would be naive to reason that this was caused by the mutineers’ frustration over poor pay and perks compared to those received by the armed forces.
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January 05, 2009Kolkata, India — The thumping majority win by Sheikh Hasinaʼs Awami League party in Bangladesh’s recent general election promises much but raises the level of skepticism more as renascent fundamentalism in the name of Islam has made the small nation a focal point for terror in recent years.
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December 22, 2008Kolkata, India — Henry Kissinger has described Pakistan as a wild card in U.S. diplomacy. Pakistan is relying on China to veto India's call to brand it a terrorist state. It is also banking on support from the United States, which needs its resources for the war in Afghanistan.
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December 08, 2008Kolkata, India — The Pakistani government cannot control the country’s various power centers, including the armed forces and the “non-state actors” that apparently are launching acts of terror from its soil. Both the army and the infamous spy agency have a vested interest in continuing to foment trouble in India.
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November 19, 2008Kolkata, India — Summits are a success only when the participants agree on what they want to do and set about working on their pre-defined tasks. The G-20 meeting in Washington D.C. last weekend achieved nothing like that, but at least 20 top leaders sat down together rather than the usual seven or eight.
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October 27, 2008Kolkata, India — European Commission President Jose Barroso urged China, India and Japan to "be on board” at the Asia-Europe Meeting in Beijing over the weekend. Apparently exasperated with the United States, Europe is eager for a new alliance in seeking to resolve the global financial crisis.
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October 16, 2008Kolkata, India — In one fell swoop, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has turned India’s decades-old U.S. policy on its head with the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. What were India’s alternatives? Could gas from Iran through Pakistan have taken care of India’s energy needs? Or was the nuclear deal the only real choice?
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September 30, 2008Kolkata, India — With the United States finally deciding to go into Pakistan when and as its likes, it is setting up its former strategic ally – which morphed into a client state after 9/11 – to go the way of Iran. Like Iranians in the last 1970s, anti-Americanism threatens to swell among the general Pakistani population.
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September 15, 2008Kolkata, India — The Indian Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the bomb blasts in New Delhi, Saturday, which killed close to 30 people. Suspected of masterminding earlier strikes, the group could not have made a move on their own if they had not been influenced by groups across the border in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
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August 28, 2008Kolkata, India — The indefinite sit-in demonstration by Mamata Bannerjee of the Trinamool Congress Party in Singur, in front of the Tata Motor factory – producer of the world’s cheapest car, the Nano – is not only about returning 400 acres of farmland taken from villagers. It is about gaining control of rural Bengal.
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August 19, 2008Kolkata, India — At last the former commando has been cornered. In a real-life battle, Pervez Musharraf would have gone down under a hail of bullets or sniper fire. But in a nascent democracy like Pakistan, he just surrendered to avoid impeachment.
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August 06, 2008Kolkata, India — Meeting his Indian counterpart in Colombo on the sidelines of the SAARC Summit, Pakistan’s foreign minister was candid in his desperation. “If the Berlin Wall can fall, so can these troubles…that are keeping us apart,” he said. That is, as long as Pakistan’s spy agency stops fomenting conflict.
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July 21, 2008Kolkata, India — U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen’s warning to Pakistan – to clean up its act or else – came as no surprise. But the US$750 billion aid package over five years for development of schools, roads and clinics in the northwest could have come much earlier.
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July 10, 2008Kolkata, India — The leaders of the world’s richest nations sat down to an eight-course dinner in a Japanese resort this week, all members of the world’s most exclusive club. In 2008, can a group of just eight nations pontificate and opine on the future course that the larger, less privileged world should take?
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June 19, 2008Kolkata, India — U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain may differ on domestic and foreign policy, but China will be a headache for whoever occupies the White House next year. The president will have to scale down anti-China rhetoric, even as China continues to ignore ethical and democratic parameters.
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May 23, 2008Kolkata, India — Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherji’s visit to Pakistan this week followed the Jaipur bomb blasts and skirmishes in Kashmir, and coincided with a truce between the Pakistan government and militants in the Swat Valley. Is Pakistan really ready for closer ties with India?
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May 12, 2008Kolkata, India — Burma once conjured up images of a land of plenty, until the junta made it morph into a land of the poorest of the poor. Cyclone Nargis laid bare to the world the intensity of misery that hapless Burmese have to endure. The regime wallows in power, but the world should help loosen its iron grip.
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May 05, 2008Kolkata, India — If India desperately needs gas from Iran in the face of rising oil prices, Iran too cannot afford to lose an old friend in the region. That is why Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is suddenly pushing for a quick deal on the Iran-India-Pakistan gas pipeline.
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April 23, 2008Kolkata, India — Pope Benedict's visit to the White House in an election year seems to be manna from heaven for the Bush administration. The papal visit also accidentally coincided with the furor over Barrack Obama's "bitter" speech, in which he described the religion of small-town Americans in unflattering terms.
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April 16, 2008Kolkata, India — Startling revelations about U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney sanctioning the torture of terrorist suspects, President George W. Bush's decision not to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, and the naming of Iran as the biggest threat to Iraq and the United States, all warn of another Bush-made catastrophe.
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April 09, 2008Kolkata, India — Back in the 1990s, a Bangladeshi acquaintance back home in Dhaka from a U.S. university told me how he still remembered the tune in the Indian Gold Spot fizz drink advertisement he had listened to as a kid. He had thrown garlands in 1971 at Indian soldiers as their trucks rolled onto Dhaka streets.
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March 31, 2008Kolkata, India — It is no surprise that Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would kick off his round-the-world tour with a visit to the United States and announce that he would fulfill his election pledge to pull out 550 Australian troops from Iraq. He is different from his predecessor.
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March 24, 2008Kolkata, India — Three first-time events took place in quick succession over the past week in Pakistan. A woman was named speaker of the National Assembly, a compromise politician was named prime minister, and President Pervez Musharraf reviewed a parade in civilian clothing. The country is changing.
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March 17, 2008Kolkata, India — Suddenly the U.S. greenback has fallen out of favor. Tour operators and travel agents in and around India's Taj Mahal -- the monument of love -- are not in love with dollars anymore. They now prefer the euro or any other stable currency, after decades of saving greenbacks to resell at a handsome profit.
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March 10, 2008Kokata, India — When a top-drawer editor and author like M. J. Akbar is forced out of office for his independent editorial stance and India's mainstream print and electronic media choose to ignore the development, serious questions arise about the ethical parameters of this fraternity.
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March 06, 2008Kolkata, India — An American I met online was at first surprised I was a non-Christian. Then he thought I was a Muslim since I was from India. His knowledge of my Hindu faith was vague. Few Americans know much about the world outside, despite the U.S. presence in nearly every corner of the globe.
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February 25, 2008Kolkata, India — Although Pakistan's "mother of elections" yielded a simple majority to the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League-N, reflecting a vote against President Pervez Musharraf and his PML-Q, the root cause of the people's ire remains firmly rooted -- and Musharraf is in no mood to budge.
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February 20, 2008KOLKATA, India — Hot on the heels of a comment by the Archbishop of Canterbury on BBC Radio 4 that recognition of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law was unavoidable, Chancellor Alistair Darling is now mulling over the issue of Islamic bonds to pay for Gordon Brown's public spending program.
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February 09, 2008Kolkata, India — "Honor killings" are on the rise among Asian immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the United Kingdom. These crimes are committed mostly against women by men from tribal, feudal and patriarchal rural societies with little or no education. They have nothing to do with Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism.
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January 29, 2008Kolkata, India — The U.S. obsession with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, taken in as an ally in the war on terror, may finally come to an abrupt end. With the Taliban dug in inside Pakistan, al-Qaida still entrenched, and civil society alienated, the United States must be in a fix about its fixation.
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January 17, 2008Kolkata, India — As the White House hopefuls, both Democrat and Republican, lace their speeches with the primary U.S. concerns -- Iraq, internal security, immigration, healthcare and the economy -- they may have to add a nuclear armed Pakistan to their list in future.
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January 09, 2008Kolkata, India — The real casualty of the 10-month East Pakistani resistance that climaxed in Bangladesh in 1971 was not the West Pakistanis who lost a jute-laden East, or the minority Bengali Hindus who fled to India. It was the Bihari community, which is still denied citizenship.
