The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation holds out benefit for India

The first multilateral summit Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend in his second term will be the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) get-together in Kyrgystan. The SCO is among a set of strategic bodies that India has signed up to as a geopolitical hedge rather than because it is clear how membership will further long-term strategic interests. That the media interest is more about the possibility of Mr Modi’s meeting Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his face-to-face with China’s Xi Jinping is not without reason.

Nonetheless, it is important that India continues to invest in SCO. The body has shown slow but steady development as a counterterrorism body and could potentially become the basis of a trading arrangement in the region. But India’s struggle to engage Central Asia and the Eurasian heartland is severely hampered by geography. The lack of a common border with Central Asia, the cordon created by Pakistan and China, the complexity of setting up a land-sea connection via Iran and Afghanistan severely constrains India’s economic footprint. Central Asia’s trade with Indian is about a fiftieth of the region’s trade with China. The possibility of a United States withdrawal from Afghanistan will only increase the difficulties India already faces.
India’s original entry was promoted by Russia to counter the influence of China in the region. Since then, Moscow has aligned itself with Beijing. The primary supporters of an active Indian role are the Central Asian countries themselves, desirous of geopolitical options beyond the two giants to their north and east. China’s overweening position is so evident that India had to agree not to directly criticise Pakistan in Bishkek. But many SCO members are pleased to join in poking Pakistan through more general statements about terrorism. Yet SCO is no one’s puppet: even China’s hopes for an SCO development bank and free trade agreement were shot down by others. These and similar pointers indicate there are enough chinks and gaps for India to exert leverage, so long as it is realistic about how far its writ will run.

Thanking you.

Bimstec

Bimstec is an important overlay to the neighbourhood policy. India has practised a protectionist trade policy for decades, ensuring that its Bay of Bengal neighbours have tended to look elsewhere for their external economic relations. Bimstec’s policy past has been as awkward and unmemorable as its name implies. Over the coming years, it must be transformed into a genuine free trade and investment agreement. It should be seen as a test of India’s ambitions to be a leading power. If India cannot harness the Bay of Bengal region firmly to its own trajectory, it can hardly aspire to have a lasting influence on any other part of the world.
Thanking you so much.

India must see Bimstec as a step towards global prominence #Sir Riko Mahato

By both word and deed, the new Narendra Modi government has signalled its determination to double down on its neighbourhood policy. The prime minister invited the heads of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (Bimstec) for his inauguration along with the president of Mauritius. Modi has kicked off his second-term foreign policy with visits to the Maldives and Sri Lanka while External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has gone to Bhutan. The foreign minister also outlined a regional policy that would operate on several layers. New Delhi would seek to promote Bimstec as the primary multilateral body for South Asia, escaping the Pakistan bottleneck that has crippled the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc). With his trip to the Maldives, the prime minister will have made a full state visit to all of India’s smaller neighbours. More practically, India must build connectivity among these neighbours to put flesh on the bones of its regional cooperation.

A stable neighbourhood has been at the top of India’s foreign policy goals since independence. But it is a policy that has struggled. The Pakistan problem has repeatedly sucked the oxygen out of the policy, with minimal rewards. New Delhi has been perceived with suspicion by many of the other countries, fuelled in part by its occasionally short-sighted interventions in their affairs. India has since become more generous in its attitudes to its eastern and maritime neighbours. It will move away from petty demands for reciprocity. It has carried out a historical turnaround in bilateral relations with Bangladesh. Thanks to China’s inroads, New Delhi has recognised the dangers of a poorly interlinked region. Just as useful, India has been increasingly able to persuade these neighbours that they are losing out economically by this lack of connectivity. Among the lessons learnt in the past five years, as the foreign minister pointed out recently, is how to finance and complete infrastructure projects, which is traditionally not an Indian strength.

The aim and imperfections of Kargil

Another aim was to open up a new route for infiltration over the Amarnath Mountains into the Kashmir Valley and the Doda region south of the Pir Panjal range. In the Batalik and Turtok Valley area, which adjoins the Siachen glacial belt, Pakistan attempted to establish a firm base with a view to eventually advancing along the Shyok River Valley to cut the only road link to India’s Siachen Brigade.

The Pakistani army had also hoped to physically occupy some territory on the Indian side of the LoC to use as a bargaining counter subsequently, particularly to seek an Indian withdrawal from the Siachen Glacier conflict zone.

The then Indian Army chief General VP Malik’s counter strategy was to immediately contain and limit the intrusions, prepare for and evict the Pakistani soldiers from the Indian side of the LoC before the end of the summer and, finally, enhance surveillance, patrolling and deployment, where necessary, to ensure that the Pakistan army is denied the opportunity to launch a similar venture again.

What the Kargil War teaches India about its national security

Kargil War, 1999. The most important lesson that India learnt from the Kargil imbroglio is that the essential requirements of national security should not be compromised (AFP).

Twenty years ago, on May 3, 1999, local shepherds reported seeing some Pakistani intruders on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) in the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). On July 26, 1999, the Pakistan army was pushed back by the Indian Army from the last of the heights it had surreptitiously occupied. With that well-earned victory, Operation Vijay came to an end.

The Pakistan army’s offensive was an ill-conceived military adventure. By infiltrating its regular soldiers in civilian clothes across the LoC and physically occupying ground on the Indian side, the Pakistan army had added a new dimension to its 10-year old proxy war against India. Pakistan’s provocative action compelled India to launch a firm but measured and restrained military operation to clear the intruders.

Operation Vijay was finely calibrated to limit military action to the Indian side of the LoC and included air strikes from fighter-ground attack (FGA) aircraft and attack helicopters of the Indian Air Force. Artillery firepower played a key role in paving the way for India’s brave infantrymen to take back the occupied heights inch-by-bloody inch.

Why did Pakistan undertake a military operation that was foredoomed to failure? Clearly, the Pakistani military establishment had become frustrated with India’s success in containing the militancy in J&K to within manageable limits and could not bear to see its strategy of ‘bleeding India through a thousand cuts’ evaporating into thin air.
Though it was not stated in the Lahore Declaration of February 1999, acceptance of the concept of the LoC as a permanent border between India and Pakistan had begun to gain currency. In an act more out of desperation than strategic planning, the Pakistan army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate decided to launch an organised intrusion into the militarily vacant remote areas of Kargil district to once again ignite the spark of militancy and gain moral ascendancy over the Indian security forces.

The strategic aim of the Pakistan army in engineering these intrusions under the facade of Kashmiri militancy was to provide a fresh impetus to the flagging militancy -- wrongly called jihad -- and again attempt to focus international attention on the Kashmir dispute.

In the Dras, Mushko Valley and Kaksar sectors the military aim was to sever the Srinagar-Leh National Highway 1A to isolate Kargil district and cut India’s lifeline to Leh, with a view to eventually choking supplies and reinforcements to Indian troops holding the Saltoro Ridge west of the Siachen Glacier.

THE HAPPINESS FEELING DISAPPEARS

We are often so busy running around wanting happiness that we donot see it right in frront of us, it is like dew on the grass there for a little while but then gone.


HAPPINESS IS WHAT BONDS US TOGETHER.

We all have the equal desire to have happiness and at the same time we donot want to feel pain or sorrow. And yet this is something we rarely think about or truely understand.

By remembering that every single other person want the same thing we can begin to understand happiness as something full of compassion and generosity.


Rather than a selfish search for pleasure  for fulfilling our own desires.

Thousands of candle can be lightened from a single candle and the life of the candle will not be shortened.Happiness never decreased ..

Happiness is a feeling that arises in you. It is not an object to be sought. It has to evolve within ourselves

We all talk about it,we think of it and we all want it- to the extent that we are all seeking it daily and every moment in out lives, but have you paused to ask or wondered what is this thing called happiness?

Why do we need so much?

Why do we crave it?

Why do we see it as the ambition of life, as it were?

The problem lies in our understanding of happiness. We understand it instinctively - a child grins smiles laughs- or so do we and we connect it to happiness.

A brief passing thought that can bring a smile to our faces or the company of some friends over drinks constitutes happiness for most of us.

Nothing wrong with that.

We all want to experience some happiness along the way but we are often not quite sure what happiness is.


Is it the pleasure from a particular experiece being with a particular person or in a particular place?

Is it a fleeting we must try and capture as much as we can and think up way and means to do so?

Or is it a deeper more durable sense that can endure effortlessly within ourselves?

Which brings us to the crux of the matter- can we make happiness a permanent fixture in our lives?