Comment & Briefs

The purposes of the visit have been achieved and a new phase of relationship has begun with India acknowledging Nepal as an ‘equal partner’.

Kim will drive the hardest bargain possible and be willing to make only small concessions like maintaining some type of a freeze on future tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.

The Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force officer corps has a challenging task at hand to preserve the operational capability of the force as well as address the genuine concerns being expressed by their subordinates.

The challenge lies in demonstrating to potential importers that India, currently the world’s largest arms importer, has the capacity to manufacture and export the equipment required by their armed forces.

Geopolitical competition between the great powers with or without direct conflict will lead to a situation where productive cooperation among them on critical international issues is likely to prove difficult.

The Draft Defence Production Policy 2018, which aims to promote the Make in India initiative in the defence sector and create a world-class arms manufacturing base, faces a number of challenges, which, if left unaddressed, may limit its usefulness.

The promises contained in the recently released draft are so intertwined that a comprehensive action plan would be required to implement all of them almost simultaneously for achieving the policy objective.

External balancing is re-emerging as an element of policy driven by the yawning power asymmetry between India and China and China’s turn towards assertive behaviour and territorial claims.

India should carefully understand the evolving foreign policy strategy of China under Xi Jinping, and notably, his worldview, and try to position bilateral relations accordingly.

The Cambridge Analytica episode highlights the need to expedite the process of developing a data protection framework and probably amend the IT Act in accordance with the changing realities of cyberspace.