Author: India Writes Network

Who will win Delhi? Modi stability mantra versus Kejriwal’s new politics

- by India Writes Network

All eyes are on the electrifying electoral battle for Delhi, and which way it will swing. On a sunny Saturday morning, Delhites queued up outside polling booths spread across the city of around 25 million people. There was a palpable sense of enthusiasm among voters, who were unanimous in their craving for a smart city, equipped with world-class infrastructure and higher standard of living.
By 3 pm, 51.15 per cent of 13 million voters had cast their ballots. Chief Election Commissioner H.S Brahma said he expected a 65-70 per cent voter turnout on February 7. 66 per cent had voted in the 2013 assembly elections. If opinion polls are to be believed, a few thousand votes may make a decisive difference.
The key issues in the Delhi polls are, according to the voters spoke by India Writes Network, indiawrites.org, access to uninterrupted electricity, decent health care, modern education, controlling inflation, encouraging sanitation drive and building infrastructure, strengthening women security, and increasing employment rate and raising living standard.
It would be fair to say that the Delhi elections have become a matter of prestige for Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal. Delhi is the power centre of the country. A win or loss in Delhi for the BJP could strip Mr Modi of some of the halo of invincibility as his party has won most state elections and done exceedingly well in states like Jammu and Kashmir, where it had hitherto no presence.

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Is India firmly aligned with the US now?

- by India Writes Network

After the high profile summit with US President Barak Obama, has Prime Minister Narendra Modi placed India firmly in the US camp, much to the chagrin of the old foreign policy establishment in Delhi that reveled in the business of non-policy making under cover of non-alignment.At the outset, our so-called non-alignment was not really so, as we were clearly in the Soviet camp for reasons not entirely of our own making. Pandit Nehru was ideologically sympathetic to the Soviet Union while his daughter went a step further and cemented the relationship with Moscow with the Indo-Soviet treaty in 1971 prior to the launching of war to liberate East Pakistan. The fact that Nixon-Kissinger led America at that time was openly ’tilting’ in favour of Gen. Yahya Khan and towards Mao’s Communist China instead of a ‘socialist democracy’ in India was one of the contributing reasons for our alignment with the USSR. In fact, before signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty, Indira Gandhi went to London and Washington to seek their support to end the massacre in East Pakistan, but returned empty handed.

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Reappraising Relations with China: From Strategic Ambiguity to Recognising Mutual Interests

- by India Writes Network

As global economic and strategic concerns shift to Asia, Chinese analysis of global trends has resulted in a strategic shift in China’s approaches to foreign and security policy. This is, for instance, reflected both in the call for a ‘new type of major power relationship’ with the United States as well as in the new outreach initiatives towards Asian countries. Beijing has been among the first to reach out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and our relations with China should not respond merely to its re-emergence but also engage with it in shaping the future regional and global orders.

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