Politics is conducted with the support of levers. That is, the handles a politician or a party or a government has at its disposal in order to force or encourage the other side to respect it and behave in a prudent manner. India had signed the famous ‘Panchsheel Agreement’ with the communist China in April 1954. What levers did the government of India have to force China not to violate the agreement? From all accounts it appears the Indian leadership did not even think about it. They simply believed in the piece of paper they had by way of the…
Author: Shankar Sharan
Yvette Claire Rosser is an US scholar working for a long time on the text-books in the Indian sub-continent. Recently she has written a small book entitled Islamisation of the Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks (Delhi: Rupa, 2003). It contains, inter alia, very interesting details of contradictions between the Pakistani nationalism and its Islamic faith. For instance, on the one hand Pakistani historians use all means to justify creating of a Pakistani nation. Entire histories of Sindhis, Balouchis are denied to serve the purpose, so that they all must feel themselves as Paksitanis, nothing else. On the other, for the purity…