Blog Posts by Ashok Malik

In almost exactly a month, the President of the United States will visit India. There was a time when such occurrences were so rare, you could count them by the decades. Dwight Eisenhower came to India in 1959, on a South Asia tour that also saw him stopping by in Pakistan, where he became the first American president to watch a cricket test match (Pakistan versus Australia). Ten years later, in the worst phase of India-US relations, Richard Nixon dropped by for less than 24 hours. It was another 10 years before Jimmy Carter landed in New Delhi in 1978 for a tepid interaction that saw disagreements on the nuclear issue.

The breakthrough came in March 2000, when Bill Clinton charmed and mesmerised India, making all the right gestures, saying just what his hosts wanted to hear. It was a landmark.

In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin landed in India, with the Congress and the Communists competing to welcome them. The visit became emblematic of New Delhi's leftward tilt and, in

It is now official that the 2011 Census of India will include a question on caste. For the first time since 1931, every Indian citizen will be asked to self-identify his or her caste or sub-caste.

The option of saying "No caste" or "My caste is Indian" will perhaps be available to conscientious objectors, but in the larger reckoning this will serve little purpose. It is more likely that several people from socially privileged backgrounds will try and present themselves as belonging to one or the other of the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and attempt to get a slice of the reservation cake. A degree of confusion and plain misrepresentation is imminent.

The reintroduction of the caste parameter into the Census process has serious implications. Till 1931, the caste headcount was undertaken by an imperial government that sought to categorise, sub-categorise and thereby divide a subject people. This is not the intention of the sovereign government of a free country. Rather, the India of 2011

Oriental cunning once gave cricket the leg glance. These days its most newsworthy contribution seems to be an unending chain of fixing syndicates. Every cricket-related betting or fixing scandal in the past decade or so has had an Indian or Pakistani fingerprint. Even so, it is important to note this is not the same story being repeated over and over again. It has evolved over the years.

If the April 2000 revelations about Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin constituted a tragedy, the recent 'no-ball swindle' is almost farcical. The Pakistani cricket establishment spent days in denial. The International Cricket Council had to be pushed and goaded into doing the right thing and suspending the three implicated cricketers.

Lost in all this was a dispassionate analysis of the nature of the crime - or alleged crime - and how it varied from that in 2000. Speaking on television, one cricket writer said he saw no distinction between 'match fixing' and 'spot fixing' because ultimately they

In recent weeks, the National Forest Rights Act (NFRA) Committee has recommended stopping work on two major industrial projects in Orissa. It has found fault with Vedanta Aluminium's proposal to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of the state's Kalahandi district. It has also waved a red flag at the proposal by POSCO (the Pohang Iron and Steel Company, to give it its full form) to set up a giant steel facility in Paradip. POSCO's right to mine iron ore in Orissa is an ancillary controversy.

The NFRA Committee has been constituted by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs. In effect, it reports to Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. The committee is headed by N.C. Saxena, an upright and extremely well-regarded former civil servant whose commitment to the social sector is acknowledged. Nevertheless, a compelling question has arisen following the twin recommendations of the Committee: are the objections state-specific, company-specific or

Rather expectedly, and unfortunately, the debate on the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh by a team of police officers from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh has got compressed into a quarrel on Narendra Modi. There are those who see this as comeuppance for the Gujarat chief minister, among India's most charismatic as well as most polarising politicians. There are others who see this as vendetta on the part of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the UPA government.

It would be unfair to reduce the episode to a referendum on Narendra Modi. Things are far more complex. Some internal security specialists and policing veterans - not all them Modi fans - are plain distraught. They believe the politicisation of standard crime fighting and the implication of sections of the police in a tussle between India's two biggest political parties will prove hazardous in the long run.

To understand why, one needs to answer four key questions:

1. Who was Sohrabuddin Sheikh?

2. Has his

Following the failure of talks between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers in Islamabad earlier this month, the Indian foreign policy establishment has gone back to familiar positioning. There are those who argue that - to borrow Mani Shankar Aiyar's phrase - the India-Pakistan dialogue must be made "uninterrupted and uninterruptible". On the other hand, there is the rhetorical flourish of L.K. Advani: "Never before has India's Pakistan policy been so completely alienated from public opinion."

There is something tiresome and repetitive about both points. They could as easily have been made 20 years ago. They also presume that India is responding to a Pakistan that is stable and predictable. In fact, the dynamics within Pakistan - and parameters that influence Pakistani decision-making, such as it is - are changing almost by the minute. Pakistan (and by extension Afghanistan) has always been a volatile polity, but for critical reasons the volatility is sky-high at this moment.

As Srinagar erupted and India's "Kashmir question" returned to haunt it, the buzz in Lutyens' Delhi was near unanimous: Omar Abdullah was not up to the job and needed to be replaced as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir by his father, Farooq Abdullah. Alternatively, sections of the Congress spread the story that the party would break its alliance with the Abdullahs' National Conference (NC) and instead support a government led by the People's Democratic Party (PDP), founded by Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. The Sayeeds and the Abdullahs are old rivals.

Such suggestions were deeply disquieting. True, Omar Abdullah hasn't quite been an achiever in two years as chief minister. True, his greying hair, so evident on television, indicates the pressure he is under. Even so, would replacing him with his father (or anybody) be the answer?

It would be worth arguing that any chief minister in Omar's situation would have done as badly. When a critical mass of your population virtually rises in revolt, or

For 60 years, Indian diplomacy has studiously kept clear of religious symbolism. Even so, in recent days a series of initiatives has made it apparent that India is using Buddhism as a foreign policy tool. Typical of this country, it is not always happening in an organised, top-down manner. Yet, different stakeholders of the Indian establishment seem to be coming round to the same view on the relative merits of promoting India's Buddhist identity.

Consider the evidence. In May 2010, President Pratibha Patil travelled to Luoyang, in China's Henan province, and consecrated a Buddhist temple inspired by the Sanchi Stupa in Madhya Pradesh. Luoyang is regarded as the nursery of Chinese Buddhism. It is home to the White Horse Temple, one of the oldest Buddhist religious centres in China. Luoyang is also the birthplace of Hiuen-Tsang, the Chinese monk who came to India as a pilgrim and student and went back as a friend and ambassador.

Historically, Luoyang has been the recipient of Buddhist