Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Maoist Spring Thunder is a detailed account and analysis of the momentous events, which made not only the West Bengal Administration but also the whole country sit up and think about the ruthless manner in which violent means were resorted to get the demands for land reforms and distribution of land among the have-nots in West Bengal.

Mohan Guruswamy and his group of scholars are to be complimented for this new approach to analysing security in a region, based essentially on examination of socio-economic data.

We have here a book of essays put together by Mahendra Lawoti, who teaches Political Science in Western Michigan University, and is President of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies in the United States.

Rehman Sobhan is among the best known and respected figures in Bangladesh, some may say a keeper of the nation’s economic conscience. The three volumes of his collected works total an impressive 1448 pages comprising 188 articles and speeches.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the father of Pakistan and had become a cult figure for most Pakistanis and therefore, it was no easy job for anyone to write an objective biography. This was illustrated by the ban imposed in the eighties on the biography, Jinnah of Pakistan, written by Stanley Wolpert in 1984 which did not conform to the official image.

It must surely be a most difficult undertaking to be the son of the founder of a state and to try and describe yourself and your life. For Field Marshall Mohammed Ayub Khan was as much the founder of the state of Pakistan as Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the founder of the nation.

Official spokespersons of both the Pakistan and Indian Governments have recently stated that ever since the partition of these countries, the relations between India and Pakistan have never been as good as they currently are.

Two decades ago, at the height of the Brasstacks exercise close to the Indo-Pak border by the Indian military, Pakistan decided that it would make public its possession of nuclear weapons. The intention of the military rulers who then ruled Pakistan was to put India on notice that Pakistan had acquired a nuclear deterrent that rendered India’s conventional superiority impotent.

J&K is very much the flavour of the day and there have been many publications on this theme in recent years. This compendium of 21 essays, put together by the Centre for Strategic and Regional Studies of Jammu University,

It is interesting to see where Pakistan is today, where the India-Pakistan relationship is headed and compare reality with what the authors have said would happen to the nuclear relationship. This is particularly so since the book attempts for the first time to link deterrence calculations with IR theory.

The very title of this book recalls to one’s mind the four articles of the eminent Pakistani journalist, the late Altaf Gauhar published during September-October 1999 in the Pakistani paper Nation under the heading ‘Four Wars, one assumption.’

N. Manoharan prefaces his book with the lament that not one study links ethnic violence and human rights in the Sri Lankan context. This is exactly what he then sets out to do. The relationship between escalating (or de-escalating) ethnic violence and levels of human rights protection is both an obvious and challenging subject of study. In and of themselves,