Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Nepal in Transition: From Peoples War to Fragile Peace straddles two choices—pulling in the writings of influential scholars who have politically explained the Maoist insurgency—Mahendra Lawoti (academic), Deepak Thapa (social scientist) and Devendra Raj Panday, (policy maker and civil society leader),

Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic chronicles the two eventful decades, after 1990, of Nepal’s experiment with democracy. Written in a non-linear, lucid narrative, and with an enviable access to political and intelligence sources, the book provides powerful insights into the Maoist insurgency…

In The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes Across Continents and Centuries Jeremy Seabrook makes the despair of the garment workers of Bangladesh convincing.

The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2014, leaving behind about 10000 odd soldiers for training and limited operations, in a sense symbolizes the end of an era.

Pakistan has been boxed in a peculiar paradoxical situation–on one hand it is pronounced as a state perpetrating militancy and on the other a victim itself of terrorism fighting rather hard to counter militancy.

aj Hashmi evidently utilized his four year stint at the US Department of Defence, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, very well. He mentions conversations with student practitioners with service in theatres of the myriad and ongoing American wars.

This is a chilling account of the origins, ideological moorings, national ambitions and global outreach of one of the world’s most proscribed terrorist groups—the Lashkar–e-Taiba (LeT), designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the United States since December 2001 and also implicated by the United Nations since December, 2008 in its front denomination,Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD).

Ayesha Jalal’s latest work is a reflective account of Pakistan’s contemporary history and the nascent effort by its citizens to reimagine Pakistan, free from military dominance and as a ‘more resilient federal union’.

A year ago no one could have imagined that Pakistan would change its course from a rickety democracy to a hybrid-military rule within less then two years after general elections in May 2013.

Three classes of people trample all over Pakistan, the military dictators and terrorists it spawns with such remarkable fecundity, and the foreign commentators who write books of a terrifying banality that purport to explain why it does so. These are usually sniggering sermons that hold it up to the rest of the world as a cautionary tale, schadenfreude masquerading as scholarship. T.V. Paul’s The Warrior State is the latest hatchling of this sorry clutch.

Thanks to the excesses following 9/11 (racial profiling, waterboarding, rendition to other countries, etc.), counterterrorism has been a subject of much public scrutiny in the US. The recent disclosure of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s reports on the CIA torture programme is a case in point.

The conflict curve of Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Kashmir insurgencies is at a fragile and vulnerable state of stability. Sri Lanka has given a massive mandate for a ‘new democracy’; stability and accountability, yet it does not take away the shadow of instability that might follow.

India has one of the world’s largest military forces and it is also among the largest military spenders in the world, both in terms of military expenditure and arms imports. Nevertheless, the Indian military faces huge challenges.

The Indo-US nuclear agreement was a watershed in many ways. First, it led to the de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan and their relations vis-a-vis the United States.

Six years after India conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998, strategy the Indian Army issued its conventional war fighting doctrine called the Indian Army Doctrine 2004. The doctrine, which later came to be known as ‘Cold Start’, drew a lot of attention in the strategic circles.

Both India and Pakistan started their nuclear weapons quest in earnest in the early 1970s, both reached weapon capability around 1990 and both became overt nuclear powers in May 1998.

One of the best known authorities in the field of Indian religious studies, Rowena Robinson has written widely on the minority religious communities. Initially, her main preoccupation was with popular Christianity and the theme of formation of Christian identities and how they have been articulated, constructed and reconstructed.

The established wisdom in international relations is that a major state seeking to secure its interests in world affairs has essentially three options to choose from. If it is powerful enough, it can play the geopolitical game of balance of power.

With numerous incidents of what the RSS offshoot, the Dharm Jagran Samanvay Samiti calls ‘ghar wapsi’, (250 Muslim families being reconverted to Hinduism in Agra in November, 2014, and 40 Mazhabi Sikh families who had embraced Christianity being reconverted to Sikhism in Amritsar in December 2014),

In Muslim Politics in Bihar, Mohammad Sajjad, an assistant professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University, breaks new ground in a number of ways.