Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

If and when foreign observers of Pakistan want to discover more about how the country behaves as it does, they can get some answers from two books published in 2013:

One of the first writers, if not the first, to compare the condition of Muslims in India and Jews in Europe was a British Professor at Aligarh, Theodore Morison, who happened to be the son-in-law of the first Jewish graduate of Oxford University.

Two admissions need initially to be made.

How does anything happen? The question seems simple enough, but its answer, once you have side-stepped the philosophical minefield of whether causes exist at all, can take you into diverse intellectual domains:

The Partition of British India in 1947 into the new nations of India and Pakistan, and the transformation of East Pakistan into the Republic of Bangladesh, in 1971, were events characterized by violence, displacement, and multiple alienations.

The books under review are two additions to the long and distinguished line of books that have puzzled over the improbable success of democracy in India.

The main argument of this comprehensive volume of nuclear weapon activity in Asia is that it is only here that there is the fear of renewed and widespread nuclear proliferation.