Comment & Briefs

With reports noting that the Israeli government had authorised the mobilisation of close to 75,000 reservists ahead of a possible ground invasion, international attention is currently focussed on preventing this possibility

While the United States stands committed to Israel, though in a much muted tone, there has been outrage in the region, particularly from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Tunisia as well as the Arab League.

India has much to learn from China with regard to using space as an ‘instrument of influence’ and also needs to expand the global footprint of its expertise.

To avoid further deterioration in the bilateral relationship, both Japan and China need to now abandon their hard-line stance and stop escalating nationalistic sentiments among their people.

A noticeable aspect of the close political relationship between India and China is the fact that in spite of changes in regimes the relationship has continued to grow.

On the capital side, there may not be much of an adverse impact of reduction in allocation if the MMRCA contract gets pushed to the next year. On the revenue side, procurement of ammunition and other equipment as well as maintenance of legacy systems would be adversely affected.

Due to circumstances prevailing inside and outside China, a lot is expected from the new leaders and thus this leadership change is a vastly important process for China and for the world.

What is worrying is that the Army is clearly abandoning its earlier pretence of readiness to take the Islamic zealots head on and sections of the establishment seem more willing now to be just silent accomplices.

US efforts to improve and expand its BMD system would degrade Chinese nuclear retaliatory capability thus forcing China to go for a qualitative and quantitative improvement of its nuclear force by deploying more ballistic missiles with MIRV and MARV capability and penetration aids.

The goodwill built up during Khaleda Zia’s recent India visit needs to be capitalised upon judiciously, by keeping a manifestly even-handed stance on the internal politics of Bangladesh.