Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Please join us for a special event with Michael Krepon on the future arms control from his recently published book, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace. He will be joined in conversation by Beenish Pervaiz and Debak Das and Toby Dalton will moderate.
The nature of new legislation to promote Hinduism, the extent of which remained very limited, indicates that it was not through lawmaking that the BJP primarily intended to operate: discourse and practices were the preferred means of action in their repertoire, as can be seen in debates about the respect owed to India’s very name.
If politics is considered a sport, then elections are India’s most cherished pastime. Constructing popular narratives about who won and who lost an electoral contest is an equal opportunity endeavor – pursed by the aam aadmi, voluble neta, and brainy analyst with equal vigor.
Tensions along the de facto India-China border have long been simmering, but past agreements have failed to permanently lower the heat. Can a new agreement succeed?
"In any democracy, parliaments are the institutions where the two mainstays of democratic culture that Levitsky and Ziblatt mention in their book— “mutual toleration and institutional forbearance”—are supposed to flourish, for the simple reason that the opposition is also represented in these aptly named representative assemblies."
From the very start, the Hindu nationalist movement has been borne by the upper castes due to the social conservatism it promotes. Indeed, while in theory it aims to abolish the “nation-dividing” caste system, such an ambition does not rule out a strong adherence to Brahminical values and the Hindu traditional social order.
What’s more, even if India did meet these objectives, its current policies and actions are only in line with a limitation of global temperatures under the 2°C mark, which stands above the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C goal.
National security crises often generate a ‘rally-around-the-flag’ effect, especially under nationalist administrations, but the salience of a security crisis varies within a country.
There are three pillars of concern: The expansion of Hindu majoritarianism, the concentration of executive power and decay of independent institutions, and curbs on free expression and dissent.
New Delhi’s close relationship with Nepal, bound in history and culture, and the misperception about China’s relations with Nepal before 1950 have contributed to a skewed understanding of Sino-Nepali relations.