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ORF Kolkata organised its 2nd annual Inter-University Debate Competition on 7 November, 2015. Students of the Tezpur University won the competition that saw participation of representatives from eight universities from eastern and north-eastern Indian states.

The relationship between Australia and India is poised at an historic moment. Consciously overcoming a challenging period, leaders of the two countries have realised new levels of mutual trust and confidence that are in turn generating policy momentum.

General elections of 2014 could well be the most interesting election they will witness in their lifetime. Several developments suggest that the elections could mark a big shift of the political paradigm and, in that sense, they could well mark the true beginning of 21st century politics in the country.

Berlin might not yet be ready to provide the kind of leadership that some expect, but the real "German question" seems to be whether Europe can really stomach German leadership. Given the uneasy reactions to Merkel's handling of the Eurozone crisis, the answer is clearly no.

It would be a mistake to assume that the US has changed its policy towards the region. It may have changed its style or the way it wishes to handle India and Pakistan but not its overall interests. The US wants to have a stronger presence in India without losing the hold it has on the military rulers in Pakistan.

Pakistan is an important player as far as determining the outcome of a post-2014 Afghanistan is concerned and should be engaged with. But to expect it to play a productive role or to expect Afghanistan and Pakistan to reconcile their differences and jointly work towards stability is a tall order.

ACT 1: March 2002. Abu Zubaidah, a Palestinian member of Al Qaeda, was arrested in Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab by the Pakistani authorities and handed over to the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was the operational chief of Al Qaeda; his arrest was a major breakthrough, we were told. This is hardly supported by the report of the 9/11 Commission.

How big a catch is Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a 40-year-old Libyan married to a Pakistani, fluent in Urdu and Arabic and suffering from lucoderma, whose arrest was announced by the Pakistani authorities at Islamabad on May 4,2005?

While the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board is well within its right to appeal to the Supreme Court against the Allahabad High Court verdict, the VHP's reaction does not represent the people's will at all.

This weekend at Goa Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his foreign policy team will undertake a significant manoeuvre with SAARC grouping gasping for breath

The violent uprising of the people of Andijan in Uzbekistan on May 13,2005, seems to have been crushed for the time being by the Uzbek authorities with heavy force, resulting in the death of at least 20 civilians. The anti-Government elements, which organised the uprising, claim to have captured 30 Uzbek soldiers and to be keeping them in their custody.

The Libyan case is vastly different from that of Syria. The maverick Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had few friends in the Arab League. Unlike Libya, Syria is a critical element of the regional balance of power in the Middle East.

Saeed Naqvi, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, traveled to Bahrain, Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Baghdad, Najaf, Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah after the Arab Spring broke out. Earlier, he visited Tunisia, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Western Sahara and Libya. In this paper, he shares his first-hand experiences and discussions with leaders and diplomats, many of whom have requested anonymity. This paper follows

To understand the strategic significance of the second summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama, it is necessary to look beyond the very important and tangible outcomes that the two leaders have unveiled.

Whatever be the demands of the Baloch nationalists, the situation now is that of a growing humanitarian crisis that the rest of the world chooses to ignore. Continued indifference will not help the problem go away but will only exacerbate it further and make it more intractable.

Kunduz has a large ethnic mix of Pashtun, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others - all of whom wish to hold the province. The recent move to capture Kunduz by the Taliban is significant in many ways. It is the first major engagement by the Taliban after Mullah Akhtar Mansour succeeded Mullah Omar.

Though it will be difficult for the Central Government and the States to agree upon certain foreign policy issues, they should work together on issues of national importance-such as terrorism and foreign policy-in order to enact policies that benefit its citizens.

From the available facts of the jihadi terrorist carnage at the North Ossetian town of Beslan in Russia on September 3, 2004, the following reconstruction is possible:

The West has finally woken up to something that strategic analysts in India have been saying for decades: Saudi Arabia funded the Pakistani nuclear programme. In this connection, we have three questions to analyse; First, how valid is this information? Second, how is it then that Saudi Arabia gets away with so much? Third, why is Nato and Israeli intelligence taken seriously but not the Indians?

In January 2000, the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi initiated a 'Bhagidari Programme' as an attempt to resolve the various problems being faced by the city's residents. Smt. Sheila Dikshit, the Honorable Chief Minister of Delhi, visited the Observer Research Foundation campus on April 10, 2008 to make a presentation on the programme. The discussion was facilitated by Ambassador M. Rasgotra. This discourse is an abridged documen

China is looking at their problems and working on them and willing to shift established positions if the situation so demands, while India seems to be trapped in the verities of the past and are unable to move beyond tired slogans and nostrums.

The problem with imposing sanctions on a country which has the world's third largest proven reserves of oil and second largest conventional natural gas reserves is that the implications are felt globally. The price of oil is highly correlated throughout the world due to market arbitrage.

There is no universally accepted international cyber treaty. However, the Council of Europe?s Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which has been in force for a decade and has been ratified by 44 countries, is the closest.

The good old days of media diplomacy launched by Washington and London to justify the Iraq invasion seem to be getting over.The American and the British administration had successfully hijacked media spaces across the world to build legitimacy for the offensive on Iraq.

On June 22, 2004, over 200 well-armed persons simultaneously raided three towns in the Ingushetia Republic of Russia, adjoining Chechnya, and attacked police stations, government buildings and checkpoints with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The Russian and the local security forces were totally taken by surprise. Ninety-five persons were killed, the majority of them members of the security forces and other Government officials,

There is an urgent need for the appointment of a new commission, on the footsteps of the Sarkaria Commission and the Justice E Venkataramaiah Commission, to review Centre-State relations, and State-to-State relations.

If the Obama Administration avoids the temptation of returning to business as usual with Rawalpindi, it has an opportunity to get both Afghanistan and Pakistan right.

India needs to take a broad approach to its foreign policy. One of the biggest mistakes Delhi could make would be to see the Indo-Vietnam relationship as simply a means for countering China.

The idea of energy security which was hitherto rooted in the supply and price of oil has now been expanded to include concerns over the availability and trade of coal. The key concern is the demand growth from China and its impact on coal price and availability, given the level of concentration in its sources of supply.

China is touting its vision of linking two Indian projects (Mausam and Spice Route) with its One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. China's main goal is to coordinate regional policy so that each country's economic development plan becomes part of a larger regional vision.

While West Asia is volatile, the Chinese are beginning to get more active in Afghanistan, retain their pre-eminence in Pakistan and strengthen ties with Iran. In fact, Iran is the third leg of China?s policy in our immediate western neighbourhood. The Chinese are obviously making preparations for the time when peace returns to the Arab world, which might leave a stronger Iran.

The fall in the value of the dollar would be worrying the central bankers in China because the value of their reserves also declines simultaneously. The promotion of the SDR agenda by the Chinese is certainly no coincidence given the position of the dollar today.

Yemen is the cradle to the Arabs, Iraq their grave. So goes an Arab proverb. Since March 2003 Iraq has certainly been the grave of a great many Arabs ¿ men, women, and children caught in the crossfire of a conflict wantonly unleashed to sustain a misbegotten thesis.

The Centre has chipped in by banning the export of beef and cows, thereby minimising the incentive for cow slaughter.

India and China, the two pillars of the dawning Asian century, are still prisoners to their perceived insecurities and imagined magnificence. They seem condemned to "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," as one wise man had once remarked. And Mr Manmohan Singh's China visit has added yet another chapter to this narrative.

The decline has gone unnoticed because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War

The three synchronised Delhi blasts of October 29,2005, have proved¿¿if further proof was needed¿¿that the motivation and the morale of the pan-Islamic jihadi terrorists belonging to the International Islamic Front (IIF) formed by Osama bin Laden in 1998 continue to remain undamaged, despite the successes scored by our security agencies in neutralising many of their sleeper cells.

Indian designers seem to be gaining in importance both in India and abroad because they are using a lot of embellished textiles in which intricate embroidery, zari, beads and semi precious stones are sown into the fabric. Unlike the western designers who use the cut of the dress or suit as the unique selling point,

In a perceptive essay written some years ago, Joseph Nye had observed that "national interest is a slippery concept used to describe as well as prescribe policy." Decades earlier, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle had cautioned against "systematically misleading expressions" couched in a syntactical form improper to the facts recorded.

The Democratic Party of Japan ( DPJ ) has been in power for about a year and a half. Despite scoring a landslide victory in the House of Representatives election in August 2009, the ruling party has failed to cash in on this great opportunity.

India has indeed sounded the trumpet of defence diplomacy as part of its engagement with the ASEAN over the last two decades. If Delhi does not help promote a stable balance of power in Southeast Asia now, India's own security challenges in the future could get a lot more daunting.

Ensuring national security is an important attribute of a modern nation-state. But as the erstwhile Soviet Union realised, the threats to the state these days do not come from orthodox sources. And looking at India with its nuclear weapons and huge armies, it is even more difficult to believe that any combination of external and internal threats can actually pose an existential challenge to the nation.

Fifty-six years after the ceasefire line was drawn between the Indian and Pakistan occupied Kashmir, the underlying seismic fault lines have made a mockery of this line. This map delineation, which was renamed as Line of Control after the 1971 Indo Pak war, has gone out of control, at least temporarily, by the fury of the nature when the earthquake struck this area on 8 October.