Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day visit to Bangladesh last month may not have led to any big-ticket announcements, but it was high on symbolism. Modi was honored as the chief guest during celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence on March 26, as well as the birth centenary celebrations of the country’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Both Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart, Sheikh Hasina, Rahman’s daughter, used the visit as an opportunity to commemorate India’s role in supporting Bangladesh’s war of liberation from Pakistan in 1971 and highlight the deep cultural and historical linkages between the two countries. [...]
For anyone interested in understanding the global economy of the recent past or in projecting the shape of things to come in world affairs in the near future, there are few fundamentals that condition the lives of nations more powerfully than population dynamics. The past 50 years have served up this lesson repeatedly, most recently with the rise of China. Riding on the back of a dramatic bulge in the number of freshly educated young people who teemed onto the workshop floors of the innumerable industries that were just then being thrown together, China turned itself into the so-called factory [...]
In late February, India and Pakistan announced a cease-fire along their de facto border in the contested region of Kashmir. In a joint statement, the two countries’ military authorities said that there will be a “strict observance of all agreements, understandings and cease firing,” while also claiming they will seek to “address each other’s core issues and concerns” to ensure sustainable peace between the two long-time enemies. The announcement essentially revives a 2003 cease-fire agreement along the Line of Control, or LoC, as the de facto border is known. It was followed on March 18 by a speech by Pakistan’s [...]
