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 Brahma Chellaney

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Brahma Chellaney
Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and the author of "Asian Juggernaut" (Harper, 2010) and "Water: Asia’s New Battlefield" (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award. He is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi.
COMMENTARY
May 9, 2008
How to succeed in Burma with a practical approach
NEW DELHI — Such is the tragedy that Burma symbolizes that, in one week, it has been hit by new U.S. sanctions and by a tropical cyclone that left thousands dead.
COMMENTARY
May 2, 2008
Publicity stunt on Everest
NEW DELHI — As a triumphal symbol of its rule over Tibet, China is taking the Olympic torch through the "Roof of the World" to the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, which straddles the Tibetan-Nepalese border. That publicity stunt will only infuse more politics into the Games, already besmirched...
COMMENTARY
Apr 9, 2008
Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma
NEW DELHI — There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the...
COMMENTARY
Mar 27, 2008
Prolonged unrest in Tibet could unravel China's monocracy
NEW DELHI — The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist China's history. It is a rude jolt to the world's biggest and longest surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure...
COMMENTARY
Mar 14, 2008
Burma sanctions don't work
NEW DELHI — Burma today ranks as one of the world's most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its ruling junta scheduling a May referendum on a draft constitution and facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari's third visit in six months.
COMMENTARY
Feb 20, 2008
Obstacles to overcome in the development of a concert of Asia-Pacific democracies
NEW DELHI — The new Australian government is signaling a wish to turn its back on an initiative bringing four major democracies of the Asia-Pacific together, even as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to institutionalize that venture.
COMMENTARY
Feb 4, 2008
Geopolitical risks on the rise
DAVOS, Switzerland — At the recent World Economic Forum meeting of top political, business, intellectual and civil-society leaders, the discussions centered on a range of major international challenges — from new threats to the growing strain on water and other resources.
COMMENTARY
Jan 3, 2008
The military is the problem
NEW DELHI — After having fretted over a rising prodemocracy tide, Pakistan's ruling military can expect to be the main gainer from former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's killing at the very public park where the 1951 assassination of the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, helped smother...
COMMENTARY
Dec 26, 2007
China puts muscle to policy
NEW DELHI — Rising economic and military power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. Having earlier preached the gospel of its "peaceful rise," China is now beginning to take the gloves off, confident of the muscle it has acquired.
COMMENTARY
Oct 13, 2007
Democracies' double standard
NEW DELHI — The repression let loose by Burma's (Myanmar) military junta has fittingly drawn international outrage. But the indignation and new wave of U.S.-led sanctions also obscure an inconvenient truth: Promotion of freedom has become a diplomatic instrument to target not China — the world's...
COMMENTARY
Sep 27, 2007
Hype on nuclear power is misleading
NEW DELHI — Talk of a "global nuclear renaissance" remains just that — all talk. Notwithstanding the strong public relations campaign by the nuclear power industry and its powerful lobbying groups, nuclear energy is hardly the answer to the twin challenges of carbon mitigation and energy security...
COMMENTARY
Aug 16, 2007
Japan, India: natural allies
NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, weakened by a mortifying defeat in Upper House elections, will address the Indian Parliament later this month. This is an honor that U.S. President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao did not get during their state visits to India last year. India and...
COMMENTARY
Jul 19, 2007
'Quad Initiative': an inharmonious concert of democracies
NEW DELHI — The newly launched Australia-India-Japan-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" has raised China's hackles, but its direction is still undecided owing to differing perceptions within the group over what its aims and objectives ought to be.
COMMENTARY
Jun 26, 2007
China aims for bigger share of South Asia's water lifeline
NEW DELHI — Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization,...
COMMENTARY
Jun 7, 2007
Playing the new Great Game in Asia and beyond
NEW DELHI — A nifty new enterprise to discuss security dangers in the Asia-Pacific and evolve a coordinated approach — the Quadrilateral Initiative — has kicked off with an unpublicized first meeting. U.S., Japanese, Indian and Australian officials, at the rank of assistant secretary of state,...
COMMENTARY
Mar 1, 2007
Musharraf moves to stay
NEW DELHI -- The fight against international terrorism is very much tied to the future of Pakistan and the central challenge that country faces: to move away from militarism, extremism and fundamentalism, and toward a stable, moderate state. That's what makes Pakistani military ruler President Pervez...
COMMENTARY
Feb 9, 2007
India's vulnerability bared
NEW DELHI -- Whatever may have been China's motivation, its Jan. 11 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test is bound to have lasting global impact like no other military event in recent years.
COMMENTARY
Dec 14, 2006
Japan-India partnership key to bolstering stability in Asia
NEW DELHI -- Japan and India are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interests and actually share common goals to build stability, power equilibrium and institutionalized multilateral cooperation in Asia. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Tokyo this week offers an...
COMMENTARY
Nov 9, 2006
Engaging India to contain it
NEW DELHI -- Managed competition is likely to define the relationship between the two demographic titans, India and China, in the years ahead, even as they seek to expand bilateral cooperation.
COMMENTARY
Sep 28, 2006
Japan's political resurgence
TOKYO -- The election of Shinzo Abe as postwar Japan's youngest prime minister signals more than a change at the helm. Abe not only symbolizes a generational change in Japanese politics but also is the face of an assertive new Japan intent on shaping the power balance in Asia in a way that China does...

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