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The ongoing visit of the Dalai Lama to Arunachal Pradesh, his seventh, has evoked strong reactions from Beijing. Arunachal Pradesh is a part of India, and New Delhi has never prevented the country’s “longest staying guest”, as the Dalai Lama describes himself, from visiting any part of its territory. Tawang, which he is visiting for the fifth time, is home to the world’s second largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery after the Potala Palace in Lhasa. As the spiritual leader of the community, the Dalai Lama has every right to visit and preach at Tawang. New Delhi could not have stopped the visit, as Beijing appears to suggest it should have done. Suggesting that New Delhi staged this visit in order to use the “Dalai Lama card” against China, gives little credit to his intelligence and wisdom, and the evolution of his own position on Tibet and China over the decades of his exile. China has said that the visit has “severely damaged peace and stability in the region” and “hurt bilateral relat...

In 2014, the government dismissed a WHO report that stated Delhi’s air quality was the worst in the world. (AP Photo/File) Last week, Union Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave asserted that there is no conclusive evidence linking mortality and air pollution. In December, the minister had argued in the Rajya Sabha that there are no credible studies linking air pollution to death. The minister and the government could do well to carefully read the State of Global Air report prepared by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the Washington University. The report, released on Tuesday, points out that dirty air doomed 91 out of one lakh Indians to early death in 2015. For the first time since 1990, India has lost more people to outdoor air pollution than China — the world’s most populous country recorded 85 deaths per lakh in 2015. Governments in India have been known to be either indifferent to or dismissive of reports that ind...

The IS has claimed a horrific bombing at the dargah of the Sufi saint Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan in Pakistan, which killed more than 70 people. The group is clearly looking for new pastures and sensational “victories” at a time when it faces big military setbacks in Iraq. What is undeniable too is that Pakistan has a ready-made ecosystem for the IS/Daesh to set up shop. Even before this, there were reports of IS links with factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, and with the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Militant groups in Pakistan — the kind that have India in the cross hairs, such as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa or the Jaish-e-Mohammed, or those ranged against non-Sunni Islamic sects — all have much in common with the IS, except perhaps the latter’s access to oil wells. Pakistan has received many “blowback” wake-up calls since 2001, but none could be a clearer call to action than the IS heralding its arrival in the country. In 2015, the Pakistan Army conducted a military campaign against...

When National Security Advisor Ajit Doval went to Moscow last month, one of the items on his agenda was to secure a place for India at the Russia-led consultations on Afghanistan. His five hour-long meeting with President Vladimir Putin’s team paid off when Moscow invited New Delhi to be a part of the six-nation meeting — along with Iran and Afghanistan — on Afghanistan on Wednesday. This was some progress from late December, when Russia hosted a meeting in Moscow with Pakistan and China, and the three countries announced they would seek the lifting of UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against select Taliban commanders to bring the militant group to the talking table. But the outcome of Wednesday’s meeting is unlikely to leave New Delhi fully satisfied. Under pressure from Kabul and New Delhi, Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran have now agreed to maintain the red lines when it comes to talking with the Taliban. But Russia, China and Iran — each of them is already negotiating with th...

Alarm bells rang out on October 21 when large chunks of the internet in the United States and Europe were made inoperable. This happened because of a specific type of hostile attack, termed “Denial of Service”; this paralyses an organisation’s internet-facing servers (computers) by flooding them with artificially created traffic that has been dramatically scaled up. Here, the pin-point objective was to paralyse an online directory service organisation, Dyn, central to successful internet operation. The attackers hacked and took control of an estimated 100,000 low-end devices that can autonomously access the internet, directing them to overwhelm Dyn — and consequentially paralyse the internet. The Internet of Things (IoT) was involved because the attack exploited very large numbers of ubiquitous low-end devices connected to the internet. This event was a chilling demonstration of the new vulnerabilities that attend the astounding growth of the IoT, and the central role of the internet ...