In troubled Pakistan, sacred spaces such as Sufi shrines have increasingly been the target of bloody attacks by Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. The Taliban-Deobandi school of Islam perceives Sufi practices such as devotional whirling dances, the veneration of Sufi saints and other rituals as being un-Islamic and against the tenets of the religion.
Both India and the United States are stable democracies. From America’s standpoint, post-World War II, a new democratic regime in India was counted upon as a strategic ally for containing Soviet influence in Asia. Yet, India refused to be an ally of the US. Strongly allied with Britain through both World Wars, the United States had a policy of ambivalence towards colonial India. F.D.Roosevelt and Truman paid scant attention to the cause of Indian independence and did not press hard Churchill or Atlee, the British Premiers during World War II to give independence to India.
The newly unveiled U.S. Nuclear Posture Review focuses on five key objectives; one of them is preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. The report underscores nuclear terrorism as ‘today’s most immediate and extreme danger.”
What is Nuclear Terrorism and how serious is the threat? Is it an overrated nightmare? Some facts here:
Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks has been sentenced to death by the court on May 6. Kasab was found guilty earlier that week and convicted for mindless murder and waging war against the country.
The new Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) was officially released by the defence minister on January 13, 2011. This bulky document—all of 281 pages, revised eight times in the last nine years—comes into effect from January 1, 2011.
Very often western observers play down the existence and influence of Pakistan based Lashkar- e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami inside Bangladesh’s territory. Investigations into number of terror strikes in Bangladesh occurred between May 2004 and December 2005 have revealed, rather unearthed, a lethal nexus between these two Pakistan based terror groups and couple of mainstream political parties (Pro-Islamic Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) in Bangladesh. It also revealed how they teamed up to score a political point by assassinating rival political leaders.
Yet again, India’s defence budget has escaped larger national attention this year. The defence component of the national budget accounts for 14% of central government expenditure but gets less than 5% of media space, the bulk of which goes towards data released by the government with sporadic analyses by experts. Virtually no discussion on the issue takes place in Parliament either. A call for increased resources for national defence usually only goes out when defence spending by Pakistan and China makes headlines.
The old arguments against the effectiveness of biological warfare still apply. The effects of novel organisms would still be delayed, unpredictable, and difficult to control. In military terms, any advance is almost certainly not a matter of the routine use of bio-technology. Whatever the fact, this double edged weapon still acts like a deterrent against any kind of conventional attack.
Review by ANIMESH ROUL (December 30, 2010): The Chief Minister of India’s Southern State, Tamil Nadu, recently named a male tiger cub “Sembian” (meaning, winning a Tiger) in memory of the great Cholas who ruled over Southern India and a tiger as a symbol on their flag. This gesture shows the lasting influence of ‘Great Cholas’ on modern and contemporary Tamil society.
The BioWeapons Monitor is an initiative of the BioWeapons Prevention Project (BWPP) to help monitor compliance with the international norm established primarily in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
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