Sanjaya Baru

With new oil and gas discoveries, Africa's energy exporters will have to invest in defence capability and work with other Indian Ocean powers to ensure security of sea lanes.

It is unfair to constantly allege that Manmohan Singh's only unfulfilled desire is to visit his birthplace in Pakistan and that his Pakistan policy is defined by this obsession.

For too long have many of us in India imagined a future in which the country would rise, leaving the rest of the subcontinent behind. This is neither possible nor warranted.

It is inconceivable that the rise of Asia could happen without the rise of the Indian subcontinent.

Few disagree with the view that the 21st century will witness the return of Asia to the centrestage of global economic activity.

The liberal fiscal spending of the 2004-08 period was made possible both by rising government revenues and national income growth and by relative comfort on the external side. After 2009,these pillars of growth began to wobble. By 2012, they were shaking.

Battles, on the military and the economic front, are first lost in the minds of the strategists for want of ideas before they are lost on the battleground for want of armoury.

If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.

Like war, economics is more an art than a science.

On the upswing of an economic cycle, workers, consumers, savers, investors, and entrepreneurs imagine a future that is brighter than the past. On the downswing, they imagine a future dimmer than the past.

India's difficulties in negotiating an FTA with both the ASEAN and E.U. are a reminder of the importance of multilateralism.

While free trade purists have always rejected regional and plurilateral trading arrangements, the WTO's charter chose to be pragmatic and regarded RTAs and FTAs as building blocks of, rather than barriers to, the multilateral trading system.

As fiscal constraints impinge on defence and diplomacy, governments find themselves increasingly homebound, even if diplomats happily travel to summits.

On climate change, Russia's interests are aligned with the West rather than the South.

Unplanned urbanisation can create urban chaos and trigger urban violence.

Africa is experiencing rising rates of growth, but will growth get translated into development?

Like wildebeest and zebra migration across the Serengeti, investment managers and consultants, too, have a habit of running together and, every now and then, changing direction.

Unlike China's growth story, which has been built on the strategy of creating excess supply, the Indian growth story has been built on the strategy of responding to incentives generated by excess demand. Which is why a certain degree of inflation is built into the Indian growth process.

Ups and downs are par for the course and very much a feature of the Indian growth process.

Unlike other flagship programmes, which have been left with unpronounceable acronyms, like MGNREGA and JNNURM, Bharat Nirman struck a popular chord.

Bharat Nirman was a development programme aimed at stepping up public investment and public-private partnerships in the construction of rural roads, drinking water supply, rural telecommunication, rural housing, and minor irrigation.

Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao put together are no Deng Xiaoping.

The new era of bottom-up politics has had politically paradoxical consequences in China. While it has made the system of governance more participatory, it has made the central government less authoritarian and, therefore, more bureaucratic and cautious.

Angela Merkel is no Konrad Adenauer or Helmut Schmidt.

The ministries of finance and industries and commerce require modern-minded, transparent, and efficient leadership.

Every university has its problems. The issues range from lack of amenities, plagiarism, poor quality research, sexual harassment, faculty moonlighting, and faulty and biased recruitment.

Family business management is a discipline that has evolved from an art into a science. The market for this line of education has been created by the growing recognition of family-run companies that shareholders are demanding greater clarity on issues ranging from succession to the management of wealth and the distribution of profits.

While ideological blinkers blind one to change that one does not wish to see, statistics and opinion surveys, too, have their limitations in a complex polity like India.

The challenge of leadership in a plural democracy is to construct policies that ensure political stability, social equity, and economic progress on the basis of a widely shared ethical and cultural foundation.

Just as the policies and programmes for development have to adhere to the law of the land - respecting the basic principles underlying the Constitution - so, too, must the idea of Hindutva.

If development is defined in social and economic terms while Hindutva is defined in cultural terms, it should be possible for the BJP to construct a political platform that is reassuring to a large majority of Indians and is respectful to the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Shoji Ito was an Indophile like no other Japanese economist I have known. During the 1990s, he would frequently visit India to keep pace with the changes in the economy. We would always meet and have long conversations about India, Japan, and the world. Unfortunately, Ito-san died early.

There are any number of socially relevant causes that publicly minded individuals may feel strongly about. In a democracy, it is for the government of the day to legislate laws to deal with such issues. Not for courts to issue advisories and declare criminal what may often be normal economic activity protecting livelihoods.

There is no denying the fact that China has been able to convert its economic might into commercial and technological capability.

All economically well-off nations have used what has been dubbed 'cheque-book diplomacy,' and China does so, too. Apart from funding government-to-government lending, China has also been able to create global companies and global brands that have contributed to Chinese soft power.

Indeed, China may never acquire the geo-political influence and reach that Great Britain enjoyed in the 19th century and the United States of America did in the 20th, even though it may have already surpassed the geo-economic clout the two major powers enjoyed in the heyday of their empires.

China has, without doubt, become an economic superpower.

Public universities are the lifeblood of modern democracies.

When national policy becomes hostage to regional interests, the federal government becomes paralysed and would be unable to act in the larger national interest.

Karan Thapar is an endangered species. They don't make them like him anymore. True, thousands have gone to the Doon Valley School after him, as indeed to Oxford and Cambridge universities. But Karan Thapar is more than the sum of his upbringing. He's a gentleman journalist.

The Indian voter will not shy away from sacrificing in the national interest. If the voter is convinced that high oil prices are a national challenge and that the government is doing its best to deal with the challenge, the voter would be willing to bear the burden.

Crises are inherent to market economies, but managing them is the key to political success, and the media plays a vital role in getting the policy message across.

The role of the media in economic management is not often recognised even by professional economists. Politicians, however, ignore this at their own peril.

An important instrument of economic policy-making in a market economy is credible, consistent, and timely communication.

The 1990s was not just Japan's 'wasted decade,' it was also a wasted decade for the India-Japan relationship.

During the 1990s, when India opened up to foreign investment, Japan was so mesmerised by the China opportunity that it chose to yield market space across a wide swathe of industries to South Korean competitors.

While UPA2's handling of immediate foreign policy challenges can be criticised, it would be difficult to challenge the long-term relevance of the principles that define the Manmohan Singh Doctrine.

If U.S. mistakes in the Middle East helped Putin raise Russia's global profile, China's missteps and hubris in East and Southeast Asia, once called Indo-China, have opened up new spaces for India's profile to be raised.

To be sure, China is nowhere as powerful as the U.S., but it has acquired the ability to impose its will on individual nations around the world. From Australia to Germany, South Africa to South Korea, political leaders are careful not to rub China the wrong way.

On many key global economic issues, Russia's loyalty is divided between the West and the South. As an energy exporter, it stands opposite energy importing China and India. As a commodity trader resisting the influx of cheap Chinese manufactures, its interests in the WTO clash with those of many of the developing economies.