An effective communicator with a questionable past builds a successful campaign as an outsider disinterested in everyday, run-of-the-mill politics. He smartly taps into the fears and anxieties of voters and projects himself as the only person who can fix the supposedly broken system. Despite...
Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, has completed seven years in office. At the same time, his autocratic leadership has brought the simmering discontent in the foreign policy establishment out in the open. Some members of the Forum of Foreign Ambassadors of India signed an open letter...
“It’s the economy, stupid,” a catchphrase coined in the 1990s by American political strategist James Carville, made George H. W. Bush — who won the First Gulf War for Americans — a one-term president, catapulting Bill Clinton into the White House. As Donald Trump’s one-term presidency...
Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is famously a man of institutions. Even a brief stint of four years as a resident of Kentucky was enough for me to learn how well he knows the levers of power. Outsiders wondering why Kentucky reelects him by double-digit margins need to study the...
The nomination of half-Indian, half-Jamaican California Senator Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate is a historic moment in American politics. The Indian American diaspora is justifiably proud of it. However, back home, it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attending the...
By banning TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expanded its ongoing military confrontation with China to include trade. While it will keep his voters happy, the brewing stand-off has exposed the yawning gap between global geopolitics and Modi’s propaganda....
In 2014, early in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, the world was abuzz with India’s demographic dividend. More than half of India’s population was under the age of 24, GDP was growing at 7% to 8% annually in spite of corruption and high inflation, and Modi had won a decisive...
Amid the debate surrounding COVID-19, the rhetoric around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the United States and India is the best example of the populism of our times. Earlier on in the pandemic, anecdotal evidence from France led US President Donald Trump to proclaim that all the patients should try...
