Kanishk Tharoor

Kanishk Tharoor is associate editor at openDemocracy. He recently escaped to London from Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude with BAs in History and Literature. He is a published and award-winning author of short fiction. His writings on politics and culture have also been published in  Guardian Unlimited and YaleGlobal Online and extensively in India, in The Hindu, The Times of India, and The Telegraph (Calcutta).

Recent articles

American political scientists have made a niche in the last twenty years of expounding the "grand theory". As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 80s, so too did the fundamental premises that framed strategic thinking in Washington and elsewhere. A rash of large ideas (with attached buzz words) rushed into fill the void. 1993 was a bumper year for this species of pontification, notable efforts including Samuel Huntington's now infamous "The Clash of Civilisations" and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man", which argued that the end of the Cold War was confirmation of the final triumph of liberal democracy and the free market.

It can be easy to forget that the hot air spewed in America has real consequences elsewhere. While Obama and Clinton wrestle over lapel pins, policy-makers in New Delhi and Tehran are calculating the future of their bilateral relations in large part on the outcome of the US elections. Indian and Iranian efforts to build a joint 2,775 km gas pipeline (through Pakistan), which would bring much-needed energy to India, remain in the doldrums, with the Bush administration running interference. So, too, has the White House driven a fissure between Iran and India on nuclear energy; the US-Indo nuclear deal not only soured India's domestic politics - with the government's Left allies making a fuss - but broke New Delhi's age-old solidarity with developing countries in last year's IAEA Board of Governors' vote on Iran's nuclear program.

As Afghan and foreign troops continue to battle the Taliban in the plains and hills of Afghanistan, another battle is being waged – and lost – in the country's legislature. The Taliban don't need to recapture Kabul for their puritan and parochial values to recapture the public stage. Afghan lawmakers – part and parcel of the new, democratic government installed since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 – are edging towards reintroducing strict bans on supposedly un-Islamic cultural forms. After six years of uncertainty, corruption, carnage and waning confidence, Afghanistan may be sliding right back to where it didn't want to be.

New Delhi this week played host to a summit of African leaders, lured to India by the promise of strengthened economic ties with the rising "Asian giant". The event was smaller than its counterpart two years earlier in Beijing, when China wined and dined fifty African countries. But the signal is clear: Indian ambitions are as global as Chinese ones. New Delhi knows it cannot afford to cede further "strategic space" to Beijing. And Africa, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acclaimed as the "land of awakening" and "our mother continent", is a growing arena for the contest of Asia's duelling realpolitiks.

Local responses wrestle with global consequences as Pashtun secularists in Pakistan's northwest have begun talks with Islamist militants.