Kanishk Tharoor

Bob Herbert in the NYT picks up on the growing number of studies and surveys done about the political orientation of young people in the United States. This generation - dubbed the "Millennials" - between their late teens and early 30s face a far bleaker economic landscape than their parents did. Indicators of the economic decline include a difficult job market, growing student debt, a drop in health insurance coverage and a rise in the percentage of income young people spend on rent.

In its report - "The Progressive Generation" - on the economic views of the Millennials, the left-of-centre think-tank the Center for American Progress suggests that this generation of young people is far more "progressive" than its predecessors, including the grunge-era depressives of "Generation X." That's because the Millennials have their backs to the wall. It is in government - and not in the eternal, self-healing logic of the market - that they seek answers.

As the CAP report outlines, a "majority of 18- to 29-year-olds believe that the government can be a force for good in the economy, and that increased investments in healthcare, education, and other areas are necessary to ensure strong and sustainable economic growth."

Herbert, one of the Times' more liberal columnists, finds cause for hope in the attitudes of the Millennials: "there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power." So too must the Obama campaign be encouraged by the CAP report; Obama has aggressively courted the support of young voters, on whom he may have to rely in November to help overcome the staid pensioners unconvinced by his appeal to "change".  Read the rest of this post...

Kanishk Tharoor

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.

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Kanishk Tharoor

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.

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Kanishk Tharoor

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.

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Kanishk Tharoor

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.

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Kanishk Tharoor

With forests of skyscrapers rising in Shanghai, fantastical contents emerging off the coast of Dubai, and fibre-optic arteries pumping knowledge from the heart of India's IT boom, it is difficult not to be impressed by the pace of transformation across Asia. Tremendous change is afoot in much of the region, greased in places by growing oil revenues and elsewhere by decade-old programs of liberal reform that now seem to be bearing fruit. This goes beyond the putative "Asian giants" of India and China; with many smaller countries also sharing in the economic success, a whole continent seems to be on the rise.

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Kanishk Tharoor

Pervez Musharraf yesterday swore in the fifth prime minister to take office during his tenure as president of Pakistan. This one may very well be the last. While Pakistan's last four prime minister have been little more than parliamentary puppets, the election of Yousaf Raza Gilani poses a real challenge to the imbalance of presidential power that has allowed Musharraf to hold sway over Pakistani politics since 1999.

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Kanishk Tharoor

Barack Obama's speech on race this Tuesday is already being hailed in quarters of American public opinion as one of the finest pieces of oratory in the country's history. The embattled Democratic presidential candidate turned the pitfall of his relationship with the volatile Jeremiah Wright into a transcendent meditation on the role of race in American society and politics. Few politicians of his stature and exposure have ever dared venture into these dusty corridors of the country's identity. And few will ever be capable of both the eloquence and the probing seriousness that Obama mustered in speaking the previously unspoken (YouTube video below).

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