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Jan 13, 2025 | 
theprint.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
Also read: Bim Bissell’s lightness with worldly connections made her easy to warm to: Sunil Sethi But your support enables us to deliver impactful stories, credible interviews, insightful opinions and on-ground reportage. Her attire was never ostentatious or overdone but always tasteful, deceptively simple and strikingly innovative. So were the accessories she wore: sometimes chunky, sometimes delicate; oftentimes tribal, very indigenous and almost never imported.
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Jan 11, 2025 | 
theweek.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
No prime minister of India made a more constructive contribution towards establishing an equilibrium between India and Pakistan than Dr Manmohan Singh.
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Dec 22, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
Our pathetic haul of medals, placing us, the most populous nation in the world, at the derisory 70th position of participating nations and teams in the Paris Olympics 2024, has only further proved how right I am in wanting India to become a sporting nation before it takes to being a sports-hosting nation.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Aditya Mukherjee |Mani Shankar Aiyar |Karan Madhok |Aditya Mukherjee Penguin
At a time when the forces of Hindutva are relentlessly denigrating Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to the freedom of our country and the first 17 years of nation-building in independent India, the historian Aditya Mukherjee brings welcome clarification to the debate largely by citing Nehru’s own words and expanding on their import in the present context.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
theweek.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
Is the Adani imbroglio an episodic, one-off incident—or does it reflect a major systemic lacuna in our conception of development and democracy? Mahatma Gandhi had said the national objective must be “to wipe every tear from every eye” and earlier answered a question about his “dream for India” by saying he would “work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country” in the making of which it is their voice that shall prevail.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
theweek.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
The Indian Olympics Association (IOA) has sent the International Olympics Committee (IOC) its ‘letter of intent’ to host the Olympics in 2036—appositely enough the centenary of the very year, 1936, when Adolf Hitler hosted the Games in Berlin!The letter, reportedly drafted in consultation with the Indian government, might have been written by Jawaharlal Nehru, the bête noire of the BJP.
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
theweek.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
The Narendra Modi-Xi Jinping handshake in Kazan provides the right opportunity to ask the most basic question: what is our long-term perspective on India-China relations? The question was, in fact, raised and settled back in 1950. In a famed letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, deputy prime minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel set out his concerns over China’s increasing belligerence towards any kind of pretence to independence by Tibet.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Mani Shankar Aiyar |Peter Ronald deSouza |Vaishna Roy
If European colonial conquest triumphed first in Asia with the French winning the Battle of Adyar in 1746, it could be said that its end came with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, fought over 56 days between March 13 and May 7, 1954 in a remote valley in the north-west of Vietnam abutting the border with Laos. Visiting Dien Bien Phu 70 years later, as we did earlier this month (October 2024), was a strangely disquieting experience.
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Oct 19, 2024 | 
theweek.in | Mani Shankar Aiyar
Of the 49 seats in the Kashmir valley, the National Conference won 42; the Congress, six; the CPI(M), one; the BJP, zero; the Jamaat-e-Islami, zero. It was a clean sweep for INDIA. It is not that the Central government’s representatives since August 5, 2019, have done nothing. It is appreciated that ‘normalcy’ of a kind has been restored—even if at the point of the AK-47.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
indianexpress.com | Mani Shankar Aiyar
The Modi government and his saffron party now have their work cut out. It is, of course, for them to collectively determine the decision over the coming cricket match and the general de-freezing of the relationship, as my colleagues and I, including virtually all former High Commissioners/Ambassadors to Pakistan, have been urging.
