Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
During the last week of May, in the Chinese city of Luoyang, one of the four great ancient capital cities on the central plain, Indian President Pratibha Patil dedicated an Indian-style Buddhist temple to the people of China. The first such Indian-style temple to be built in China in many centuries – and one housed, fittingly, within the precinct of the first such temple ever constructed on Chinese soil almost two millennia ago (the White Horse Monastery), the shrine constitutes a powerful symbol of independent India’s determination to revert to the syncretic world whose ideas it once shaped and within which it once participated wholly.
Regardless of whether the Buddhist scriptures arrived in Luoyang via Central Asia on the back of a white horse, as legend has it, or were in fact carried by itinerant preachers (early missionaries being associated with horses in the Chinese Buddhist tradition), the land bridge that such spiritual contact erected ushered in a brilliant early age of Asian cosmopolitanism. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Seeking to solidify their Global and Strategic Partnership, Prime Ministers Aso and Singh had issued a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation in October 2008. The landmark document was only the second instance of such bilateral cooperation entered into by Tokyo, aside from its security arrangement with the US. In keeping with the upgraded schedule of ministerial-level consultations envisaged in the Joint Declaration (and its accompanying Action Plan), over the Golden Week holiday period Defence Minister Kitazawa paid a visit to his counterpart in New Delhi.
Topics of discussion included safety of sea lines of communication, anti-piracy cooperation as well as drawing up a timeline of joint exercises to be conducted by the two countries’ navies. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Two presumptions surface axiomatically in Western commentary of Burma’s macro-economy: that rife with mismanagement and ridden by an ‘institutionalised rent extraction mechanism,’ Burma has been reduced, developmentally, to among the most destitute states in the world. Further, that before the rot set in, it was once Southeast Asia’s most promising economy. Both presumptions appear in Lex Rieffel and Raymond Gilpin’s contribution, as well as, implicitly or explicitly, within the recently released Asia Society Task Force Report on Burma.
But how accurate are both presumptions? Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
On February 18th, President Obama personally welcomed His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the White House, drawing the predictable ire of the Chinese leadership. As if in response, on March 1st, Beijing named its hand-picked Panchen Lama to its top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. In 2013, it is speculated the young lama will be elevated to the prominent political position of vice-chairmanship of the National People’s Congress. With Beijing gradually moving towards engineering a similar schism in the revered institution of the Dalai Lama by way of issuing regulations that purport to manage the reincarnation of living lamas, an altogether more purposeful negotiating approach by the Dalai Lama vis-à-vis Beijing is imperative.
Foremost in this regard is the need for His Holiness to match rhetoric with action as he goes about securing an enhanced autonomy arrangement for the Tibetan people. Read more…
