Michael Kugelman, a US-based foreign policy expert and the Director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, on Monday drawn a bleak comparison between India's deteriorating ties with Canada and its long-standing strained relations with Pakistan.
In 1969 WH Auden, the celebrated British poet published ‘Partition’, a poem which is a tragic reminder of when riots, rapes, atrocities, massacres and savagery raise high the bar of inhumanity in our land
India’s strategic interests in South Asia have always been intricately linked with its relationship with Bangladesh. Over the past 15 years, the India-Bangladesh partnership flourished under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s leadership.
Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule ended on 5 August when she left her country for temporary refuge in India. The progeny of Bangladesh’s founding patriarch Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, she was once heralded as a transformative figure whose leadership ushered in an era of unprecedented economic prosperity for her nation.
The Fragile State Index has highlighted South Asia as a politically unstable region with the maximum number of failed states and acute political instability.
The gender-poverty gap will worsen further still in South Asia, Central and Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa ~ “home to 87 per cent of the world’s extreme poor”.
The report highlights how the pandemic has worsened the situation for children who are already suffering malnutrition in the region, bulk of which lives in India.
The report said that an even more troubling aspect of the pandemic has been the blaming of ethnic or religious communities for starting or fuelling the spread of COVID-19.
With the pandemic expanding rapidly across a region that contains a quarter of the world’s population, Lives Upended describes the disastrous immediate and longer-term consequences that the virus and the measures to curb it have had on 600 million children and the services they depend on.
The COVID-19 outbreak came at a time when India's economy was already slowing, due to persistent financial sector weaknesses, the report said.
