India’s Vice President M Hamid Ansari released a book by Hardeep Puri titled ‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos’ at a well-attended function September 7 in New Delhi.
Addressing a packed house after releasing the book ‘Perilous Interventions,’ Vice President lauded the book, saying that, “To the initiated, the title of Ambassador Hardeep Puri’s timely and well written book reveals much!”
A former Indian diplomat blows the cover off the politics of intervention in other countries’ affairs.
There are interventions and then there are perilous interventions. As the world tackles growing fundamentalism and non-state actors, nations are increasingly debating deploying their militaries to take on the new threats. But each intervention comes with a baggage of unpredictable consequences that have led to the creation of new wars and conflicts.
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The need to reform the United Nations and especially the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where the veto power of the five permanent members holds the key to crucial global decisions, is imperative. This is an opinion that has been expressed on numerous occasions in recent times and Hardeep Singh Puri’s book is another important voice in this direction.
The book makes a powerful case of why reform of the UNSC is so crucial and to illustrate this argument, Puri uses the examples of Syria, Libya and Yemen, among others. Closer home, the author Continue reading
NEW YORK– When the government of Rajiv Gandhi ordered the Indian Air Force to carry out an airdrop of humanitarian supplies in June 1987 inside embattled northern Sri Lanka — infamously dubbed “the parippu drop”– the Sri Lanka government reacted furiously describing India’s action as a “naked violation of Sri Lanka’s independence and an unwarranted assault on Sri Lanka’s territory and sovereignty.”
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Humphrey Hawksley lauds a call for reform of the UN Security Council, by a participant who remains unaware of how it reaches its decisions
As a young diplomat in the 1980s, Hardeep Singh Puri cut his teeth on India’s ill-fated intervention in Sri Lanka, and rose to become his country’s ambassador to the United Nations when India was a rotating member of the Security Council.
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India is on the threshold of a re-engagement with the Levant
For the prime minister, Narendra Modi, Balochistan is not a flash in the pan. The articulation of Indian concerns, stakes and interests in Balochistan is part of a pattern in his government’s evolving foreign policy after two and a quarter years in office. Balochistan is not the only conflict zone that the National Democratic Alliance government is wading into. Ending a hands-off Continue reading
Book: Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos; Author: Hardeep Singh Puri; Publisher: HarperCollins; Pages: 263; Price: Rs 599
As modern civilisation continues to reel under a battery of murderous attacks from Islamic extremists, many of who now claim to owe allegiance to the contemporary quasi-state terror entity called the Islamic State (IS), the world looks increasingly vulnerable to ordinary citizens, who wonder at the impunity with which militarised attackers are able to operate freely and spread mayhem, Continue reading
