Home Page of Dr. Saumitra Mohan

How Can We Survive the Clash of Civilisations? Saumitra Mohan It was in an article published way back in 1993 in Foreign Affairs that Samuel P. Huntington had declaimed that the post-Cold War conflicts would not be ideological or economic, but cultural. He said, “The local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars shall be those along the fault lines separating the civilizations from one another.” The next world war, he further said, shall be a war between civilizations. Since Huntington came out with this thesis, reams have been written arguing for and against it. But any claim of a ‘clash of civilisations’ springing from divergent religious beliefs represents an oversimplification of the reality. As Amartya Sen wrote in 2003, ‘this single-dimensional categorization of human beings and the increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has trying to classify individuals according to a single pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion ...

Sino-Indian Relations: Moving forward Saumitra Mohan China occupies a prominent place in India’s ‘Look East Policy’. The two civilisational behemoths’ bilateral relations have undergone a slow, but steady consolidation for the better in recent times, notwithstanding a background of mistrust and misunderstanding carried over through decades. Marred by the memories of 1962 border war and Cold War shenanigans, the qualitative improvement in bilateral relationship saw its beginning in Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China in 1988 which has since then been sustained and consolidated through a series of actions including 1993 agreement between the two countries to maintain peace and tranquillity along the line of actual control. This positive transformation is reflected in the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh calling China ‘The Greatest Neighbour’ at Heillegendum Summit of G-8 countries. It is the same China whom the then Indian Defence Minister Mr. George Fernandes had termed India’s ‘Enemy Numbe...