Arnold Zeitlin is managing director of Editorial Research & Reporting Associates (ERRA). He was a senior reporter for the Associated Press as well as Asia vice president for United Press International, and Asia center director for the Freedom Forum. He is an Advisory Board Member of South Asia Journal.
by Arnold Zeitlin 11 May 2020 The profanity-laced conversations described in The Blood Telegram between a deeply prejudiced, obdurate President Richard Nixon and his remarkably sycophantic national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as they coped with the events leading to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, lead also to speculation about the conversations these days between
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 15 April 2020 Reading Midnight’s Furies account of the 1947 partition of India through the prism of the year 2020 and the widening Hinduization of Narendra Modi’s India, one can summon sympathy for the obstinate villain of author Nisid Hajari’s piece — Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah, the revered Quad-i-Azam (Great
READ MOREIn his provocative, detailed description of the events that led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, author Srinath Ragavan is intent in upending myths and conventional and perceived wisdom. Early in his narrative of the state India found itself in after the Pakistan army cracked down in East Pakistan in March 1971,
READ MOREby Arnold Zetlin 1 April 2020 When Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, and Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, signed the Indus Water Treaty in 1960, the agreement was hailed as a diplomatic triumph. The neighboring, hostile states, between two wars, one in 1948, the other in 1965, agreed on the management
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 23 March 2020 The value of Saghir Iqbal’s brief thesis is its reflection of the Pakistan view of its nuclear arms competition with India. In this view, India went nuclear because “China is perceived as a long-term threat. Secondary to this threat perception is India’s ambition to achieve regional hegemony and global
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 23 March 2020 Anonymous authors take the reader on a brisk 54-page journey focussed on the Punjab against the broader context from the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization dating back to 3300 BCE to the region’s modern state divided between India and Pakistan. Along the way, we meet Alexander the Great who
READ MOREby Arnold Zetlin 23 March 2020 Author Harold A. Gould, whose long career as an anthropologist and student of India has spanned the independence of India and Pakistan and the first 60 years of their relationship with the United States, doesn’t think much of the intellectual capabilities of the men who shaped American policy toward
READ MOREFriends and relatives of two victims of a triple bombing in the northeastern city of Qamishli, attend their funeral on November 13, 2019. AFP by Arnold Zeitlin 29 January 2020 the cry has been raised once again, inspired by the marking of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz-birkenau, camps where the nazis murdered
READ MOREReview by Arnold Zeitlin 19 January 2020 Writing as Joseph Allchin, the author lays out in vivid, if not bloody, detail, the persistence in contemporary Bangladesh of violent extremism in the name of Islam. He has produced one of the best compilations of terror in Bangladesh in English and between two covers. Allchin, who has
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 7 November 2019 The tale has been often told: the U.S.-Pakistan-relationship was founded on the misunderstanding that never has been resolved and, perhaps, has been deliberately maintained. In the mid-1950s, the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, saw Pakistan as a South Asian bulwark against the Soviet Union. Field Marshall Ayub
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Book Review Writing history in Bangladesh always has been a sensitive activity, what with so many people hesitant to revisit their experience, especially during the war that brought independence to the country. Now the writing of that history has become risky with proposed legislation that criminalizes challenging myths of creation — like the numbers killed
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Three wise old men from South Asia with connections to Singapore have produced a book in which they offer a well-meaning, idealistic cure for the ills of Afghanistan that inadvertently may lead to a genuine solution in that troubled land. In a book entitled Afghanistan: The Next Phase, they suggest a formal association of 10
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