South Asia Investor Review

Both the American and the Iranian delegations are expected to begin peace talks in Islamabad tomorrow after the announcement of the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire. The US team is led by Vice President J.D. Vance and includes President Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Iranian team includes Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi. Mohammad Ghalibaf is a former IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) commander with close ties to the hardliners.   The Islamabad meeting has come as a result of the tireless efforts of the Pakistani leaders to stop the war since it started on February 28 with the US-Israeli attack on Iran. But these efforts took on special urgency on the morning of April 7,  when President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: "A Whole Civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again". "We will find out tonight, one of the most important mome...

President Donald Trump joined Israel in yet another war of choice in the Middle East last week. Polls conducted in the United States immediately after the start of the Iran war show that the majority of Americans do not support it.  A YouGov snap poll fielded Saturday — the day of the strikes — found 34% of Americans approve of the U.S. attacks on Iran, with 44% disapproving and 22% unsure. A CNN poll done soon after found that 59% of Americans disapprove of the war.  59% of Americans Disapprove of the Iran War. Source: CNN It appears that President Trump has caved in to pressure from the Israelis to go to war against Iran, a fact confirmed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In answer to a question, Rubio essentially admitted that Israel forced the US into war with Iran. 'There absolutely was an imminent threat,' Rubio said. 'And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked (by Israel), and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immedia...

"We are not proxies for India in the US", wrote Suhag Shukla, co-founder and executive director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) in a recent article for  The Print , an Indian media outlet.  This was written in response to Indian diplomat-politician Shashi Tharoor's criticism that the Indian-American diaspora was largely silent on the Trump administration policies hurting India.  After a meeting with a US congressional delegation in September 2025, Tharoor had questioned why the Indian diaspora appeared apathetic to US policies affecting India, including H-1B visa fees and tariffs. Suhag Shukla (L) and Shashi Tharoor The HAF is seen by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's critics and human rights advocates as an American proxy for the Hindutva movement and its Hindu Supremacist ideology. HAF spun off in 2003 from the American branch of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organization with ties to anti-Muslim violence in India. HAF co-founder Mihir Meghani published a...

India is losing its best and brightest to the West, particularly to the United States, at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2023 study of the 1,000 top scorers in the 2010 entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) — a network of prestigious institutions of higher learning based in 23 Indian cities — revealed the scale of the problem. Around 36% migrated abroad, and of the top 100 scorers, 62% left the country, according to a report in the science journal  Nature .  Nearly two-thirds of those leaving India are highly educated, having received academic or vocational training. This is the  highest  for any country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Example of The Great Indian Brain Drain. Source: Boston Political Review Brain drain is defined as the loss of precious human capital of a nation. It is a “consequence of an education system designed for ‘selecting’ the best and brightest in an economy that is still too con...

As of 2019, there were 35,000 Pakistan-born STEM workers in the United States, according to the American Immigration Council. They included information technologists, software developers, engineers and scientists. These figures do not include medical doctors and healthcare workers.  Foreign-Born STEM Workers in America. Source: American Immigration Council Foreign-born workers make up a growing share of America's STEM workforce. As of 2019, foreign-born workers made up almost a quarter of all STEM workers in the country. This is a significant increase from 2000, when just 16.4% of the country’s STEM workforce was foreign-born. Between 2000 and 2019, the overall number of STEM workers in the United States increased by 44.5 percent, from 7.5 million to more than 10.8 million, according to  American Immigration Council .  India and Pakistan Among Top 10 Countries Receiving US Immigrant Visas. Source: Visual Capitalist India topped the top 10 list of foreign-born STEM workers...

Retired US Marine Richard Mac McKinney hated Muslims so much that he planned to bomb an Islamic Center in the state of Indiana. His transformation is the subject of a documentary short film called "Stranger at the Gate." The film has already won a special jury prize at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. It tells the story of how McKinney abandoned his plot and ended up converting to Islam.   L to R: Mac McKinney, Jomo Willians, Dr. Mohammad Bahrami, Mrs. Bibi Bahrami When Mac, a veteran of the US "global war on terror",  returned to Indiana in 2006, he was outraged by the presence of the local Muslim community who he saw as enemies.  During the periods he described to Joshua Seftel, the director of "Stranger at the Gate", as “between being drunk and sober,” he brainstormed how he could attack Muslims —an action he thought of as continuing to protect his family and serve his country. He hatched a plot to bomb the Islamic Center of Muncie, Indiana on a Friday ...

Kishore Mahbubani, a prolific writer, speaker and former Singaporean diplomat, believes that the western domination of the world over the last 200 years is "aberrant" when seen in the context of the last several thousand years of human history.  In his book "Has China Won", he writes that "we are also moving away from a black-and-white world". "Societies in different parts of the world, including in China and  Islamic societies , are going to work toward a different balance between liberty and order, between freedom and control, between discord and harmony".  Kishore Mahbubabi In a recent interview,  Mahbubani  made the following points about US-China competition:  1. The United States with about 240-year history likes to pass judgement on  China  which has over 2,400 year history. What makes the US think China would listen to the American advice?  2. The West is in the habit of judging everyone, including the Chinese. The Chinese have just h...

"One hard truth that Indians have to contend with is that America has also had difficulty treating India with respect", writes former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani in his latest book "Has China Won?". "If America wants to develop a close long-term relationship with  India  over the long run, it needs to confront the deep roots of its relative lack of respect for India", adds Ambassador Mahbubani. It's not just Mahbubani who suspects the United States leadership does not respect India. Others, including former President Bill Clinton, current US President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CNN GPS host Fareed Zakaria have expressed similar sentiments.  Kishore Mahbubani Kishore Mahbubani: Kishore Mahbubani is a former top diplomat who served as the head of Singaporean mission at the United Nations. He was born in Singapore in 1948 to Hindu Sindhi parents who migrated from Pakistan to India in 1947, and then to Singapore ...

China has emerged as the top destination for Pakistani students studying abroad with  19,000  of them in China this year. This figure is more than 3 times the  6,141 Pakistani students  currently enrolled in the US universities, according to data available from reliable sources. Foreign Students in China:  China is hosting over 440,000 foreign students in 2017, up 35% from 2012. No other Asian country has as many foreign students as China does today, according to  Shanghiist . The countries sending the largest number of students to China are South Korea, the United States and Thailand, followed by Pakistan, India, Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Japan and Vietnam, according to data from China's Ministry of Education as reported by  Chinese media . China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC):  The number of students from countries involved in China's One Belt, One Road  (OBOR) initiative, also known as The Silk Road Economic Belt and ...