[alephnerd]

KP Sharma Oli is pro-China which even Nepali media has pointed out [0]. And his formative years were spent growing up in a village (Garamani) barely 30 km outside Naxalbari during the Naxalbari Uprising, and attended secondary school barely 5 miles (Mechinagar) away from Naxalbari during the uprising.

In Nepali politics, Sher Bahadur Deuba is pro-India and Prachanda is pro-Prachanda (will back India some years, other years will back China).

The whole Indian internet conspiracy of "CIA ki saazish" is ridiculous when the US has barely 20 India scholars at all. There is 0 domain experience in India studies in the US, and that reflects in America's South Asia strategy (there is none).

[0] - https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/09/07/oli-s-diplomati...

[selimthegrim]

Did the departments at Berkeley, Columbia and Chicago just turn over and capsize?

[alephnerd]

Their scholars primarily specialize in the history of South Asia, not contemporary foreign relations and strategy in South Asia.

IMO, the only American program that has a good program in Contemporary Indian politics and foreign policy is Stanford, as Sumit Ganguly acts as the primary linkage between American and Indian policymakers, and the FSI and Hoover Institution tends to host Indian policymakers and career bureaucrats as affiliates and fellows. For example, during the US-India trade negotiations, the only public visit Nirmala Sitharaman and her staffers had was at the Hoover Institution [0]. Even the USIBC is hosted at Stanford, and that event has a lot of Indian and American dignitaries and policymakers coming.

Other than Christine Fair and a couple Pakistani fellows at HKS, I can't think of a similar domain experts on Pakistan either in the US.

If you want to study contemporary Indian foreign policy outside of India, your only options are NUS, ANU, Stanford, LSE, and maybe Oxford.

It's the same reason why the best China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea scholars tend to be clustered at Harvard and Stanford.

[0] - https://www.hoover.org/events/laying-foundations-developed-i...

[selimthegrim]

I have gone back-and-forth with Christine Fair on Twitter DMs (she had an issue with a translation I wasn’t credited on) and she certainly has her strongly personal point of view, but she’s got a lot of sharp edges. Maybe Michael what’s his name who is always writing op-eds in Dawn would be another option.

[alephnerd]

> she’s got a lot of sharp edges

Understatement of the year.

> Maybe Michael

I've never been impressed by Michael K. He's tends to view South Asia relations from a NatSec only view that is heavily colored by his experiences during the GWOT.

He isn't the most proficient in understanding the ins-and-outs of institutions. And fundamentally, it's institutions - not interests or personas - that set strategy or goals.

I think he is a good source if we want to understand KPK and transnational terrorism, but not really beyond that.

-----------

And this is the fundamental problem with South Asia studies in the US - almost all academics in the space largely entered during the GWOT or the NPT, and their domain experience is largely around either transnational terror or nuclear posture.

There are almost no academics in the US with US citizenship who have significant experience and knowledge about how institutions work within South Asian countries, and those who have that knowledge decide to retain their home country's citizenship becuase they know they can pull a Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramaniam, or a Krishnamurthy Subramanian (no relation to Aravind).

Chinese studies faced the same issues before 2017-19 as well, because there were few Chinese born American naturalized academics with a background in Chinese institutions, plus when I was in college (Obama 1/2) the majority of the limited academic funding in Govt/PoliSci was devoted to Russia, Iran, and the Arabic speaking nations. China was largely viewed the same way India is today and India the same way Vietnam or Indonesia are viewed today in American academia.

These academic blind spots are a major reason why American foreign policy keeps failing - there is almost no domain experience outside of Russia/CEE and MidEast studies in the US. We barely built Chinese studies domain experience but a lot of that is ex-USSR scholars pivoting to China for funding.

[selimthegrim]

Michael Kugelman