Burzine Waghmar

Burzine Waghmar is the inaugural Visiting India Fellow. He is an affiliate of the SOAS South Asia Institute; Centre for the Study of Pakistan; Centre of Iranian Studies; and South Asia librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London.

Burzine's open-source intelligence-commissioned reports and briefings range over Indo-Iranian, Indo-Pakistani, Indo-GCC foreign and security relations as well as the history, religions, and socio-political status of confessional and ethno-linguistic minorities of the SAARC and MENA regions. He is a familiar commentator on BBC News 24, BBC World TV, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service; Channel 4; ZDF TV; Monocle Radio; Al-Jazeera English (AJE); CNN News 18; Times NOW TV; Republic TV; and Voice of America (VOA).

Burzine has been a consultant and external auditor to the U.S. National Intelligence Council; Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO); Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), UK; Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), UK; Greater Manchester Police Counterterrorism Unit; Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), UK; and Ministry of Defence Languages Examination Board (MODLEB).

He obtained his Bachelor's and Master's in International Relations from the College of William & Mary, VA, and Boston University, MA respectively. His thesis examined the evolution of the office of Supreme Leader (velayat-e faqih) in Shi'i political thought and Khomeinism.

Besides French, German, Italian, Persian and Russian, his reading and research skills of the SAARC sphere incorporate Urdu, Pashto, Balochi, Kashmiri, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali; and Indo-Iranian dialectology, ethnography and historical geography of the Irano-Pak, Sino-Pak and Af-Pak borders (Balochistan, Trans-Karakoram Tract, Gilgit-Baltistan/Northern Areas, NWFP/Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas/FATA).