#Modi's grand delusion of Digital #India - The Hindu. #ModiInSiliconValley #SiliconValley #DigitalIndia http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article7727159.ece …

The idea of attacking poverty by increasing mobile connectivity in a country that ranks 55 in the Global Hunger Index is just fantasy

Interviewer: What would you regard as the most outstanding and significant event of the last decade?

Siddhartha: The… war in Vietnam, sir.

Interviewer: More significant than landing on the moon?

Siddhartha: I think so, sir.

— “Pratidwandi” (The Adversary), 1970

The most fundamental debate for our youth is the choice between Android, iOS or Windows. — Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A glib modernity has perpetrated the belief that technology can bring about the liberation of human beings. Therefore, it is not surprising that the post-colonial history of colonised nations is also largely a history of this unrealisable fantasy. Digital India is the latest enchantment. The irony is that what goes missing in the search of a “technological fix” is human beings themselves. What should worry us is not the digital divide, but the fundamental divide between a rapidly growing technological capability and a snail-like growth in eliminating human deprivation.

Mr. Modi’s Digital India speech at Silicon Valley showed his remarkable continuity with the policies of post-independence governments, which grievously ignored the fundamental bases of development, health and education, leading to colossal failures in eliminating deprivation. Is it of any surprise that in 2011, 50 per cent of rural India was illiterate or semiliterate? Or that dengue overwhelms New Delhi now? All this is the result of an impoverished understanding of development as merely economic growth and progress in science and technology, rather than ensuring basic human capacities and dignity. Hence, we are in a conjuncture in which 71 per cent of rural India owns mobile phones while 75 per cent of it lives on Rs. 33 per day.

Retired General Hoon of #India reveals Brasstacks was prep for invasion of #Pakistan by #Indian Army Chief in 1987
http://www.hindustantimes.com/punjab/lt-gen-hoon-reveals-some-untol... …

Operation Brasstacks was the army’s preparations for a war against Pakistan and not a military exercise, says Lieutenant General PN Hoon (retired), who was the then commander-in-chief of the Western Command. The revelation was made by the veteran during the launch of his book, “The Untold Truth”, on Saturday evening.
In the book, Lt Gen Hoon has revealed behind-the-scene politics of major operations and events that took place during his 40-year service in the army. While in one chapter, the author has called the Operation Blue Star a “botched-up operation”, in another chapter he has revealed that Operation Brasstacks was a “war against Pakistan”.
“I have written about operations I have been part of and no one else knows about till today,” said the author.
The chapter 9 of the book reveals the inside story of Operation Brasstacks. It was in peacetime in January 1987 that the Indian Army began moving to the western border carrying live ammunition. The citizens were told that it was an exercise. The book suggests that “it could only be a preparation for a war”
Talking about the operation, Lt Gen PN Hoon said, “Brasstacks was no military exercise, it was a plan to build up a situation for a fourth war with Pakistan. And what is even more shocking is that the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was not aware of these plans of a war.”
The author said that it was General Sundarji’s (the then chief of army staff) and minister of state for defence Arun Singh’s plan to provoke Pakistan “into launching an offensive in Kashmir”.
“... an attack on Kashmir would be an attack on India and in the garb of the exercise that India was already conducting, India would go into a full-fledged war with Pakistan,” reads the chapter.
Lt Gen Hoon said that it was during a dinner party on January 15, 1987, (Army Day) that the PM came to know about the exercise.
“Rajiv Gandhi asked me, ‘How is the western front?’ To this I replied, “Mr Prime Minister, sir. The western army is in fine fettle and very soon I shall be past our battle stations and will give you Sind on one side and Lahore (Pakistan) on the other,”said the author.
“Rajiv was totally aghast and visibly angered. He left the party immediately. The PM did not want to go into a war. Hence, on January 20, Sundarji, pleaded me to stop moving forward,”he added.
When asked as to why Arun Singh and Sundarji would want a war while keeping the PM in the dark, Lt Gen Hoon said: “It was a power game. Sundarji wanted to become a Field Marshal and Arun Singh wanted to become the Prime Minister.”
Apart from these issues, the book reveals behind-the-scene politics when India was forced to take over Sikkim. The author has tried to expose the true nature of political mindset, which should have been protecting the economic, political and strategic interests of the country.
The author also reveals that how President Giani Zail Singh was planning to take the help of the army in dismissing Rajiv Gandhi. “The army had a role to play in the plans to dismiss Rajiv Gandhi. The conflict between the former President Giani Zail Singh and then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was well known by all. But what is still not known is the real politics that continued during the period and how army was involved in all this,” mentions the book.

India:
Exports ↓ http://bit.ly/1jLMMVT 
Manufacturing ↓ http://on.mktw.net/1Pg1Y9Q 
Services ↓ http://bit.ly/1Lfio0g 

: Exports from India are still not out of the woods, with 23 key sectors, including petroleum, engineering and leather, declining in August mainly due to a fall in global prices and demand downturn. In all, 23 out of 30 sectors monitored by the commerce ministry were in the negative zone last month, data showed.

This has prompted exporters' body FIEO to seek immediate intervention of the government to arrest the decline.

A gauge of manufacturing activity in India fell to a seven-month low in September, providing fresh evidence that a recovery in the South Asian economy remains sluggish.

The seasonally adjusted India Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index, prepared by Markit, fell to 51.2 from 52.3 in August, according to Nikkei research released Thursday. A figure above 50 indicates an expansion while a reading below that signals contraction.

"Growth of Indian manufacturing production was weighed down by a difficult economic climate," Pollyanna De Lima, an economist at Markit, said.


New orders rose at the weakest pace since June, with export-order growth slumping to the slowest in two years. As a result, manufacturers cut jobs to keep costs in check.

"This bodes ill for the economy in the near-term and suggests that manufacturers' expectations for future output growth are clouded with uncertainty," Ms. De Lima said.

Bengaluru: India’s pivotal services industry lost some momentum in September as demand weakened despite firms cutting prices for the first time this year, a business survey showed on Tuesday.

If #India economy is really growing 7.4%, why is consumer sentiment at 3-year low? Is #Modi fudging GDP? #BJP http://www.livemint.com/Money/XGY7AWl1fNfNEsMWe0PMFO/If-economy-is-... …
The survey shows that not only are consumers worried about current conditions, they also don’t expect any improvement in the medium term. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint
Indian consumers are turning increasingly pessimistic about the economic recovery. The MNI India Consumer Sentiment Indicator, from Deutsche Borse, fell to a three-year low in September, suggesting that demand continues to be lacklustre. That sentiment is completely out of sync with the rosy estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The survey shows that not only are consumers worried about current conditions, they also don’t expect any improvement in the medium term.

“Seen through the eyes of our survey respondents… the short- to medium-term outlook looks less compelling, with consumer confidence at a record low and little sign of a quick turnaround, ” said MNI chief economist Philip Uglow.

Simply put, the 75 basis points rate cut that happened from January to September wasn’t good enough to boost demand and convince consumers that things will improve. One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.

It’s not just consumer sentiment that is pessimistic. Expectations for business conditions improving one year from now fell to their lowest since September 2013, when India was battling a sharply depreciating rupee. Besides, consumers were the least optimistic about their household finances, with both current and future measures of personal finances falling to record lows.

This level of pessimism ties in with other indicators as well. For instance, the Nikkei Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for India shows there has been no improvement in manufacturing employment since the Narendra Modi government took charge at the Centre.

In September-end, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) cut rates by another 50 basis points to boost demand. It remains to be seen whether it will boost the much-needed confidence.

“So far the rate cuts have had little impact, with consumers particularly concerned about their finances. The recent cut in the policy rate by RBI should help, although for now our survey suggests that household spending will remain capped,” said Uglow.

#India-#Pakistan border is so closely guarded that it can be seen lit up from space in night's darkness http://qz.com/516864 via @qzindia

The border between India and Pakistan is one of the few international boundaries that can be easily identified from space.

Late last month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Earth Observatory shared a nighttime image of the international border that divides India and Pakistan.

Amid countless dots and some larger blobs of yellow, the border between the two countries can be seen as a distinct, brightly-lit orange line—thanks to the security lights that run the length of the boundary.

Nearly 2,000 kilometres, out of about 3,300 kilometres, of the India-Pakistan border is floodlit, according to Indian government officials, which racks up massive electricity and diesel bills.

One of the most heavily militarised international borders, the Radcliffe Line—the boundary demarcation line established during Partition in 1947—divides the two nuclear-armed nations. Both countries have thousands of troops stationed all along its length, especially in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. These troops are served by hundreds of kilometres of roads that run alongside the boundary.

The photograph was taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, using a Nikon D4 digital camera and a 28-millimetre lens. “For scale, the distance from Karachi to the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains is 1,160 kilometers (720 miles),” NASA’s Earth Observatory said.

But this is not NASA’s first photo of the international border.

Another night view of the border zone, “looking southeast from the Himalaya,” was taken four years ago, on Aug. 21, 2011. Again, the borderline appears as an orange line, flanked by a number of cities on both sides.

The top left cluster is New Delhi. The cluster next to the border on the other side is Lahore, while the cluster right at bottom centre is Islamabad. The photograph was taken with a Nikon D3S digital camerausing a 16-milimetre lens.

“Clusters of yellow lights on the Indo-Gangetic Plain reveal numerous cities large and small in this astronaut photograph of northern India and northern Pakistan,” NASA said. “The lines of major highways connecting the cities also stand out. More subtle, but still visible at night, are the general outlines of the towering and partly cloud-covered Himalayas to the north.”

In comparison, daytime images of the region are less revealing. The following photograph of the region was clicked on June 14, 2014.

The divide between #India and #Pakistan is so deep you can see it from space. Only such border in the world. #NASA http://wpo.st/1aFf0

See that border between India and Pakistan? Well, it's one of the very few international boundaries that can be seen at night, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The satellite image was released by NASA last month and posted on the organization's Facebook page two days ago. The post has gone viral, with more than 17,000 shares.

The India-Pakistan border is one of the most heavily guarded in the world. Since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, disputes between the two countries have led to three wars and thousands dead.

The boundary between the two countries wasn't always so easily visible from space. In 2003, the Indian government decided to use floodlights on part of the border to deter arms trafficking and smuggling. And this year, a plan was announced to replace some of those floodlights with LED lights to save electricity and increase visibility, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper.

This isn't the first time that NASA has released a photo of the border. Here is one from 2011, showing the border, as well as big cities in both countries.

Indian hawk RAMAHARITHA PUSARLA (NitiCentral) on "Pakistan’s Nuclear Posturing and the Americans":

two US think-tanks The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and The Stimson Centre together released a report titled: “A normal nuclear Pakistan” a fortnight ago (1). The report authored by Toby Dalton and Michael Kripon quite characteristic of the US double speak, justified its infallibility towards Pakistan and postulated subtle rationalisations for normalisation Pakistan’s nuclear arena. Drawing parallels to the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement, the authors appealed to the US to consider Pakistan for a similar kind of treaty paving way for its eventual entry into global nuclear regime. Authors plead the US administration to extend concessions to Pakistan and seriously contemplate on helping it become “a normal nuclear state” on par with India. This intimidating explanation logically strengthens India’s doubts of the US double standards. It is intriguing as how the report chooses to ignore malefaction of Pakistan and its alarming pace of vertical proliferation of nuclear arms.

Despite being identified as the aggressor in Indo-Pak Wars of 1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999 Pakistan seems to have floored the defence analysts of the US by invoking the apprehensions of being over ridden by a bigger country – India. With its obsessive paranoia of India as the enemy, Pakistan has embarked on a race of outcompeting India in nuclear weapons production. Post 1998 India shifted gears and focussed on building conventional military capabilities while Pakistan was relentlessly engrossed in bomb-building. While Pakistan blames India for the nuclear build-up in the region, international community must raise a toast to India for maintaining peace in the region despite unequivocal provocations from belligerent Pakistan and a nuclear weapon state China. Seeking a waiver of all the brutal terrorist activities funded by it to organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) that carried the gruesome Mumbai blasts, it assures that it conducted massive clamp down operations against extremist groups. But alas! Counter terrorism operations were directed against Tehreek-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that targets the military. It is now a known fact that LeT works in collusion with Pakistan’s military and intelligence services and expectedly so, in spite of concrete evidence furnished by India stating its direct involvement in the Mumbai blasts no legal action has been taken. Pakistan in fact revels in patronising the scourge of terrorism and considers extremist groups as real assets of state. But tactfully complains of being victims of terrorism (read as Pakistani Taliban) and for not getting enough credit for containing some extremist groups.

Till now the popular deterrence theory holds that possession of nuclear weapons would deter nuclear exchanges and other conventional military threats. Nuclear weapons are reckoned as long term fixed assets of state since they checkmate the aggression of rivals. Observers world over feel that repeated provocations by Pakistan coupled with sustained toleration of sponsored extremist activities might inadvertently educe India into a battle with its neighbour. Principally nuclear states behave responsibly and try to avoid evade situations that can spark a war. But the combative nuclear posturing of Pakistan indicates that it is not a normal state. Envisaging a framework for mainstreaming Pakistan’s nuclear program is dangerously preposterous and illogical.

http://www.niticentral.com/2015/09/13/u-s-report-endorsing-pakistan...

Indian hawk RAMAHARITHA PUSARLA (NitiCentral) on "Pakistan’s Nuclear Posturing and the Americans":

Despite the insidious attitude of Pakistan the report appeals to help Pakistan to become normal state. It recommends Pakistan to fulfil five conditions for its nuclear normalisation. These are: shift from the full spectrum deterrence to strategic deterrence, limit production of tactical weapons or short range delivery weapons, become amenable to talks on the fissile material cut off treaty (FMCT), delineate civil and military nuclear programs and finally sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). But Pakistan wielding to any these conditions is next to impossible as their military leadership firmly believes that nuclear weapons are matter of national survival. Further the recent US-Pakistan joint statement indicates that President Obama clearly favours integration of the Pakistan to the global nuclear order (4). Reassured of Washington’s consent the National Command Authority (NCA) of Pakistan began making unauthenticated claims that India has fissile material enough for 2000 warheads (5).

China has so far chaperoned Pakistan’s odyssey into the nuclear arena but with the US too giving into the Faustian bargaining of the Rawalpindi overlords, India might witness unprecedented ceasefire violations and intransigent infiltrations bids. The most debilitating account of the report has been its nonchalant account of Pakistan despite nurturing anti-India terrorists.

http://www.niticentral.com/2015/09/13/u-s-report-endorsing-pakistan...

The Kasuri effect: #India acknowledges secret #Kashmir draft, #Balochistan link. #Pakistan http://www.dawn.com/news/1211813

The Baloch issue with India has also figured in Mr Kasuri’s book, though not quite as dramatically as The Hindu report states.

“I want to say here that Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies have a full measure of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. There’s no gainsaying that it is a futile and self-defeating motive to hurt the other side, because both are capable of destabilising each other or wreaking havoc. There is no substitute to good sense and for talks at every possible level,” he told this correspondent in a conversation.

Files recording the unsigned documents, exchanged by both sides, were personally handed over to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his predecessor at a May 27, 2014 meeting, the Indian diplomat told the Express.

The paper confirmed that the Indian official was speaking even as Mr Kasuri was in New Delhi to release the Indian edition of his book, ‘Neither a hawk nor a dove’. The Express described the book as the first insider account of India-Pakistan secret diplomacy on Kashmir.

Mr Kasuri’s book quotes General Musharraf as stating that the secret Kashmir agreement envisaged joint management of the state by India and Pakistan, as well as demilitarisation of the territory.

The Indian negotiator said the final draft of the framework agreement in fact spoke of a “consultative mechanism”, made up of elected representatives of the governments of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, as well as officials of the two national governments. The consultative mechanism, he said, was mandated to address regional “social and economic issues”, like tourism, religious pilgrimages, culture and trade.

New Delhi, the official said, had rejected General Musharraf’s push for institutions for joint management of Kashmir by the two states, arguing it would erode Indian sovereignty.

Prime minister Singh’s hand-picked envoy, Ambassador Satinder Lambah, and General Musharraf’s interlocutors, Riaz Muhammad Khan and Tariq Aziz, held over 200 hours of discussions on the draft agreement, during 30 meetings held in Dubai and Kathmandu, the Express said.

“Lambah, a former intelligence official recalled, was also flown to Rawalpindi on a Research and Analysis Wing jet as negotiations reached an advanced stage, travelling without a passport or visa to ensure the meetings remained secret.”

#Modi's (and his cabinet's) poor education, #India's great educational divide fueling anti-#Muslim bigotry, hate?

http://nyti.ms/1QdP0rc

Aatish Taseer Op Ed in NY Times:

In India, the Congress Party was liberal, left-leaning and secular; but it was also the party of the colonized elite. That meant that practically everyone who was rich, and educated, and grew up speaking English, was also invariably a supporter of Congress.

------------

The cabinet, save for the rare exception, is made up of too many crude, bigoted provincials, united far more by a lack of education than anything so grand as ideology. At the time of writing — and here the one will have to speak for the many — Mr. Modi’s minister of culture had just said of a former Muslim president: “Despite being a Muslim, he was a great nationalist and humanist.”

Some 10 days later, there was the hideous incident in which a Muslim man was lynched by a Hindu mob in a village outside Delhi, on the suspicion of slaughtering a cow and eating beef. It was a defining moment, the culmination of 16 months of cultural chauvinism and hysteria under Mr. Modi, the scarcely veiled target of which are India’s roughly 170 million Muslims. This ugliness is eclipsing Mr. Modi’s development agenda, and just this week, there was yet another incident in which a Kashmiri politician was attacked in Srinagar for hosting “a beef party.”

Poisonous as these attitudes are, they have much more to do with class than politics. They are so obviously part of the vulgarity that accompanies violent social change. If the great drama of our grandparents’ generation was independence, and our parents’ that post-colonial period, ours represents the twilight of the (admittedly flawed) English-speaking classes, and an unraveling of the social and moral order they held in place. A new country is seething with life, but not all vitality is pretty, and there now exists a glaring cultural and intellectual gap between India’s old, entrenched elite and the emerging electorate.

In other places, education would have helped close the gap; it would have helped the country make a whole of the social change it was witnessing. No society is so equitable that men as economically far apart as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — or as Ed Miliband and David Cameron, for that matter — would have attended the same schools. But, in England and America, there is Oxford and Yale to level the field, to give both men the means to speak to each other.

This is not true of India. In India, one class has had access to the best private schools and foreign universities, where all the instruction is in English; the other has had to make do with the state schools and universities Indian socialism bequeathed them. The two classes almost never meet; they don’t even speak the same language. It has left India divided between an isolated superelite (and if you’re an Indian reading this, you’re probably part of it!) and an emerging middle class that may well lack the intellectual tools needed to channel its vitality.

--------

In another society, with the benefit of a real education, Mr. Modi might have been something more than he was. Then it would be possible to imagine a place with real political differences, and not one in which left and right were divided along the blade of a knife by differences in class, language and education. But just as that other society does not yet exist, neither does that other Modi. Indians will have to make do with the Modi they have; and, as things stand, perhaps the cynics are right: Perhaps this great hope of Indian democracy, with his limited reading and education, is not equal to the enormous task before him.

India leaving China behind? Not so fast

The ‘bright spot’ of emerging markets promises much but has yet to deliver


The truth may finally be wearing off the old saying that India only ever compares itself with itself. As the Indian economy has proved to be one of the least dim spots in a gloomy emerging market landscape, boasts are multiplying that it is overtaking China as the engine of world expansion. Jayant Sinha, India’s junior finance minister, recently laid down the bold prediction that “in coming days, India will leave China behind as far as growth and development matter”.
Not, as it were, so fast. While India’s short-term macroeconomic performance has put it at a better place in the cycle than most big emerging markets, the longer-term structural problems that have kept it in a lower growth class than China unfortunately persist, as do the political elephant traps awaiting intrepid reformers.


On the face of it, the Indian economy is performing well, and the popularity of Narendra Modi, the prime minister elected on the promise of liberalising reform last year, is holding up. Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, has referred to India as a “bright spot” in the slowing global economy. Growth equalled China’s last year at 7.3 per cent, and the IMF predicts India will be the fastest-growing large economy in the world this year.
The reality is less encouraging. For one, the statistics may quite simply be wrong. A new data series for GDP introduced in February did much of the work in raising India’s growth rate near China’s, and the numbers, with a short history and without detailed data to underpin them, sit at odds with other indicators such as industrial production and imports.
Second, the current conjuncture has been delivered by a number of one-off factors. The falling global oil price since late 2014 has benefited India both in holding down inflation and in helping Mr Modi reform public finances by cutting expensive government fuel subsidies without raising the price to consumers.
Third, substantial impediments remain to the challenge of increasing investment, particularly in infrastructure, to unlock India’s potential for competing with east Asian countries for the manufacturing industry currently being priced out of China by rising wages and costs. Growth in manufacturing came to a halt between 2012 and 2014 after several years of expansion, casting severe doubts on its underlying momentum.

--------------------
Mr Modi’s government insists it will push on with reform but, given the snarl-ups in parliament over the summer, his political space is shrinking. An important test of his government’s political momentum comes next month in the state elections in Bihar. The eastern state has long been one of India’s poorest and, while it has been growing rapidly, it has struggled to expand its manufacturing sector. If Mr Modi’s message of clearing away the impediments to investment does not resonate, it does not bode well for his chances of maintaining momentum into next year.
For the moment, it seems that India will be happy being regarded as a standout in the otherwise disappointing emerging market class. If its cyclical advantage fades and it returns to its familiar sub-China levels of growth, its politicians are unlikely to be so vainglorious.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/71a4cad2-728e-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc...

Half the Kids in This Part of #India Are Stunted due to malnutrition, open defecation. #DigitalIndia #Modi #BJP http://nyti.ms/1RJtCeD

India is a vigorous democracy that has sent an orbiter to Mars. Yet its children are more likely to starve than children in far poorer nations in Africa.

In a remarkable failure of democracy, India is the epicenter of global malnutrition: 39 percent of Indian children are stunted from poor nutrition, according to government figures (other estimates are higher). Stunting is worse in India than in Burkina Faso or Haiti, worse than in Bangladesh or North Korea.

“The average woman in India ends pregnancy weighing less than the average woman in sub-Saharan Africa begins pregnancy,” Coffey writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The upshot is that many children are malnourished in the uterus and never recover.

The second new theory is poor sanitation, particularly open defecation. About half of Indians defecate outside without using toilets. The result is that children pick up parasites and chronic infections that impair the ability of the intestines to absorb nutrients — and 117,000 Indian children die each year from diarrhea, according to Unicef.

That may explain an anomaly: Infant mortality is lower for Indian Muslims than for Hindus, even though Muslims are poorer. One reason may be that Muslim villagers are more likely to use outhouses.

This is a life-or-death matter. Governments invest in tanks and fighter aircraft to defend their people, when the greater threat to their citizens comes from their own poop.

Still, few recognize the risk. Worldwide, far more people have access to mobile phones than to toilets. That’s because phones are seen as the higher priority. In the villages that Austin and I visited, villagers routinely had mobile phones, but very few had outhouses. Even fewer used them: It’s easy for aid groups to build latrines, harder to get people to use them.

#India's strange preoccupation with #Pakistan. India needs to look within for homegrown extremism #Modi http://dw.com/p/1GthD via @dwnews

In 2003, on a flight to Hong Kong, I had a Frenchman and an Indian sitting behind me. Both must have been in their 30s, as was I. Their conversation throughout the flight was quite audible, especially when the Frenchman begun to groan about the time that he had spent in Mumbai (in the early 1990s).
He was telling the Indian how he (and his wife) got caught up in a riot that had erupted after mobs of Hindu extremists attacked and destroyed an old mosque in the Indian city of Ayoudhia in 1992.
"It was horrific," he told the Indian. "The rioters were attacking people with sticks and I even saw some of them trying to set a Muslim man on fire."
"The rioters were Hindu?" the Indian asked.
"Well, they were attacking Muslims, so they must have been," the Frenchman replied. "My wife refuses to go back to India now," he added, laughingly.
I concentrated a bit more on the conversation because I was now eagerly waiting for the Indian's response.
And voila: "Usually such riots are funded and instigated by the Pakistanis," came the explanation.
One of my eyebrows went north and I hoped the Frenchman would ask exactly how Pakistan could be involved in starting riots in India.

He didn't. He just went on about his ordeal, and how his wife had made them take the very next flight back to Paris.
"It's worse in Pakistan!" the Indian shot back. "It (Pakistan) is destabilizing the whole region."
"Maybe, but we were in India," the Frenchman reminded him.
I couldn't help but turn around and intervene in the conversation: "Can I just pop in, and speak to my South Asian brother here?" I asked the Frenchman. He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Addressing the Indian in Urdu (which is quite similar to Hindi), I said: "Bhai (brother), have you ever been to Pakistan?"
He replied in English: "No, but my father went back in the 1970s. Are you Pakistani?"
"Yes," I replied, "and I am flying to Hong Kong to whip up a riot among the Indian community there."
The Frenchman snickered and so did the Indian. I raised my small green can of Carlsberg, and added: "Here's to the usual mutual accusations and counter-accusations between India and Pakistan. And to the freedom of Kashmir and Khalistan!"
This time the Indian did not snicker, but the Frenchman did, knowing well that I was being entirely sarcastic. The Indian raised his paper cup full of white wine and spouted out his own toast: "And here's to Pakistan stopping being such a nuisance and becoming a part of India again."
I smiled: "Well, it all depends on how the Indian community in Hong Kong treats our French friend here after I incite them to burn a mosque in downtown Hong Kong."
The Frenchman laughed out loud: "So, it's true. This is exactly how we (in France) perceive the way Pakistanis and Indians engage with one another."
I agreed: "Absolutely!"

#China refuels #Nepal as #India fails to deliver - http://FT.com http://on.ft.com/1kLzTvx via @FT

China is to supply fuel to its impoverished neighbour Nepal for the first time, amid a halt in Indian supplies that has severely disrupted life in the mountainous country still struggling to recover from April’s massive earthquake.
Nepali officials flew to Beijing on Monday to negotiate the terms of the petroleum purchase deal, which will in effect end the longstanding role of India’s state-owned Indian Oil Company as Nepal’s monopoly fuel supplier.

Nepali government officials have said the initial transaction will lead to China providing 1.3m litres of fuel, but analysts suggest it could evolve into a long-term arrangement that would end Nepal’s dependence on India.
The deal comes as Nepal and its 28m people face crippling fuel shortages amid severe disruptions to supply from India.
“Nepal is reeling,” Kanak Mani Dixit, publisher of Kathmandu-based Himal Southasian magazine, told the Financial Times. “The hospitals don’t have oxygen. The ambulances don’t have gasoline and the roads are empty. All industry has come to a standstill.”
New Delhi denies imposing a deliberate fuel blockade on its poorer neighbour, blaming the disruption on the unwillingness of Indian truckers to pass through parts of Nepal where residents are protesting — sometimes violently — against a recently adopted constitution.
But after nearly a month of fuel and cooking gas shortages, most Nepalis believe the crisis is the result of New Delhi seeking to force the country to change the document.
“India is trying to blunderbuss its way to forcing Nepal to be a client state and do its bidding so the Indian state can get what it wants,” said Mr Dixit. “But India must understand that it is playing with fire, which will ultimately not do itself any good.”
Nepal’s constitution — crafted after more than nine years of tortuous negotiations — was adopted in September with a two-thirds majority of Nepal’s elected constituent assembly. But it has been criticised by members of the Madhesi community, which lives in Nepal’s plains, accounts for 32 per cent of the total population and has close ethnic, cultural and social ties with people from the adjacent regions of neighbouring India.
Many Madhesi politicians are aggrieved that the plains — home to about half of Nepal’s population, including people from other ethnic communities — was not designated as a distinct province but divided into different parts of multiple provinces. Madhesis have seen this drawing of state boundaries as a deliberate plot to weaken their political influence.
New Delhi has not called publicly for any particular changes, but has urged Nepal to find a “mutually acceptable solution” that will satisfy all parties.
The tension between Kathmandu and Delhi is an unfortunate turn in a relationship that was poised for strong improvements a year ago, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi became the first Indian premier in 17 years to visit Kathmandu.
In an emotional address to Nepal’s constituent assembly in November last year, Mr Modi won many hearts by speaking in Nepali, emphasising the ancient cultural, spiritual and social ties between the two countries, and promising to help boost Nepal’s physical and economic “connectivity” to India.
India also won many hearts with its rapid rescue and relief efforts after Nepal’s devastating earthquake in April.

Ratings Agency #Moody’s to #Modi: Keep #BJP members in check or risk losing credibility - The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/article7823019.ece …

Moody’s Analytics, the economic research and analysis division of Moody’s Corporation, is the first major global institution to comment on the recent political controversies in India.

In the wake of the beef controversy, Moody’s Analytics on Friday cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi that unless he reined in members of his Bharatiya Janata Party, India ran the risk of losing domestic and global credibility.

Noting that Mr. Modi’s “right-leaning” party did not have a majority in the Upper House and also faced an obstructionist Opposition, making it difficult to pass crucial reform Bills, it said: “In recent times, the Government also hasn’t helped itself, with controversial comments from various BJP members… Modi must keep his members in check or risk losing domestic and global credibility.” In a report titled ‘India Outlook: Searching for Potential’, Moody’s Analytics — the economic research and analysis unit of Moody’s Corp. and distinct from the global rating arm Moody’s Investors Service — expressed concern over what it called the belligerent provocation of various Indian minorities.

Stiffer opposition

This had raised “ethnic tensions”, it said, and stressed that the government’s reform agenda needed attention. “Along with a possible increase in violence, the government will face stiffer opposition in the Upper House as the debate turns away from economic policy.”

It further said that the election in Bihar could prove pivotal to the leadership of Mr. Modi and noted that he had largely distanced himself from the nationalist jibes.

“Overall, it’s unclear whether India can deliver the promised reforms and hit its growth potential… Undoubtedly, numerous political outcomes will dictate the extent of success.”

The comments in the report, Moody’s Analytics said, were independent of those of the ratings arm, which had earlier this month forecast 7-7.5 per cent GDP growth for India in the current year, the highest among G20 economies. Moody’s rating for India’s sovereign debt is Baa3, just above junk status, with a positive outlook.

Moody’s rival international rating agency Standard & Poor’s on October 20 affirmed its ‘BBB’ long-term and ‘A-3’ short-term sovereign credit ratings for India, adding that its outlook continued to remain stable.

In its report, Moody’s Analytics said that for GDP growth in the current year to be higher than its projection of 7.6 per cent, the key economic reforms of land acquisition bill, a national goods and services tax, and revamped labour laws will have to be delivered. “They are unlikely to pass through Parliament in 2015, but there is an even chance of success in 2016.”

Sensex had fallen about 11 per cent since the euphoria behind the new government propelled the stock market but it was the consistent failure to deliver key economic reforms that had dimmed the optimism, Moody’s Analytics said. It also drew a clear distinction between the domestic and the global causes for investor worries. “While global market sentiment is down, Indian equities have also suffered from a loss in domestic sentiment.”

Lauds RBI

In sharp contrast to the concerns it expressed over the pace of reforms, Moody’s Analytics was all praise for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the improving macroeconomic fundamentals. “India is well placed for the U.S. interest rate normalisation…the rupee will come out relatively unscathed thanks to the RBI’s bulging foreign exchange reserves stockpile.”

Unusual appeal: #India central bank head Rajan calls for tolerance in speech at #IIT #Delhi. #Modi #BJP http://on.wsj.com/1P3nqjt via @WSJ

MUMBAI—The head of India’s central bank made an unusual appeal for tolerance in a speech Saturday, triggering a debate about whether he was trying to send a message to the country’s leaders.

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said Saturday that India’s tolerance and tradition of debate and openness help form the foundation for its current and future success.

Speaking to the students of his alma mater—the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi—he said tolerance means not being so insecure about one’s ideas that one cannot subject them to challenge.

“The first essential is to foster competition in the market place for ideas,” Gov. Rajan according to a copy of the speech posted on the RBI’s website. “Without this competition for ideas, we have stagnation.”

While he didn't mention Indian politics today or any group, party or politician, some interpreted his statements as a warning to New Delhi. An RBI spokeswoman said the speech should be read as a plea for tolerance in India, something the government is also pursuing.

His statements come at a time when some intellectuals, activists and opposition politicians have been urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to do more to reduce communal tension.

On social media some people welcomed Mr. Rajan’s sophisticated attempt to connect freedom, innovation and economic progress. Others said he should stick to monetary policy.

Mr. Modi’s government has been facing mounting criticism for not being decisive enough in reprimanding acts of intolerance that have dominated media attention in recent months.

While many groups have long criticized the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for its roots in Hindu nationalism, protest shifted to a new level in September, when a Muslim man was beaten to death by a mob after a rumor spread that his family was eating beef.

Some BJP leaders have ratcheted up their campaign for cow protection amid religious polarization surrounding the issue and this has increased the pressure on Mr. Modi.

Critics—including some of India’s most prominent artists, writers and scientists—say Mr. Modi’s rise to power last year emboldened Hindu fundamentalists and increased intolerance toward religious minorities, particularly India’s large Muslim population.

Cows are sacred to India’s Hindus—which make up over 80% of the country’s 1.2 billion population—but are accepted as food by the Muslims and Christian populations.

Disputes about beef eating, a long-standing conflict in India, are more indicative of a general atmosphere of intolerance that some say is rising in the country. A number of high-profile writers and scholars have returned national awards they had won for their work to protest what they call an attack on Indians’ right to free speech.

With his speech Saturday, Gov. Rajan seemed to be lining up one of India’s most respected institutions with those who demand vigilance against intolerance.

“No one should be allowed to offer unquestioned pronouncements,” Gov. Rajan, a former International Monetary Fund Chief Economist said. “This means encouraging challenge to all authority and tradition.”

The Interviews Blog : If #intolerance in #India continues, #US liberal press will isolate #Modi again Aatish Taseer: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/the-interviews-blog/if-intolerance-continues-us-liberal-press-will-isolate-modi-again-indian-writers-returning-awards-are-right-aatish-taseer/ …

Author Aatish Taseer has written The Way Things Were. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das, Taseer discussed writers returning their awards against cases of intolerance in India, how this is being seen internationally – and why his own belief in PM Modi has suffered a blow:

What is your view on authors returning their awards against what Nayantara Sahgal feels is rising intolerance in India today?

I have no special love for the people protesting – of course they loathe Modi. Of course they’re settling scores. Of course there are Ongee tribesmen in the Andaman Islands, yet unacquainted with the art of letters, who have more writing talent than Nayantara Sahgal. But that’s not the point – the point is, the grounds for their protest, regardless of their motives, are unimpeachable.

Critics say the literary scene protesting includes Congress-based patronage networks – is that fair?

I’m sure that’s true. All governments put their people in place. And intellectuals do have political agendas. But if you want to replace them, do so with people of ability – you can’t replace them with people whose only qualification is a violence of opinion.

This is the intellectual gap between India’s old elite and this new lot – they’re so angry about power in this world that’s suddenly become theirs.

I’m sure they have reason to be. But if you want to change things, come with intellectual heavy artillery of your own. You can’t just tear the world apart without any thought of what you’re going to put in its place.

They hate Romila Thapar, Amartya Sen, Sheldon Pollock. Fine – but come to the table with as much reading as them because these are very serious people who’ve spent their lives thinking very hard about their subjects.

If they’re to be denounced now, they deserve the courtesy of being denounced by their equals – not by some plagiarist garden gnome who wouldn’t know a shashti tatpurusha if it came and sat in his lap.

How are India’s writers returning awards being seen internationally?

Very badly. I was at a screening in New York. The liberal press, from The New York Times, etc., was there. On India, all anybody could talk about was the lynching – and how important it was now for their leaders to put daylight between themselves and Modi.

That press is very powerful in America – if next year, there’s a Democrat president and this bad business in India continues unchecked, there’ll be a lot of pressure to put Modi out in the cold again.

No one wants India to fail – but equally, no one wants to be tainted by prejudice. Consider Obama’s reaction when a black teenager is shot in America – that’s what good leaders do when a crime occurs that’s representative of a country’s deepest tensions.

Do you think PM Modi could have handled Dadri differently?

I thought his silence after Dadri was revolting – for me, it was a turning point. Here’s this man, pronouncing on every little thing – and 50 kilometres from Delhi, a man is lynched, because of hysteria his cohorts whipped up, and he doesn’t have a word of comfort to offer the dead man’s family? Nothing to say to millions wondering what this means? He waits a week before breaking his silence with an utter banality. And we’re subjected to primitive statements from his ministers.

I wish i could say his silence was calculated – but i think it was an aspect of the bigotry that comes as second nature to the Modi government. They can’t open their mouths without something ugly tumbling out.

It’s not that Modi wanted Mohammad Akhlaq lynched – he just didn’t care that he was.

This, in a leader, is a terrible failing.

You approved of Modi during the elections though.

It was a very moving election. We were emerging from a terrible time under UPA and millions invested this man with a hope for change. It was not Modi i approved of – it was the mandate. I felt the man so many Indians believed in should be given a chance.

But my dispatches are full of unease. I knew BJP had a cultural agenda but what i thought was, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta says, ‘opportunism would tame fanaticism’. I also felt Modi’s fear for his international image would force him to keep his nutcases in check – but i was wrong.

It turns out we might have the worst of two scenarios. Nutcases running amok – and the economy puttering along. Neither riches, nor sanity!

#BJP leader Arun Shourie on growing intolerance in #India : Managing economy means managing the headlines. #Modi http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/venkaiah-na... …

On Monday, in a sharp attack on the Modi government, BJP leader Arun Shourie contended that it believes that managing economy means “managing the headlines” and that people had started recalling the days of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“Doctor Singh (Manmohan Singh) ko log yaad karne lag gaye hain (People have started recalling the days of Manmohan Singh). The way to charaterise policies of the government is — Congress plus a cow. Policies are the same,” Shourie said at book launch function.
Speaking to reporters at the sidelines of an event organised by Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) ministry, Naidu said government of India is at no fault in any of the incidents which have taken place and some people were unnecessarily try to highlight them and trying to defame the country.
“Some people may have made comments here or there may have made some comments but they have been disowned by the party, disowned by the government,” Naidu said adding that even the Prime Minister had made his views clear on the issues.
Opposition parties have criticised the government over incidents like Dadri lynching saying it signified rising intolerance.
Naidu however said that the government agenda is only development and asked people not to be carried away by the “disinformation campaigns by political opponents.”
“Some people are saying intolerance has increased. Yes unable to accept the people’s mandate the opposition has become intolerant,” Naidu said.
When asked about Shourie’s comments that he felt there was never a weaker a PMO as now, Naidu said it need not be discussed as some people were saying that the Prime Minister is all powerful while others saying he is weak.
Attacking the Congress, he said the party had ruled by lying for years and was making baseless allegations. Divisive tendencies in the country are a result of wrong policies of the Congress, Naidu added.
Earlier in his speech at a workshop organised by HUPA, Naidu said that people are not interested in blame games but want development.
He said Indian economy holds hope for the world and though some people were trying to disturb, he felt that people of India and those who invest are wise and won’t be deterred by noises here and there.
He said some incidents had taken place in different states and they have to be taken care by state governments. They have to be nipped in the bud.

A Nuclear Arsenal in #Pakistan, #India and Far Beyond http://nyti.ms/1N31pBa 

NY Times Op Ed by Nadeem Hotiana

“The Pakistan Nuclear Nightmare” (editorial, Nov. 8) portrayed Pakistan as a country irresponsibly building its nuclear arsenal. We disagree.

Pakistan was not the first to introduce nuclear weapons in South Asia; India was. Recent public reports confirm that India continues to grow its nuclear program by testing missiles with longer ranges, working on coming fissile material production facilities, and investing in a nuclear triad that inevitably requires a larger nuclear arsenal.

India also propounds war-fighting doctrines while being ascendant as one of the world’s largest importer of military hardware. A special waiver for India for nuclear trade is another destabilizing step.

Pakistan has for decades offered proposals to India for nuclear restraint, including a strategic restraint regime that could address concerns raised in the editorial.

As late as September, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan made fresh proposals for peace in South Asia in his speech at the United Nations. Sadly, India has refused to engage.

Peace can be better served by focusing the world’s attention on India’s lack of constructive response to Pakistan’s proposals, its investment in destabilizing technologies and its aggressive posturing. 

Here's why the world laughs at Indians' delusions of being a global power:


1. Recent World Bank report on student learning in South Asia shows Indian kids perform very poorly on math and reading tests. Buried inside the bad news is a glimmer of what could be considered hope for Pakistan's grade 5 and 8 students outperforming their counterparts in India. While 72% of Pakistan's 8th graders can do simple division, the comparable figure for Indian 8th graders is just 57%. Among 5th graders, 63% of Pakistanis and 73% of Indians CAN NOT divide a 3 digit number by a single digit number, according to the World Bank report titled "Student Learning in South Asia: Challenges, Opportunities, and Policy Priorities". The performance edge of Pakistani kids over their Indian counterparts is particularly noticeable in rural areas. The report also shows that Pakistani children do better than Indian children in reading ability.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2014/08/pakistani-children-outperform-indian...


2. Indian kids rank at the bottom on international standardized tests like PISA and TIMSS. 

http://www.riazhaq.com/2011/12/pisa-timss-confirm-low-quality-of.html


3. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has said India will never be a great power with its uneducated and unhealthy population. 

In a recent visit to the LSE, Sen laid out his thoughts in black and white. In an interview to Sonali Campion and Taryana Odayar, he explains why the Narendra Modi government's economic philiosophy is completely wrong — and bound to fail.

"India is the only country in the world which is trying to become a global economic power with an uneducated and unhealthy labour force. It’s never been done before, and never will be done in the future either." 

"India is trying to be different from America, Europe, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, China — all of them. This is not good way of thinking of economics."

Sen then warns of the inherent contradictions of this approach:

"The whole idea that you could somehow separate out the process of economic growth from the quality of the labour force is a mistake against which Adam Smith warned in 1776. "

Sen is harshest when asked about the comparison between India and China

"By 2009 they could bring in a scheme of universal healthcare and by 2012 they are well in the 90s in terms of percentage coverage of health insurance. China are able to do that if ten people at the top are persuaded.

In India, ten people is not sufficient. You have to carry the population. Against the blast of propaganda that happened in the general elections last year — fed on one side by the activism of the Hindutva Parivar, and the other side by the gigantic money of the business community — it is slow to correct ongoing deficiencies."​

http://www.outlookindia.com/blogs/post/why-india-will-never-be-a-su...

"#Modi can't promote Make in #India abroad, #Hate in India at home": Shashi Tharoor. #BJP http://toi.in/Ur6zpY via @timesofindia

Congress parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday tore through the Narendra Modi government, saying it cannot promote its ambitious Make in India programme abroad while a 'Hate in India' campaign is on in the country.

Speaking during a charged debate on intolerance in Lok Sabha, Tharoor said the "bomb of communalism" was dividing India. "It's safer to be a cow than a Muslim in India today," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said, inviting a loud protest by the BJP members.

Tharoor quoted a Bangladeshi friend as telling him that fundamentalists in his country were attacking India after incidents of intolerance and communal polarisation grew in the country. "We are shamed with the reputation we are gaining abroad," he said.

The Congress leader said India was built on the premise of respecting diversity, and it is the responsibility of the government to uphold that promise.

Attacking Modi and reminding of his election promises, Tharoor said, "Has the Prime Minister forgotten that he is a leader and he is supposed to walk with people belonging to all caste, class and religion?"

"Where is the Modi who refused to politicise the bomb blasts that took place while he was addressing an election rally at Patna's Gandhi Maidan?" he asked in Hindi.

Tharoor also demanded the abolition of death penalty, describing it as an "aberration in a healthy democracy". Raising the issue during Zero Hour, he said hanging people does not deter crime and there is a lot of subjectivity in application of death penalty.

"It (death penalty) is an aberration in a healthy democracy," Tharoor said, adding that instead preventive and reformative measures should be strengthened to prevent crimes.

Contending that death penalty has mostly affected the marginalised people, the Congress leader said the state should not become killer. "We should abolish death penalty to uphold the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi," he said.

According to him, around 70 per cent of the United Nations members have abolished death penalty.

#India is second most ignorant nation of the world after #Mexico: Survey http://www.ibnlive.com/news/india/india-is-second-most-ignorant-nat... … via @ibnlive

London: India has the "dubious honour" of being the second most ignorant nation in the world after Mexico, according to a survey which posed questions on issues like inequality, non-religious population, female employment and internet access. The survey conducted by Ipsos MORI, a London-based market research firm, polled 25,000 people from 33 countries and found that while people "over-estimate what we worry about", a lot of major issues are underestimated.
"Mexico and India receive the dubious honour of being the most inaccurate in their perceptions on these issues, while South Koreans are the most accurate, followed by the Irish," the survey said. The rankings of the nations were based on the "Index of Ignorance" which was determined by questions about wealth that the top one per cent own, obesity, non-religious population, immigration, living with parents, female employment, rural living and internet access.

Most Indians "underestimate" how much of their country's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 1 per cent, the survey said, adding that the top 1 per cent actually own an "incredible" 70 per cent of all wealth. The survey also found that most Indians "hugely overestimate" the proportions of non-religious people in the country to be 33 per cent when the true figure is under 1 per cent.
While Israel significantly underestimates the proportion of female employment (by 29 percentage points), people in countries like India, Mexico, South Africa and Chile all think of more women in work than really are, it said. India fell in the list of nations which overestimate representation by women in politics. Countries like Columbia, Russia, India and Brazil all think there is better female representation than there really is, the survey said.

However, the Indian population seriously underestimates the rural population of the country and thinks more people have internet access than in reality. In India the average guess among online respondents for internet access is 60 per cent - an overestimation of the true picture of 41 percentage points, the survey added.

#India blockade has shattered my dreams, says #Nepal PM K P Sharma Oli. #NepalChokedByIndia http://toi.in/vngW7a via @timesofindia

Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli on Sunday said his dream to develop the Himalayan nation as "vibrant" had been shattered by the "embargo imposed by India". Receiving a memorandum submitted by academicians on Sunday, Oli said his plan to make Nepal a developed nation was under a cloud. Nepal's economic growth witnessed a sharp fall following the April 25 earthquake which claimed over 9,000 lives and devastated vast areas of the nation.

After being elected prime minister, Oli said, he had made many commitments to the nation, including ending the long daily load-shedding, plying electric vehicles in Kathmandu, and building a self-reliant economy. "I had dreamt several dreams on becoming prime minister," he said.
"I became prime minister in a very difficult situation. As we were trying to overcome the pain caused by the quake, the embargo along the border came as a serious jolt," he added, "I have been trying my best to overcome the pain and suffering."

Oli admitted that he had not been able to fulfil his commitments because of the unrest in Nepal's southern plain for the last four months. Due to protests and demonstrations at the border, thousands of Nepal-bound freight vehicles are stuck on the Indian side of the border

This has brought the economy of the landlocked Himalayan nation to a grinding halt. Officials say that if the standoff continues, Nepal will soon face a humanitarian crisis.

#India's aid to #Nepal dwindles to $22 million vs #China's $37 million in 2014-15 - The Economic Times

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/indias...


India's aid to Nepal has dwindled by over 50 per cent in the last five years to USD 22 million while China's assistance to the land-locked nation doubled, a Nepalese Finance Ministry report says, amid Nepal's deepening ties with the Communist giant.

Chinese aid of USD 37.94 million was disbursed in the 12-month period in 2014-2015 which made it the fourth largest bilateral donor to Nepal behind the UK, the US and Japan, according to Nepal's Development Cooperation Report 2014-15.

#Asia's sweetheart: Why the region's giants are wooing #SriLanka? #China #India #Japan #US

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/24/global-opportunities-china-india-tus...

Situated almost in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there is no escaping Sri Lanka's centrality.

The country lies just a few nautical miles away from the super-busy east-west shipping route, through which an estimated 60,000 ships pass every year, carrying two-thirds of the world's oil and half of all container shipments.

Now, with Asia's economic rise, experts say Sri Lanka's location has become even more alluring. Not only are three Asian powers - China, Japan and India - playing dominant roles in the global economy at the same time for the first time, there are also increasingly attractive markets and trade opportunities in Asia.

"Sri Lanka is the pivotal point for a global grand strategy," R. Hariharan, a retired Indian army colonel and specialist in South Asian geopolitics, told CNBC. "Sri Lanka's geography gives it an advantage disproportionate to its size."

The small island nation with a population of 22 million has been rediscovering its strategic location for the past few years as it comes out of a 26-year civil war that depleted government resources and held back development. As Sri Lanka looks for assistance to reboot its economy, a largely two-way tussle for influence in the country and, in turn, the region is on.

#Modi's man Doval's meddling: #India losing the neighbourhood - The Hindu. #Nepal #SriLanka #Maldives #Pakistan #BJP

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/modis-neighbourhoodfirst-polic...

Save for Bhutan and perhaps Bangladesh, much of South Asia has major grievances against New Delhi today. Clearly, then, there is something fundamentally wrong with the BJP-led government’s neighbourhood diplomacy. If so, what is it that New Delhi has done to deserve the ire of its neighbours? While New Delhi’s not-so-friendly relationship with Islamabad is unsurprising, what has provoked the other countries, some of which figured very high on Mr. Modi’s bilateral priorities, to suddenly come out openly against India?

Nosey in Nepal

One of the major reasons for India’s growing unpopularity in the regional capitals is its increasing tendency to interfere in the domestic affairs of its smaller neighbours, either citing security implications or to offset the target country’s unfriendly strategic choices. Take the case of Nepal, for instance. New Delhi was deeply upset with the Constitution passed by the Nepalese Constituent Assembly in September last year. Its unhappiness resulted from the legitimate feeling among the people of Terai, especially the Madhesis and Tharus, living close to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, that they have been short-changed by the country’s new Constitution. But a substantive political argument was thwarted by poor diplomatic style.

Meddling in Sri Lanka

If New Delhi’s Mission Kathmandu was both a failure and distasteful, its ‘subtle interference’ in Sri Lanka in the run-up to the island nation’s elections last year has set a dangerous precedent. New Delhi had proactively promoted the coalition led by Maithripala Sirisena to defeat the then Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa whose anti-Tamil record and pro-China tilt was resented by New Delhi. Several reports at the time claimed that Colombo had asked New Delhi to withdraw the Research and Analysis Wing’s station chief in Sri Lanka for allegedly working to ensure the victory of the anti-Rajapaksa coalition.

While involving ourselves in regime changes in the neighbourhood is a terrible idea in the longer run, we must ask whether the regime change in Colombo has actually prompted it to declare itself pro-India. Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, while visiting India last year, removed any such misgivings by saying, “Sri Lanka is neither pro-India nor pro-China.” The new government in Colombo has been vigorously courting Beijing for economic and infrastructural assistance, something it knows fully well that New Delhi can only provide in small measure.

Riling the Maldives regime

Maldives, yet another traditional ally of ours, has also been resenting the Indian reactions to its domestic political developments. New Delhi, being highly critical of how the pro-India former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed was jailed by the current regime under terrorism charges, publicly stated that “we are concerned at recent developments in the Maldives, including the arrest and manhandling of former President Nasheed”. The Maldivian government responded by saying it hoped that India would “adhere to the principle of Panchsheel and will not intervene in domestic politics of Maldives”.

During External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Maldives in October last year, Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen’s office issued a sharply worded statement that his “government will not tolerate foreign parties interfering with the country’s domestic issues”.

#Pakistan sends 30-bed field hospital to #SriLanka, 17 doctors coming to help flood victims- The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article8633155.ece …

Hospital has operation theaters, and x-ray laboratories, two special cargo aircraft carrying relief items also expected.

Even as relief and rescue operations continued in Sri Lanka, the government of Pakistan sent a 30 bed fully-equipped field hospital and relief materials.

A release of the Pakistan High Commission here stated that the field hospital had operation theaters and x-ray laboratories. Two special cargo aircraft, carrying relief items, were also expected to reach Colombo shortly. Besides, 17 Pakistani doctors would be arriving in Sri Lanka for providing health care assistance.

Oz announces contribution

The Australian government said it would contribute $5,00,000 to UNICEF for humanitarian assistance, including the provision of clean water and sanitation for children in shelters.

On Sunday afternoon, the number of deaths in the country went up to 84 with the recovery of 11 more bodies. Toll in Aranayaka, the site of last week’s landslip, stood at 32 and the district of Kegalle accounted for 50 deaths. As of now, 2.37 lakh persons were kept at relief camps. President Maithripala Sirisena visited Wellampitiya, Meethotamulla and Kolonnawa, all located in Colombo district, and met the flood-affected people.

3.4 lakh people affected

Of about 3.4 lakh affected people in the country, the Western Province accounted for around 2.43 lakh persons. There were about 94,151 persons hit by the floods in the Kolonnawa division and 24,824 – Kaduwela, both in the district of Colombo. In the neighbouring Gampaha district, Wattala had 35,407 affected persons; Biyagama – 21,302 and Kelaniya – 16,202, according to a report of the government’s Disaster Management Centre.

Anti-#Pakistan hawk & ex spy Ajit Doval shaping #India's aggressive foreign policy under #Modi #BJP http://bloom.bg/2cwLzOT via @business

He spent seven years undercover in Pakistan, recruited rebels as informants in disputed Kashmir, and once disguised himself as a rickshaw driver to infiltrate a militant group inside India’s holiest Sikh temple. Now some consider Ajit Doval the most powerful person in India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi picked Doval as his National Security Advisor, a position that holds more sway than the ministers of defense and foreign affairs. It puts Doval in charge of talks with arch-rival Pakistan. He visits arms manufacturers to discuss strategic capabilities, and orchestrates the response to militant attacks, liaising daily with Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, the nation’s top diplomat.
Since Doval took the job, he has supported a nationalist agenda while adopting a tougher line against hostile neighbors. That has growing economic ramifications as China funds a $45 billion trade corridor through Pakistan that bypasses India and as both China and India eye resource-rich neighbors in central Asia like Afghanistan.

“Every strategic issue in this region involves security in a way that it doesn’t in other regions,” says R. K. Sawhney, a former director general of military intelligence who’s known Doval for nearly two decades. “As the profile of the country grows, the profile of the national security advisor grows.”
Short, trim and bespectacled, Doval shuns the limelight and rarely appears in public. His office said he wasn’t available for an interview. Six people who have known him personally for years—some of whom requested not to be identified because he dislikes publicity—said Doval is overseeing India’s most delicate diplomatic issues.
Shortly after taking office, Modi sent Doval as his special envoy to Afghanistan and brought him on his first foreign trip to Bhutan. He’s also special representative in charge of talks with China over a disputed border, a task made more difficult as China plans to invest millions into transportation links through Kashmir, an area claimed by both India and Pakistan.
In December, Doval flew to Bangkok for a secret meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in an effort to restart peace talks between the two nuclear-armed nations.

Calls for Doval’s replacement intensified after Home Minister Rajnath Singh suffered a politically embarrassing trip to Pakistan in August that Doval pulled out of at the last minute, according to press reports. A spokesman for the prime minister's office declined to answer questions about Doval.
“The best experts on how to deal with terrorism, how to think about diplomacy and foreign affairs—they are not being consulted,” opposition politician Rahul Gandhi, son of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, said in January. Doval’s job is “strategy, not tactics.”
No government website carries Doval’s profile. A biography provided during a lecture he gave in August 2015 in Mumbai stated he was born in 1945 in Garhwal, in a northern region now called Uttarakhand, and graduated with a master’s degree in economics from the University of Agra in 1967 before joining the police force.

In 1972, he moved to the Intelligence Bureau, where he spent three decades, including stints in the restive regions of India’s northeast, Jammu and Kashmir, and the U.K. Doval is fluent in Urdu, the main language used in Pakistan. He told an audience in November 2014 he had lived in Pakistan for seven years, getting plastic surgery to remove signs his ears had been pierced—an indication of his Hindu roots.
“I haven’t seen anyone else at his level who would continue to come into the field,” said S.S. Virk, former director general of police in Punjab who was shot during the Golden Temple operation and says Doval visited him at the hospital. “He was an outstanding operator.” 

Anti-#Pakistan hawk & ex spy Ajit Doval shaping #India's aggressive foreign policy under #Modi #BJP http://bloom.bg/2cwLzOT via @business

Those who know him describe him as a heavy smoker with an almost insatiable thirst for knowledge, taking guests at his home in Noida near New Delhi for drinks in a library in the basement lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of books.
After retiring from the Intelligence Bureau, Doval founded the Vivekananda International Foundation in 2009. In its red sandstone and concrete headquarters in a tony district of Delhi, Doval has courted foreign diplomats and high-ranking defense officials, striking hawkish, nationalist views that resonated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

“Doval wields more influence than previous national security advisers in part because of his credibility and experience in intelligence and security matters,” said Sameer Patil, who served in the prime minister’s national security council secretariat under the previous Congress government. Patil said it was long rumored that Doval advised Modi even before he was elected prime minister in 2014.
In papers published during that time, Doval argued for a more assertive foreign policy and a beefed up military. He warned of India’s “eroding maritime preeminence" in the Indian Ocean, of Pakistan’s attempts to influence Afghanistan and the Taliban, and said China’s development was "not an assured peaceful rise."
“India has a mindset that, where it hits, it punches below its weight,” he said at the August 2015 lecture. “We have to increase our weight and punch proportionately.”

Threat of a nuke war with Pakistan has increased: Shivshankar Menon

http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/threat-of-a-nuke-...

Former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon has said the threat of a nuclear war with Pakistan has increased, but criticised Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for suggesting that India should give up its ‘no first use’ policy. He believes the September 29 ‘surgical strikes’, following the Uri terror attack, were inevitable, but disagrees with the Narendra Modi government’s decision to go public with the information.

Menon had played a key role in the India-US civil nuclear deal and was India’s foreign secretary when the 26/11 terror attacks took place in Mumbai in 2008. Menon told India Today TV’s Karan Thapar in an interview that he was wrong in advising the then Manmohan Singh government to retaliate after the 26/11 terror attacks. Pranab Mukherjee, then the external affairs minister, had “seemed to agree” with him. While Menon didn’t reveal Singh’s response, India had eventually not retaliated militarily.

On Parrikar, Menon said the defence minister did not have a right to voice his personal opinion on nuclear policy in public, particularly when that opinion contradicted the official policy of the country. Menon, the NSA from 2011 to 2014 during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s second term, said Parrikar’s suggestion would not be in India’s strategic interest, as it would increase India’s insecurity against Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons.

Earlier this month, Parrikar had said at a public function that his “personal opinion” was that India should relook at its pledge of ‘No First Use’ (NFU) of nuclear weapons. Parrikar said New Delhi should only commit to being a “responsible nuclear state”. In 1998, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had given a unilateral pledge that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Elaborating on his criticism of Parrikar’s comments, Menon said India’s nuclear weapons were no guard and no deterrent against Pakistani terror. Threatening a nuclear response to a terrorist attack from Pakistan “would be like threatening to kill a mosquito with a shotgun and would be unlikely to be understood by India’s own people, let alone the international community.”

What #India Has Done To Its Money Is Sickening And #Immoral. #Modi #Demonetization via @forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/12/22/what-india-has-d...

Not since India's short-lived forced-sterilization program in the 1970s--this bout of Nazi-like eugenics was instituted to deal with the country's "overpopulation"--has the government engaged in something so immoral. It claims the move will fight corruption and tax evasion by allegedly flushing out illegal cash, crippling criminal enterprises and terrorists and force-marching India into a digitized credit system.

India is the most extreme and destructive example of the anticash fad currently sweeping governments and the economics profession. Countries are moving to ban high-denomination bills, citing the rationales trotted out by New Delhi. But there's no misunderstanding what this is truly about: attacking your privacy and inflicting more government control over your life.

India's awful act underscores another piece of immorality. Money represents what people produce in the real world. It is a claim on products and services, just as a coat-check ticket is a claim for a coat left at the coat check in a restaurant or a ticket is for a seat at an event. Governments don't create resources, people do. What India has done is commit a massive theft of people's property without even the pretense of due process--a shocking move for a democratically elected government. (One expects such things in places like Venezuela.) Not surprisingly, the government is downplaying the fact that this move will give India a onetime windfall of perhaps tens of billions of dollars.

By stealing property, further impoverishing the least fortunate among its population and undermining social trust, thereby poisoning politics and hurting future investment, India has immorally and unnecessarily harmed its people, while setting a dreadful example for the rest of the world.

What India must do to fulfill its desire to become a global powerhouse is clear: slash income and business tax rates and simplify the whole tax structure; make the rupee as powerful as the Swiss franc; hack away at regulations, so that setting up a business can be done with no cost and in only a few minutes; and take a supersize buzz saw to all the rules that make each infrastructure project a 100-year undertaking.

#India’s bizarre war on cash. #Modi #Demonitization http://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-bizarre-war-on-cash-1482452964 … via @WSJ

Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says “India has to move towards the cashless society.” Cashless society? India? Last month’s demonetization continues to wreak economic havoc, and now defenders say it will pay off long-term by promoting digital-payment systems that increase efficiency and transparency. But why should Indians believe that officials exercising arbitrary power over their cash will keep their hands off a system that monitors every transaction?

In a cashless society the state has far greater means to harm the public, both through inept policies and abuses of power. Recent weeks have been bad enough, starting with the shock announcement that 85% of Indian currency in circulation was no longer legal tender and would have to be exchanged at banks for new bills not yet printed. As citizens idle in long bank lines and businesses fold without liquidity, officials are issuing contradictory directives about the new cash regime. Now these same officials want a digital record of every exchange.

India already has a too-powerful bureaucracy that imposes punishing licensing, labor, tax and other regulations, stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. This is a major reason an estimated 95% of all transactions use cash and some 45% of the economy is “informal” or off the books. When it’s prohibitively expensive to comply with every regulation, businesses that are otherwise legitimate stay underground. Without sweeping deregulation, going digital and cashless would strengthen bureaucrats to be even more intrusive and burdensome.

There’s also the loss of financial privacy. As journalist Amit Varma writes in the Times of India, “If you buy AIDS medication or a porn magazine or book a hotel room for a romantic alliance, this information can be accessed by the government—or any hacker with the requisite skills—and used against you.” It would also hurt people in regular interactions. “Cash is empowerment: Ask the young wife who saves spare cash from her alcoholic husband,” Mr. Varma notes, “or the old mother who stuffs spare notes under her mattress for years because it gives her a sense of autonomy.”

In Germany, where memories of communism and Nazism help citizens prize anonymity, some 80% of transactions are in cash. The U.S. figure is 32%. In Japan and Switzerland savers hoard cash to avoid punitive negative interest rates on deposits. This is an entirely reasonable response to runaway monetary policy, but it annoys Keynesians like Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff and Citigroup’s Willem Buiter, who want cash limited so central banks can squeeze savers with impunity.

Sweden may be the best model for cashlessness, as only 2% of transactions use cash. But Sweden has low corruption in government, reliable legal protections, high social trust and advanced financial and technological infrastructure. India has none of that, but it does have government officials with radical plans to reshape a society in which half of the population (some 600 million) doesn’t even have a bank account.

Indians would benefit from access to digital finance, which can cut transaction costs, make credit more affordable and channel state aid directly to citizens, bypassing sticky-fingered bureaucrats. The government can help by liberalizing financial regulation and improving telecommunications infrastructure. But it should also respect citizens who want to keep at least some cash. Imposing a “cashless society” is antithetical to economic liberty.

By M K Bhadrakumar – May 13, 2017

Modi blew it big time on China policies

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2017/05/13/modi-blew-it-big-t...

According to Pakistani press, one highlight of the participation by PM Nawaz Sharif at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing (May 14-15) will be the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries opening the door to massive Chinese investment – to the tune of $50 billion – for the development of the North Indus River Cascade in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region. This will be Chinese investment over and above the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
A whopping 40000 MW of electricity can be produced in the region known as the North Indus River Cascade, which stretches from Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan and runs through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as far as Tarbela. The stunning development catapults Pakistan as by far the number one recipient of Chinese investment in infrastructure development. The geopolitical significance is at once obvious.
Beijing, which went the extra league in the recent months to convince India that the latter’s concerns over sovereignty relating to the CPEC are unwarranted, has apparently given up and decided to simply ignore Delhi’s protestations and proceed with the CPEC projects in a big way in Gilgit-Baltistan. It is a political and diplomatic snub by China, conveying a frank message to the Modi government to “get lost”.

The Modi government is now left with an option to carry on regardless along the path of confrontation and rivalry with China, or, alternatively, to see the writing on the wall and get adjusted to the fait accompli with a sense of stoicism and sense of modesty. The latter course is not easy since the “core constituency” of the BJP will mutiny and the RSS will rap on the government’s knuckles. However, China seems to estimate that it is in India’s DNA that sooner rather than later, it will feel the intensity of regional (and global) isolation – especially now that all of India’s neighbours, including Nepal, have joined the OBOR – and make atonement.

Meanwhile, the announcement in Washington on Thursday that President Donald Trump has nominated his special assistant and the point person on Asia in the National Security Council Matt Pottinger to represent him at the weekend event in Beijing must come as shock to the Indian foreign-policy elites. The US-China détente that is unfolding under Trump’s stewardship makes complete nonsense of Modi government’s China policies that are tied to the apron strings of the Obama administration’s pivot strategy in Asia. The US and China made a joint announcement on Thursday regarding the first tranche of policy decisions on trade issues envisaged under the so-called Initial Actions of the U.S.-China Economic Cooperation 100-Day Plan that was agreed upon by Trump and President Xi Jinping at their Mar-a-Lago meeting in Florida in April.

The White House feels delighted that the relationships Trump has built with President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders “are clearly paying dividends.” The announcement covers areas such as agricultural trade, financial services and energy to boost economic cooperation. Amongst other things, China will receive imports of beef and LNG from the US, while the latter agrees to apply the same bank prudential supervisory and regulatory standards to Chinese banking institutions as to other foreign banking institutions.

Modi’s Beijing Policy Is Like Cutting Off India’s Nose to Spite China’s Face
PREM SHANKAR JHA ON 12/05/2017 

https://thewire.in/134775/modi-china-policy-is-like-cutting-off-ind...
• 
India’s strategic thinkers have been quick to conclude that China’s goal is to cut India off from the rest of Asia. But this is a frog-in-the-well kind of perspective.
For three years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been indulging in acts of bravado in foreign policy that he believes, or wants the people of India to believe, are acts of bravery. The most recent is his boycott of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) forum meeting in Beijing next week.
New Delhi’s official reason for not attending the meeting is that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passes through Gilgit, which has been illegally occupied by Pakistan since 1947. Attending the meeting would, therefore, risk conceding sovereignty over Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) to Pakistan. But this is poppycock.
The CPEC passes through the same territory as the Karakoram highway that China built in the 1960s. India has been lodging formal protests over this for the past fifty years. But this has not prevented it from increasing its trade with China by more than 20 times, and cooperating with it on all kinds of strategic and environmental issues in various international fora.
Modi could have safeguarded India’s legal position on Gilgit by issuing a similar formal caveat. But by making the recognition of Gilgit’s disputed status by China a pre-condition, Modi has cut India’s nose off to spite China’s face.
For India, the gains from OBOR would not have accrued so much from the investments in roads, railways and ports that it envisages, but from the immense investments that China would have liked to make in India’s infrastructure. Indian strategic thinkers have been quick to conclude that China’s goal is to cut India off from the rest of Asia, and destroy its hegemony in South Asia. But this is a frog-in-the-well kind of perspective, for China has far more compelling reasons.
First, it is an industrial juggernaut that produces close to half of all the consumer goods traded in the world and therefore needs safe trade routes more than any other country. India does not lie on any global trade route so OBOR cannot go through India. But all India has to do to benefit from it is invest in links to it via Bangladesh and Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal and, one day, Pakistan.
Second, China is willing to spend colossal sums on OBOR because it desperately wants alternatives to the sea lanes it relies on for its oil, and its trade with Europe and Africa. Half of its exports, and 90% of its oil passes through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea. With 400 US military installations spread in an arc around it and carrier fleets equipped with thousands of Tomahawk missiles cruising the South China Sea, its wish to insure against a blockade of the kind that the US imposed on oil supplies to Japan in 1940 is understandable.
But its most pressing concern is to find orders for its huge capital goods industry. While India’s industrial production is wasting away because of its acute shortage of up-to-date infrastructure, China is literally suffocating in excess capacity. China produces more than 800 million tonnes of steel a year, almost exactly half of the world’s output, and has run out of places in which to use it. The provincial governments have built all the airports, container ports and all-weather highway they could think of. Starting with a single line with 20 pairs of bullet trains in 2005, the Chinese have built 19,000 km of high speed train track and are running 2,300 pairs of bullet trains on them today. And residential and commercial space is so overbuilt that as far back as 2013 China had 55 million square metres of unoccupied apartments.

Geopolitically, the (Nepal) elections also reveal to what extent China will emerge as a viable alternative to India in Nepal's foreign policy. Nepal, sandwiched as it is between the nuclear rivals, is the quintessential buffer state. Although India has long been the dominant actor in Nepalese foreign policy, the country faced a tipping point during the 2015 blockade at the India-Nepal border. The nearly five-month ordeal exposed Nepal's almost singular economic dependence on trade routes crossing through India and gave the government an incentive to diversify its relations through closer ties with China. In addition, the blockade caused many of the ruling elite in Kathmandu to cast a suspicious eye toward India, believing that the government in New Delhi tacitly supported the blockade.
Although none of the parties explicitly aligned themselves with India or China during the campaign, clear preferences along party lines emerged in rhetoric and in the minds of voters. Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba's ruling Nepali Congress party is generally seen to be pro-India, while the recently stitched-together Left Alliance between the country's two main communist parties is seen as pro-China. Left Alliance leader and former Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli also suggested he would renegotiate treaties with India and try to forge closer ties with China if elected. Going forward, the election winner will be able to draw the country closer to India or China through development deals. For example, Dueba's administration recently revoked a contract for a hydroelectricity project held by a Chinese firm, with rumors suggesting it will be awarded to an Indian firm.

The elections mark a critical phase in Nepal's transition to democracy, though the country has a long way to go as it embarks on the arduous task of administering a new political system. One thing, however, is certain: The rivalry between India and China for influence in Nepal will only ramp up. 

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/nepal-new-elections-mark-new...

What the Success of the Left Alliance Means for Nepal
BY BISWAS BARAL ON 10/12/201

https://thewire.in/203749/what-the-success-of-the-left-alliance-mea...

But perhaps the biggest reason people rejected the NC this time has to do with the 2015-16 shutdown of the Nepal-India border. As the Congress has always been close to New Delhi, its leaders were at the time seen as mincing their words in condemning the ‘Indian blockade’. But while they vacillated, Oli and his comrades felt no such qualms. They openly blamed India for bringing misery to Nepalis.


Deuba and company were seen as weak and doing ‘India’s bidding’. In contrast, Oli came across as a strong nationalist leader who was not afraid to call a spade a spade. Oli, the blockade-time prime minister, got the credit for courageously standing up to the ‘Indian bully’.

Oli back then also signed the landmark trade and transit agreements with China. These agreements ended Nepal’s total dependency on Indian ports for business with third countries and put paid – at least in terms of optics if not reality – to India’s monopoly on the supply of fuel. Both these acts were seen favorably by Nepalis who had felt humiliated by India’s highhandedness during the standoff. India-bashing has traditionally been a foolproof electoral strategy in Nepal, and Oli milked it.

Perhaps Prachanda, who has long since abandoned his revolutionary zeal, also realised that it would for the moment be wise to align with Oli and try to steal some of his thunder. On the campaign trail, Prachanda was seen as openly projecting Oli as the new prime minister. Apparently, the deal is that while Oli will lead the country, Prachanda will head the new party formed after the left merger. (A more cynical interpretation is that Prachanda is looking for Oli, who has multiple heath issues, to step down sooner rather than later so that he can then become the undisputed communist leader in Nepal.)

China’s puppet?

Speculations are rife that with the Left alliance poised for at least a simple majority, and very likely a two-thirds majority, the new government under Oli will firmly align with China. But this would be an over-simplification of the ground realities in Nepal. Oli understands very well – as does Prachanda, who in 2009 lost his prime minister’s chair after angering India – that no government in Nepal can afford to be seen as openly anti-India. Former Indian foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon rightly refuses to label Oli ‘pro-China’ and thinks of him as ‘just another politician doing whatever is convenient to get to power’.

Oli, who was until a few years ago among India’s most trusted lieutenants in Kathmandu, embraced the pro-China nationalist image because he knew it would pay off electorally. But once in power, he will not need to be so openly hostile to India and will, in all likelihood, make efforts to mend his frayed ties with New Delhi, safe in the knowledge that there is no immediate threat to his government.

#India Scrambles For Ground In #SriLanka After Pro-#China Leader Named PM. Mahinda Rajapaksas return to power has drawn concern in New #Delhi that China would tighten its grip on the island that lies along busy shipping lanes. #Pakistan #Modi https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-scrambles-to-claw-back-ground... via @ndtv

India, caught flatfooted by the appointment of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Sri Lanka's premier, has opened urgent diplomatic and political contacts with the strongman who drew close to China during his previous tenure as president, officials said.
The tear-shaped island, located off the southern tip of India, has become an arena of tussle between New Delhi and Beijing, which has built ports, power stations and highways as part of its Belt and Road Initiative of trade and transport links across Asia.

Rajapaksa had opened up Sri Lanka's main port to Chinese naval submarines when he was president, which stoked anger in India. His return to power in a surprise move by current President Maithripala Sirisena has drawn concern in New Delhi that China would tighten its grip on the island that lies along busy shipping lanes.

"It is advantage China at the moment," said Srikanth Kondappali, a specialist on India-China ties at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University who closely tracks the regional rivalry between the Asian giants.

He said Beijing had invested in Rajapaksa and in his political constituency of Hambantota in the south of Sri Lanka where it has built a $1.5 billion deep water port, an airport and also planned an industrial zone.

China's ambassador to Sri Lanka, Cheng Xueyuan, was among the first diplomats to meet Rajapaksa soon after he was sworn in as prime minister and he presented a congratulatory message from Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang.

Wickremesinghe, who was seen as pro-India, said his sacking was illegal and he has maintained that he is still prime minister and had majority support in parliament.

Sri Lanka is one of a chain of countries where the India-China rivalry is playing out, stretching from Bangladesh, Nepal to the Maldives, where a pro-China leader was voted out in a surprise election result last month that was welcomed by India, the United States and the European Union.

Indian diplomats were in contact with Rajapaksa's camp, officials in New Delhi said, adding they were ready to do business with the new leader so long as his appointment was in line with the country's constitution.

"India will continue to extend our developmental assistance to the people of Sri Lanka," an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday.

Separately, leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's governing Hindu nationalist-led alliance, have reached out to Rajapaksa to promote ties, party sources said.

Why #India does not deserve to be Permanent Member of #UNSC. #Delhi can’t see that the 12 state ‘United for Consensus’ group, headed by Italy and includes Pakistan, which opposes any reconfiguring of the UNSC, is not primarily to blame
https://bharatkarnad.com/2018/11/23/why-india-does-not-deserve-to-b... via @BharatKarnad

The principal hurdle specifically to India’s entry, however, are the two countries the Indian government in the new Century, helmed by both the BJP and the Congress party, has bent over backwards to appease — the United States and China. The Trump Administration has made it plain it supports only a “modest” increase in permanent seats. This by way of saying that Washington would happily countenance its treaty allies, Japan and Germany, in the UNSC but not India or Brazil — though to the Indian PM’s face US functionaries have assured support. China, on its part, has declared it is against “arbitrarily launching text-based negotiations” in IGN as demanded by India; the larger reason, of course, is to deny both its Asian rivals a leg up. Again, Beijing does not say it’s not for India at the high table but hints at its unwillingness to see Japan in the Council, knowing fully well that no move will ever be made to just ease India’s entry into UNSC.

India’s yearning for a permanent seat in the Security Council raises the pertinent question whether India deserves it. Because the five current permanent members (P-5) — US, Russia, China, UK and France are great powers and have traits in common (including the last two which are long into the imperial dusk). They all have hefty nuclear forces, modern militaries to reckon with, are security providers with extra-territorial military presence, with France even in the Indian Ocean (on Reunion Island in the French Indian Ocean Territories and the Heron base in Djibouti), generate advanced technologies in all fields and are frontline technology innovators, have a whole bunch of Third and Fourth World states the world as arms dependencies, courtesy vigorous arms sales schemes, are large foreign aid donors with extensive and tested development and infrastructure assistance programmes, high volumes of global trade and extremely strong and active economies, and relatively high standards of living. So, does India, other than possession of simple, low yield, nuclear weapons (that in quality, perhaps, lags behind a lowly Pakistani arsenal), meet any of these metrics?

Our case rests on the following arguments: that India (1) boasts of a large fraction of the world population, (2) is a “responsible state”, (3) is a longstanding democracy and an exemplar of liberal values (4) contributes disproportionately to UN peacekeeping missions, (5) shaped the post-WWII international system by championing anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-racism, (6) is a steadying influence in a disordered world, (7) has always taken taken the lead role in furthering universal good — disarmament, climate accord, solar alliance, etc., (8) has never been expansionist or coveted foreign territories, but has no neighbour at peace with it, and (9) is a trillion dollar economy, except 40% of its population is below the poverty line.

-----------

And yet the Indian political class and the bureaucrat-dominated system remain entirely innocent about the main ingredients of great power and what the country needs to do to become one. The irony is India has all the requirements of great power except the crucial ones — the political vision and will, the ruthlessness and drive, the resolution to not take guff from anyone, selectively to strengthen only military wherewithal with strategic reach and clout, the cussedness and single-mindedness to slyly but consistently prosecute disruptive, risk-acceptant,  policies, that upend global regimes and upset every inimical P-5 state’s apple cart. That’s how China became a great power and now dictates to the world.

But India, alas, has no Dengxiaoping, no leader to challenge the world and motivate the Indian people to work for the nation’s cause, only gasbags furthering their advantage in domestic politics while using India’s democracy as an excuse for the country remaining a perennial also-ran.

Surely then such a country cannot credibly ask in good faith for a permanent seat in UNSC to preside over a world it had no role in making, and has even less of a role in running. The P-5 have to feel sorry enough for a “flailing” India to accommodate it, which won’t ever happen. So India is fated to remain on the outside, like a beggar with face pressed to the windows of a posh eatery.

Maleeha Lodhi
@LodhiMaleeha
"Kashmir’s immediate future appears to be as an impoverished police state, run from Delhi, with light shows and tulip gardens, but little peace, liberty or prosperity" The Economist

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/01/10/the-mirage-of-peace-and-p...

https://twitter.com/LodhiMaleeha/status/1613632661108494347?s=20&am...


The Economist
@TheEconomist
Narendra Modi’s government has deployed even more troops to the region and intensified surveillance and control of Kashmiris’ lives

https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1613741716024037376?s=20&am...

Riaz Haq
@haqsmusings
#Modi's #Kashmir Blunder: Even more troops to the region to control of Kashmiris’ lives..Kashmir’s immediate future appears to be as an impoverished police state, run from Delhi, with light shows and tulip gardens, but little peace, liberty or prosperity"

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1613763693837451264?s=20&...