India and the World

Scaling new heights: Get ready for biggest India-Africa summit

- by Manish Chand

In the biggest diplomatic event New Delhi will hold in decades, India is set to host the third edition of its summit with the leaders of the renascent African continent in the last week of October, a defining step that is expected to push the envelope for multi-tiered engagement between the two emerging growth poles of the world.
Ending months of speculation, India’s external affairs ministry announced on March 25 that the third India-Africa Forum summit will be held on October 29, and will be preceded by meetings of senior officials and foreign ministers of India and 54 African countries.
The October 26-30 India-Africa summit will be a microcosm of India’s multi-faceted engagement with the continent that harks back to shared anti-colonial solidarity and has morphed into a multi-dimensional relationship that has been mutually empowering and rewarding. This is reflected in burgeoning trade and investment – bilateral trade has exceeded $70 billion and investments from Indian companies into Africa have already crossed $32 billion dollars. Development partnership, pivoted around capacity building and human resource development, is already on an upswing.
Clearly, there is much more India can do. There is a tendency to compare India’s engagement with Africa with that of China’s spectacular success in the continent in areas of trade and investment. China’s bilateral trade with Africa is three times more than that of India’s with the continent. But such comparisons are misleading as the two Asian giants have different histories of engagement with Africa and have a different set of core competencies and capacities.

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Qatar bets big on India, 6 pacts signed

- by India Writes Network

India and Qatar, the energy-rich Gulf state, have taken a set of important steps to bolster their economic and security partnership as the two countries signed six agreements, including one on the transfer of sentenced prisoners.

The pacts were signed after full-spectrum talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Emir of Qatar Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani in New Delhi on March 25.

The six agreements, besides the transfer of sentenced prisoners, included: an MoU for Cooperation in the field of Information and Communication Technology; an MoU between the ministry of earth sciences and Qatar Meteorological Department for Scientific and Technical cooperation; an MoU between Diplomatic Institute of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Qatar and Foreign Service Institute of the ministry of external affairs; an MoU for cooperation in the field of Radio and Television; and an agreement for Mutual Cooperation and Exchange of News.

The pact on the transfer of sentenced prisoners envisages the repatriation of Indian prisoners convicted in Qatar to India to serve the remaining part of their sentence. Similarly, Qatari citizens convicted in India can be sent to their home country to serve their sentence. This agreement would enable the sentenced persons to be near their families and would help in the process of their social rehabilitation, said an official statement.

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Feasting, bickering and philosophising: Way to go for India-Pakistan relations!

- by Manish Chand

Feasting, bickering and rhetorical fireworks. It was a conflicted see-saw day for the prickly relations between India and Pakistan as the Pakistan high commission rolled out a moveable feast for at least 3,000 Indian guests on its National Day in New Delhi even as New Delhi sharply reminded Islamabad that there is no place for third party (Kashmiri separatists) in the dialogue process.

March 23, 2015 – it was just another day in the subcontinent bidding adieu to winter and bracing for the long blistering summer ahead, but it telescoped multiple contradictions in the tangled India-Pakistan relations.

What does all this symbolism, rhetoric and below-the-belt barbs mean for India-Pakistan relations and the prospects of the dialogue process? The messaging is confused, but still one can isolate some strands: one, for all the occasional bickering and reiteration of well-known positions, the leadership in New Delhi and Islamabad are increasingly realising that there is no option but to talk and re-engage. There is also a healthy dose of pragmatism, a sobering realisation that bickering between the governments will not prevent bonding and feasting on people-to-people level. If nothing works, they can always bank on the robust appetite of people on both sides of the divide for good food: the rich spread of biryani, chicken tikka and kakori kabab…

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India’s response: Is China shifting goalposts on boundary?

- by Srikanth Kondapalli

The 18th Special Representatives meeting between India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart, the influential State Councillor Yang Jiechi, in New Delhi on March 23 has a twin agenda. The main purpose of the meeting under this mechanism is to try to find a solution to the long-standing territorial dispute between the two countries, but the focus will be equally on preparing the ground for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China in May.
Several trends recently suggest that the territorial dispute is more intractable than has been imagined in the beginning. The border transgressions at Depsang Plains in April 15-May 6, 2013 or the Chumar troop’s build-up by China in September 2014 – all in the Western Sector of the border – tested the bilateral equations. PM Modi stated, while raising the troop build-up by China, during the visit of President Xi Jinping in September last year that bilateral relations are dependent on the LAC stability.
During her visit to Beijing towards January-end this year to attend the 13th Russia-India-China foreign minister’s meeting Sushma Swaraj suggested an “out of the box” resolution to the vexed territorial dispute.
Also, China’s response to PM Modi’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh on February 20 to inaugurate a rail link was sharp and unusual. While PM Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 was criticised by China, now the level of protest was enhanced to the vice foreign ministerial level.
The success of the 18th meeting hinges both in arriving at an early and mutually acceptable solution as well as stability in the border areas.

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Ahead of Modi visit, India, China to iron out boundary issues

- by India Writes Network

India and China are poised to hold their first round of boundary talks since the formation of the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi – a key round of discussions that could see some movement ahead of the Indian leader’s much-awaited visit to Beijing.
China’s Special Representative for boundary talks, Yang Jiechi, a former foreign minister, will hold talks with his Indian counterpart, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, in New Delhi on March 23-24.
Ahead of the talks, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has struck an optimistic note and spoke out an uphill climb recording some positive developments. “At the moment, the boundary negotiation is in the process of building up small positive developments. It is like climbing a mountain,” he said. “The going is tough, and that’s only because we are on the way up and that the dispute (on the LAC) has been contained, he had remarked a couple of weeks ago, in much-reported remarks.
On a positive note, we must keep in mind that there are several components to the Sino-Indian relationship. While a boundary dispute acts an inhibitor, at times, to progress on other fronts, due credit must be given to both governments for not allowing it to hamper the multifarious cooperation between Asia’s first and third largest economies.

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India’s enhanced Africa diplomacy takes off, with Tanzania & S. Africa

- by Manish Chand

The Narendra Modi government has flagged off its enhanced Africa diplomacy, which will be telescoped in India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s first bilateral visit to two key partners of New Delhi in the resurgent African continent – Tanzania and South Africa. The forthcoming African safari of Mrs Swaraj will cohere the trinity of India’s engagement with Africa that pivots around three Ts: Trade, Training and Technology.
The minister’s interactions with her counterparts in Dar es Salaam and Pretoria are going to focus primarily on stepping up bilateral relations across the spectrum, but will also involve some preliminary consultations on the evolving agenda of the third edition of the India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS-III) in New Delhi later this year. This will be the Modi government’s first summit-level interaction with the leaders of African countries, and promises to be bigger and grander than the previous two summits in New Delhi and Addis Ababa.
The March 28-31 visit of Mrs Swaraj, which was formally announced by Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesperson of India’s external affairs ministry on March 20, will be watched closely in the continent as this will signal the Modi government’s desire to raise the bar for this vibrant multi-faceted relationship that some feel was not given enough attention during the first few months of the new Indian government.

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Indian hostages in Iraq: India seeks Turkey’s help

- by India Writes Network

With the extremist Sunni terror group ISIS continuing its assault in the Middle East, the lives of 39 Indian constructions workers hang in the balance as they remain in the ISIS’s captivity for almost nine months. Against this backdrop, India has sought Turkey’s help to secure the release of the Indian hostages from Iraq, who were kidnapped from Mosul, Iraq, last June.

India’s External Affair Minister Sushma Swaraj has been pursuing the issue over the past months through various channels and took it up with her Turkish counterpart, Mr. Mevlut Cavusoglu, who was in India on a short visit. Although intelligence agencies have been unable to locate the exact whereabouts of the Indian hostages and their captors, the talks with Turkey have brought fresh hope for their secure rescue.

India was faced with a similar situation last year when the ISIS held 46 nurses captive, later releasing them unharmed. Their safe return to India, after much back and forth across multiple diplomatic channels, showed the diplomatic prowess of the newly-elected Modi government.

In the current case, according to sources, Mr. Cavusoglu said that the ISIS’s information flow was very “restricted” and no concrete details were available on the whereabouts of Indian workers. Recent ISIS killings of hostages from Japan have caused concern for the safety of the Indian hostages. Some sources had also claimed earlier that the hostages had been killed.

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‘Modi ranks ahead of Xi in handling domestic affairs and Global diplomacy’

- by India Writes Network

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi added yet another feather to his cap by securing the top rank, ahead of China’s President Xi Jinping, in handling domestic as well as international affairs, as per China’s National Image Global Survey 2014, which ranked nine heads of state on different parameters.

The survey, collating responses of 4500 people across nine countries, showed that amongst the leaders’ capability in handling domestic affairs, Mr. Modi led the rest with a score of 3.74 on a scale of five, followed by Mr. Xi (3.58), Mr. Tony Abbott (3.55), Mr. David Cameron (3.53), Mr. Barack Obama (3.48) and Mr. Shinzo Abe (3.37). In the international affairs department too, Mr. Modi scored ahead of Mr. Xi, followed by Mr. Cameron and Mr. Obama.

“Xi’s handling of both domestic and international affairs has won high praise. He ranks second, after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his capability of handling domestic and international affairs,” Said Wang Gangyi, vice-president of China International Publishing Group, citing the survey report released in Beijing on March 18.

The survey was aimed at surveying international perception towards global leaders’ domestic and foreign image and policies. It also showed that President Obama was the most well known Head of State, followed by Mr. Putin.

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