Tag: narendra modi
Biden: No Change To U.S. "Strategic Ambiguity" On Taiwan Defense

Biden: No Change To U.S. "Strategic Ambiguity" On Taiwan Defense

By Trevor Hunnicutt and Sakura Murakami

TOKYO (Reuters) -- President Joe Biden on Tuesday said there was no change to a U.S. policy of "strategic ambiguity" on Taiwan, a day after he appeared to stretch the limits of the U.S. line on the island by saying he would be willing to use force to defend it.

The issue of Taiwan looms over a meeting in Tokyo of leaders of the Quad grouping of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, who have stressed their determination to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region in the face of an increasingly assertive China.

While Washington is required by law to provide self-ruled Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has long followed a policy of "strategic ambiguity" on whether it would intervene militarily to protect it in the event of a Chinese attack - a convention Biden had appeared to break with on Monday.

On Tuesday, Biden, asked if there had been any change to the U.S. policy on Taiwan, responded: "No."

"The policy has not changed at all. I stated that when I made my statement yesterday," he said after a round of talks with his Quad colleagues.

China considers Taiwan an inalienable part of its territory and says it is the most sensitive and important issue in its relationship with Washington.

Biden's Monday comment, when he volunteered U.S. military support for Taiwan, was the latest in a series of apparently off-the-cuff assertions that suggest his personal inclination is to defend it.

Some critics have said he has misspoken on the issue, or made a gaffe, and his muddying of the issue risked accelerating China's desire to act, without carrying the muscle of a formal security guarantee.

But other policy analysts have suggested that given Biden's extensive foreign policy experience, and the context in which he made the remarks, next to Japan's prime minister and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggested he didn't misspeak.

Taiwan was not an official item on the Quad agenda and Biden spoke more about Ukraine, condemning Russia's invasion as a global issue.

"Russia's assault of Ukraine only heightens the importance of those goals of fundamental principles of international order, territorial integrity and sovereignty. International law, human rights must always be defended regardless of where they're violated in the world," he said.

Biden said the United States would stand with its "close democratic partners" to push for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

'Ambitious Action'

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida echoed Biden's condemnation of Russia, saying its invasion "shakes the foundation of international order" and was a direct challenge to the principles of the United Nations.

"We should not allow similar things to happen in the Indo-Pacific region," he said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not mention Ukraine, Russia or China in his opening remarks.

India has frustrated the United States with what it regards as a lack of support for U.S.-led sanctions on Russia and condemnation of its invasion.

Though India has developed close U.S. ties in recent years and is a vital part of the Quad grouping aimed at pushing back against China, it also has a long-standing relationship with Russia, which remains a major supplier of its defense equipment and oil supplies.

India abstained in U.N. Security Council votes on Russia's invasion, though it did raise concerns about some killings of Ukrainian civilians.

New Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his goals were aligned with the priorities of the Quad, telling his fellow leaders he wanted them all to lead on climate change.

"The region is looking to us to work with them and to lead by example," he said.

"That's why my government will take ambitious action on climate change and increase our support to partners in the region as they work to address it, including with new finance."

China has been extending its influence in the Pacific where island nations face some of the most direct risks from rising seas.

On India's stand on Ukraine, a U.S. official said Biden, who is due to hold bilateral talks with Modi later on Tuesday, would seek out commonalities, emphasizing the importance of a face-to-face meeting.

"It's true with all the members of Quad there are some differences, the question is how they're addressed and how they're managed," the official said in a briefing to reporters before the talks.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Sakura Murakami, David Dolan, Chang-Ran Kim, Kiyoshi Takenaka and Krishna Das; writing by Trevor Hunnicutt and Elaine Lies; editing by Michael Perry, Robert Birsel)


Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Far-Right Prime Minister Culpable For India’s Pandemic Disaster

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

India has become the new global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections surpassing 300,000 per day and the official death toll—likely a massive underestimate—nearing a quarter of a million people. Hospitals are being overrun with patients, and the crisis is exacerbated by a devastating shortage of oxygen. The Indian judiciary has gone as far as threatening capital punishment for anyone caught trying to divert shipments of oxygen from around the country to affected areas. There have been dozens of deaths documented directly tied to a lack of oxygen.

Only a few months ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was basking in the glow of success at beating the virus and scientific experts were confounded as to why COVID-19 infections and related deaths were falling. India had access to two vaccines, a homegrown one developed by Bharat Biotech, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was being mass-produced at Indian facilities. Mask wearing was reportedly nearly universal, and the Wall Street Journal hailed India's "proven pandemic strategy."

So, what happened?

Amandeep Sandhu, a journalist and novelist based in Bangalore, author of Bravado to Fear to Abandonment: Mental Health and the COVID-19 Lockdown, had a one-word explanation for me: "complacency." In an interview, he issued a scathing critique of the Modi government, saying it suffered from "arrogance, policy paralysis, and no efforts to learn from the past year." A government with a religious fundamentalist ideology that has taken aim at minority groups and elevated a form of fascist Hindu supremacy has failed its people spectacularly.

Sandhu cited how Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has retained a majority stranglehold on Indian politics for decades, sponsored massive in-person rallies this spring to shore up votes for state elections. Modi's Twitter feed is replete with videos of his speeches in early April (here, here, and here for example) where he boasted of "euphoric" crowds packed together like sardines with nary a mask in sight cheering him on. The phenomenon was not unlike Donald Trump's political rallies in the United States last year, which were often marked by increased rates of infection in the weeks following.

Modi also encouraged millions of Hindus to attend the Kumbh Mela festival that takes place every 12 years. This largest religious pilgrimage on earth involves masses of devotees submerging themselves in the Ganges River. A whopping 3.5 million people attended this year, even as rates of infection had begun to rise and public health experts warned of the potentially dire consequences.

A year ago, government leaders denounced a far smaller gathering by a Muslim organization called Tablighi Jamaat which was linked to the spread of the virus. A BPJ member of the legislative assembly from the state of Karnataka went as far as encouraging the lynching of Muslims over the gathering and said, "Spreading COVID-19 is also like terrorism, and all those who are spreading the virus are traitors." This year, no such pronouncements were aimed at the Hindu gathering that was many orders of magnitude larger.

Modi has also refused to negotiate with tens of thousands of poor farmers who began a mass occupation on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi last year in protest of new harsh privatization farm laws. While the number of farmers protesting declined during the annual spring harvest as they returned to pick crops on their farms, an estimated 15,000 still remain, and according to Sandhu, many more are ready to return if needed.

"What choice do the farmers have at this point?" asked Sandhu. "The farm laws will kill them in the next few years, and, heaven forbid, if the virus comes, it will kill them quickly. So, death is on both sides. What do they do?" And so, the farmers continue to protest, although, according to Sandhu, their outdoor occupation has not been linked to the spread of COVID-19 yet. Instead, farmers fear that the Modi government will use the pandemic as a tool to force them to end their protests.

Like Trump, Modi has gone out of his way to ensure he receives credit for combating the virus, launching a relief fund last year called PM Cares that has collected massive amounts of donations. And just like Trump, he has been opaque about disseminating and managing the fund. One activist called the PM Cares fund "a blatant scam."

In spite of being the world's largest manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines, India has exported far more doses to other nations than were deployed internally. Modi has been accused of engaging in "vaccine diplomacy," giving away millions of vaccines to other nations to shore up his international support. Sandhu said that although he didn't hold India's vaccine exports against the Modi government given that the pandemic is a global disaster, what he does object to is how the privatization of Indian health care has kept vaccines out of the reach of the poorest Indians.

According to Sandhu, the "vaccine has been put on the open market with limited provision from the government to inoculate citizens." In other words, poor Indians have to wait far longer to obtain the vaccine compared to wealthier Indians who can walk into a private clinic and purchase a dose. Sandhu asked, "how will India's poor afford the vaccine? If they can't, we as a society, and the world at large, remain vulnerable. The vaccine must be free for all."

Now, as the Indian government flounders under international scrutiny with hundreds of thousands of new infections emerging each day, Modi, who is as prolific on Twitter as Trump had been before he was banished from the platform, appears more concerned about his image than about his country. His administration found time amid the crisis to demand that Twitter remove tweets critical of his handling of the pandemic—and the social media company complied.

It's not just Twitter that is validating Modi. Right-wing supporters of Indian origin in the U.S. routinely donate millions of dollars to float the Modi government's fascist educational programs and nationalist groups. Indeed, some groups like the Houston-based Sewa International are considered the U.S. arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the parent organization of the BJP. Sewa International, taking advantage of international concern over India's coronavirus crisis, is seeking to raise $10 million for oxygen concentrators and other medical supplies. But, in 2004, the organization was implicated in a scam where it diverted funding from the British public intended for earthquake relief toward the building of ideological Hindu supremacist schools. More recently, the group was caught restricting funding for flood victims in Kerala to Hindus only.

President Joe Biden's administration has also faced criticism for embracing the BJP and its authoritarianism, continuing a trend from the previous administration. Biden appointed Sri Preston Kulkarni, an Indian American with ties to the RSS, to a key position in AmeriCorps. Kulkarni ran a failed campaign for a congressional seat representing Texas with funding help from Ramesh Bhutada, who is now the director of Sewa International.

The Biden administration has been under pressure for months to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, weighing the need for pharmaceutical corporations to reap profits against the lives of millions. Now, with India's devastating crisis, Biden once again considered the option ahead of a World Trade Organization meeting on April 30. But by the time the waived patents are put to use, hundreds of thousands more will have died.

In the meantime, Indians continue dying in numbers so large that the capital New Delhi glows at night from the fires of mass cremations. As the hashtag #ResignModi began trending to new heights, Sandhu summarized succinctly that "the government has failed on all accounts."

Indian Students Protest In Thousands As Government Cracks Down On Dissent

Indian Students Protest In Thousands As Government Cracks Down On Dissent

By Sankalp Phartiyal and Rupam Jain

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s biggest nationwide student protests in a quarter of a century spread across campuses on Monday after the arrest of a student accused of sedition, in the latest battle with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government over freedom of expression.Outrage over the arrest of the left-wing student leader, who had organized a rally to mark the anniversary of the execution of a Kashmiri separatist, has led to demonstrations in at least 18 universities.

In the largest protest, thousands of students and academics at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) boycotted classes and erected barricades for a fourth day in an escalating conflict with the authorities.”The government does not want students to have a say,” said Rahila Parween, vice-president of the Delhi unit of the All India Students’ Federation, a left-wing student union. “It wants to dictate what students think, understand and say.”

The incident marks another flare-up in an ideological confrontation between Modi’s nationalist government and left-wing and liberal groups that is prompting critics to compare it with Indira Gandhi’s imposition of a state of emergency in the 1970s to crush dissent.

Members of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar, of “anti-India” sentiment. One BJP lawmaker said the university, which has a tradition of left-wing politics, should be shut down.

“I can assure you that every action we take is to protect our country. Any anti-India activity will not be tolerated,” BJP President Amit Shah, one of Modi’s closest allies, said at party headquarters.

Protests spread when Kumar was arrested last week for sedition, after giving a speech questioning the hanging in 2013 of Mohammad Afzal Guru over his role in the 2001 attack on parliament.Activists have long questioned Guru’s conviction, and India’s Supreme Court has described the evidence against him as circumstantial.

Scuffles erupted outside a New Delhi courthouse between lawyers and students where Kumar, 28, was to appear before a judge on Monday.

Anti-India Sentiment

A leader of the student group that is aligned with the BJP said freedom of expression should not be misused to justify acts that could harm the country.

“You cannot be an Indian if you celebrate the death anniversary of a terrorist,” said Saurabh Sharma, joint secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All India Student Council).

Home Minister Rajnath Singh has, meanwhile, faced ridicule for citing a fake tweet to say that the JNU demonstration had been backed by Hafiz Saeed, a Pakistani militant accused by India of being behind the 2008 attack on Mumbai in which 166 people died.

Delhi police circulated the fake tweet at the weekend in a warning to students “not to get carried away by such seditious and anti-national rhetoric”. A spokesman did not answer calls to his mobile phone on Monday seeking comment.

“The crackdown signals an utter lack of judgment in the government, where ministers manage to manufacture a national crisis out of what were always, at best, minor affectations in student politics,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a leading political commentator, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper.

Since Modi rose to power in May 2014, people in India have been attacked by Hindus enraged at reports of cows – sacred in their religion – being slaughtered, smuggled or consumed.

There has been a series of attacks on churches, while writers have returned awards in protest over the government’s silence over a series of murders of secular scholars. At least 18 university campuses witnessed protests on Monday. Students in the eastern city of Kolkata burnt an effigy of Modi and left-wing groups in the neighboring state of Odisha planned state-wide demonstrations.Analysts said the student protests were the most widespread in India since the self-immolation of a young Indian in 1990 after the government ruled in favor of providing affirmative action to the lower castes in higher education. “We are witnessing liberal India, particularly young people who are usually more idealistic, fighting back,” said Satish Misra, a political analyst at the Observer Research Foundation.

 

(Additonal reporting by Jatindra Das; Writing by Andrew MacAskill and Rupam Jain; Editing by Douglas Busvine and Mike Collett-White)

Photo: Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) attend a protest inside the university campus in New Delhi, India, February 15, 2016. REUTERS/Anindito Mukherjee

Obama Urges Religious Tolerance, Human Rights In India

Obama Urges Religious Tolerance, Human Rights In India

By Christi Parsons and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

NEW DELHI — President Obama urged support for religious tolerance and human rights in a speech Tuesday in New Delhi, drawing on the American experience and his own personal ones to soften a message with the potential to give offense to his Indian hosts, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

American society isn’t immune from intolerance and violence, Obama said, recalling the 2012 attack on Sikh worshipers at a temple in Wisconsin as an example of “the darkest impulses of man.”

In his own life, the president said, his Christian faith has been questioned by “people who don’t know me,” a reference to lingering suspicions among some about his Islamic heritage on his father’s side.

“Every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose,” he said, “or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free from persecution and fear.”

The speech was the first Obama has delivered on his three-day trip to India without Modi at his side. The two leaders have displayed a concerted effort this week to emphasize the shared interests of their countries and the personal amity between the two of them, and Obama had not previously raised his concerns about human rights in a direct and public way.

But his final set of remarks on the way out of the country came as reformists are hoping Modi will mute the divisive agenda of his militant Hindu-nationalist supporters and turn the country’s attention more squarely to economic reform.

Hindu militants have recently run campaigns of mass conversion to bribe or force Muslims and Christians to change their religion, including in Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

Though Indian courts found no evidence of Modi’s involvement in deadly religious rioting there when he was the state’s the top elected official, Muslims and Christians are still wary of his right-wing party.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party grew out of a right-wing Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose leaders believe that India is a fundamentally Hindu nation. The South Asian nation’s 1.2 billion people are 78 percent Hindu, with Muslims making up the largest religious minority at 14 percent, according to 2011 census figures.

In recent months, the RSS, for which Modi worked as a volunteer before entering politics, has announced mass camps to “reconvert” Muslims and Christians to Hinduism, claiming their forefathers were forced to change their religions. Hindu fundamentalists also have accused Muslims of marrying Hindu girls for the sole purpose of converting them to Islam, a practice dubbed “love jihad.”

Modi has refused to distance himself publicly from the hard-line efforts, although his aides say he does not support forced conversions, which are outlawed in India. Modi did apologize in December after a junior minister in his government described non-Hindus as “illegitimate children,” although he rejected calls to fire her.

The Obama administration has worked hard to smooth over hard personal feelings after Modi was denied visa entry into the U.S. in 2005 following the religious rioting.

But as they prepared for this week’s trip to promote stronger ties with India, top advisors said Obama did not want to make the journey without specifically addressing the issue of human rights.

As he did so on Tuesday, Obama repeatedly emphasized the two country’s shared democratic values and intertwined histories of struggle: When Martin Luther King, Jr. visited India, he was introduced to schoolchildren as “a fellow untouchable.” Obama’s grandfather was a cook for the British army in another British colony, Kenya. First Lady Michelle Obama’s family tree includes both slaves and slave owners.

“When we were born, people who looked like us still couldn’t vote in many parts of our country,” he said.

But in India and the U.S., he said, the grandson of a cook and the son of a tea seller can rise to the top elected office in the land.

“Our nations are strongest when we see that we are all God’s children — all equal in his eyes, all worthy of his love,” he said. “Across our two great countries we have Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, Jews and Buddhists and Jains and so many faiths.

“And we remember the wisdom of Gandhi,” he said, quoting Mahatma Gandhi as saying, “For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree.”

Afterward, Obama prepared for a trip to Saudi Arabia to pay respects to the family of the late King Abdullah.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama, left, talks with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee at Presidential Palace on Jan. 26, 2015 in New Delhi, India. U.S. President Barack Obama Sunday said that it was a ”great honor” for him to be back in India, after inspecting a guard of honor at the presidential palace in the national capital. (Xinhua/Zuma Press/TNS)