📰 Government relaxes visa restrictions
Except electronic tourist visa on arrival, which includes short-term medical visa, all visa restrictions have been lifted.
•The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Thursday further relaxed visa restrictions enabling foreigners to come to India for various purposes such as business, conference, employment, education, research and medical purposes. Except electronic tourist visa on arrival, which includes short-term medical visa, all visa restrictions have been lifted.
•“The government has now decided to make a graded relaxation in visa and travel restrictions for more categories of foreign nationals and Indian nationals who wish to enter or leave India. Therefore, it has been decided to permit all OCI (Overseas Citizens of India) and PIO (Persons of Indian Origin) card holders and all other foreign nationals intending to visit India for any purpose, except on a Tourist Visa to enter by air or water routes through authorized airports and seaport immigration check posts. This includes flights operated under Vande Bharat Mission, Air Transport Bubble arrangements or by any non scheduled commercial flights as allowed by the Ministry of Civil Aviation,” the MHA said in a statement.
Adherence to guidelines
•All such travellers should, however, strictly adhere to the guidelines of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare regarding quarantine and other health/COVID-19 matters, it stated.
•“Under this graded relaxation, Government of India has also decided to restore with immediate effect all existing visas (except electronic visa, Tourist Visa and Medical Visa). If the validity of such visas has expired, fresh visas of appropriate categories can be obtained from Indian Mission and Posts concerned. Foreign nationals intending to visit India for medical treatment can apply for a Medical Visa including for their medical attendants,” it said.
•The travel restriction, prohibiting international travel to and from 107 immigration check-posts was issued on March 23, a day before the first phase of the 21-day-countrywide lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The visa restrictions have been gradually relaxed and on August 18, the MHA allowed foreign journalists and their dependents to enter India. On August 7, the Ministry allowed foreign nationals from the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France to travel to India on “business, medical and employment” visas under the air bubble scheme.
•The controversial 20th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s Constitution that envisages expansive powers and greater immunity for the Executive President was passed in Parliament with a two-thirds majority, following a two-day debate.
•The 20th Amendment was the Rajapaksa administration’s first big test in the legislature, since it triggered concern and resistance from not just the political opposition, but also the influential Buddhist clergy that Sri Lanka’s southern polity venerates.
•As many as 156 MPs in the 225-member House voted for it, while 65 legislators voted against the Bill.
•Significantly, eight opposition MPs voted in favour of the legislation that their parties and leaders not only vehemently opposed, but also challenged at the Supreme Court. Following as many as 39 petitions filed by opposition parties and civil society groups, the Supreme Court determined that the passage of the legislation required only a two-thirds majority, except for four clauses that needed additional public approval through a referendum, unless they were amended in line with the determination.
Ceremonial role
•The 20th Amendment rolls back Sri Lanka’s 19th Amendment, a 2015 legislation passed with wide support from the Rajapaksa camp — then in Opposition — that sought to clip presidential powers, while strengthening Parliament. The new legislation in turn reduces the Prime Minister’s role to a ceremonial one.
•In the two-day debate, opposition MPs broadly argued that the Amendment threatened to take the country on the path of authoritarianism, giving the President unbridled powers, while government MPs emphasised the need for centralised power for better governance.
•The 20th Amendment’s passage comes at a time when the country is facing a new wave of COVID-19, with the number of cases rapidly increasing — after Sri Lanka contained the pandemic in the early months — to 6,028 cases and 14 deaths as of Thursday evening.
📰 Sooner, better: On indigenously developed COVID-19 test kits
Indigenously developed tests will allow scaling up of efforts to detect infections
•Thanks to the pandemic, scientific institutions in India have been able to demonstrate their ability to rise to the occasion and show why the country should increase funding for science research and development. The ICMR’s approval, recently, of two indigenously developed tests that are rapid, low-cost and have high sensitivity and specificity provides the much-needed boost to scale up daily testing without diluting accuracy. After carrying out about one million tests each day for the last few weeks, India, for the first time, tested nearly 1.5 million samples on October 21. While most tests done each day were the low sensitivity rapid antigen tests, the ones developed by the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a CSIR institute, and IIT Kharagpur will now enable the shift to more accurate tests. The low sensitivity of rapid antigen tests has meant that even people with symptoms were being handed out a negative result nearly half the time, leading to undetected cases. With unrestricted movement, businesses opening up, the festival season beginning and winter around the corner, the requirement for a rapid, low-cost test with high accuracy is crucial in checking the virus spread through early detection and repeated testing of even asymptomatic cases. Having locally developed tests with higher accuracy will now help States to offer tests on demand — as required in a September 4 ICMR advisory — while keeping costs low.
•While the low sensitivity of rapid antigen tests arises from not isolating the viral RNA from the swab samples and amplification of the DNA before detection, the two indigenously developed tests follow these two vital steps, the reason why the sensitivity and specificity are far superior to that of the rapid antigen tests. But, at the same time, both the tests developed locally do require minimum laboratory infrastructure to isolate the viral RNA from the samples. For that reason, India has to still rely on rapid antigen tests in rural areas that have no laboratory infrastructure. But the tests developed by the Indian institutions, once commercially available, can readily replace the rapid antigen tests in places where such laboratory infrastructure is in place. Rapid antigen tests will become less important even in rural areas once research institutions succeed in developing protocols and tests for using saliva rather than swabs, and do not require isolation of viral RNA from patient samples before amplification and detection. Field testing and validation of such protocols is now pending. Relying on saliva samples would mean non-invasive sample collection, and probably even self-collection. Thus, the reliance on trained personnel would reduce and also minimise the risk of health workers getting infected.
📰 Drive a harder bargain at the Delhi meet
At the 2+2 Ministerial forum, India must ensure that its gamble with Trump’s regime so close to the U.S. election pays off
•In August 2016, just months before the United States presidential elections, then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had detailed discussions about the Paris Climate Change Agreement, with the U.S. urging India to sign it at the earliest. Part of the statement they issued included the U.S.’s [developed countries] commitment to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020 as part of a Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help developing countries such as India with climate adaptation methods and renewable technologies.
Then, the Paris Accord push
•The ratification of the Paris Agreement was then U.S. President Barack Obama’s legacy project, and Washington was pushing for India to join before election day, November 8, in a bid to help Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton with her campaign against Republican nominee Donald Trump, who was against the Paris deal.
•While New Delhi could have chosen to wait for the results of the U.S. elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not, and announced a few weeks after Mr. Kerry’s visit that India would ratify the UN climate protocol on October 2, to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.
•Months later, on June 1, 2017, the new U.S. President, Donald Trump, announced that the U.S. would exit the Paris agreement, and also revoked U.S. promises towards the GCF, calling it “very unfair”. “India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries,” Mr. Trump added, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was based on his predecessor’s promises that India had made its calculations.
This time, the Indo-Pacific
•As the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, makes his way to India next week, history may just be repeating itself. This time, Mr. Pompeo is coming exactly a week before the election, and his brief is clear: to ensure that New Delhi (also Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia that are on his itinerary, from October 25 to October 30), makes a strong, public, strategic commitment to the U.S. on its plans in the Indo-Pacific. Mr. Pompeo has made no bones about his mission. In Washington on Wednesday, he said he was sure that his meetings “would include discussions about how free nations can work together to thwart threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party”.
•Just a few weeks ago, at the Quad Foreign Ministers meeting in Tokyo, Mr. Pompeo had said that as partners in this Quad (Australia-India-Japan-U.S.), “it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the Chinese Communist Party’s exploitation, corruption, and coercion.” In contrast, India has maintained that its membership of the Quad is aligned to its Indo-Pacific policy, and as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated at the Shangri-La dialogue, in June 2018, “by no means... directed against any country”. While there is no doubt that Beijing’s relentless aggression against India at the Line of Actual Control this year and its refusal to disengage or withdraw from land China’s People’s Liberation Army has occupied for more than six months is changing India’s priorities, the Narendra Modi government has maintained that it will resolve issues with China bilaterally. Any shift in that position at the U.S.’s prompting must also accrue benefits for India.
Electoral calculations
•Mr. Pompeo’s tenuous position must also be considered closely. For one, it is by no means clear that Mr. Trump will win the presidential elections or that Mr. Pompeo will remain in that spot. In fact, all presidential polls, as well as predictions for the U.S. electoral college point to a probable win for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
•Even if Mr. Trump does win the election, it remains to be seen how far he will take ties with China to the brink once he dusts off his campaign rhetoric. The weight of commitments made by Mr. Pompeo during his India visit could thus be assessed better in a similar visit made even a week later, once the election results are more clearly known.
•In the event Mr. Biden wins the election, India will hardly have endeared itself to the incoming administration by making strong statements of solidarity with Trump policy, strategic or otherwise. The two rallies Mr. Modi has held with Mr. Trump in Houston (2019) and in Ahmedabad (2020), as well as his use of the Trump campaign slogan, “Ab ki baar Trump Sarkar”, have already been noted within the Democratic campaign, and it may be recalled that most supporters of India in the Democratic leadership skipped the Houston rally.
China and India’s three fronts
•As a result, South Block must consider carefully just what it discusses and projects from the meeting with Mr. Pompeo and U.S. Defence Secretary Mark Esper as they arrive for the Third India-U.S. 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. China has gone from being the “Elephant in the Room” (as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun described it earlier this month) to becoming an agenda item on the table. Therefore, it is critical to study just how India hopes to collaborate with the U.S. on the challenge that Beijing poses on each of India’s three fronts: at the LAC, in the maritime sphere, and in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region surrounding India.
•On the maritime sphere, discussions will no doubt include strengthening ties in the Indo-Pacific, enhancing joint military exercises like the ‘Malabar’, where the entire Quad including Australia will participate next month in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and completing the last of the “foundational agreements” with the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Cooperation (BECA). On the SAARC region, Mr. Pompeo is speaking with his feet, given that his travels will take him to Male and Colombo as well. In Male, the U.S. has already announced a defence agreement that will pave the way for a strategic dialogue, and unlike in the past, New Delhi has not objected to ceding space in its area of influence in the Indian Ocean Region, as it will allow the U.S. to counter Chinese influence there. With Sri Lanka too, the U.S. has a pending defence agreement, but more importantly, discussions on infrastructure projects, and progress on its “Millenium Challenge Corporation” (MCC) offer of a five-year aid grant of about $480 million, that is meant to offer alternatives to the Rajapaksa government, will be key. At a time when India is delaying Sri Lanka’s requests for debt relief, given its own economic constraints, the U.S. aid offer will be seen as one way of staving off China’s inroads into Sri Lanka.
•Finally, and of most interest, will be how the U.S. and India can collaborate, if they can, on dealing with India’s most immediate, continental challenge from China: at the LAC. While the Indian Army will defend its borders with China on its own, there is much that Mr. Pompeo could promise, apart from enhancing and expediting U.S. defence sales to India. Mr. Pompeo must, for example, commit to keeping the pressure on Pakistan on terrorism, despite the U.S. need for Pakistan’s assistance in Afghan-Taliban talks. A firm U.S. statement in this regard may also disperse the pressure the Indian military faces in planning for a “two-front” conflict with China.
Other key areas
•Mr. Pompeo should be pushed on resolving trade issues with India, an area the Trump administration has been particularly tough, and perhaps commit to restoring India’s Generalised System of Preferences status for exporters. The government could press for more cooperation on 5G technology sharing, or an assurance that its S-400 missile system purchase from Russia will receive an exemption from the U.S.’s Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) sanctions.
📰 At 75, the UN needs a rebirth
There must be a global push against the rules that have privileged rule of the few over the many
•October 24 marks the diamond jubilee of the United Nations. But far from joyous celebration, it is an occasion to sombrely reflect on why the UN is stagnating at 75 and how it can regain its lost lustre.
•Although much has changed in the international system since 1945, the world body continues to see a tussle between ‘principle’ and ‘power’. On the one hand, the UN represents hopes of a peaceful and just world order through multilateral cooperation, abidance by international law, and uplift of the downtrodden. On the other, the institution has been designed to privilege the most powerful states of the post-World War II dispensation by granting them commanding heights over international politics via the undemocratic instruments of veto power and permanent seats in the Security Council (UNSC).
•Arguably, if the great powers of that period were not accommodated with VIP status, we may have seen a repeat of the ill-fated League of Nations. Keeping all the major powers inside the tent and reasonably happy through joint control over the UNSC was intended to be a pragmatic step to avoid another world war. Presumably, the collective command model of big powers built into the UNSC is one of the reasons why there has been no third world war.
A model that didn’t work
•But this model has also caused havoc. Almost immediately after the UN’s creation, it was pushed to the verge of irrelevance by the Cold War, which left the UN little room to implement noble visions of peace, development and human rights. It was only in the uncontested post-Cold War political milieu, when the liberal sole superpower, the U.S., strode like a colossus, that the UN could spring back to life and embark on a plethora of peacekeeping missions, nation-building interventions and promotion of universal human rights. In the U.S.-led ‘new world order’ of the 1990s, it appeared as if the problem of ‘power’ cutting out ‘principle’ had been resolved under the benign hegemony of a Washington that would be the flag-bearer of UN values.
•However, that golden age of the UN was too deceptive to last. We are now past the unipolar moment and the ghosts of the Cold War are returning in complex multi-sided avatars. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has labelled the present peaking of geopolitical tensions as a “great fracture”. The phrase ‘new Cold War’ is in vogue to depict the clash between China and the U.S. Tensions involving other players like Russia, Turkey, Iran and Israel in West Asia, as well as between China and its neighbours in Asia, are at an all-time high.
•The recrudescence of the worst habits of competitive vetoing by P-5 countries has prevented the UNSC from fulfilling its collective security mandate. So dangerous are the divisions and their spillover effects that Mr. Guterres has lamented that “we have essentially failed” to cooperate against the immediate global threat of the pandemic. He has also rekindled the old maxim, “The UN is only as strong as its members’ commitment to its ideals.”
Obstacles to reforms
•But apart from rivalries of member states, there is a larger underlying problem. At the core of the paralysis of the UN is the phenomenon of P-5 countries (China, France, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.) blocking reforms. Outmoded procedures based on the discriminatory original sin of superior prerogatives to P-5 countries have to be discarded. Why should expansion of the UNSC require consensus of the P-5? In the 21st century, why should there be veto power in anyone’s hands? If a simple majority voting method could replace the P-5 consensus method, the obstacles to UNSC reforms would reduce.
•On the 75th anniversary of the UN, there must be a global push against ossifying ‘rules’ which have privileged ‘rule’ of the few over the many. That is the only way to restore some balance between ‘power’ and ‘principle’ and ensure a renaissance of the UN.
