📰 NHAI’s road-laying feat enters Guinness
75-km road laid continuously in Maharashtra in 105 hours and 33 minutes
•The National Highway Authority of India has entered the Guinness World Records for the longest continuously laid bituminous lane of 75 km in 105 hours and 33 minutes on the National Highway between Amravati and Akola districts in Maharashtra.
•Mentioning the record, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday said the project was implemented by 720 workers, including a team of independent consultants, who worked day and night. The total length of the 75 km of single lane continuous bituminous concrete road is equivalent to 37.5 km of a two-lane paved shoulder road and the work started at 7.27 a.m. on June 3 and was completed at 5 p.m. on June 7, the Minister said in a video message.
•The previous Guinness World Record for the longest continuously laid bituminous was for building 25.275 km of road that was achieved in Doha, Qatar, in February 2019 and that task was completed in 10 days, Mr. Gadkari said.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and his Vietnam counterpart, General Phan Van Giang, sign a joint vision statement
•India and Vietnam on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on mutual logistics support during the ongoing visit of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to the Southeast Asian nation.
•“The Defence Ministers signed the ‘Joint Vision Statement on India-Vietnam Defence Partnership towards 2030’, which will significantly enhance the scope and scale of existing defence cooperation,” the Indian Defence Ministry said in a statement.
•“In these times of increasing cooperative engagements between the defence forces of the two countries, this is a major step towards simplifying procedures for mutually beneficial logistic support and is the first such major agreement which Vietnam has signed with any country,” the statement said on the logistics agreement.
•“Had an excellent meeting with General Phan Van Giang,” Mr. Singh said on Twitter after the meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart. “We had wide-ranging discussions on effective and practical initiatives to further expand bilateral defence engagements and regional and global issues.”
•“Our close defence and security cooperation is an important factor of stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” Mr. Singh added.
•India has signed several logistics agreements including with all Quad countries, France, Singapore and South Korea beginning with the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement with the U.S. in 2016.
•Logistics agreements are administrative arrangements facilitating access to military facilities for exchange of fuel and provisions on mutual agreement simplifying logistical support and increasing operational turnaround of the military when operating away from India.
•Both Ministers also agreed for early finalisation of $US 500 million Defence Line of Credit extended to Vietnam. Mr. Singh also announced gifting two simulators and monetary grant towards setting up of Language and IT Lab at Air Force Officers Training School for capacity building of Vietnamese armed forces.
•Mr. Singh began his official visit by paying respects to President Ho Chi Minh at his Mausoleum in Hanoi. India and Vietnam share a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership since 2016 and defence cooperation is a key pillar of this partnership. Vietnam is an important partner in India’s Act East policy.
📰 Dealing with the Indo-Pacific is not easy
While the IPEF may be a good idea, the framework does not address issues of trade and tariffs
•U.S. President Joseph Biden cannot forget his recent five-day visit to Asia. Hours after he left to return to the U.S., North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles even as it is preoccupied with a ‘fever’ in the country. Japan’s Defence Minister said Chinese and Russian fighter jets carried out joint flights over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on May 24 as leaders of the Quad met in Tokyo. And when Air Force One landed in the U.S., Mr. Biden became witness to the sparring between Republicans and Democrats about gun control legislation in the aftermath of a shooting at an elementary school in Texas which claimed 21 lives, of which 19 were children.
Biden’s Asian visit
•Still, in the assessment of the Biden White House, the outcome of the Asian trip could not have been better. The new conservative South Korean government showed willingness to turn the heat on North Korea and said it would even expand the presence of a U.S. missile defence system in the country, which had earlier angered China. In Japan, the administration promised him that it was ready to do away with its long-standing 1% GDP ceiling for annual defence spending.
•Against the backdrop of growing concern over Chinese military activity in the region, Mr. Biden said at a press conference that the U.S. would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if it came under attack from China. The jury is still out on whether this unusually forceful statement by the President was a gaffe or a well-thought-out response. In any event, the President and members of his delegation were quick to walk back and clarify that there is no change in the substance of American foreign policy, which is still governed by the Taiwan Relations Act. As per the 1979 Congressional law, the U.S. “shall provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” so that the region can defend itself; the law says nothing about the U.S. being required to step in militarily to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China. But Mr. Biden made some folks happy in the region even if the primary purpose of his visit was not about clarifying ‘strategic ambiguity’.
•It is no secret that the Indo-Pacific region has been under pressure and East Asia, in particular, has had to weather repeated storms. South Korea and Japan face regular nuclear and missile threats from North Korea. China not only challenges international maritime laws in the South China Sea, but also confronts Japan over the Senkaku Islands. Six nations, including China and Taiwan, are involved in the dispute over the Spratly Islands, which are supposedly sitting on vast reserves of oil and natural gas. China has vigorously militarised some portions of the disputed isles, islets and coral reefs; and countries like Vietnam and the Philippines are anxious not to be left behind.
The IPEF framework
•The buzzword in the Indo-Pacific that President Biden wanted to emphasise was China. Nearly every one of the nations in this part of the world recognises the assertiveness and aggressiveness of Beijing, which is seen as wanting to be at the centre of things and on its terms, but few are able to come up with a strategy to deal with China. And one way that the Biden administration has sought to get around this is by establishing an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) with Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The IPEF will work on fine-tuning four major pillars: standards and rules for digital trade; resilient supply chains; green energy commitments; and fair trade.
•But first indications are that while the IPEF may be a good idea, there is discontent that the framework does not address issues of trade and tariffs. The Biden administration would not want to touch this with a barge pole, especially with mid-term elections barely five months away. “I think what the U.S. has to offer, and the only thing the U.S. has to offer, is money. Which some, I think, will be forthcoming, particularly for clean energy, maybe even some for supply chain resilience, and anti-corruption,” Professor of Law and Trade Bryan Mercurio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong said. “But of course, what Asian partners really want is trade. I think they want market access. And the trade component of the IPEF is really lacking.”
•There are two facets to the Asia Pacific/Indo-Pacific that any administration in Washington must pay attention to. One is that China’s neighbours would rather balance relations between Washington and Beijing. But as Michael Schuman said in a piece in The Atlantic, the message to Chinese President Xi Jinping should be loud and clear: “As in Europe, where Vladimir Putin’s aggression is uniting the rest of the region against him, so too in Asia is an aggressive China entrenching, not weakening, American power.”
•On the other hand is the extent to which countries in the region will want to get on the anti-China bandwagon, economic or strategic. Whether it is in East, Southeast or South Asia, every country has its own unique relationship with Beijing. South Korea and Japan are part of a strong American security/strategic partnership but will be keen on maintaining their economic status with China. This is also true for the Association of South East Asian Nations. India may be a part of the Quad, but is quite mindful that it is the only country in the group that shares a land border with China which is laced with disputes.
An uphill task
•It is useful to recall what Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at the International Conference on the Future of Asia in Tokyo on May 26: “In response to geopolitical tensions, countries have increasingly emphasised resilience and national security considerations over the economic gains from free trade and investment flows but they should be very careful about taking extreme measures, pre-emptively before conflicts arise. Whether to disconnect themselves from global supply chains and strive for reshoring or to go for “friend-shoring” and to cut off countries that are not allies or friends... such actions shut off avenues for regional growth and cooperation, deepen divisions between countries, and may precipitate the very conflicts that we all hope to avoid”.
•For all the tough talking prior to the bilateral talks or at the time of the Quad summit, the four leaders of the Quad did not mention Russia or China in the Joint Statement, for each of them understands the sensitivities. Further, President Biden is perceptive and aware of the vagaries of U.S. lawmakers. As it is, foreign policy has little traction and with Democrats expected to perform poorly on November 8, legislation, especially pertaining to funding for external initiatives, is going to be an uphill task.
📰 It is a bumping-off of the rule of law too
The inquiry into the 2019 Hyderabad encounter killings is a reminder that the police must observe the spirit of the law
•A recent report submitted by the commission of inquiry headed by a former Supreme Court of India judge, Justice V.S. Sirpurkar, indicting the police in Hyderabad for the fake encounter, in 2019, on the outskirts of Hyderabad near Shamshabad, should serve as an eye-opener to senior police officials who by-pass the law and due processes and eliminate suspects with impunity. Decidedly, a fake encounter, the law should now take its own course; a first information report should be filed against the police officials concerned for the murder of the four youth suspected to have gang-raped a veterinary doctor and then murdered her and burnt her body on the night of November 27.
Stretching credulity
•That D.R. Karthikeyan, a very senior Indian Police Service officer (also Special Director in the Central Bureau of Investigation who investigated the Rajiv Gandhi murder case), was associated with the commission of inquiry lends credence to the fact that after a thorough investigation, the killing of the youths was deemed to be nothing but a pre-meditated cold-blooded murder. The alleged culprits deserved severe punishment after observing all legal procedures. But definitely not execution by policemen who later boasted about their so-called heroic act — shooting down unarmed men in the early hours of December 6, 2019.
•The public outcry to apprehend the men after the crime may have pushed the police to act fast. Indubitably, they did a great job by arresting the criminals in a very short time. But, thereafter, things became murky when the police preferred to take the law into their own hands and eliminate the four youth.
•Even as the details of the encounter were reported in the media, it became amply clear that it was indeed a fake encounter. The version by the police, that the four youth attempted to escape after throwing mud in the eyes of the policemen and attempting to snatch their weapons, was silly and nothing but a cover up; it was a murderous act. That unarmed youth, who should have been in handcuffs, attempted to overpower a large number if policemen sounds too ludicrous to believe.
A signal from the top
•In November 2017, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, had publicly stated that criminals would be jailed or killed in encounters. The message that went to the law-enforcing agencies, though in a subtle manner, was that they had been given a free hand to deal with criminals; no questions asked. By the end of his first term as the Chief Minister, 151 criminals had been killed and over 3,300 maimed by gunshot injuries, mostly in the legs, in over 8,500 encounters; 13 policemen are reported to have been killed and 1,157 injured.
•Following the lead of Uttar Pradesh, the Chief Minister of Assam too gave clear directions to the Assam police personnel that criminals who attempted to escape should be shot. The message was loud and clear. It was for the police to prove that a criminal was shot dead while trying to escape. Between May 10, 2021 and January 28, 2022, as many as 28 suspects were killed and 73 injured by the police, a majority of them from the minority community and most others from ethnic communities.
•Following three murders within 24 hours in three districts of Bihar in March last year, three legislators of the State (from the Bharatiya Janata Party) suggested that the Uttar Pradesh model of encounter killings by the police be adopted in Bihar too, in order to bring down the crime rate. In the same manner, the recent ‘bulldozer policy’ of Uttar Pradesh has also been adopted in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, giving established legal procedures a go-by.
•Extra-judicial killings go against the very spirit of rule of law. What is mind boggling is the fact that the very same veterans of the Indian Police Service who confabulate on fake encounters and custodial deaths on various television channels, condemning police actions, are also the ones who while serving in the police setup acquiesced to public outcry or political diktats and went with the tide. There are exceptions, of course.
•When commissions are set up to inquire into fake encounters, it is usually low-ranking officers, from constables to inspectors, who have to face the brunt. Senior police officers who may have given their consent to eliminate the criminals are allowed to go scot free and are rarely indicted. If personnel from the ranks are incarcerated for fake encounters, so should senior officers; it is their responsibility to ensure that the rule of law is strictly followed in their jurisdiction.
•Complaints of fake encounters need to be attended to on top priority and the judiciary activated immediately after a complaint is received. For obvious reasons, the police will not readily register a complaint of a fake encounter lest comrades in khaki land in trouble.
On magisterial inquiries
•Magisterial inquiries conducted by local magistrates turn out to be farce as they have to work in consonance with the police of the district; they would be inclined to go with the police version and give them a clean chit. A solution would be to nominate magistrates from other States who would be impartial and fair in their inquiries. Commissions of inquiry should comprise police officers from other States who enjoy a reputation of moral rectitude and fair play. But for the intervention of the Supreme Court of India that had constituted the inquiry commission to look into the Hyderabad case, the 10 policemen accused of carrying out the murder of four youths would have escaped censure and may have been looking for more such opportunities to wear and demonstrate the “encounter specialist” tag placed on them.
•It would not be a surprise if those indicted in fake encounters have been awarded police gallantry medals. These medals or citations should be withdrawn as fake encounters do not in any way give an opportunity to display an act of courage. Killing unarmed and helpless suspects who may not decidedly be criminals is an act of cowardice.
•If States begin to adopt extra-judicial strategies to bring down the crime rate, the day may not be far off when the country would be ruled by criminals in uniform, with the judiciary watching mutely as the protective cover of rule of law is torn to pieces.
•Back in August 2011, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices Markandey Katju and C.K. Prasad (while hearing a fake encounter case of an alleged gangster by the Rajasthan police in October 2006) had said: “Fake encounter killings by cops are nothing but cold-blooded brutal murder which should be treated as the rarest of rare offence and police personnel responsible for it should be awarded death sentence. They should be hanged.” The sooner it is done after trial through fast track courts, the better it would be for the nation, as it will serve as a signal and deterrent to other policemen.
📰 Safe foods
States need help in developing food lab infrastructure and enhancing manpower
•Food safety and consumer empowerment are areas in need of constant attention in India, where enforcement is often lax. But in this, Tamil Nadu deserves credit for finishing at the top among 17 large States for food safety; it was ranked third in the previous edition of the State Food Safety Index. That Tamil Nadu, with 82 marks, is ahead of Gujarat by 4.5 marks and Maharashtra by 12 marks, highlights its creditable showing. Developed by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the Food Safety Index evaluates States and Union Territories on these parameters, apart from their size: human resources and institutional data; compliance; food testing – infrastructure and surveillance; training and capacity building, and consumer empowerment. Tamil Nadu has improved its standing in ‘human resources and institutional data’, and ‘training and capacity building’. There has been incremental progress in ‘compliance’ (which measures overall coverage of food businesses in licensing and registration), and ‘food testing’ (which scrutinises availability of adequate testing infrastructure with trained manpower in the States/Union Territories for testing food samples). The State has performed marginally lower than what it did last year in ‘consumer empowerment’. But barring Tamil Nadu, there is nothing for the other southern States to cheer about despite the region being more advanced than the rest of India in many socio-economic indicators. Kerala, which came second last time, is now at sixth spot; Karnataka has retained its ninth position; Telangana slipped from 10 to 15 and Andhra Pradesh dropped to the last slot from the penultimate slot in the previous edition when 20 States were covered, unlike the 17 now. Among Union Territories, Puducherry rose from seventh to sixth spot.
•But in an area such as food safety, States alone cannot make a big difference without the support of the Central government. Liberal assistance should be provided to the States and Union Territories as far as laboratory infrastructure and improvement of manpower, both technical and non-technical, are concerned. The private sector should come forward in a big way to have staff trained at their cost and where such persons are used productively for the purpose. There are inspiring accounts of the participation of some information technology majors in getting surplus food distributed to the needy, of course with the help of non-governmental organisations, and this should serve as a lesson to those who are still hesitant to make their contribution. What every player in the field of food safety should realise is that each one has a critical role to play, and there has to be collective and well-coordinated action.
📰 Vicious domestic politics, foreign policy shocks
The ready set of templates India has used to push back the West has been blunted in the West Asian backlash
•The unprecedented diplomatic backlash against India just a few days ago over the derogatory remarks made by the now-suspended spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against Islam highlights the tenuous limits of a carefully calibrated and politically useful binary that the BJP-led government in New Delhi has been pursuing in conducting its relationship with the West Asian states: dismiss the growing anti-Muslim sentiments in the country as either a fringe or a ‘domestic matter’ while proactively improving India’s relations with the Muslim-majority states. The backlash has clearly put the Government on the back foot, which is now struggling to contain the diplomatic fallout.
•While none of the Muslim-majority states in West Asia can claim to teach India the virtues of religious tolerance or pluralism — going by the despicable standards they adopt in their own counties — for India, this is not just a lesson in religious tolerance and pluralism but one that should drive home the stark lesson that vicious domestic politics has foreign policy implications. More so, when bilateral relationships carefully built over decades by professional diplomats start getting undermined by communal politics and electoral calculations, hate speech can no longer be dismissed as “our internal matter”; it becomes a matter of national interest.
Larger binary
•In fact, there is a larger binary that has been at the heart of the conduct of India’s foreign policy in the recent past. So far, India has been able to fend off external criticism about shrinking democratic space and rising religious intolerance in the country while at the same time being a champion of those very global platforms rooted in democratic values – Quad (India, the United States, Japan and Australia) is an example; Summit of democracies is another. New Delhi has consistently dismissed, rather contemptuously, criticism from the U.S. and the West about India’s internal issues using a politically smart blend of ripostes rooted in its post-colonial identity, and its right to stand up to western hypocrisy and their imperial urges. However, India’s ability to manage its international normative identity while at the same time dismissing criticism against its own domestic failings will shrink, and the carefully calibrated binary will find fewer takers going forward, thanks to the current crisis.
•After all, India has been called out not by the ‘colonial’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘imperial’ West/U.S., but by the smaller regional states which do not come with any of these labels. New Delhi, in other words, has a ready set of templates to push back the U.S./the West, but none of those templates can help it fend off the criticism from the smaller but influential regional powers in West Asia.
When extremism boils over
•An even larger question is whether domestic extremism can be fanned but kept contained without external consequences. Historically, India has had its run-ins and experiences with extremism, and sometimes has even fanned it. Dealing with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, which has been one of the major preoccupations of the Indian state, and the deadly fallout of initially supporting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have taught India an important lesson: hobnobbing with extremism is counterproductive.
•Despite this valuable lesson, there is an increasing number of ‘fringe’ but extremist groups in India today that are determined to make life difficult for Indian Muslims, and who are hardly taken to task by the BJP-led government. The reason why the international community has been more or less tolerant of such home-grown extremist elements in India is because they are, for all practical purposes, domestically focused and contained therein.
•That is also in some ways an important difference between, say, the extremist organisations in Pakistan and those in India: while Pakistan’s home-grown extremism spilled over into other countries as terrorist violence with active state sponsorship, in India, home-grown extremism and intolerance has neither manifested itself as terrorism nor spilled over national borders.
•More so, most manifestations of extremism in India have never received any state patronage (despite the occasional tolerance by the ruling party), and the various domestic checks and balances have been able to blunt its sharpness. But when extremism or communalism is increasingly viewed as being tolerated by the ruling party, and it boils over into spaces outside the borders, even if without any material manifestations, it is bound to have foreign policy consequences.
•Take the example of global reactions to India’s policies in Kashmir, especially in 2019, or how certain right-wing Hindutva organisations have been going after Indian Muslims. While there were some criticisms of India’s Kashmir policy especially from the Islamic countries, even they had ignored these issues for most practical purposes. If anything, India’s relationships with the Islamic countries have only improved since the arrival of the Narendra Modi government in 2014.
•What this means is rather straightforward. Outsiders more or less ignore what happens in the domestic space in India provided what happens there is kept below boiling point and contained there. While the external reactions to how Indian Muslims are treated by Hindutva extremist organisations in India may be muted, derogatory remarks about Islam in general are unlikely to be tolerated. So, the question before us is a two-fold one: one, is it possible to keep the temperature on anti-Muslim tirade in India below boiling point, and two, once a politically convenient anti-Muslim narrative is created in the country, would it be possible to ensure that there is no spillover, materially or rhetorically?
West Asia is not the West
•There is also a noticeable difference between how India has reacted to the criticism from the U.S./West on the treatment of Muslims in India or other issues pertaining to democracy and human rights, and how it has chosen to react to the criticism and summoning of its diplomats by the Muslim-majority states in West Asia. If anything, the Indian charge of hypocrisy against the U.S./West applies more to the Muslim-majority states in West Asia. And yet, India’s response has been very different. Why so?
•For one, the material consequences of defying the western/U.S. indignation are far less than those of aggressively or defiantly pushing back the criticism from the Islamic countries. India needs the region for remittances, energy, and more importantly, for the well-being of its millions of migrant labourers there. For sure, India also needs the U.S./West for similar and other reasons. However, given that the U.S. and the West are more advanced democracies, they are highly unlikely to impose any arbitrary material costs on India or Indian citizens living in those countries.
•That might not be the case with the West Asian countries if the Prophet is denigrated. Put differently, if India defiantly pushes back using the same language it uses against the West/U.S., it could prompt them to impose material costs on New Delhi. Second, while India and the West/U.S. need each other for a variety of reasons, including the China challenge, such inter-dependence does not really exist when it comes to India-West Asia relations: India needs the West Asian states more than they need India.
A lesson
•India’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term has been on a high, with a number of achievements to its credit. Indeed, just a month ago, the world was queuing up for New Delhi’s attention. Today, India’s diplomats are getting summoned for an apology. There is little doubt that New Delhi’s diplomats will be able to tide over the current crisis and repair the country’s relations with West Asia. But the recent incident has highlighted the undeniable danger of unconstrained domestic extremism harming India’s foreign policy objectives.
