it is not about who knows him better.KJoishy wrote: You know about what Modi will do as much as I do.
However, I am confident that he will not slobber before the gora like most of our other leaders.
RajeshA wrote: Modi's first visit should be to Japan!
SaiK wrote:a japan,s-korea,taiwan towards east and israel, france, russia towards west on bonding for mil specific needs... will make earth shatter on such news... especially in deep collaborations, all orchestrated via indic controls and management.
all these kick talks will just show our maturity.. just do it! nike ishtyle.
harbans wrote:Modi's first foreign visits should be as follows:
1. HH The Dalai Lama (on the 1st day in Office)
2. Bhutan
3. Nepal
4. The Kingdom of Thailand.
5. Myanmar
6. Japan
Need to stress on a Dharmic federation.
+786. Look East should be the foreign policy for NaMo govt. Galvanizing our relationship on every front (trade, military, research, tourism and so much more) with our eastern counterparts should be top priority for NaMo Govt's foreign/external affairs ministry. Next should be African/South America continent.Rudradev wrote:
NaMo should first visit Tokyo, then Beijing, then Seoul, then Moscow.
Second tier, Tel-Aviv, Teheran and Kabul.
Secular Indians are so proud of their relation with Pits, the fast friend of Fai and ISI. Aoa only.ramana wrote:The Rajiv Malhotra expose validates the Slideshare presentation on Taxonomy of Indian Elite put togerher by BRF members.
Its immaterial who is a better debater. Goal here is to get the people to debate the issue which already started, thanks to Modi. If Modi and BJP keep hammering the issue of high unemployment levels in J&K, over a few years, the people of J&K will call for a change which permits investment. That would be like punching a couple of holes in Article 370. A good first step.SwamyG wrote:Modi should accept Omar's proposal. Both teams will come prepared, and Modi will be easily better prepared. It will be on the news at least for 2 days on national media - if not a week; and spawn renewed interest on the topic and BJP. Imagine a PM candidate having a debate on such an important issue; and Congress no were in the picture. Likes of Digvijay, Manish, Sanjay and Abhishek will bark after the debate.
Also it will validate the idea that Modi is the agenda setter as far as national discussions/vision go - makes Congress a non-entity. It will be a nail on the coffin for the thought that Modi is relevant only in Gujarat and not at a national level. After all J&K politicians are ready to debate with Modi.
The debate should be held in New Delhi around January 26th 2014, and nationally televised.
ps: If I was a Modi team campaigner, I would milk this thoroughly.
Let's not forget South Korea. Right now, SK internally is being taken over by the EJs within SK. So much so, that some things like bowing to their elders is being openly discouraged by the EJs. It will lead to their social decay and the destruction of their civilization.Rudradev wrote: +1. Though I am not sure about Japan. Their current state and projected future state will keep them under Khan's thumbs. So a NaMo version of the "Asian Pivot" (whoever thinks up of these terms in the U.S!!) with Japan in mind will have huge limitations in terms of dependability and sustainability.
So to send the subtle message to Beijing, wouldn't visits to Taiwan and Vietnam followed by Moscow, Seoul and then Beijing be a better bet?
I think a lot depends on whether the Shinzo Abe government remains in power. Abe has shown far stronger signs than any predecessor, of wanting to establish strategic (especially military/naval) independence from the US. The visit of NaMo to Tokyo would have enough cover, from the "economic cooperation" pretext, so as to not appear openly hostile towards Beijing as a first move-- but the underlying message would go through regardless.
Vietnam, I agree would be a great visit-- but I think a tour of SE Asian capitals is warranted in its own right, and should ideally have very strong *cultural* overtones that won't entirely be applicable to Northeast Asia. Taiwan-- I'm not so sure about, because the argument you have put forward for Japan (firmly under Khan's thumb) actually applies to them more than to Japan, at least at present-- and the open insult to Beijing implied by such a visit may not be appropriate at least at the very outset.
A national referendum could be seen as outsiders imposition by Kashmiris. Best of have Kashmiris themselves realize that job creating investments are necessary for their welfare. Of course, investments cannot come without tinkering the Article 370.Cosmo_R wrote:Why not a debate in the form of a national referendum on 370?
Mumbai: In a desperate attempt to galvanise its divided legions, the state unit of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is pulling out all the stops for the December 22 rally that will be addressed by Narendra Modi, the party's prime ministerial candidate. 36 committees have been formed to make for flawless planning and 14 trains booked to ferry party workers.
Over a lakh of the party's booth chiefs spread across the state have been asked to flock to the city for the rally to make it a success, revealed state unit office bearers. The city unit of the BJP, entrusted with the task of making arrangements for the rally, has appointed as many as 36 committees for a host of tasks - from stage design, sanitation, SMS and emails to coordinating with the Sangh Parivar.
A special committee has been appointed to arrange for a special enclosure at Diamond Market, very close to the Bandra-Kurla Complex grounds where Modi will deliver his address. The party expects people from the spheres of business, films and television to attend the rally and separate committees have been formed accordingly, said Vivekananda Gupta, secretary of the city unit of the BJP.
Apart from asking the younger leaders to take charge of these committees, the party has roped in old veterans as well, such as former union ministers Ram Naik and Jaywantiben Mehta. While Naik has been asked to head coordination with Railways, Mehta has been asked to liaise with various institutions.
'First note, then vote': Leaders scurry to collect cash for campaign
The BJP has decided to shower largesse on Modi for his campaign, of which Rs. 25 crore will come from Mumbai. Senior party leader Gopinath Munde has appealed to the BJP cadre to start collecting funds that would be offered to Modi for the party's election campaign. "'First note, then vote' should be our slogan, similar to the call made in 1977 by the Janasangha," Munde is believed to have told BJP party workers. He has announced a personal donation of Rs. 1 lakh and vowed to collect Rs. 17 crore from the Marathwada region.
ashashi wrote:A national referendum could be seen as outsiders imposition by Kashmiris. Best of have Kashmiris themselves realize that job creating investments are necessary for their welfare. Of course, investments cannot come without tinkering the Article 370.Cosmo_R wrote:Why not a debate in the form of a national referendum on 370?
at least I don't want India to topping the list where toilets are considered as lesser need than cell phones.More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows
Out of the world’s estimated 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to mobile phones. Only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets
According to Yahoo, India alone is responsible for 60% of the global population lacking access to basic sanitation. About half of its 1.2 billion residents are mobile subscribers, but only 366 million people (about one-third of its population) have access to toilets, noted a 2010 U.N. report.
Last August, Bill Gates launched the “Reinvent the Toilet” campaign to reduce the number of children who die as a result of sanitation problems. According to the Los Angeles Times, in 2011 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offered $42 million to researchers, asking them to build the toilet of tomorrow — one that is safe, hygienic, uses little water and is easy to install.
Read more: More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/mor ... z2medVcUqm
japan has also used that same model. they have preserved their pristine forests for 100s of yrs under royal patronage. the plundering goes on in indonesia, malaysia, africa and brazil.SaiK wrote:I would say import brazil sugar for ethanol, and make all home grown sugar organic farming. heck, this is the same strategy massan has.. they will plunder forest and wood from malaysia and other timber faring nations, and preserve their forests pristine. they think that model works for them, but in the end, more tropical forest destruction means indirect death to humanity starting from tropical but definitely creating disaster on long term destruction of resources.
so essentially, India should grow forest cover to 50% in a decade or so.. and encourage more tropical countries to do so. thorium based fuel and reactors can be supplied to those nations whom interact to our diktat.
10. You will kindly recall that in the Chief Ministers’ Conference on Internal Security in Delhi in May earlier this year, I had brought to your notice how certain individuals with questionable credentials and condemnable links with anti-national elements have penetrated into our policy making think tanks like the Planning Commission and the National Advisory Council, NAC. It is the same NAC, an extra-constitutional authority and the same set of individuals who seem to have now usurped the law-making powers because of the void created at the political level that are behind this draft
12.Similarly, section 3(d) read with Section 4, attempts to bring in the concept of “knowledge and intent” into the definition of communal violence. This makes one wonder whether the Orwellian concept of “thought crime” is being introduced in Indian criminal jurisprudence. The said provision has certainly not been examined from the point of view of Evidence Act as also investigation and prosecution.
13.The proposed bill seeks to undermine the basic constitutional tenet of equality before law by attempting to create different classes of citizens based on religion. Under Section 9A, certain offences under IPC have been classified as offences of communal violence. This is a clear breach of Article 14 and 15(1) of the Indian Constitution. If A murders or rapes B, law has to apply similarly regardless of the religious and linguistic identities of A and B; and the equal application of law includes both substantive law and procedural law
14.The proposed bill tarnishes the police and security forces and paints them as communal at large. Sections 9B and 10A are totally ill conceived in the context of communal violence. The other assumption is that all incidents of communal violence can be prevented by the law and order agencies. Both these assumptions are fallacious and too simplistic.
By this provision MMS needs to be jailed for incompetence
16.Section 10B is absurd in that it criminally penalizes a public servant for failure of his subordinates! Incompetence cannot be handled by putting people in jail. It needs capacity building, training, sensitization, motivation, imparting leadership skills etc- certainly issues requiring more inputs and efforts, than mere legislation. I do not know whether such provisions have been weighed at various levels in Government of India
18.There are several other ill-conceived provisions in the proposed Bill which are either non implementable or counter-productive. The only provisions which pass muster are the redundant ones like those in Chapter IV-A and IV-B. These are nothing but a reiteration of existing provisions in the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973.
19.Chapter V and Chapter VI simply reiterate the analogous provisions of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993. Here I have a serious opposition to bringing NHRC and SHRC into the process of exercising powers that are vested in the executive wing of an elected government. I think these bodies are already empowered under the existing statute to deal with serious violations of human rights during incidents of communal violence.
So Amit Shah was not being chargedAfter investigating the role of senior Intelligence Bureau officers in the Ishrat Jahan and Sadiq Jamal fake encounter cases for nearly a year and questioning them multiple times, one set of CBI investigators have now taken a view that there is inadequate evidence to chargesheet them and departmental action against them could be sufficient.
CBI Director Ranjit Sinha has received divergent opinions from the members of the probe team on whether retired IB Special Director Rajender Kumar and his three deputies can be chargesheeted. "There is a very strong view from a set of the probe officers that there is no prosecutable evidence to chargesheet the IB officers on charges of murder and conspiracy. It is being contended that the IB officers were only conducting a controlled operation to nab terrorists and had no personal enmity
It is, however, believed that CBI Special Director Saleem Ali, who was supervising the Ishrat probe and retired on November 30, has given his opinion that the IB officers should be chargesheeted. "The files are now with the CBI director who will take a final call after consulting the director of prosecution.
Agreed.Arun Menon wrote:ashashi wrote:
A national referendum could be seen as outsiders imposition by Kashmiris. Best of have Kashmiris themselves realize that job creating investments are necessary for their welfare. Of course, investments cannot come without tinkering the Article 370.
Kashmiris should get over this whole outsider/insider thing fast. They should learn to be productive citizens of the nation. Coddling them further is not gonna improve their situation. At this point they are like a little brat that need a tight slap to get over its hysterics. Of course, the focus on jobs is a good thing, but it should be part of a broader approach. It is our mollycoddling of these so called "minorities" that got us into this mess in the first place.
Ehh - Spanish reconquista was extremely ruthless. Large scale burnings featured prominently in sending said mullahs into remission.Prasad wrote:Spain has probably been the only such country me thinks.
The reconquista was basically complete after 1212 (Las Navas de Tolosa) when the last significant Almohad force was crushed by a combined Christian force. After that, only a few minor strongholds like Malaga, Granada, and Cadiz remained in Moorish hands. Also, the kingdom of Granada was useful as a slave trading port for the Christians of Europe, who imported African slaves by the ton. Consequently, it was left as a vassal of Castile. But, by 1492, things had changed, and the trade was no longer valuable, as Portuguese slave traders started bringing in African slaves directly from the Guinea coast. That signified the end of the vassalage of the kingdom of Granada (which, by that time, basically encompassed the Andalusian coast from Almeria to just east of Gibraltar).Singha wrote:if you mean the reconquista, the xtians methodically defeated the 'moors' from the north to south, until their last stand on granada and that too fell. people were reconverted back to xtian faith or shipped off to tunisia or morocco with a vague promise they would be allowed to return in 3 yrs when the situation was stable!
they have a long history of being at each others throats.
if you read about the 1st crusade onward...most of these coastal xtian city states were captured by french nobles who brought their own elite knights along or formed them on the spot (Le hospitallers, the templars..), muslims got the stick and infact the muslim leaders like Saladin come across as way more merciful and sagacious than some of the religious zealots who made their way from europe to squat on the holy land for profit and power.
The Russians had some success in converting the Muslim Tartars and Cossacks to Christianity. But that was because Tartar and Cossack nobles saw Christianity as a means of advancing their careers in Tsarist Russia. However, even today, there are very significant numbers of Tartar and Crimean Muslims. But even Russia failed to break islam (granted they had less time than the British had in India, and Orthodox Christianity is not particularly missionary) in the Caucasus and Central Asia.Prasad wrote:Yep. But the reconquista isn't an option that we should even think about. It is fact though that that is the only method that has worked. We will have to find another.
By ZAHIR JANMOHAMED
In March 2005, the United States denied a visa to Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, now the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate in next year’s Indian elections. The visa was denied because of Mr. Modi’s alleged role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat that left more than 1,000 dead, most of them Muslims. But it came about from a highly unusual coalition made up of Indian-born activists, evangelical Christians, Jewish leaders and Republican members of Congress concerned about religious freedom around the globe.
I had a front-row seat to these events as they unfolded. I worked in Washington. D.C., from 2003 to 2011, mostly at Amnesty International and in the United States Congress, and I was a part of the campaign to deny Mr. Modi a visa.
In 1996, Nina Shea, the director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, organized a summit sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group that represents 42,000 Evangelical Churches. At the conclusion of the event, the delegates pledged their collective efforts to “take appropriate action to combat the intolerable religious persecution now victimizing fellow believers and those of other faiths.”
The timing was perfect. Two years earlier, Republicans had taken a majority of seats in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952, and the new batch of Republican Congress members were eager to see that protection of Christians be a central part of United States foreign policy.
The result was the International Religious Freedom Act, which Representative Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, introduced in March 1998 to wide, bipartisan support.
Though Mr. Wolf’s original vision called for sanctions on countries that violated religious freedom, that idea ran into resistance from corporations that worked in countries like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.
In the new piece of legislation, most of the language on sanctions was dumped. However, one clause would carry over and would later prove fateful to Mr. Modi. Section 604 of the new legislation read: “Any alien who, while serving as a foreign official, was responsible or directly carried out, at any time during the preceding 24-month period, particularly severe violations of religious freedom, as defined in Section 3 of the International Religious Freedom Act 1998 and the spouse and children, if any, are inadmissible.”
Soon after the passage of the law, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government-funded agency, was created. Many of the initial commissioners had strong evangelical leanings, but when Felice D. Gaer, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s human rights program, was selected as a commissioner in 2001, she decided to widen the panel’s scope to other religions.
“I wanted to turn this around, to make our focus broader,” Ms. Gaer said in an interview. This chance came in February 2002 when she learned about the riots in Gujarat, India. “We learned about the riots in real time. We had people on staff who kept telling us we need to do something,” Ms. Gaer said.
Ms. Gaer tried to arrange an official commission trip to India to survey the damage caused by the 2002 riots but was denied permission to enter India.
Instead, the commission decided to hold a hearing in Washington in June 2002. Ms. Gaer was “shocked” by the findings at the hearing. “I can’t forget what I heard that day,” Ms. Gaer said.
Congressman Frank Wolf speaking at a campaign rally in Springfield, Virginia, on Aug. 17, 2012. Mr. Wolf was the author of the International Religious Freedom Act, which served as the basis to deny Narendra Modi a United States visa.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Congressman Frank Wolf speaking at a campaign rally in Springfield, Virginia, on Aug. 17, 2012. Mr. Wolf was the author of the International Religious Freedom Act, which served as the basis to deny Narendra Modi a United States visa.
In the fall of 2002, an Indian-born, Washington-based evangelical Christian named John Prabhudoss led a delegation to riot-affected Ahmedabad that included two Republican congressmen, Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania and Mr. Wolf. Another person on the trip was Raju Rajagopal, an Indian-born retired health professional based in Berkeley, Calif.
“It was unimaginable what we saw in Gujarat,” Mr. Rajagopal said. “People in Gujarat told us that Indian Americans were sending loads of money to groups like the R.S.S. and the V.H.P.” that, he argued, had a role in fueling the violence, Mr. Rajagopal said. He was referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, two Hindu nationalist groups founded in 1925 and 1964, respectively.
In a report on violence against women during the 2002 Gujarat riots, written by a collection of Gujarat-based nongovernmental organizations known as Citizen Initiative, the authors found that the violence followed “an escalation of tension and build-up by the V.H.P. and the Bajrang Dal,” another Hindu nationalist group.
In a report in 2002, Human Rights Watch described a letter, bearing the name and logo of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, that called for an economic boycott of Muslims in Gujarat, creating a climate of fear. However, Human Rights Watch acknowledged that the letter could not be traced and that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad denied authorship.
When Mr. Rajagopal returned to California, he began to campaign against the American support for Hindu nationalist groups in India like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. He co-wrote a 91-page report that alleged that the India Development and Relief Fund, which was based in the United States, had collected $4 million and sent some of the funds to right-wing Hindu groups.
Soon after the release of the report, Silicon Valley companies with large numbers of Indian-American employees promised to either stop or suspend donor matching programs with the fund.
“It was a tremendous victory and it gave us momentum to keep fighting,” Mr. Rajagopal said.
The report also did something else — it created a network of activists across the United States who could be quickly mobilized when they learned of Mr. Modi’s planned visit to the country in 2005.
“When we heard about Modi’s visit, we were ready,” Mr. Rajagopal said. “Actually, we had been ready and waiting for Modi’s visit for a few years.”
In early 2005, Mr. Prabhudoss learned that the Asian American Hotel Owners Association was sponsoring a conference in south Florida in late March 2005 and had invited then-Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the TV talk show host Chris Matthews and Mr. Modi. The association was created in 1989 as a trade group for hotel owners in the United States, and today there are 10,000 members representing 22,000 hotels. The group’s chairman, Nash Patel, said at the time that 98 percent of the group’s members had roots in Gujarat.
Soon after Mr. Modi’s United States visit was announced, 41 South Asian groups across the country came together to form the Coalition Against Genocide. On Feb. 24, 2005, a letter organized by the group was signed by over 100 professors and sent to the hotel association, asking them to rescind Mr. Modi’s invitation. Another pressure group flooded Mr. Matthews with letters.
On March 8, 2005, Mr. Matthews backed out of the conference for “scheduling reasons.” On March 15, Amnesty International said it had written a letter to American Express asking it to withdraw its sponsorship of the conference.
Mr. Prabhudoss focused on Washington. “If this was going to work, we had to make a legal and not a political argument as to why the United States should deny a visa to Modi,” he said. He zeroed in on the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which stipulates that no person who has violated religious freedom could enter the country.
He knew he could count on Mr. Pitts, the Republican lawmaker who accompanied him on a visit to Gujarat in 2002, but he had a tough time convincing Democrats to block Mr. Modi’s visa.
“We needed a Democrat so the White House could say there is bipartisan support against Modi,” Mr. Prabhudoss said. He hired two professional Democratic lobbyists to assist him with his efforts, for an amount Mr. Prabhudoss declined to disclose.
Mr. Prabhudoss found an ally in John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan who is the longest serving African-American member of Congress and has a large Arab and Muslim constituency.
On March 16, 2005, House Resolution 160 was introduced in Congress, condemning Mr. Modi “for his actions to incite religious persecution.” On March 18, the State Department denied Mr. Modi a visa. Three days later, the United States ambassador to India, David C. Mulford, said, “This decision applies to Mr. Narendra Modi only. It is based on the fact that, as head of the state government in Gujarat between February 2002 and May 2002, he was responsible for the performance of state institutions at that time.”
People waiting to hear Narendra Modi talk at a rally in Jammu city, Jammu and Kashmir, on Sunday.
Channi Anand/Associated Press
People waiting to hear Narendra Modi talk at a rally in Jammu city, Jammu and Kashmir, on Sunday.
Mr. Modi called the visa denial in 2005 “an attack on Indian sovereignty” and raised the question, “Will India also consider what America has done in Iraq when it processes visa applications of Americans coming to India?”
Despite the success in denying Mr. Modi a United States visa, disillusionment quickly set in for Mr. Rajagopal, the retired California businessman who accompanied Mr. Prabhudoss to Gujarat in 2002.
“The frustrating thing was that the visa denial was probably the only thing really dealt a blow to Modi,” he said. “I just wish it had been brought about by a large, secular coalition. I am not so sure that is true. The thing that made a difference was the right-wing evangelical support.”
Mr. Prabhudoss acknowledged that evangelical support played a big part but said that Mr. Modi was denied a visa for other reasons as well.
“Back then, we were working without any opposition. It was incredible, really,” Mr. Prabhudoss said. “The Modi supporters were there, but they sat that one out. And back then, the Indian lobby was not powerful like they are today. You could speak against Modi and there were no political consequences. Today, it is a completely different story.”
Joseph Grieboski, the founder of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy in Virginia, who also was deeply involved in trying to block Mr. Modi’s visit, said that the mood has shifted now.
“When the U.S. denied Mr. Modi a visa in 2005, it was like the U.S. denying a visa to the governor of Iowa — no offense to Gujarat,” he said. “The U.S. did not see it as a big deal. And back then, it seemed clear to everyone in this town that Modi was involved in the riots. Now the picture is fuzzier, and many are intrigued by Modi.”
But the American government’s stance on Mr. Modi remains the same. Two days after Mr. Modi was selected on Sept. 13, 2013 as the official prime ministerial candidate to represent the B.J.P., the United States government reiterated its policy on Mr. Modi’s visa.
“There’s no change in our longstanding visa policy,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman. “He is welcome to apply for a visa and await a review like any other applicant.”
These days, however, religious freedom is no longer a foreign policy priority in Washington, and the strong evangelical Christian opposition to Mr. Modi has faded.
While Republicans led the opposition to Mr. Modi’s visa in 2005, there are now Republicans among Mr. Modi’s strongest supporters. When the Tea Party candidate Joe Walsh campaigned in Illinois for Congress, he promised he would push the United States to grant Mr. Modi a visa. (He lost to his Democratic challenger, Tammy Duckworth.)
In March, three Republicans members of Congress visited Mr. Modi in Gujarat, including Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state. The trip for Ms. McMorris Rodgers and her husband cost $15,000 and was paid for by the co-founder of the National Indian American Public Policy Institute, Shalli Kumar, a supporter of Mr. Modi based in Chicago.
But the opposition to Mr. Modi continues to be led by Republicans as well, in particular by Mr. Pitts and Mr. Wolf. In November, Mr. Pitts introduced House Resolution 417, which urges the United States government to continue to deny Mr. Modi a visa. Notably, the resolution has 28 co-sponsors, the majority of them Democrats.
The resolution is not expected to pass, partly because India is not seen as a priority in American foreign policy at the moment. When I conducted research in Washington this summer, many House and Senate aides said they had no idea who Mr. Modi was. Those who did know told me they would make up their minds about Mr. Modi when next year’s elections in India are decided.
Despite his rising profile in India, there is still little interest in Mr. Modi in Washington. This may be a harder pill for Mr. Modi to swallow: It is not that he is hated or loved in Washington; he is just not mentioned much.
What has shifted, however, is that the Indian lobby is much more powerful today than it previously was. “There is no Modi lobby,” said a former colleague of mine from Amnesty International, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. “There is an Indian lobby, and they do not want to hear any criticism of India, whether it be on the Delhi rape case or on the Modi issue. They just want to hear good things about India.”
Others I spoke with, especially Indian Americans in the United States government, said they are anxious to see how the issue plays out.
One of them, who was appointed to a senior position by President Obama, agreed to meet me at a cafe in Washington but asked to remain anonymous because this official was not authorized to speak to the media.
“I know it is a cliché,” the official said, “but our talking point on India has always been, ‘India and the U.S. are both democracies that share the same values.’ You cannot really apply that statement to Modi. If Modi becomes prime minister, I guess we will have to come up with something new to say.”
Zahir Janmohamed, a writer from the United States, lives in Ahmedabad.
I have a textile engineer cousin who is otherwise above average in terms of GK. He read an article about LCA a few days back and believed that it is world's best plane. Now he strongly believes that if NM comes to power he will build (hold your breath) 5000 LCAs in 5 years and show a middle finger to everyone including china and USGus wrote:people who post a lot of 'modi should do this..modi should do that' are in for a rude shock when he does gets to power.
he's most certainly not going to "kick USG where it hurts".
.Before we know the answer to that, the first question is 'where does it hurt most to USG?'Gus wrote:people who post a lot of 'modi should do this..modi should do that' are in for a rude shock when he does gets to power.
he's most certainly not going to "kick USG where it hurts".
India should also consider withdrawing from the commonwealth club. No point in staying this 'ode to past' glorifying the British empire's rule over 2/5th of the globe.Rudradev wrote:That is exactly why I believe NaMo should personally take charge of relations with PRC at a summit level!
When it comes to the US and European countries-- the investment climate NaMo generates in India will itself be enough to bring their MNCs beating a path to OUR door. The corporate lobbies in these countries will themselves become India's primary lever of influence there. Meanwhile, the deep-state apparatus in places like Washington and London are so completely, intrinsically biased against India that no amount of personal visiting and wooing by any Indian leader will charm them out of their positions. So, no use going and attending White House/ 10 Downing St. "state dinners" unless very special circumstances arise to demand NaMo's personal presence there. That sort of thing is only for MMS type performing-monkeys who want to elevate their profiles among the Dilli Billi chattering class.
