Bharat Rakshak

vinod wrote:

Manish_Sharma wrote:
Did he say it immediately then and there to Blinker's face OR later on some other platform?



Staying mum at that time shows weakness, timidity!

What is the damage?
When you are put on spot, I would prefer a well thought out response than a blurted one.
.

Cain Marko wrote:Agreed. It's better to say something with a cool head. Having said this, one would expect that an elite product of the foreign service have the presence of mind to not let such moments slide. Nevertheless SJs late response was a step up from previous FMs.

Behind the exchange of words on the state of human rights in each other’s countries between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a more intense battle being fought in the corridors of United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) as it prepares a report to be submitted to the US State Department on April 25.

Twice in the past successive years, the USCIRF wanted the US State Department to treat India as a “Country of Particular Concern (CPC)” which would bracket it with egregious human rights abusers such as China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.And, both times two different US administrations have rejected its recommendation and kept India a rung below the red list.

This time the battle within USCIRF on the India chapter is more intense than in the past amidst insider accounts that one USCIRF Commissioner has “been turned” and is understood to be insisting on several changes in the draft under preparation.

On Wednesday, Jaishankar held a press conference in Washington to rebut Blinken’s comments a day earlier. Stating that human rights issue was not a topic of discussion during the India-US 2+2 ministerial meeting, Jaishankar said people were entitled to have views about India but “we also take our views on other people’s human rights situation, including that of the US.”

Zynda wrote:Battle within US panel on religious freedom on putting India on Red List


This time the battle within USCIRF on the India chapter is more intense than in the past amidst insider accounts that one USCIRF Commissioner has “been turned” and is understood to be insisting on several changes in the draft under preparation.

@vtchakarova:

Keep in mind that Biden’s administration is currently appeasing China while antagonizing India #geopolitics
https://twitter.com/vtchakarova/status/ ... p1Fmw&s=19

@DharmicFundoo:

USA couldn't live with another white nation in competition for influence in the white world (Russia).

USA can also not live with another strong democratic nation in competition for the freedom & morality narrative for the democratic world (India)

Godless authoritarian China welcome
https://twitter.com/DharmicFundoo/statu ... a4OwA&s=19

g.sarkar wrote:Udduji,
I hope that the US in their state of absolute ignorance and frustration with India, does not plan a regime change, as it has tried to do in many countries.
Gautam

https://twitter.com/AnasMallick/status/ ... lcxkw&s=19
US congresswoman @IlhanMN to arrive in Islamabad tomorrow, she will be visiting Lahore and Azad Kashmir as well and will meet country’s senior leadership. #Pakistan

@Daeroplate_v2:

its got to have gotus approval or encouragement at some level. when was the last time a congressman visited POK esp someone already so controversial.

attack dog has been unleashed to 'punish' India for other things.
https://twitter.com/daeroplate_v2/statu ... lrDrA&s=19

g.sarkar wrote:I missed this. Slightly older, but still relevant:
https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/indias- ... or-the-us/

......Similarly, the U.S. support to India during the 1965 war against Pakistan and reluctance to back Pakistan in the Kargil War in 1999 all failed to penetrate the Indian public memory, another missed opportunity for U.S. public diplomacy.
......
Gautam
Muhsin Puthan Purayil is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at University of Hyderabad, India.

On an array of issues and norms of importance to the Biden administration, India’s position is more akin to that of China than the US.

When he took office last year, Biden was expected to focus on the threat from China and build a coalition of democracies against it. Early in his term, Biden hosted a Summit of Democracy toward that end. India was invited to that summit and was also positioned as a key partner in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

Then, Russia invaded Ukraine and everything changed overnight.

Last Sunday, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan outlined America’s three key objectives in light of this new crisis: “a free and independent Ukraine, a weakened and isolated Russia and a stronger, more unified, more determined West.”

But if isolating Russia is now a key policy objective in Washington, India is an important obstacle. In response to these efforts, India has begun talks with Moscow to explore ways to sidestep Western sanctions, including by trading in their own currencies. Prior to the war, Russia was only a marginal energy supplier to India. But in March and April of this year alone, India has signed contracts to import more oil from Russia than it did in 2021.

Coal is in fact even more important than oil — it is the largest export commodity from Russia to India. Early this month, the European Commission proposed banning Russian coal as part of its isolation efforts. Yet, India imported more Russian coal in March than it had in any month since January 2020. India has announced that it plans to double those imports in order to bolster its steel industry.

The problem for Washington is that India has robust economic reasons to defy the West and continue such trade with Russia. And if India is indeed a U.S. ally against China, then such trade is also in Washington’s own interest, given that it would strengthen India’s hand. Cheap energy and commodities from Russia are increasingly vital for India’s post-pandemic recovery — to jumpstart an economy that was ravaged by a devastating second wave of COVID-19 infections last year. In addition, Russian arms — which still make up 60 percent of India’s artillery — are crucial in any war with China.

But Biden also has an even more fundamental question to answer: Is India really a reliable ally against China?

Critics argue that a persistent border dispute will keep India hostile to China, and thereby still give the U.S. an incentive to prop New Delhi up against Beijing. But that specter may not be as permanent as one would think. For Beijing, these serendipitous ideological commonalities are an opportunity to exploit.

As he looks set to return to office for an unprecedented third term later this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping might want to take a longer view of Chinese foreign policy. That would involve establishing China as a clear rival to the Western liberal order, building a coalition of allies for that cause, and possibly strengthening Beijing’s hand in Taiwan as it has sought to do in Hong Kong over the last few years.

In light of these challenges, troubles on the border with India — especially in the context of diminishing common ground between Washington and New Delhi — are distractive at best and destructive at worst. Last month, China conveyed to India that it seeks a broader partnership in Asia. That may become extremely alluring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi if Xi is willing to make meaningful compromises on the border.

For Biden, these shifting sands in Asia present a number of policy dilemmas that will not be easy to solve.

Dilbu wrote:Biden’s Problem With India

On an array of issues and norms of importance to the Biden administration, India’s position is more akin to that of China than the US.

When he took office last year, Biden was expected to focus on the threat from China and build a coalition of democracies against it. Early in his term, Biden hosted a Summit of Democracy toward that end. India was invited to that summit and was also positioned as a key partner in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

.

Pratyush wrote:
The US created a circumstance in which they have pushed Russians in a destructive path. Once the Russians have started walking that path, the US is systematically closing all avenues for a deescalation.

How does India know that India will not be pushed in a similar circumstance in favour of PRC or TSP.

kit wrote:

Dilbu wrote:Biden’s Problem With India

properly cultivated India could be China's biggest ally and enhance its own national strength. Why is it that they cannot realise that its not the US but India who is going to be their biggest trading partner in a couple of decades?

An idea to ponder is whether a democratic China is better for India or a communist one

Just like China . India is key to the new geopolitical game

n February, as Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border and Russian missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities, India equivocated. Its representatives at the UN abstained on 12 resolutions condemning the invasion. Its initial statements at the Security Council were decidedly mealy-mouthed: its UN ambassador did not mention Russia by name, nor did he criticize the war. India’s foreign ministry expressed a curious evenhandedness, seeking “de-escalation,” as if both countries were belligerents, and pleading for a “return” to “the path of diplomatic negotiations and dialogue.” Despite the rhetorical care the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has adopted to appear neutral, the time may have come for India, in its own interest, to rethink its stance. Sharp criticism at home and abroad appears to have prompted India to take steps in that direction. It has toughened its language and reiterated the principles of international law it has traditionally upheld: respect for the UN Charter and the sovereignty of states, the inviolability of borders, and opposition to the use of force to resolve political issues. By hardening its tone while refraining from full-fledged repudiation, New Delhi is signaling to Moscow that even if it is unwilling to condemn its old friend, it does not exactly approve of its actions either. Thus a stance that began with equivocation has progressed to mild disappointment. Some have argued that the war in Ukraine will “consolidate a global alliance that unites democracies against Russia and China,” as the scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands wrote in Foreign Affairs. There is an element of wishful thinking in that proposition, which overlooks, as the Indian diplomat Shivshankar Menon pointed out in response, “Asia’s sense of its own difference—its focus on stability, trade, and the bottom line that has served Asian countries so well in the last 40 years.” But it would be wrong to look at the reluctance to take sides that India and other developing countries in Asia have shown and conclude that a faraway war in Europe simply does not matter to the rest of the world. India’s dilemma is more complicated than its repeated abstentions on the Ukraine question imply, and it illustrates why the world order cannot simply remain what it was before the invasion

A RISING TRAJECTORY
India has spent the twenty-first century seeking to establish itself as a major player on the world stage. As galloping economic growth drew a level of attention the country had not experienced since the 1950s, India asserted itself on a variety of fronts. It became a founding member of the G-20 when that organization was established in 1999; concluded a nuclear deal with the United States in 2005 that was portrayed as enshrining an “Indian exception”; took over the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2006, dubbing itself “the world’s fastest-growing free market democracy”; won then President Barack Obama’s endorsement of India’s claims to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2010; got the UN to adopt an International Day of Yoga in 2015, showcasing its cultural soft power; and joined the quadrilateral security dialogue with the United States,Australia, and Japan known as the Quad. That last development also marked a change in the way American officials referred to the region, speaking of “the Indo-Pacific” rather than “the Asia-Pacific.” After decades of marginalization, India became a force to be reckoned with, a player of consequence in global councils, and a growing regional counterweight to an increasingly assertive China.

Now, however, the West has implied that there could be consequences for India’s ambivalence. Shortly after the invasion, U.S. President Joe Biden warned, “Any nation that countenances Russia's naked aggression against Ukraine will be stained by association.” And in a virtual meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in early April, he pressed India to align itself with the United States on this issue. Despite a number of statements by Western visitors to New Delhi expressing understanding for the Indian position, India seems out of step with the passions felt in the West. According to Indian publications including ThePrint, Germany is considering disinviting India to meetings on the sidelines of the G-7 summit, solely because of its stance on Ukraine. While the German government has denied those rumors, such reports have heightened apprehensions among Indians that their country has damaged its standing and marginalized itself in the eyes of its valued partners. The irony is that India has never needed Russia less. Yes, India depends on Russia militarily, with the Kremlin supplying some 45 percent of its weaponry and defense equipment. But that share is down from 75 percent a decade ago, and India has diversified its purchases to include U.S., French, and Israeli armaments. Yes, the Indian government has a history of relying on Russian support when problems with Pakistan and China—notably over Kashmir—come to a head. But support from the United States has meant that India no longer needs a Russian veto at the Security Council to keep Kashmir off the agenda.

Moscow, moreover, has become ever less reliable as it gravitates closer to Beijing, which India’s hostile neighbor and traditional antagonist, Pakistan, calls its “all-weather friend.” Russia has even conducted military exercises in Pakistan—which began in territory India claims—and on the very day the invasion of Ukraine began, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was welcomed in Moscow for meetings.

INDIA SHOULDN’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS
Washington’s interest in India was always predicated on the justification of “shared values” between the two democracies—the world’s largest and the world’s oldest, as U.S. presidents never tire of reiterating. Before the invasion, whether or not the fledgling “community of democracies”—Biden’s democracy-promotion effort—would ever constitute themselves into a formal alliance, many in Washington argued that a democratic India deserved U.S. support for what it was, not only for what it might provide. It was in the United States’ interest to shore up and facilitate the influence of a regional power that stood for the same democratic norms as the West. A secular and democratic India, committed to the rule of law and the liberal international order, was thought to be an invaluable partner in global governance.

This was the implicit deal, and it was a good one for India, opening up markets, supply lines, and global influence for New Delhi, as well as the new partnership of the Quad. The recent wishy-washiness on Ukraine, however, has raised fundamental questions about the extent of India’s commitment to those norms. At a time when the world media had woken up to the increasing signs of Modi’s illiberalism—the respected V-Dem Institute has suggested that India had turned from a “liberal democracy” into an “elected autocracy”—the country’s stand on Ukraine has raised fresh questions as to whether this Indian government genuinely shares the democratic assumptions that merited Western support. An India behaving increasingly undemocratically at home could hardly be expected to make common cause with democracies worldwide.

One way for India to salvage its reputation in the West would be to leverage its nonaligned position to play peacemaker on Ukraine. So far, it hasn’t tried to do so, even while Israel and Turkey have. Ahead of the first Security Council debate on the war, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted that in a call to his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, he had asked “India to use all influence in its relations with Russia to force it to cease military aggression against Ukraine.” Clearly, New Delhi’s influence with Moscow did not extend that far. India’s strategic autonomy had not won it such an influential role on the world stage.


India’s lack of influence on Russia and failure to take a clear stand on the war have also undermined its case for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. As it happens, India is currently serving a two-year term as a nonpermanent member of the council; it was from that perch that it abstained on the resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. That decision makes it harder to argue that India would advocate a liberal vision of world order if it were given a permanent seat.Those who have put a gloss on India’s temporizing as a refusal to fall into the logic of what Menon calls a “global Manichaean struggle” overlook the very real interests that are at stake. The inexorable rise of China is a new geopolitical factor that India, which shares a 2,200-mile disputed border with China, cannot ignore. As recently as June 2020, Chinese troops killed 20 Indian soldiers in a mountainous region of the Himalayas that both countries claim as part of their territory.

It is true that India, a founder of the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, has historically been allergic to alliances and disinclined to put all its strategic eggs in one star-spangled basket. But China’s recent belligerence has made it increasingly necessary for India to make common cause with others—to use their collective diplomatic, geopolitical, and military leverage to limit Beijing’s ambitions and constrain how much it can get away with. At a time when Russia, weakened by its Ukrainian misadventure, risks becoming a satellite state of a rising Chinese imperium,reliance on Russia makes even less sense in the future. With Pakistan already reduced to a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, the potential emergence of a hostile axis on India’s borders points to the imperative need for New Delhi to find and shore up its own partnerships.

The Ukraine war may indeed, as Menon suggests, have underscored the “fundamental incoherence” of “the free world.” But one of the results of the war is bound to be an increasing coherence, as nations aroused from their slumber dust themselves off and rearrange the global furniture. If Russia can do this to a neighbor and get away with it, China could easily try the same approach next. An India that equivocated on Ukraine cannot blame others for responding with the same indifference if China decided to teach it a lesson and redraw the Chinese-Indian border by force.Before the Ukraine crisis, the United States had seemed to be more focused on the global threat from China, and the Indo-Pacific had loomed larger in Washington’s concerns than Europe. At that time, Washington might well have been inclined to give an increasingly illiberal India a free pass for the sake of shoring it up against China. That has now changed with the renewed focus on Europe and Western determination to resist Russian assertiveness at all costs—and it is not to India’s advantage. Today, the United States might well be tempted to put containing China behind its interests in Europe—and then norms and values matter more, for they are all that undergird the West’s interest in India. An increasingly autocratic, antiminority Modi government at home might find itself the object of greater Western criticism rather than the recipient of enhanced Western support.Worse, China could take advantage of the situation by forcibly attempting to absorb parts of its disputed border with India while the world is distracted by the war in Ukraine. If, as Menon suggests, “geopolitical disputes and security dilemmas that could affect the global order are concentrated in maritime Asia,” that is all the more reason why India needs the West. The Quad has been weakened by India’s failure to go along with its other three members on Ukraine and on challenging the emerging geopolitical convergence between China and Russia. India finds itself in a position where its traditional reluctance to choose sides on any major international question could come back to haunt it—when it wants other nations to choose its side.

India, like France, will always cherish a prickly independence, but also like France, it cannot easily do without “the free world,” because the enemies of freedom are its own enemies, too. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has indeed opened up new fault lines that prompt clear strategic choices.India—and other nations far away from Ukraine but falling under China’s shadow—will have to make choices in their own interest that they have so far preferred to evade. At the UN, one of India’s pieties was that the developments in Ukraine “had the potential to undermine peace and security in the region.” It is becoming increasingly clear that they also have the potential to undermine India’s own peace and security—in the region and beyond.

Vayutuvan wrote:Mohammed Zeeshan, Columbia masters in international relations. writes for deccan herald among others.

vmalik wrote:If US puts sanctions on India, isn't that a good thing? BJP can finally take out all the garbage that is being funded by 3 lettered gora agencies. I mean, sure the economy is going to tank but that seems kind of pointless at this stage as RoPers, nationwide, are starting to getting antsy as 2024 approaches. Next decade isn't looking pretty anyways, internal security wise.

Ambar wrote:The puppets are tumbling out of every closet, drawer and cupboard in the room !

Here's the latest one in Foreign Affairs magazine by our esteemed Shashi Tharoor

Modi’s Big Mistake
How Neutrality on Ukraine Weakens India

There is an element of wishful thinking in that proposition, which overlooks, as the Indian diplomat Shivshankar Menon pointed out in response, “Asia’s sense of its own difference—its focus on stability, trade, and the bottom line that has served Asian countries so well in the last 40 years.” But it would be wrong to look at the reluctance to take sides that India and other developing countries in Asia have shown and conclude that a faraway war in Europe simply does not matter to the rest of the world. India’s dilemma is more complicated than its repeated abstentions on the Ukraine question imply, and it illustrates why the world order cannot simply remain what it was before the invasion

A RISING TRAJECTORY
India has spent the twenty-first century seeking to establish itself as a major player on the world stage. As galloping economic growth drew a level of attention the country had not experienced since the 1950s, India asserted itself on a variety of fronts. It became a founding member of the G-20 when that organization was established in 1999; That last development also marked a change in the way American officials referred to the region, speaking of “the Indo-Pacific” rather than “the Asia-Pacific.” After decades of marginalization, India became a force to be reckoned with, a player of consequence in global councils, and a growing regional counterweight to an increasingly assertive China.

Now, however, the West has implied that there could be consequences for India’s ambivalence. The irony is that India has never needed Russia less. Yes, India depends on Russia militarily, with the Kremlin supplying some 45 percent of its weaponry and defense equipment. But that share is down from 75 percent a decade ago, and India has diversified its purchases to include U.S., French, and Israeli armaments. Yes, the Indian government has a history of relying on Russian support when problems with Pakistan and China—notably over Kashmir—come to a head. But support from the United States has meant that India no longer needs a Russian veto at the Security Council to keep Kashmir off the agenda.


India, like France, will always cherish a prickly independence, but also like France, it cannot easily do without “the free world,” because the enemies of freedom are its own enemies, too. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has indeed opened up new fault lines that prompt clear strategic choices.India—and other nations far away from Ukraine but falling under China’s shadow—will have to make choices in their own interest that they have so far preferred to evade. At the UN, one of India’s pieties was that the developments in Ukraine “had the potential to undermine peace and security in the region.” It is becoming increasingly clear that they also have the potential to undermine India’s own peace and security—in the region and beyond.

Cyrano wrote:Shampoo boy predictably missed the point that "Any nation that blindly stands alongside America will be burned by association." Couldn't read the rest of his grovelling drivel.

U.S. President Joe Biden's deputy national security adviser, Daleep Singh, a key architect of global sanctions against Russia, plans to take an extended leave of absence in the near future, two people briefed on the situation said on Tuesday.

Singh is taking the leave to deal with a family issue, one of the people said. It is unclear exactly when his leave will start or end.
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