India as a future super power? 🇮🇳

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This guy kept it real. Stop chasing headlines like a superficial groupie.


www.livemint.com

How to survive if you don’t feel proud of our Moon feat

India is right in its space pursuit but success needn’t mean the country’s global prestige has gone up
www.livemint.com


I do not feel any pride in India’s Moon landing. It did bring me low-grade joy, like an Indian victory in Test cricket against Bangladesh. But pride is a giant emotion. I wonder what made the others proud? Did they imagine that they share the same genes as the scientists who planned the mission? Or did they elect excellent space-faring politicians? Or maybe they are beautiful hive-minds, who not only feel pride, but also shame when India does shameful things? Or maybe they donated money to the space programme? Or, maybe they sacrificed their well-being by asking their children to pick space science and seek government jobs instead of pursuing computer science and emigrating. Why were they proud? What is this thing called pride? Maybe their localities have excellent roads that do not resemble the lunar surface, and the same government that sent metal to the Moon has also figured out how to keep traffic signals working and runs excellent hospitals, or has cleaned the air of cancerous particles? Maybe the joy in pride is not thinking so much about it; maybe thinking is the enemy of feeling. You cannot feel anything if you also want clarity.

What India’s Moon landing tells me though is that if India can do it, many nations can. And if they don’t because it is too expensive, then it means they pay their people high wages, while India underpays its scientists and just about anybody down the chain. There is an entertaining piece of data that says that every Moon mission of India has been cheaper than a typical Hollywood big-budget film set in outer space. But I do not believe these missions are as cheap as India officially claims. I suspect they are subsidized in ways that are not apparent on paper. In any case, as an amiable Indian rocket scientist himself told me once, rocket science is an easy form of science; not trivial, but still easier than solving malaria or other major scientific efforts. Rocket science, oddly, is no rocket science....



If India wants its space-faring to lend it a certain scientific heft in global perception, it needs to do a host of mundane things first, like create a more orderly nation. As of now, if anyone lands in Delhi, or worse, in Mumbai, or by even worse misfortune, Bangalore, the full civic dysfunction of the country is apparent in no time.

Also, India continues to be in the news for things that usually happen in some of the most backward regions in the world. In that light, India’s ability to land on the Moon takes away the veneer of sophistication from such missions.
 
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www.thetimes.co.uk

China builds bunkers, airfields and missile bases along disputed border with India

China is accelerating its network of underground bunkers and tunnels in disputed territory on the border with India, raising the prospect of a military escalation between the nuclear powers
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk

China builds bunkers, airfields and missile bases along disputed border with India

Both Delhi and Beijing have been deepening their relative footholds in the contested region. Two years ago China’s legislature passed a law which said that authorities should “promote coordination between border defence and social, economic development in border areas”.

Images from the US satellite firm, Maxar, show a new build-up of Chinese infrastructure in another disputed area called Aksai Chin, which is around 40 miles from the border. The photographs show bunkers and tunnels being dug into the hillside, which military experts say are designed to protect Chinese armaments and troops from air attacks by the Indian Air Force.

“Such infrastructure indicates preparations for an eventuality of hostilities,” Rakesh Sharmahe, a retired lieutenant general in the Indian army told the Hindustan Times. He added that China had been creating roads, oil pipelines, communications systems, housing for troops and storage for equipment over the past three years.

Both sides lay claim to territory on either side of the frontier in a dispute that has festered since the countries went to war in 1962. Three years ago tensions flared when Chinese troops crossed the border in eastern Ladakh to seize strategic positions.


Three years ago tensions flared when Chinese troops crossed the border in eastern Ladakh to seize strategic positions.

Soldiers from both sides died in the resulting clashes, bringing India and China the closest they have been to war in almost 70 years. Frequent clashes followed, though with fewer fatalities.

The two sides clashed in June 2020 when Chinese troops crossed the Line of Actual Control to seize strategic positions

GETTY IMAGES

At the recent Brics summit in Johannesburg, an “informal conversation” about the border row took place between India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and President Xi of China. The pair reportedly failed to come to any agreement, with Beijing briefing reporters that Modi had asked for the meeting while Delhi said it was China’s suggestion.

Modi is understood to have told Xi that restoring peace on the border and respecting the LAC was essential for normalising relations. However, this week the border dispute escalated again after Beijing issued a map that included the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin in China.

China claims that Arunachal Pradesh is part of Tibet; in the past it has renamed Indian villages and protested when Indian officials visited the state. China also claims that Aksai Chin (most of which it controls) is Chinese. India has historically considered the region its own.

President Xi, second from left, and Narendra Modi, second from right, had an informal conversation at the Brics summit but did not come to any agreement

EPA

“This is an old habit of theirs,” said Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s minister of external affairs. “Making absurd claims does not make other people’s territories yours.”

The photos and map put Modi under greater pressure from opposition parties, who since 2020 have mocked him for “surrendering” Indian land and “sleeping while China was preparing for war”.

Asaduddin Owaisi, an Indian politician with the Aimim party, said: “China’s preparations on the border should be sending alarm bells within the government. India’s response cannot be weak and timid. We need to stand up to China. But we have a PM who can’t call out China by name and a government that stalls all discussions in parliament on the subject.”

The Indian opposition has urged Modi to rebuke Xi and “expose China’s transgressions” at the G20 meeting

AP

The tensions also threaten to upset India’s hosting of the G20 in September where it is thought Xi will attend. The Congress party has urged Modi to rebuke Xi and “expose China’s transgressions” at the summit.

Retired naval commodore C Uday Bhaskar told The Times that the construction on the border and the map were a clear case of China “raising the temperature for India and Modi in the run-up to G20”.

“India has been firm about wanting a return of the status quo,” said Bhaskar. “There is also the fact that India’s standing is being showcased at G20. This is an attempt to put India on the defensive at the summit.”
 
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Making Sure 1.4 Billion People Are Very Aware India Is Hosting the G20

With wall-to-wall promotion and a barnstorming flair, India’s governing party is milking the lead-up to this weekend’s summit for all it’s worth.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Making Sure 1.4 Billion People Are Very Aware India Is Hosting the G20
With wall-to-wall promotion and a barnstorming flair, India’s governing party is milking the lead-up to this weekend’s summit for all it’s worth.

Sept. 5, 2023
A worker waters plants in front of a hotel. Behind the worker is a sign promoting the G20 meeting.
India’s G20 logo features a lotus, also the symbol of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.Harish Tyagi/EPA, via Shutterstock
Sign up for The Interpreter newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Original analysis on the week’s biggest global stories, from columnist Amanda Taub.

In cities across India, the beaming face of Prime Minister Narendra Modi adorns giant posters promoting the country’s G20 presidency. A hundred national monuments, including the Red Fort in Delhi, were illuminated with the G20 logo to encourage people to post selfies. Government reading lessons inform students that India is a fitting G20 host because it is “the Fountain Head of Democracy.”

To behold the advertising and public relations blitz that the Indian government has mounted as it prepares to hold the Group of 20 summit this weekend, one might think India had been personally anointed by its peers, rather than merely being next up in the hosting rotation.

But India, and its governing party, were primed to capitalize on the moment.

The G20 has arrived just as India is asserting itself as a rising geopolitical and economic force, courted by an array of global powers and offering itself up as a leader and model for developing nations. Mr. Modi has seized on the G20 presidency as confirmation and celebration of India’s ascent — a rise to which he has fused his own image — as he seeks a third term in an election early next year.

Mr. Modi has been a master political marketer ever since his time as a state leader, “and now he is also making good use of the G20,” said Neerja Chowdhury, a political analyst and editor. “That India has arrived on the world stage will go strongly in his favor with the electorate.”

To the prime minister’s opponents, the promotional barrage has been an unseemly political hijacking of an international gathering intended to foster economic cooperation. India’s G20 logo features a lotus, the symbol of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. At a launch event for the logo, he proclaimed that even at a time of global crisis, “the lotus still blooms.”

Narendra Modi, wearing a yellow turban, walks in front of a group of people. The railing next to him is adorned with colorful flowers.
Opposition leaders have criticized Mr. Modi and his party for using the G20 summit to promote his own image.Harish Tyagi/EPA, via Shutterstock
Television shows and newspapers in the B.J.P.-dominated media landscape have raved nonstop about India’s moment in the spotlight. The government is reported to have spent more than $100 million on over 200 G20-related events across dozens of Indian cities, a level of fanfare that has redefined — perhaps uneasily for future hosts — what it means to hold the G20 presidency.

The events have taken on the feel of a barnstorming carnival and, in effect, have allowed Mr. Modi to start campaigning long before the start of the political season. If Mr. Modi’s party reaps political dividends from the G20, it is well deserved, his lieutenants say.

“Why shouldn’t G20 be used for domestic politics? If G20 has come to the country during Modi-ji’s time and it is completed with success, then Modi-ji must get credit,” Amit Shah, the home minister, told an Indian news outlet in February, using an honorific with Mr. Modi’s name.

B.J.P. politicians have said that the G20 is a chance to show the “best face” of this country of 1.4 billion people.

Delegates at the events leading up to the summit have been treated to an array of Indian delights. Guests who visited Kashmir received walnuts, saffron and papier-mâché gifts. They were also taken to famed Mughal gardens and for boat rides on a pristine lake in an effort to project an air of normalcy in the restive Himalayan territory, where democracy has been suspended for the whole of Mr. Modi’s second term.

In Gujarat, his home state, delegates were kept entertained between meetings with fashion shows and a night featuring local dance. Delegates participated in a yoga session in the south Indian temple town of Hampi and went on quaint heritage walks to palaces and forts in the central Indian city of Indore.

Small boats are lit up as people float along a calm lake during the evening.
Delegates from the G20 on a lake in Kashmir in May.Mukhtar Khan/Associated Press
At the Taj Mahal, a vertical garden was set up so V.I.P.s could take selfies. One of its supposed benefits was to keep away the stench from nearby drains. But the garden collapsed, a victim of a “monkey attack,” according to a government official.

Even humble millet — India is the world’s largest producer — has found itself in the G20 spotlight. A millet-heavy menu, including in dosas and pancakes, will greet delegates this weekend at hotels and restaurants across New Delhi.

Schools are getting in the G20 spirit, too. Teachers have been instructed to organize quizzes and essay- and slogan-writing competitions. Government reading materials — titled “Let Us Learn About Group of Twenty” — encourage students to “write a letter to the Prime Minister of India suggesting him an important idea, point or action” in the G20 agenda. The materials also point to democracy’s deep roots in India, even as the country has taken an authoritarian turn under Mr. Modi.

As many other places have done before hosting a major international event, India has been tidying up and taking steps to ensure visitors’ comfort.

An action plan to keep away deadly dengue-carrying mosquitoes includes “drone-based vector surveillance and concurrent anti-larval spray in the drains.” Cutouts of large monkeys have been installed to keep away the packs of smaller monkeys that sometimes harass people. Videos emerged of municipal workers violently dragging away stray dogs to clear the areas.

The Indian government has bulldozed homeless shelters, slums and illegal encroachments in New Delhi and put them behind white barricades and green shade nets in cities like Mumbai and Vishakhapatnam.

A person squats in the rubble of a recently bulldozed slum. Other people are walking in the background, some atop small mounds.
A recently bulldozed slum in New Delhi.Suhasini Raj/The New York Times
A report compiled by activists accused the government of using the G20 as a weapon to “snatch away the basic livelihood and rights” of common people. A spokesman for the B.J.P., Tom Vadakkan, said that the evictions had nothing to do with the G20, and that the government was helping the displaced get adequate housing.

Residents of a recently bulldozed New Delhi slum disagreed.

Squatting on the debris of their belongings, some said they hoped they could return to their original homes someday. Karan, a day laborer who goes by one name, dug out a photo of himself next to a cutout of Mr. Modi, with a multistory housing block in the background.

“We were herded in a bus by some B.J.P. workers earlier this year, just before the local municipality elections, and told we will get these homes after the elections,” he said, teary-eyed. “We were then asked to pose with Mr. Modi’s cutout. Now our homes have also been bulldozed. Where are these homes promised to us, then?”

Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014. More about Suhasini Raj

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 6, 2023, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: As G20 Host, India Aims the Spotlight at Itself. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 
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Can India’s Global Ambitions Survive Its Deepening Chasms at Home?

Can India’s Global Ambitions Survive Its Deepening Chasms at Home?
India’s hosting of the G20 summit this weekend will put its growing power on display. But its leader’s divisive religious politics threaten its rise.

Sept. 7, 2023Updated 10:05 a.m. ET
A woman in a red sari stands in a dirt field near a wild chicken and large, bundled-up parcels.
Residents packing their belongings after clashes in the state of Haryana last month in the shadow of the burgeoning tech hub of Gurugram.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Inside a sprawling golf resort south of New Delhi, diplomats were busy making final preparations for a fast-approaching global summit meeting. The road outside was freshly smoothed and dotted with police officers. Posters emblazoned with the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi bore the slogan he had chosen for the occasion: One Earth, One Family, One Future.

Not far away, however, were the remnants of bitter division: grieving families, charred vehicles and the rubble of bulldozed shops and homes. Weeks before, deadly religious violence had erupted in the Nuh district, the site of the resort. The internet was shut down, and thousands of troops were rushed in. Clashes quickly spread to the gates of Gurugram, a tech start-up hub just outside New Delhi that India bills as a city of the future.

These scenes sum up India’s contradictions as it basks in its moment this weekend as host of the Group of 20: Its momentum toward a bigger role in a chaotic world order is built on increasingly combustible and unequal ground at home.

Mr. Modi, India’s most powerful leader in decades, is attempting nothing less than a legacy-defining transformation of this nation of 1.4 billion people.

On the one hand, he is trying to turn India into a developed nation and a guiding light for the voiceless in a Western-dominated world. The country, now the world’s most populous, is the fastest-growing major economy, adept digitally and awash in eager young workers. It is also a rising diplomatic power that is seeking to capitalize on the frictions of the superpower competition between the United States and China.

Narendra Modi waves to a crowd throwing a spray of flower petals as he rides past atop a parade vehicle.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched a campaign to reshape India into a Hindu state, with the help of his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.Jagadeesh Nv/EPA, via Shutterstock
On the other hand, Mr. Modi is deepening fault lines in Indian society with an intensifying campaign to reshape a vastly diverse country, held together delicately by a secular constitution, into a Hindu state. His party’s efforts to rally and elevate Hindus — both a lifelong ideological project and a potent lure for votes — have marginalized hundreds of millions of Muslims and other minorities as second-class citizens.

The question for India, as Mr. Modi seems poised to extend his decade-long rule in an election early next year, is how much the instability caused by his religious nationalism will hinder his economic ambitions.

The sectarian clashes in Muslim-majority Nuh were sparked by a religious march held by a right-wing Hindu organization that falls under the same Hindu-nationalist umbrella as Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.

They were only the latest flare-up in what has become a seemingly constant state of tensions.

Emboldened right-wing vigilantes and the aggressively Hindu-first messaging of B.J.P. politicians have left the country’s Muslims and Christians in a perpetual state of fear and alienation.

The northeastern state of Manipur, where its top leader has employed the B.J.P.’s majoritarian playbook, has been burning in ethnic conflict for months, with about 200 people killed and regions effectively partitioned along ethnic lines.

In the restive Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, the government has suspended democracy for four years and is responding to any grievance with a tightening crackdown.

A boy walks past a pile of rubble that may be a collapsed building.
Rubble marks the site of deadly religious violence between Hindus and Muslims in Nuh, India, last month.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Asked whether his government had discriminated against religious minorities, Mr. Modi said during a state visit to Washington in June that there was no discrimination in India under its democratic values.

“We have always proved that democracy can deliver,” he said during a news conference with President Biden. “And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Yet B.J.P. politicians continue their divisive rhetoric even when Mr. Modi is on the global stage. In 2020, for example, as Mr. Modi and President Donald J. Trump were addressing a stadium in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat, large swaths of New Delhi were engulfed in deadly violence that had been incited in part by B.J.P. leaders.

Gurcharan Das, an intellectual who supported Mr. Modi during his first term for his promise to focus on development, said he had grown disenchanted as the damage of the ruling party’s Hindu nationalism overshadowed its economic progress.

In a public lecture this week, he said that although Mr. Modi’s government had failed to deliver the jobs he had promised, it had still taken up key reforms, from streamlining taxes to help unify the Indian market, to ushering in a digital revolution that has brought more people into the formal economy.

But he said he saw danger as the B.J.P. rejected pluralism as the appeasement of minorities. He repeated a warning that has become frequent: that India is on a path of religious fundamentalism similar to what has plunged neighboring Pakistan into catastrophe.

“While dreaming of a grand civilizational state, Hindu nationalists are in fact trying to create a narrow-minded, identity-based, 19th-century European nation-state — a sort of Hindu Pakistan,” he said.

As India’s economic growth largely enriches those at the top, the masses are still waiting for their promised prosperity. While India is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, ahead of Britain and France, its average income — a key indicator of living standard — remains in the world’s bottom third, next to countries like Congo.

Women in colorful uniforms work in a factory.
India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, but the masses are still waiting for the prosperity Mr. Modi promised.Atul Loke for The New York Times
Mr. Modi, in a recent interview with the Press Trust of India, said that the country would be a developed nation when it marks 100 years of independence in 2047. But with that promise still far away, he has filled the gap with the politics of polarization.

Ajai Sahni, the director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, said that what distinguished the recent violence in India from its long history of far bloodier sectarian clashes was the attitude of the government.

“The state always notionally distanced itself from such violence. There was always a reaffirmation, at least verbally, of the constitutional order and the secular order,” Mr. Sahni said. Under Mr. Modi, “there is clear, shall we say, evidence of state support or endorsement for extremist positions.”

“The violence is still episodic,” he added. “One killing here, two killings there, then a certain flare-up,” he said. “But the threat is sustained.” He attributed much of that to the “virality” around violence now — social media is “harnessed” to spread a local episode nationally, to chilling effect.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s state minister for electronics and technology, said the government was trying to tackle potential “misinformation and incitement” online as it intensifies its digital efforts.

A crush of men exits the towering doors of a mosque.
Efforts by Mr. Modi’s party to rally and elevate Hindus have marginalized hundreds of millions of Muslims and other minorities as second-class citizens.Joseph Campbell/Reuters
In the case of the Nuh violence, online threats and counter-threats in the days before the march made clear the possibility of an imminent spiral, which residents said the police ignored. The Muslim side was also armed and ready to clash when the Hindu marchers arrived.

Five of the six people killed were Hindus, a mix of day laborers who appeared to be caught in the violence and members of the right-wing group. The minority Hindu residents are now vulnerable in a district where they said they had survived without trouble through even the worst phases of India’s earlier sectarian tensions.

The government, after its initial lax response, responded to the clashes with full force, in what has become an extrajudicial pattern of punishment. Bulldozers were wheeled in to raze homes and shops — mostly those of Muslims — without due process and with the visuals transmitted across the country.

The economic ramifications of the clashes were immediate, and palpable even a month later.

As the violence spread to Gurugram, many offices quickly had employees work from home. Executives at companies in the city told of a fearfulness they had never experienced before.

About 500 families, both Hindus and Muslims, had settled in the shadow of the Gurugram skyscrapers seeking a better life. Now, a majority of the Muslims have left.

“It’s fear,” said Sourav Kumar, who works as a security guard.

An ornate medley of artwork makes up the front of a giant facade leading to a temple.
Sectarian violence broke out at the Nalhar Temple in Nuh in July after a religious march held by a right-wing Hindu organization.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Other families had piled their belongings — a tied-up mattress, a couple of tin boxes, a single bed — outside as they contemplated their options.

Just days before the diplomats arrived at the resort in Nuh for final G20 preparations, the Hindu outfit that had carried out the march in late July threatened to stage another one, even though the state’s B.J.P. government had denied it permission.

As the organization pressed on, the government came up with a characteristic compromise: It escorted the group’s leaders in vans so they could offer a prayer at a temple, avoiding another clash for now so the G20 parade could carry on.
 
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℃ertifed said:
The Indian government has bulldozed homeless shelters, slums and illegal encroachments in New Delhi and put them behind white barricades and green shade nets in cities like Mumbai and Vishakhapatnam.

A report compiled by activists accused the government of using the G20 as a weapon to “snatch away the basic livelihood and rights” of common people. A spokesman for the B.J.P., Tom Vadakkan, said that the evictions had nothing to do with the G20, and that the government was helping the displaced get adequate housing.

Residents of a recently bulldozed New Delhi slum disagreed.

Squatting on the debris of their belongings, some said they hoped they could return to their original homes someday. Karan, a day laborer who goes by one name, dug out a photo of himself next to a cutout of Mr. Modi, with a multistory housing block in the background.

“We were herded in a bus by some B.J.P. workers earlier this year, just before the local municipality elections, and told we will get these homes after the elections,” he said, teary-eyed. “We were then asked to pose with Mr. Modi’s cutout. Now our homes have also been bulldozed. Where are these homes promised to us, then?”
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Indian leadership right now are some sick fukking people.
 
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