Bully on the block China is stamping on neighbouring Mongolia for daring to invite the Dalai Lama to address a religious meeting in the country’s capital Ulan Bator. Mongolia and Tibet are sister nations related by blood, culture and faith for centuries. The Dalai Lama was, and still is, the revered pontiff for both peoples. Mongolia and Tibet were once part of the Chinese Empire, and when that empire crumbled in 1912, rebellious Mongolia and Tibet came together and signed a treaty in 1913, affirming their independence as part of their alliance. Thanks to Russian support and military protection, Mongolia attained international recognition of its sovereignty in 1945 at the close of the Second World War. Such is the historical landscape that’s our starting point.
China has begun applying economic pressure – tantamount to a blockade-on Mongolia. An official Chinese statement explains why. ‘The erroneous action taken by the Mongolian side on the Dalai’s visit hurt the political foundations of China-Mongol relations …The Chinese side requires the Mongol side to genuinely respect China’s core interests and major concerns and requires effective means to remove the negative impact caused by its erroneous action…’ Adolf Hitler wouldn’t have been too displeased by the brazen arrogance of a declaration reminiscent of the one delivered by Nazi Germany to Czechoslovakia in October 1938 prior to Germany’s invasion of the country some six months later.
One may recall that it was the Dala Lama’s flight to India in April 1959 and the sanctuary given to him by the Indian government that eventually led the collapse of Sino-Indian relations in the early 1960s, culmination in a border war in late 1962. Threatening Chinese demands to India recently to ban the visit of the Dalai Lama to Arunachal Pradesh, to which China has laid claim, were rejected; and the Tibetan leader went ahead with his planned journey. He is set to do again in March 2017.
Following its stand-off with China, the Mongolian Ambassador to India, Gonchig Ganbold has appealed to India for support and help. He said that with the imminent onset of winter the Mongolian people would suffer greatly.
Standing up to Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea, Vietnam has been drawing closer to India in every field, in particular defence cooperation. There have been two-way ministerial visits that have taken the cycle of friendship to higher levels. A top level Vietnamese military delegation visited India and signed a deal under which the Indian Air Force will train Vietnamese pilots on Sukhoi-30MKI aircraft. An agreement was also signed on Indo-Vietnam nuclear cooperation for peaceful purposes..
However, another factor has been injected into an already charged situation. US President-elect Donald Trump fired a salvo in China’s direction, calling up the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen; each dignitary congratulated the other - she having been elected to office earlier in the year with a thumping majority. They promised closer relations between their countries. Interestingly, Mr Trump made the telephone call without consulting the US State Department or the Pentagon or any of think tanks strewn across Washington. It was his decision alone; he ‘brings no baggage to the table,’ noted Henry Kissinger during a television interview with an American journalist.
A leading America’s foreign policy magazine, The National Interest, was quickest off the mark in interpreting the signal. The US and China established diplomatic relations under the Carter Administration (1976-80), which then severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The two Bush administrations and the Obama administration went out of their way to placate Beijing on this sensitive issue. Keenly aware of this bestowed advantage, Beijing started calling the shots and was emboldened to flex its muscles at will.
Beijing considers Taiwan a province of China, and all nations with ties to Beijing are obliged to kowtow to this unreal and bizarre order. The people of Taiwan overwhelmingly see themselves as Taiwanese rather than as Chinese, still less an integral part of Maoist China – which is why they voted in Tsai Ing-Wen’s Democratic party to power with a landslide majority. More than anything, Beijing fears a unilateral declaration of Taiwan’s independence, thereby igniting further ethnic unrest in Xinjiang and, maybe, Tibet. China’s superpower gloss may start losing its shine. Mr Trump has put the ball firmly in China’s court, leaving Beijing to decide whether it wished to go to war with the United States. The global order is on the cusp of seminal change.
UK must remain India’s gateway to Europe
Carwyn Jones, First Minister of Wales, has issued a declaration in New Delhi that the UK must remain India’s gateway to Europe, that the UK must maintain ‘free and unfettered access’ to the European market to ensure that it continues to be a gateway for Indian businesses to the EU. Mr Jones was also critical of the UK’s immigration policy, warning that history had demonstrated the negative consequences for the economy of closing a country from the rest of the world.
‘It’s important that Wales and the UK are seen as an important gateway to the EU market for Indian businesses. The UK is just 60 million, the EU is 440 million and there are many companies that use the UK as their base for accessing the single market. If that advantage is lost, then other countries will profit from it,’ said the Welsh First Minister.
Mr Jones explained that a ‘soft Brexit’ that gave access to the European market would not impact negatively on the British steel industry, but he feared that the ‘hard Brexit’ advocated by some ministers in Whitehall might lead to tariffs rising up to 16 per cent. Much of the Tata’s UK’s steel operations are located in Wales, where Tata currently employs a workforce of 6,800, including 4,000 at its integrated site at Port Talbot.
‘At the moment, the exchange rate is such that it is helpful for exports, but it’s a short-tem thing. The UK is too small a market to absorb any market loss as a result of the imposition of tariffs.’
A welcome postscript to this conversation was the accord reached between Tata Steel and the trade unions, which includes protection for its pension liabilities and commitment to secure jobs at Tata’s Port Talbot plant until at least 2021. The deal also contains an undertaking by Tata to invest for a further five years. Wales’s First Minister Carwyn Jones declared: ‘This good news secures the future of steel-making at Port Talbot for at last 10 years. This agreement was achieved by a lot of hard work by everyone involved [and] brings investment not just to Port Talbot, but to steel works across the UK.’
Roy Rickhuss, General Secretary of the Community union expressed satisfaction at the outcome, as did Kaushik Chatterjee, Group Executive Director of Tata Steel and Executive Director for European business, who said that the far-reaching changes would ensure ‘sustainable’ development. All’s well that ends well.
Conquering adversity: Boy dreams big
Life for a poor boy struggling to make a living on the streets of a teeming Indian metropolis is a daunting experience, more so when the city is pitiless Kolkata. The urban disaster of 25 years ago has undergone a marked transformation, but the city is still a hard place for the poor and disadvantaged.
Sunil Mahato starts his day at St Thomas Day School , afterwards gives his mother a helping hand at her roadside stall selling handkerchiefs. He returns home well after dark studies on a bench under the light of an outdoor lamp, before turning in for a night’s sleep in the family’s single room with mother Tulsi Devi, a younger brother and uncle. Sunil lost his father at the tender age of 11, forcing his mother to eke out a very modest living to support a struggling family.
Sunil was awarded an enabling scholarship by a Kolkata newspaper to carry on with his studies. It has fired up his ambition to enter an elite Indian Institute of Management and qualify one day as a chartered accountant and provide his mother and the rest of the family with a comfortable standard of living and guaranteed future security. Sunil’s unflinching resolve tells of his indomitable will to conquer adversity without a semblance of self pity. Such determinastion rarely fails to provide its just reward.
