India’s ties with Japan and Israel are shaping its security architecture. The lomg awaited visit to Japan of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and critical talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on a civilian nuclear accord was completed successfully. Japanese technology, a vital cog in Western reactor manufacturing will now be made available to western companies seeking to build nuclear power plants in India. This clearance will benefit the American company Westinghouse and the French Ariva, both now able to enter in meaningful negotiations for the sale of nuclear reactors to India for fulfillment of its ambitious plan to install 30 nuclear power stations across the country by 2030. The package included an Indian undertaking to cease nuclear weapon tests. As there is already an Indian moratorium in place this was scarcely a sticking point, despite the song and dance of certain scribes who appeared to detect an undetected surrender of Indian sovereignty. One newspaper in India known for peddling the Chinese political line, displaying much patriotic ardor when opposing the Indo-US nuclear accord of 2008 with similar posturing, whilst China, simultaneously, was attempting slyly to sabotage the Indo-US deal in Vienna by lobbying certain smaller members of the International Atomic Energy Authority to oppose India’s exemption to the provisions of the Non Proliferation Treaty on the ground of nuclear proliferation.
A closer Indo-Japanese relationship has a strong security dimension, but Japanese investments in India are set to grow exponentially, particularly in transport and manufacturing. Japan has also expressed its intention to partner India in infrastructure development of Iran’s Chabahar port on its west coast overlooking the Persian Gulf. Chabahar will be a communications and export hub for Afghanistan’s Herat province, and part of an ambitious rail network between Iran and Afghanistan. For India, the development of Chabahar has a broader purpose: it will be the hub for a rail and road network system, thereby facilitating the carriage of Indian goods and services to markets in Central Asia, thence to Russia and beyond.
With US President-elect Donald Trump promising to mend ties with Russia, a Russian-Japanese peace treaty for formal closure to the Second World War should be easier to reach as there would be less likelihood of American opposition to better Russian-Japanese ties. With this settlement in place, Siberia’s enormous mineral wealth would be opened up for Japanese industry and consequently help the development Russia’s Far East. The Indo-Japanese talks might well be the magic key to unlock the door to new vistas. It was no coincidence that, shortly after engaging with Prime Minister Modi, Prime Minister Abe flew out to meet Donald Trump in Washington, the first foreign leader to do so for one-to-one talks with the President-elect. We may be witnessing the incubation of a new global order. Watch this space.
Indo-Israel ties surge
Prime Minister Modi returned home to welcome an important visitor and friend, President of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, who had come to India on a weeklong trip. India and Israel have drawn ever closer since they established diplomatic relations in January 1992. The gamut of their strategic relationship stretches to every area, from security, jihadi terrorism, defence cooperation, agricultural development – particularly water management - fields in which Israel, deservedly, has acquired unrivalled expertise, to education and culture. There is also a free trade agreement that has been in the pipeline for far too long.
President Rivelin will be in Mumbai where he will, among other engagements, will attend a memorial service at the city’s Jewish Centre where a young Rabbi and his wife were murdered in cold blood in the carnage let loose on 26/11/2008 by jihadi killers from Pakistan.
Hopefully President Rivlin’s visit, reciprocal to President Pranab Mukherjee’s to Israel several months ago it is likely that Mr Modi will follow up with a trip to Israel, with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s returning the call by coming to India. The Indo-Israel relationship is the hub of their regional security architecture, now and into the future.
Trump’s pivots against jihadi terror
Stephen Bannon, the principal strategist behind President-elect Donald Trump’s sensational victory in the recent presidential election, has been sharing a few thoughts with the media. What did his victory signify in the broader context?
The new political wave, he opined, whose climax was Brexit in the UK , followed by Trump’s road to the White House, started with Prime Minister Modi’s stunning rise to power in India in May 2014. This tidal bore could have further shocks for the European establishment when France goes to the polls next year, then Holland and Germany et al. The Richter scale movement of the tectonic plates might even lead to the demise of the tubercular European Union and its strangulating bu00reaucracy and myriad self-serving hypocrisies.
Timothy Garton Ash, the EU’s, Dr Goebbels, talks and writes brazenly of democracy, the rule of law and freedom of speech and much else, but avoids all mention of the disasters of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the biblical exodus of displaced humanity from these parts to Europe. He makes no mention of the Bush administration’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition,’ the anodyne label for the hidden CIA torture chambers in Poland, Lithuania and Romania, not speak of those in Iraq. He cited German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the true light of the free world supplementing the effusions of President Obama, who thought little of having her telephone and office bugged by US intelligence services, with no embarrassing talk of the bugging of her telephone and office by the US intelligence services.
A postscript to Trump’s triumph come some revealing facts. Approximately 500 US newspapers and magazines rooted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. New Week was forced to withdraw some 100,000 copies of its election issue because it carried a cover picture Clinton as the winner and an article to go with in celebration of the non- event. The New York Times has issued an open letter, to assuage widespread concern in response to the deluge domestic protests of its jaundiced anti-Trump reporting. Media integrity has rusted from disuse in America and Britain, and in India too, one national broadsheet is prone to publish full-page paid advertisements of Chinese government special pleading policies relating to India.
While India media gurus were chanting their praises of Hillary Clinton in unison, having culled their wisdom from the syndicated columns of the New York Times and Washington Post, both hugely discredited in their own country, India’s former representative at the United Nations, the much respected Hardeep Puri, bet on Trump, not to please but to inform his readers. His book, ‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos,’ is well worth reading. He appears to be at one with the contention of US Lieutenant General Michael Flynn - reportedly Trump’s choice as the National Security Advisor - that it was the Obama administration’s policy on Syria that had laid the country to waste. Is it not curious that Clinton hasn’t blamed President Putin for her election defeat and, instead, pointed an accusing finger at the head of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for reopening her case of worms as Secretary of State. She’s not a Russian spy, is she?
Tejinder Virdee honours India
Sir Tejinder Virdee, FRS, was honored with a knighthood not too long ago – in 2014, to be precise - was his work as one of the world’s top theoretical physicists. A professor at Imperial College, London, he is engaged in taking physics forward to the next stage following the discovery of the discovery of the elusive by Sir Peter Higgs bears his name, and for which Sir Peter won the Nobel prize. In July 2012, its existence was confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, by an experiment devised by a team led by Sir Tejinder. He is now looking to set up a more advanced experiment to examine the origin of the universe some 13 or 14 billion years ago. Professor Virdee was in India delivering three lectures on his work. In Mumbai, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, he addressed a an elite assembly of 180 scientists from 40 top instutions across the world.
‘There is great potential in India,’ he told a correspondent. It’s one of the few countries in the world that is increasing its abilities in research – hiring new faculty members and so on. So the Indian scientists can play a very significant role.’
