Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood tall before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. He stood tall, as India stood tall, when he recounted the astonishing success of the five-year Swachi Bharat campaign which had taken modern sanitation and basic healthcare across the country. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had bestowed the ‘Global Goalkeeper’ award on Mr Modi for his magnificent effort organizing and arousing society to make this a national cause. Prime Minister Modi, in turn, told UN delegates that Swachi Bharat for cleanliness and hygiene provided a model for other nations with similar problems. ‘The very core of our approach is public welfare through public participation,’ explained Mr Modi. The Prime Minister highlighted the critical measures – financial and technological - taken by India to protect the environment and combat climate change.
On the sidelines of the General Assembly summit, India allotted $150 million each to the Pacific Ocean Island states endangered by rising sea levels, and another $150 million in a line of credit for renewable energy and related products to Caricom, the Caribbean Island states off the North and South American coasts in the Western Hemisphere a $14 million as grant for development, including Information Technology, trade and investment. Around 1 million people of Indian descent live in these scattered islands, the bulk on Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and Jamaica. The India-Carricom meeting was co-chaired by Prime Minister Modi and Carricom Chairman Allen Chasstenet. Returning to the General Assembly summit, Prime Minister Modi pointed India’s contribution to UN Peacekeeping ventures, the numbers of Indian lives lost were the highest of any participating nation.
Mr Modi turned his sights on terrorism, which he opined, was a menace to global peace and security. ‘It is absolutely imperative that the world unites against terrorism.’ However, wise to the ways of the world, Mr Modi is aware that this is likely to remain an ideal for reasons of realpolitik. The US needs both Pakistan and China on board, hence routinely expresses anodyne hopes that India and China settle their differences peacefully, even as Beijing issued dire threats of military action over Doklan on the Tibet-Bhutan border in the summer of 2017. The same recipe was given to India and Pakistan. On Iran, Washington was all fire and brimstone. India must thus combat jihadi terrorism on its own terms without fear or favour.
Before he left New York , Prime Minister Modi responded vigorously to Turkey’s support to Pakistan at the UN. He met with Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to endorse unification of the island, following the Turkish invasion in 1974 and the formation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Mr Modi then met with Greek Premier Kyriakos Mitsotatakis, offered India’s full support to Greece against Turkey in its claims to ownership of islets in the Aegean Sea. Finally, Mr Modi assured Armenian President Nicol Pashiyan of India’s support against Turkey’s continuing refusal to acknowledge its genocide in 1915, during the First World War, in which millions of its Armenian subjects perished. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will have time and opportunity for reflection.
Prime Minister Modi studiously avoided mention of Pakistan, leaving the indecent exposure to Premier Imran Khan, who, true to form, raved and ranted on Kashmir; on the iniquities of Hindu imperialism and its alleged manifold inequities, holding out the spectre of an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war. India’s junior diplomats administered a scorching rebuke to Mr Khan. A nihilist contraption, Pakistan is on the rocks. The once London night club habitué Imran Khan – a born again hotgospelling mullah - has to surmount the perils of the Stygian crossing to save his blighted soul.
Scrimmage of British politics
The Rugby Union football World Cup with its robust tackles, crafty tries, adroit drop goals and heaving scrums might be pin-ups of the sport, but scarcely less arresting were the scrimmages in the House of Commons between a government without a majority and a raucous Opposition of discordant voices. Prime Minister Boris Johnson played for high stakes when he advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament, which the Supreme Court to his dismay, and the dismay of his ministerial colleagues, declared null and void. Mr Johnson cut short his visit to New York, where he was scheduled to address the annual General Assembly of the United Nations, and hurried returned home to damage control.
The brawls in the House of Commons, worthy of a Hogarth reprint, exposed Brixit as an embarrassing national malaise, the gulf between Brussels and London wider and deeper than the Channel.
Bit between his teeth, the Prime Minister fought back with prospect of an early general election to break the impasse. But the Labour opposition is equally a house divided, and hence unlikely to form the next government. It will require the wisdom of a Solomon to resolve the gridlock.
Across the water, President Donald Trump has his own existential challenges in the White House to consider, hence is unwilling or unable to minister to his friend and alter ego, Boris Johnson.
These are clearly troubled times, but the Labour Party has chosen to muddy the waters by passing an egregious resolution on Kashmir, calling for the restoration of Article 370, condemning the perceived human rights violations in the State, and demanding elections on self-determination as allegedly recommended by the United Nations. It disdainfully abjured consultative conversations with Indian diplomats. Such words and actions were both foolish and counter-productive. India is no coolie state, nor a banana republic to be harried and bullied. Its immediate response was severance of ties with a party captive to jihadi vote banks and a radical chic lunatic fringe.
The Labour leadership has little awareness of the historical realities of the Kashmir imbroglio nor of the telling details of the refereed UN resolutions; seemly impervious to the horrors of jihadi terrorism, despite five attacks on British soil. The ethnic cleansing of Hindu Pandits from the Kashmir valley - their ancestral homeland for two millennia - leaves Labour cold, no stirring of conscience here. Terrorist attacks across India, most notably in November 2008, on Mumbai causes no moral outrage. The funding and export of terrorism across international borders as statecraft is beneath Labour’s concern. This is no longer the party of Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Fenner Brockway, Reginald Sorensen et al. It is no longer the party of the British working class either, it is an organ for an underclass of jihadi gorgons, groomers and demagogues out for a seasonal India-baiting binge, wherever and whenever comes the call. It is inebriating theatre with a godly, scriptural script.
The future of a constructive, fully engaged Indo-British partnership will revolve round business, finance, the professions education, culture, science and technology. The best minds from both countries will participate in this wholesome, visionary exercise - with no place for loquacious feather-brained hypocrites.
Tigers in Himalayan habitats
At this stage, no more, India, Nepal and Bhutan are set to engage in a pioneering exercise to track tigers at high Himalayan altitudes. Siberian tigers – the largest of the species – exist in some the world’s coldest regions, as do snow leopards at high altitude Ladakh. Why not tigers? Conservationists and experienced tiger watchers from the three countries are fit for purpose. Camera traps will shortly be set up at strategic locations to track the movements of these magnificent creatures who once glimpsed by the human eye is indelibly recorded in the human brain and thence progresses to the human imagination. There are potentially 52,671 square kilometres in these high altitudes that could be tiger habitats. Of this, 38,915 square kilometres lie in India – home to the world’s largest tiger population of around 3000 – with the rest locates in similar terrain in Nepal and Bhutan. Camera traps in earlier years have spotted tigers in India’s Arunachal Pradesh, a mountainous area abutting Tibet, Uttarkhand, North Bengal at elevations of 1765 metres, 3274 metres and 2400 metres respectively. Bhutan had its sole sighting at 4200 metres. Cooperation of as part of the high altitude tiger master plan, gathering background information on land attributes, ascertain effectiveness of protection and engagement with local communities. Tiger conservation is a critical imperative in high altitude districts straddling the three countries. It is an exhilarating exercise – as exciting in its way as was the once fabled gold rush.
