Posts tagged ‘India’

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20/09/2014

Modi Uses Another International Visit to Raise His Local Profile – India Real Time – WSJ

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week once again showed that Mr. Modi is a master of media management.

The summit of the heads of the world’s two most-populous countries produced mixed results. A lot of agreements were signed, but the $100 billion in Chinese investment pledges that some local media had predicted did not materialize. And just as the leaders were shaking hands, there was an embarrassing faceoff between Chinese and Indian troops along the countries’ disputed boundary.

That didn’t stop India’s prime minister from again using photo opportunities and body language to broadcast his confidence, an impression that is likely to remain long after local media stop discussing the border tension and whether China had promised enough money.

Indians watching the visit wouldn’t have missed some of the symbolism. Mr. Xi flew into Mr. Modi’s home state, on the Indian prime minister’s birthday. Mr. Xi wore an  Indian vest that Mr. Modi gave him. Video of the two showed Mr. Modi walking in front of Mr. Xi at one event and swinging on a swing with him. At one point it even looked like Mr. Xi was carrying an umbrella for Mr. Modi.

Reuters Xi Jinping looked like he was carrying an umbrella for Narendra Modi during a recent visit to Gujarat.

The Indian prime minister has used the same charisma in photo ops during other international summits, most recently in Japan where he gave Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a big bear hug and later performed a solo on traditional Japanese drums.

All of this has been beamed into Indian homes and marks a major change from the demeanor of the country’s previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who was soft- spoken and slow-moving.

Mr. Modi’s multimedia skills are one of the things that made him prime minister.  Whether it is his controversial selfies, the sight of hundreds of supporters wearing Modi masks, campaign speeches delivered through hologram, his stylish outfits or his willingness to put on almost any kind of regional headwear, Mr. Modi knows how to make an impression.

via Modi Uses Another International Visit to Raise His Local Profile – India Real Time – WSJ.

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20/09/2014

To engage with China, India must stop peddling myths about the Line of Actual Control

Nehru’s hubris about his own statesmanship, coupled with a refusal to discuss the matter reasonably since 1962, has led us to the present tangle.

Political commentators have been gushing over the possibilities of strengthened economic and strategic relations between China and India, but the unresolved border dispute remains alive and can always play spoiler in the future. A border is, after all, more than a line on the map or a series of military posts on the ground; it is a reflection of how the political elite of a nation-state thinks about its security.

Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin is claimed by India as part of Jammu and Kashmir, and Indian-controlled Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by China. The only feasible solution is to accept the status quo and transform the Line of Actual Control into an international boundary. There have been several rounds of talks since the 1990s, but a resolution remains distant. Despite its parliamentary majority, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government will be unable to sell a permanent boundary settlement without being accused of ceding territory in Aksai Chin, though in reality it will only be giving up its claim over a territory India never controlled.

This raises a pertinent question: what precisely is the border upon which India and China cannot agree?

New neighbours

Through history, China and India have not been neighbours. The current de facto border has its genesis in a line drawn on a map by Henry McMahon during a secret treaty between Britain and Tibet in March 1914. Both entities, British India and Tibet, are no more: one has been transformed into postcolonial India and the other was occupied and colonised by communist China. Yet India and China, both of whom have overthrown the mantle of Western imperialism, are jostling over the same imperialists’ line – and have completely militarised and destroyed the traditional zone of contact that the border regions were.

The border is a legacy of a few dynamics, including the expansionist policies of the British in the Himalayan regions of India, the disappearance of the traditional Tibetan state, which had political and sacral hegemony over much of the region, and the modern nationalisms in postcolonial India and revolutionary China, which are keen on implementing a rigid notion of sovereignty in the border regions and legitimising the primacy of militarised security over the religious, cultural and human rights of the people inhabiting the region.

Stuck in the middle

The primary loser in the dispute is neither India nor China but Tibet. China has occupied most of Tibetan territory, while India has occupied the Tawang tract, which was historically part of Tibet. The Tibetan state had given up the Tawang region to British India in 1914 on the understanding that they would get friendship and assistance to protect their independence from China. When China went on to occupy Tibet in 1949-’50, India reneged on that understanding, preferring the diplomatically attractive Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai rhetoric over a strategically sound and morally defensible Indo-Tibetan friendship.

Despite reluctantly hosting the Tibetan exile community today, India did not offer any tangible help to the Tibetans in their struggle for independence. Today, as Modi and Xi plan collaborations on various fronts, Tibetans are reminded that in this world of realpolitik, morality and human rights are subservient. Tibetans are perceived as strategic assets or liabilities in bargaining with China, not people of an occupied land for whom India should raise its voice. For India, it is the border matters, not the border inhabitants.

Myths peddled by India

The popular as well as strategic approach of many in India towards the border dispute is jaundiced by the myths the Indian state peddled about the humiliating war of 1962. After the 1962 defeat, there was no credible reflection at the policy level in India. Indians accepted as real the myths that Indian territorial claims were legitimate and sacrosanct, and that the Chinese were duplicitous and stabbed gullible India in the back. The reality could not be further from this. The first Survey of India Map in 1950 showed the boundary as undefined in Aksai Chin and as undemarcated in the north east. It was only in the summer of 1954 that Jawaharlal Nehru gave personal orders for all old maps to be withdrawn and destroyed and to remove qualifiers and show the McMahon Line in bold, as if that was the de jure boundary.

Nehru later claimed innocence, insisting that there was no boundary disagreement and that Chinese claims were surprising. Since 1959, India rejected all the diplomatic overtures of Zhou Enlai and said negotiations could only take place if China withdrew from Aksai Chin, though India would not offer anything in return. Since 1961, the Indian military followed a “forward policy” in the border regions that was not only provocative but based on the assumption that China would not retaliate.

A great unresolved mystery from the time is why the best Indian minds working in intelligence, military and diplomacy accepted this assumption without a murmur of protest. It can be explained by Nehru’s hubris in his own capacity as a statesperson, bureaucracies subservient to him, and the inability of the civilian and military elite to be independent-minded. Macho posturing was the order of the day. The Indianisation of the top brass in the military occurred only after independence in 1947, so they were inexperienced as leaders. Faced with an army that had its genesis in revolutionary wars, the Indian army, which had been servant to an imperial power, failed to perform its basic duty of protecting the country.

via Scroll.in – News. Politics. Culture..

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18/09/2014

Trade, investment hopes as China’s Xi visits India – Businessweek

Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in the Indian prime minister‘s home state of Gujarat on Wednesday for a three-day visit expected to focus on India’s need to improve worn out infrastructure and reduce its trade deficit.

Xi was greeted on the tarmac by state officials carrying fringed umbrellas to guard him from the sun in Gujarat’s main financial city of Ahmedabad.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to court Chinese business and seek investment to upgrade creaky infrastructure, banking on China’s track record at building highways, railways, and industrial zones. India is also eager to address the imbalance in their annual trade, which now totals around $65 billion but is skewed toward imports of Chinese electrical equipment and parts.

Modi and the Gujarat government are staging a lavish welcome for Xi, with billboards across Ahmedabad showing a smiling Modi and Xi. A banquet dinner was being held Wednesday night on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad. Modi was also celebrating his 64th birthday.

Xi has been equally effusive in expressing excitement for the visit.

“China-India relations have become one of the most dynamic and promising bilateral relations in the 21st century,” Xi wrote in an article published Wednesday in The Hindu newspaper.

via Trade, investment hopes as China’s Xi visits India – Businessweek.

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18/09/2014

Chinese Views of India: Culturally Rich but Backward – China Real Time Report – WSJ

From China’s side of the Himalayas, the view of India isn’t always that great.

“This place is like China from 20 years ago. It’s much, much worse than I’d imagined,” said Tony Jiang, 29, an employee at an electronics-parts maker in Hangzhou visiting New Delhi this week.

Reshma Patil, an Indian journalist who spent more than three years based in Beijing reporting on China for the Hindustan Times newspaper, writes in a recently published book that Chinese she met tended to view India as poor and unsanitary.

In “Strangers Across the Border: Indian Encounters in Boomtown China,” Ms. Patil argues that ties between the two countries are hampered by their citizens’ mutual ignorance of each other.

A survey by the Pew Research Center published this year found that 30% of Chinese have a “favorable” view of India and 55% an “unfavorable” one. By contrast, 50% of Chinese have a favorable view of the U.S., according to Pew. Just 8% of Chinese hold a favorable view of Japan.

More Chinese are getting first-hand knowledge by visiting India as tourists or on business trips.

But the numbers are still small. India’s Ministry of Tourism says that about 175,000 Chinese tourists visited India in 2013, a 46% increase from around 120,000 in 2010. Tourism experts say China’s newly affluent prefer traveling to Europe, the U.S. and Southeast Asia.

India Real Time interviewed some Chinese visitors to India to get their impressions of the country as the two nations focus on bolstering ties that have long been strained by territorial disputes. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in India on Wednesday for a three-day trip aimed at deepening economic relations.

For some Chinese, the allure of India is its cultural heritage, especially its connection to Buddhism.

Mario Tang, a 26-year-old store manager from Shanghai who traveled across north India, said he came to see India’s centuries old history — against the advice of family and friends.

“My parents thought I was crazy. Most people I know think India is a poor, dirty, backward place,” Mr. Tang said.

He found it magical. “India is one of my favorite places on the planet,” he said. He visited Buddhist holy sites and even took a dip in the Ganges, India’s sacred river. He said Indians he spoke to seemed happy, something he attributed to “the power of belief and culture.”

Di Wenjie, a 32-year-old Chinese magazine editor who has visited India several times, said the country is “beyond imagination and full of color.” She says she studied meditation and yoga and plans to come again soon.

Others take a dimmer view.

“We didn’t have high hopes coming here,” said Mr. Jiang, the electronics-company employee, who was visiting Delhi for a trade fair. “Our impression was that Indian people are dirty and disorderly,” he said, while working on his laptop at a Starbucks in the center of the Indian capital this week.

Mr. Jiang also questioned Indians’ dedication to their jobs. “Indians are still eating breakfast at 10 a.m. Then they go home by 5 to 6 p.m.,” he said. “This is why this country is developing so, so slowly.”

His colleague, Ray Zhang, 28, said that his experience in New Delhi had been “terrible.” But he said he wouldn’t rule out returning to India to see the sights. “I’ve heard a lot about the Taj Mahal,” he said.

via Chinese Views of India: Culturally Rich but Backward – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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18/09/2014

India to hold talks with China on civil nuclear cooperation | Reuters

India will open talks on civil nuclear energy cooperation with China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday after summit talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in New Delhi.

The announcement, part of the new government’s push to broaden its nuclear energy sector, comes on the heels of a deal India struck this month to buy uranium from Australia to increase its fuel supplies.

“We will begin the process of discussions on civil nuclear energy cooperation that will bolster our broader cooperation on energy security,” Modi said in a statement, with Xi beside him, at a news conference.

Ahead of Xi’s visit, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao told reporters that China had a “positive attitude” towards nuclear cooperation with India, but offered no details.

Behind the scenes, China has been pressing India hard to begin talks on civil nuclear cooperation, said W.P.S. Sidhu, a senior fellow at Brookings India.

Any deal for India to buy civil nuclear reactors from China may take years, but both countries benefit by starting the conversation, said Sidhu.

“It’s a way for India to explore other options,” he said.

via India to hold talks with China on civil nuclear cooperation | Reuters.

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18/09/2014

India’s rice output, exports to climb on revival of monsoon | Business Standard News

India’s summer-sown rice output is likely to cross the previous year’s level due to a pick up in monsoon rains, raising prospects for higher overseas sales in 2015 by the world’s biggest exporter of the grain, trade officials said.

Robust exports from India could keep a lid on global prices that have surged 12% in the past three months and help cut bulging government stockpiles built as a result of bumper harvests over the past several years.

“There were concerns over production due to poor rainfall in June. The pick-up in rains from mid-July changed the situation. Now, the crop is in good shape,” said B.V. Krishna Rao, managing director of Pattabhi Agro Foods Pvt Ltd, a leading exporter.

In June, monsoon rains were 43% lower than the 50-year average, raising concerns about output of the rice crop that guzzles a lot of water. But rains picked up in the past few weeks, narrowing the rainfall deficit to 11%.

“Overall rice production will definitely be higher than last year but it is a little early to quantify by how much,” said Rajen Sundareshan, executive director of the All India Rice Exporters Association.

via India’s rice output, exports to climb on revival of monsoon | Business Standard News.

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18/09/2014

After Modi-Xi meeting, China agrees to quickly settle border dispute, demarcate LAC – Hindustan Times

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday agreed to quickly resolve the border dispute and demarcate the Line of Actual Control to improve peace and cooperation between both countries.

Addressing the media after the conclusion of one-on-one meeting with visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping, Modi said India is concerned about the frequent incursions along the border. The Line of Actual Control should be demarcated soon to ensure peace and tranquility in the area, he said.

President Xi, in response, said that China will work to settle the border issue at the earliest date. Since the border is not demarcated there will be some incidents, but both countries are capable of settling it at various levels without causing a bigger impact, he said.

President Xi said both countries would be respectful and sensitive to each others concerns. “We also have the sincerity to work with India to maintain peace and tranquility in the border areas before we are finally able to settle the border question,”he said.

The latest incident India was referring to was the  fresh incursion by the Chinese army in Chumar area, even as talks were on between both the leaders.

via After Modi-Xi meeting, China agrees to quickly settle border dispute, demarcate LAC – Hindustan Times.

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18/09/2014

Despite the Xi-Modi bromance, Indians and Chinese don’t actually like each other

One in two Indians thinks China is a major threat.

In the last two days alone, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called India an ancient, magic, enchanting, and beautiful land. And Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reciprocated with syrupy adjectives, reminding visiting journalists how ancient Chinese technology was responsible for sugar being called cheeni in India.

The pictures of the two leaders’ bonhomie on Wednesday went even further. By the time you get to the sight of Modi and Xi sitting on a swing by the Sabarmati, most would imagine that India and China are steadfast allies who support each other through thick and thin.

Which is why it might be worth pointing out that we don’t actually like each other very much, and that Indians and Chinese people have very different intentions for the bilateral relationship. And it’s not just about the trade deficit and the border disputes. Ordinary Indians and Chinese people simply aren’t sure whether they like each other.

via Scroll.in – News. Politics. Culture..

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17/09/2014

Could India Edge Out China? – Businessweek

China’s President Xi Jinping is due to arrive in India tomorrow, and for a change he’s the one with an economy heading in the wrong direction, not Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After several dismal years, growth in India is rebounding, and the stock prices of companies selling to Indian consumers are benefiting from the surge in optimism that accompanied Modi’s landslide election victory in May. Britannia Industries (BRIT:IN), the Kolkata-based maker of cookies and other food products, is up 55 percent so far this year and today hit a 52-week high. “The Indian consumption story is back,” Credit Suisse analysts Neelkanth Mishra and Ravi Shankar wrote in a report published today.

Electronic ticker boards at the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai, India

Meanwhile, China is struggling as the troubled banking system and property markets put a damper on the economy. Hit by a slump in the property market, the Chinese economy expanded at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in August, a dramatic slowdown from the 7.4 percent growth in July and nowhere close to the government’s target of 7.5 percent. So far this year, the area of new property under development has declined 14.4 percent. The data from last month “made depressing reading,” Bloomberg economist Tom Orlik wrote in a report published yesterday.

The role reversal could lead to a world-turned-upside-down moment as early as 2016. That’s when India, always the laggard, may pull ahead of China and became the fastest-growing of Asia’s giants. India is likely to enjoy 7.2 percent growth in 2016, says Rajeev Malik, senior economist in Singapore with CLSA, compared with China’s 7.1 percent. Given the structural problems Xi faces and the slack Modi inherited, “China has to slow down, and India can do much better,” he says.

India has suffered from a chronically high inflation rate, but there are signs that pressure is easing, albeit slowly. Consumer prices last month rose 7.8 percent, a slight improvement from July’s 7.96 percent. Yesterday, the government reported wholesale prices rose 3.74 percent in August. That’s the best result in five years.

via Could India Edge Out China? – Businessweek.

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17/09/2014

Is China Ready to Step Up and Invest in India? – India Real Time – WSJ

While Chinese companies have been great at peddling their products in India, they have been surprisingly reluctant to invest here. China has invested less in India than even Poland, Malaysia or Canada have.

President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to India starting Wednesday is likely to include some massive pledges to try to remedy this imbalance.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Japan recently, Japan pledged to invest $35 billion in India. President Xi is expected to try to eclipse Japan’s promises, possibly pledging $100 billion in investment according to some local reports. His meetings with Mr. Modi are predicted to lay the groundwork for a wave of Chinese money to build industrial parks and bullet trains.

Annual trade between India and China has galloped to $66 billion from $3 billion 14 years ago, something that underscores the rise of Beijing as the global manufacturing hub and India’s growing appetite for everything from phones to machinery from China.

While the trade relationship between the two countries has bloomed, foreign direct investment from China has not. According to Indian government statistics, the country has received a total of around $400 million from China in investment in the last 14 years. Even if you add the $1.2 billion of direct investment India received from Hong Kong, China is still well behind the $22 billion in foreign direct investment from the United Kingdom, $17 billion from Japan, $13 billion from the Netherlands and $1.9 billion from Spain.

It’s not that China doesn’t invest abroad. According to data from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China was the third biggest source of foreign direct investment last year, having invested more than $100 billion in other countries. In the seven years to 2012, it invested more than $25 billion in the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations alone.

Chinese investment has tended to focus on the resources sector to power its economy. Much of it has gone into getting control of oil, natural gas and coal in Africa, Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere. India has not attracted much of this investment as it is a net importer of resources and has a heavily regulated energy sector, said Rajiv Biswas, economist for IHS.

“China wants to increase investment in India and wants Chinese companies on the ground there,” Mr. Biswas said. “Most of it will be in manufacturing and infrastructure space.”

Chinese companies may also be looking to move some of their manufacturing to India as they struggle with rising wages at home, said Ajay Sahai, director general and chief executive at Federation of India Export Organization.

If India can’t find better ways to fix its trade imbalance with China, New Delhi may want to increase taxes on some imports such as auto-components and pharmaceuticals to encourage Chinese companies to set up factories in India, he said.

“This will not only raise Chinese investment in India but also help in fixing the trade imbalance,” said Mr. Sahai.

via Is China Ready to Step Up and Invest in India? – India Real Time – WSJ.

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