Category: Politics

External Affairs Minister of India, S. Jaishankar is on a two-nation visit to Vietnam and Singapore from October 15-20 to bolster bilateral relations and cooperation in a wide range of areas.

Jaishankar’s visit to Vietnam came at the invitation of his counterpart Bui Thanh Son. The two foreign ministers co-chaired a meeting of the India-Vietnam Joint Commission on economic, trade, scientific and technological cooperation. During the visit, the minister travelled to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and held talks with the top Vietnamese leadership. He met members of the Indian community and unveiled Mahatma Gandhi’s bust in Ho Chi Minh City.

India and Vietnam have a robust comprehensive strategic partnership, and Vietnam is a key member of India’s Act East Policy, the external affairs ministry said. The union minister’s visit provided an opportunity to review progress in several areas and discussed ways to further enhance bilateral cooperation, it added.

Jaishankar will next travel to Singapore, where he will meet his Singaporean counterpart and the country’s top leadership. He will also chair a regional conference of Indian heads of missions.

In 2015, the relationship between India and Singapore was upgraded to a strategic partnership. This year, numerous ministerial discussions took place between the two countries during the G20 meetings presided over by India. Singapore, as a guest nation, was invited to the G20 gatherings. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made a trip to New Delhi to attend the G20 Summit in September.

Business heir Daniel Noboa on October 15 won Ecuador’s presidential election. The 35-year-old leader won more than 52% of the vote, while his leftist adversary Luisa Gonzalez won about 48%, with more than 90% of ballot boxes counted.

Noboa formed his own party, National Democratic Action, ahead of the election. The party has won the third-highest number of seats in August legislative elections. The leader will have just 17 months to govern, as he is serving a truncated term from December 2023 to May 2025. He will be able to run again in the regularly-scheduled 2025 contest.

In his election campaign, Noboa made a special point to woo young people, as did his competitor Gonzalez, with events at universities towards the end of the campaign. About a quarter of the 13 million Ecuadoreans obliged to vote are between the ages of 18 and 29.

As president of the South American country, Noboa has pledged to improve the economy and create jobs for young people, and address rising crime and violence. The economy of Ecuador has struggled since the coronavirus pandemic and motivated many thousands of citizens to migrate – and sharply rising crime. Noboa has said he will balance meeting Ecuador’s foreign debt obligations with the needs of the population, and pledged to beef up security at ports and airports – the hot spots for drug smuggling.

The tallest statue of Bharat Ratna Dr BR Ambedkar, the Principal Architect of India’s Constitution, outside India was formally inaugurated in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC, US, on October 14. More than 500 Indian-Americans from across the country and some from other countries attended the unveiling ceremony of the 19-feet-tall Statue of Equality.

The statue located at the Ambedkar International Center (AIC) has been made by renowned artist and sculptor Ram Sutar, who also built the statue of Sardar Patel, Statue of Unity, installed on an island in river Narmada in Gujarat, India.

Spread over 13 acres, the AIC in Accokeek township, about 22 miles south of the White House, would consist of a library, convention center, and Buddha Garden, among others. The statue will not only inspire millions of Indians residing in the US, but also all communities, including Black, Hispanic and others, believe his followers. The unveiling ceremony of the statue was followed by cultural performances by Indian-Americans from various parts of the country.

Born on April 14, 1891, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar was the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly’s most crucial Drafting Committee. He died on December 6, 1956, months after he embraced Buddhism on October 14 that year, the day celebrated as Dhamma Chakra Parivartan Din.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has congratulated Prime Minister elect Christopher Luxon for his party’s win in the New Zealand’s general election. Luxon’s National Party and coalition partner ACT registered victory on October 14, together securing 61 seats in a 121-seat parliament.

On Saturday, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins conceded that his Labour Party had lost the election and was not in a position to form a government. The outgoing Prime Minister has spent just nine months at the job after taking over from Jacinda Ardern in January.

Luxon on October 16 said that while his party was waiting for special votes to be counted, the parties were working on building relationships with both ACT New Zealand and New Zealand First parties. While the National Party and ACT have the numbers to form a government on the current count, roughly 5,67,000 special votes, around 20% of the total, are still be counted. The official result will be declared on November 3.

The New Zealand election campaign saw a significant emphasis on the challenging economic landscape and a sharp rise in the cost of living.

India and Tanzania on October 9 elevated their bilateral relations to a strategic partnership with the meeting of Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. The two leaders pledged to strengthen collaboration across a spectrum of areas, including trade, investment, defense, and counter-terrorism.

Tanzania has emerged as one of the significant beneficiaries of India’s intensified engagement with Africa. India has notably established about 15 new diplomatic missions in the African country.

President Hassan’s visit follows the recent agreement to establish the first overseas campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Tanzania, and the African Union’s entry into the G20 as a full member during the summit hosted by India in September 2023.

India and Tanzania identified new initiatives to expand cooperation in trade and investment, including a proposed agreement on increasing trade in local currencies. The countries also agreed on a five-year roadmap for defence cooperation that encompasses new areas such as military training, maritime cooperation, capacity building and defence industry.

The two sides signed six agreements, including a technical agreement between the Indian Navy and Tanzania Shipping Agencies Corporation on sharing white shipping information, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on sharing digital public infrastructure, and an MoU between Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority and Tanzania Investment Centre for setting up of an industrial park in Tanzania.

In a major step towards boosting India-Africa ties, the Government of India has announced to post more Defence Attaches (DAs) in African nations. The DAs will include officers from all three defence services of the Indian Army, Navy, and the Air Force.

The Indian Army has decided to send DAs to Mozambique and Ethiopia. The Indian Navy, which already has Naval Attaches (NAs) in Kenya and South Africa, will post new NAs to Djibouti and Tanzania. A new Additional Air Attache (AA) will be appointed to serve in Ivory Coast, besides new AAs to be sent to Spain and Armenia. The appointed DAs will have a three-year tenure.

Sources from the three services confirmed to media that “more positions for DAs in Africa are under consideration.” Till some time back all three Armed Forces were sending envoys to over 100 Indian missions abroad.

In September 2023, with India’s support, the African Union became a permanent member of the Group of 20 (G20) largest economies of the world. In addition, India has contributed to Africa’s military, social and economic sectors to further enhance stable and long-term bilateral relationships.

India will continue to work with African nations to promote regional security, foster stability and enhance the defence capabilities together, said Defence Minister Rajnath Singh during the first edition of the India-Africa Army Chiefs’ Conclave organised on the sidelines of 2nd Africa-India Joint Exercise ‘AFINDEX’ in Pune, Maharashtra on March 28, 2023.

India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his counterparts from Brazil and South Africa renewed their commitment to work for the expansion of the UN Security Council to include representation from developing economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America during the 11th IBSA Trilateral Ministerial Commission in New York on September 23.

At the Intergovernmental negotiations on UN Security Council reform, the foreign ministers stressed that the time has come to move towards a result-oriented process and urged the redoubling of efforts to achieve concrete outcomes within a fixed time frame through the commencement of text-based negotiations.

The leaders supported the legitimate aspiration of African countries to have a permanent presence in the UNSC and supported the endeavour of Brazil and India “to occupy permanent seats in the Security Council.”

Apart from Jaishankar, Brazil Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira and South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Grace Naledi Pandor, attended the meeting. The Indian minister led the Indian delegation for a week-long visit to New York, where he addressed a High-Level session of the 78th UNGA on September 26.

The ministers affirmed the need for a reformed, revitalised and reinvigorated multilateralism aimed at implementing the 2030 agenda, to adequately address contemporary global challenges of the 21st Century and to make global governance more representative, democratic, effective, transparent and accountable.

IBSA was created 20 years ago to promote coordination on global issues between three large pluralistic, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic democracies of Asia, South America and Africa, and to enhance trilateral cooperation in sectoral areas, providing a new framework to South-South Cooperation.

US President Joe Biden on September 22 announced a new office dedicated to gun violence prevention. The office, to be led by Vice President Kamala Harris, who pursued gun safety measures when she was California’s top prosecutor, will help the administration coordinate gun policy and pressing congressional leaders to act on the issue.

The Office of Gun Violence Prevention aims to combat a growing US national crisis through executive action instead of the more sweeping reforms that would require congressional approval. “We all want our kids to have the freedom to learn how to read and write instead of duck and cover, for God’s sake,” US President Biden said during remarks in the Rose Garden, where survivors of school shootings were among the hundreds of attendees.

For more than a decade, the US political system has been deadlocked on major changes to gun laws, despite several ghastly shootings.

In her address, Kamala Harris illustrated the urgency of the office’s mission. One in five people have lost a family member to gun violence, about 120 people are killed by a gun every day, and Black Americans are 10 times more likely than white Americans to be victims of gun violence and homicides; Latino Americans are twice as likely, she said.

BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is an alternative strategic platform for boosting cooperation between developing countries as traditional institutions of international economy management lose credibility, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on September 19 at the 78th session of the UN General Assembly.

The recent decision taken by the group of five countries to invite new members to cooperate in the BRICS format after the Johannesburg summit in August helps “strengthen efforts for the order that would reflect economic, geographical and political pluralism of the 21th century,” the leader said. “We are a power that works on establishing fairer global trade in the light of the severe crisis of multisided institutions,” he pointed out.

The decision on Argentina, Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia becoming full members of BRICS was taken at the BRICS summit that took place in Johannesburg under South Africa’s chairmanship in late August. The membership will take effect from January 1, 2024.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was in India for the G20 summit on September 9-10, called himself a proud Hindu and noted that he always had a strong connection with India.

The leader said that his wife is Indian and being a Hindu, he will always have a bond with India and its people. “I am hugely proud of my Indian roots and my connections to India,” added Sunak. He also hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership saying that India is the “right country” at the “right time” to hold the G20 presidency.

On the India-UK trade deal, the UK PM said there was “still some way to go” for a free trade pact with India to be finalised, but he appeared confident that the final outcome will be a “forward-looking” and “modern” deal that would benefit both sides and help shared ambition of doubling trade by 2030. He pointed out that the trade deal could help Indian exporters, including 48 million small and medium enterprises, gain access to the British market.

On the margins of the G20 Summit in New Delhi, the British Prime Minister agreed to a new strategic partnership with Singapore during a meeting with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on September 9. Following the new partnership, both countries will work to conclude a new and modern bilateral investment treaty – the first for the UK after leaving the European Union.