Category: Politics

In a first, India, Iran and Armenia held a round of political consultations in Yerevan, Armenia in April. The countries agreed to hold future meetings in a trilateral format. In addition to trilateral cooperation, the countries had a wide range of discussions, particularly on economic issues and regional communication.

J. P. Singh, Joint Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs led the Indian side. He was joined by Mnatsakan Safaryan, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia, and Seyed Rasoul Mousavi, the Assistant of the Foreign Minister of Iran, Head of the Regional General Department of South Asia.

Media reports from Iran claimed that the three countries discussed how to connect Armenia to India through Iran, using the latter’s roads and railway lines.

For India, Armenia has emerged as a key geopolitical partner in recent years. India has supplied arms to Armenia over the years and Armenia has traditionally supported New Delhi on the Kashmir issue.

India-Iran relations span millennia marked by significant interactions. Their commercial ties were traditionally dominated by the Indian import of Iranian crude oil. In February, Irani Ambassador to India Iraj Elahi said, “India is “most important to Iran” and the recent cordial meeting between Tehran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is proof of this.” The minister said this while addressing the event held on the occasion of the 44th Anniversary of the victory of the Islamic revolution of Iran. He said the Chabahar port, with which India is highly involved, is considered the “Golden Gateway.”

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will temporarily join Harvard University later this year. The university said that she has been appointed to dual fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School and to a concurrent fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center.

In January, Ardern announced her decision to step down, saying she had “no more in the tank” to lead the country. A global icon of the left and an inspiration to women around the world, Ardern led her country through a devastating mass shooting. She will serve as the 2023 Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow and a Hauser Leader in the Harvard Kennedy School’ Center for Public Leadership beginning this fall.

Ardern, who was just 37 when she became prime minister in 2017, said she sees the Harvard opportunity as a chance not only to share her experience with others, but also to learn. “As leaders, there’s often very little time for reflection, but reflection is critical if we are to properly support the next generation of leaders,” she said.

Ardern will also do a stint as the first tech governance leadership fellow at the school’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The center had partnered with New Zealand to confront violent extremism online after a white supremacist gunman shot 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, Ardern said. The gunman live-streamed the slaughter for 17 minutes on Facebook before the video was taken down.

Mohammed Shahabuddin was sworn in as the 22nd president of Bangladesh on April 24 at a state ceremony attended by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her cabinet colleagues. The veteran politician was elected unopposed as the President of Bangladesh in February as a candidate of the ruling Awami League.

Bangladesh Parliament Speaker Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury administered the oath to 73-year-old Shahabuddin at the Durbar Hall of Bangabhaban. Several politicians, Supreme Court judges, and senior civil and military officials attended the event.

Born in 1949 and hailing from the northwestern Pabna district, Shahabuddin is a retired district judge. In his early life, he was a leader of the Awami League’s student and youth wings and took part in the 1971 Liberation War. He was imprisoned after the 1975 assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. In 1982, he was inducted into the country’s judicial service. He also served as one of the commissioners of the independent Anti-Corruption Commission. He later joined politics and became a member of the Awami League Advisory Council that has senior party leaders and technocrats as members.

India has evacuated 534 citizens so far from the crisis-hit Sudan in a 72-hour ceasefire. The first batch of 278 citizens arrived at a port in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah on board INS Sumedha under Operation Kaveri on Tuesday. The second and third batches of 121 and 135 citizens carried by IAF’s C-130J aircraft arrived on April 26.

The Government of India launched an evacuation mission for its citizens stuck in Sudan following the fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. It is looking to rescue more of its citizens from the strife-torn African nation. Under Operation Kaveri, India is taking the evacuees to the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah from where they are returning home. India has set up a transit facility at Jeddah. The Minister of State for External Affairs, V. Muraleedharan is supervising the evacuation mission from the city.

Apart from the Sudanese authorities, the MEA and the Indian embassy in Sudan have been in regular touch with the UN, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and US, among others. At a high-level meeting on April 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued directions for preparation of contingency plans to evacuate Indians from Sudan.

In a related development, the French embassy in India said that France has evacuated 388 people of 28 nationalities from Sudan, including Indian citizens.

Recalling her meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India last month, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that he is the most popular world leader with the commitment and desire to move India forward as a global power. “Unbelievable and visionary,” that is how Raimondo described the Indian premier in her statement during an event hosted by the Indian Embassy in Washington on April 15.

The diplomat was in India last month for the India-US Commercial Dialogue and India-US CEO Forum meeting.

“I had an incredible opportunity to spend more than an hour and a half with Prime Minister Modi. He is the most popular world leader for a reason. He is unbelievable and visionary, and his level of commitment to the people of India is just indescribable and deep and passionate and real and authentic. And his desire to lift people out of poverty and move India forward as a global power is real and it is happening,” she said amid thunderous applause from the audience.

The US Commerce Secretary added, “In the years to come, there will be two ecosystems of technology – one consistent with our democratic values and another not. I said to him, the United States and India need to lead the world together in this technology ecosystem. Without missing a beat, after he travelled all week, he said to me, well, Secretary AI does not stand for artificial intelligence. He said, “AI is America-India technology,” she said.

High Commissioner of Uganda to India, Joyce Kakuramatsi Kikafunda on April 15 said that India is going to be the voice of the Global South and it will bring her country’s issues to the G20. The Ugandan envoy also termed the recent visit of External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to her country as beautiful.

“We believe that they (India) are going to be the voice of the South. India is already going to be a superpower. So we believe they (India) know our issues and they will bring them up and they are ahead of some big countries who have forgotten how it was. But we believe India will bring our voices, our issues or problems to the G20,” she said.

India’s National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU) opened its first overseas campus in Jinja, Uganda, in a significant milestone in the bilateral relationship between India and Uganda. NFSU is the first government university of India to open a campus anywhere abroad.

Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar was on a visit to Uganda and Mozambique from April 10-15 to further boost India’s strong bilateral relations with the two African countries. Kikafunda called the bilateral relationship between India and Uganda good and strong, and focused on trade and investment. She also mentioned that Uganda sees India as an elder brother and wants the relationship to continue along with development assistance.

Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel was honoured with the country’s highest honour for her achievements in office. The Grand Cross award was handed to her in a ceremony in Berlin by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The Order of Merit entails no financial reward.

Merkel, Germany’s first female Chancellor, led the country from 2005 to 2021. Notably, only two former chancellors of Germany, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, have received the Grand Cross award earlier. All three former leaders belong to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Merkel led Germany from 2005 to 2021, serving four terms in office. She did not seek a fifth term. She was the first woman to take the post of chancellor and the first German head of government to have grown up in socialist East Germany. In his speech, Steinmeier praised Merkel for EU unity. “At a time when our continent threatened to break apart, you held together center and periphery, north and south, east and west,” he said, addressing the former chancellor.

Steinmeier said that Merkel had “contributed to the continued existence of the Eurozone” and helped ensure that no country was forced to drop the euro as its currency despite opposition from parts of the German public and even within her own party. He also praised her for “the art of negotiation and the ability to compromise.”

The four additional Philippine military bases that the United States now has access to under a 2014 defence and security deal will not be used for offensive actions, said Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on April 10.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr statement came after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning warned that Manila’s decision to expand the number of military bases under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with Washington may draw the Philippines “into a whirlpool of a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait”.

Manila and Washington in February agreed to expand the EDCA by naming four more military bases where American forces can construct facilities, bring in equipment and hold joint training exercises with their Philippine counterparts. He made assurances that while the Philippines will primarily protect its territory, it will not take action unless provoked. Five other military bases were previously identified under EDCA in 2016, which means the US now has access to a total of nine military locations in the Philippines.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr added the expansion of EDCA is also meant for humanitarian and relief operations during disasters. He pointed out that Isabela and Cagayan provinces are often lashed by typhoons, triggering landslides and flash floods.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met her Saudi Arabia counterpart, Mohammed Aljadaan and discussed the global debt crisis and strengthening of the multilateral development banks – an initiative under India’s G-20 presidency.

The finance ministers met on the sidelines of the annual Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington on April 12. In a series of tweets, the ministers shared their experiences. “H.E. Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and I discussed the #G20 agenda, and the progress made,” Aljadaan said in a tweet.

Among other things, the two leaders discussed the World Bank Evolution Roadmap and the Expert Group on Strengthening the Multilateral Development Banks constituted by the G20 India Presidency, the finance ministry said in a tweet. The finance ministers discussed global inflation issues, including spillover effects of measures taken, on the growth prospects of developing and low-income countries, besides the urgent need to tackle increasing global debt distress and improving the implementation of the Common Framework, the ministry said in its tweet.

Nirmala Sitharaman also visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland during her US visit. She also met with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the sidelines of the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2023 in Washington. The two leaders discussed strengthening the India-US economic and financial partnership and increasing engagements at bilateral and multilateral forums.

After it shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in February, the US military held a brief conversation with the Indian side and other like-minded countries to update them about the matter, a senior American military commander said on April 10.

General Kenneth S Wilsbach, commander of the US Pacific Air Forces, said the country held the interaction behind closed doors with most of the air chiefs of the region. The suspected giant Chinese balloon was supposedly spying on key military sites across America. The US used fighter jets to bring down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina led to a diplomatic crisis with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelling a scheduled trip to China.

There were reports of an unidentified object flying in the sky of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands over a year ago. There were reports that the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by the US had also transgressed over Canadian territory.

The US military commander was in India in connection with a mega air exercise between the two countries. Gen Wilsbach said it is important to protect the sovereignty of the airspace of various countries across the world.  In June 2016, the US designated India a “Major Defence Partner” paving the way for sharing of critical military equipment and technology.