epubdos : Afghanistan
SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS
Prepared for the U.S. Department of State
Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs
TO:
SCA & Staff
DATE:
Monday, April 22, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan
One killed in explosion claimed by IS in Afghan capital (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [4/21/2024 6:57 AM, Staff, 761K, Negative]
One person was killed and three others wounded by an explosion in Kabul on Saturday evening, Afghan police said, with the Islamic State group claiming responsibility for the sticky bomb attack.

The improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated in the Kot-e-Sangi neighbourhood, near an enclave of the historically persecuted Shiite Hazara community, which has been targeted by the militant group in the past.

"The sticky bomb was planted on a minibus," Kabul police spokesperson Khalid Zadran said in a statement late Saturday.

"The driver of the vehicle lost his life, and three other civilians were injured."

Security personnel were investigating the incident, the statement added.

The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility on its Telegram channel, saying a minibus carrying Hazaras was blown up as it passed through a Taliban checkpoint.

The attack "led to its destruction and the killing and wounding of around 10" people, the IS statement said.

The number of bombings and suicide attacks in Afghanistan has reduced dramatically since the Taliban ended their insurgency after ousting the US-backed government and returning to power in August 2021.

However, a number of armed groups, including IS, remain a threat.

Multiple people were killed last month when a an IS suicide bomber targeted a bank as people were gathering to collect their salaries. Authorities put the blast’s toll at three, but hospital sources told AFP 20 people were killed.
High-profile Afghan Taliban religious scholar assassinated in Pakistan (VOA)
VOA [4/19/2024 2:43 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
Afghanistan’s Taliban government confirmed Friday that one of its leading religious scholars was assassinated by unknown assailants in neighboring Pakistan.

The deceased, identified as Mohammad Omar Jan Akhundzada, was leading evening prayers at a mosque in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Thursday when gunmen stormed the building and fatally shot him before fleeing, according to local police.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the deadly shooting.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Friday on social media platform X that Akhundzada was part of a government oversight committee of top Islamic scholars and taught at the central “jihadi” madrasa, or Isla mic seminary, in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Mujahid also tweeted a picture of the deceased man.

“We are saddened to learn that the country’s leading religious scholar … has been martyred,” Mujahid wrote. “We condemn the killings of religious scholars as a heinous crime by enemies of Islam,” he said without providing further details.

Multiple Afghan sources reported that the slain scholar was a senior adviser to the reclusive Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who is based in Kandahar and governs Afghanistan from there through religious decrees stemming from his strict interpretation of Islam.

A senior Taliban official explained that the oversight committee comprises leading religious scholars and is responsible for reviewing all regulations before they are implemented to ensure that they conform to Islamic principles.

Quetta is the capital of Pakistan’s border province of Baluchistan. The city and surrounding areas host hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees and have previously also witnessed deadly attacks on Taliban-affiliated personalities in the community.

Taliban chief Akhundzada himself was based in the Pakistani province and directed insurgent attacks from there against the United States-led foreign forces in Afghanistan until their withdrawal in August 2021, which paved the way for his fundamentalist group to reclaim control of the country.

Since then, several central Taliban religious figures and associates also have been assassinated inside Afghanistan, including the capital, Kabul.

Islamic State-Khorasan, a regional Islamic State affiliate and bitter rival of the Taliban, has claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.
A Virginia family took in a child refugee. Then his brothers came. (Washington Post – opinion)
Washington Post [4/20/2024 11:00 AM, Theresa Vargas, 6902K, Neutral]
The teenager on the other end of the video call could have asked Mandy and Matt Hill any questions before deciding whether to leave a group home for refugee children to come live with them in Virginia. He had only three:

Would he be able to use his phone?

Would he be allowed to go outside?

Could he have friends?

That teenager, Noorulhadi Noorani, who goes by Noor, recalled that initial conversation as he sat at the Hills’ dining room table on a recent evening. Nearby, three of his brothers worked on a painting and another sipped a cup of chai. They listened as Noor spoke with me in English, a language that he didn’t know a few years ago and that his brothers, who more recently arrived in the country, are trying to learn.

How the five brothers, who range in age from 8 to 21, all ended up living in Loudoun County is a story that starts with them getting separated at an airport in Afghanistan. Their family was one of the many that crowded the grounds around the international airport in Kabul in 2021 in hopes of evacuating as the United States withdrew its troops.

As Noor tells it, his father worked for UNICEF and his older brother served in the Afghan army, positions that made them targets of the Taliban. His family received three threatening letters and his brother was beaten repeatedly, once in front of their mother. The family went together to the airport and made it as far as the gates. There, Noor said, the Taliban stopped them and told them that they couldn’t go any further.

Noor was 16, and in that moment, he made a decision that would shift the trajectory of his life and, although he didn’t know it yet, his brothers’ lives. He saw a fountain inside the gates and asked if he could get some water. He was granted permission, but instead of getting a drink and returning to his family, he hurried toward the airport.

“They were calling me back, and I wouldn’t look,” Noor recalled of the Taliban. “I just kept going. I never stopped.”

Noor had no identification when he boarded a plane that took him to Qatar. Later, after it was determined he had no relatives to take care of him, he was brought to the United States where he stayed in a shelter, then a group home, before coming to live with the Hills in 2022.

“This family, I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me, and they chose to help,” said Noor, who is now 19 and a senior in high school. “I will never forget that help. It changed my life 100 percent.”

Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area placed Noor with the family. The organization helps find foster families in D.C., Maryland and Virginia for refugee minors who enter the country unaccompanied and migrant children who end up in the country alone.

“These are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable kids,” the group’s chief executive, Kristyn Peck, told me. Many of those children have been displaced by conflict or orphaned by it. Others have been trafficked or neglected. All have found themselves without a parent or guardian to take care of them, either temporarily or permanently, in a country they don’t know.

I ended up speaking with Peck on a recent afternoon about those children because the organization is facing a need right now. There are young people waiting for homes and not enough foster families. The organization places children in long- and short-term foster homes.

The organization, which receives funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, can accept 70 children but would need to add 20 foster families to meet that capacity, Peck said. The organization also plans to open centers soon in Virginia and Maryland that will provide schooling and other services to unaccompanied minors who are placed in short-term foster homes. She said they need families to sign up to take in those children as well.

“Unfortunately, given the state of our world and all of the conflicts happening around the world right now, I don’t anticipate the need going down,” Peck said. Children who are not placed in foster homes, she said, may have to remain in refugee camps, shelters or group homes. She said the organization welcomes all types of families, including single parents and LGBTQ+ couples, to apply to foster. “If they have the capacity and the interest in doing so, we want them at the table.”

My grandfather came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at the age of 9. I have no idea who took care of him as a child. He died when I was still a kid, before I could interview him or appreciate what it must have taken for him to build his family in the same way he built my grandmother a house — from the ground up, without a foundation already in place.

After hearing about the need for foster families in this region, I asked Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area if I could see what an arrangement looked like. That’s how I ended up at the Hills’ house on a warm evening.

Mandy Hill said her husband served in Afghanistan with the Navy and his translator took good care of him. The couple hoped to help the translator’s sisters come to the United States and were devastated when they realized they couldn’t. They decided they could try to help another family and were waiting to take one in when they received a call they didn’t expect. They were told a teenage boy needed a home.

The couple had a daughter in college, another daughter who was about to finish 12th grade and a teenage son in high school when Noor came to live with them. He and their son will now graduate together.

Noor not only now has foster siblings — he also has biological siblings living nearby.

At the end of last year, his parents brought his brothers, ages 21, 17, 10 and 8, to Loudoun and rented a home. Then two weeks ago, his parents returned to Afghanistan for what Noor describes as family obligations. His brothers couldn’t go back without fear, Noor said. He recalled seeing people maimed by explosions on his way to school and hearing bullets pass by his head as he and his brothers slept on the roof of his grandparents’ house. He was so used to avoiding crowded spaces that for a while whenever he stepped into the cafeteria at his school in Loudoun, he had to remind himself that he was safe.

He didn’t want that life for his brothers, and they didn’t want it. They decided to stay, and the 21-year-old is now taking care of them. Since his family moved, Noor spends time with them every week, including some overnights. But he stays with the Hills to allow him to focus on his goals. (I was asked not to identify the brothers by name out of safety concerns for their family. Noor changed his name).

“There’s a lot in my life that I don’t want to remember,” Noor’s older brother told me through him. He said he wants his younger brothers to get the chance to do well in school and eventually “help people in this country the way that people have helped them.”

The boys are alone, but also not really. Noor and the Hills have been helping them. So, too, have community members and the children’s teachers. People have donated food, clothes and gift cards. They have provided jobs and English lessons.

“It makes me really happy to see my brothers here,” Noor said. “They’re happy here. We’ve never had a situation to be happy.”

Mandy said that if there is one thing that people who are considering fostering take away when looking at her family, she hopes it’s this: “If we can do it, you can do it. … We are not special by any means.”

She recalled the questions her family asked Noor that first time they spoke: What are your needs? What are your dreams? What are your concerns or fears?

Two years later, his answers have stayed consistent, she said. He didn’t have many fears. His dreams were to get an education and start his own business. And his needs he expressed with his own questions.

“He wanted to be able to have the freedom to go outside on his own and have friends,” she said. “He wanted to basically have what to us seems an average teenage life.”
Pakistan
Pakistan protests ‘erroneous’ US sanctions on Chinese firms over missile program allegations (VOA)
VOA [4/20/2024 9:53 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Neutral]
Pakistan criticized the United States on Saturday for penalizing four international companies on charges they are aiding its ballistic missile program.

“Pakistan rejects political use of export controls,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch.

The reaction came a day after Washington imposed sanctions on three Chinese companies and one Belarus-based firm for their alleged links to Islamabad’s missile development program.

“These entities have supplied missile‐applicable items to Pakistan’s ballistic missile program, including its long-range missile program,” the U.S. State Department said on Friday.

It noted that the sanctions are part of U.S. efforts to disrupt and target “proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery” and strengthen the global nonproliferation “regime.”

“Such listings of commercial entities have taken place in the past as well on allegations of links to Pakistan’s ballistic missile program without sharing any evidence whatsoever,” Baloch said.

“We have pointed out many times the need to avoid (the) arbitrary application of export controls and for discussions between concerned parties for an objective mechanism to avoid erroneous sanctions on (the) technology needed purely for socio-economic development pursuits,” she added.

Baloch renewed Islamabad’s readiness to discuss “end-use and end-user verification mechanisms so that legitimate commercial users are not hurt by discriminatory application of export controls.

She asserted that Pakistan has in the past come across instances where mere suspicions led to the blacklisting of foreign companies.

The U.S. identified the alleged suppliers to Islamabad’s ballistic missile program as China-based Xi’an Longde Technology Development Company Limited, Tianjin Creative Source International Trade Co. Ltd., Granpect Company Limited, and Belarus-based Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant.

Under the U.S. executive order, all assets, properties, and interests in properties of the sanctioned companies located within the United States or controlled by U.S. citizens must be blocked and reported to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC.

The listing makes it illegal for any individual or entity within the United States, or any U.S. citizen to engage in any transactions involving property or interests in property of designated or blocked companies unless authorized by a specific or general license issued by OFAC or exempted.

Without naming the U.S. or any other country, Baloch stated that “the same jurisdictions" claiming “strict adherence” to the nonproliferation of weapons and military technologies would sometimes make exceptions "for some countries” and have even waived licensing requirements to help them obtain advanced military equipment.

“Such discriminatory approaches and double standards are undermining the credibility of nonproliferation regimes and accentuating military asymmetries, which, in turn, undermine the objectives of regional and global peace and security,” she said. “This is leading to arms buildup (in the region)."

Baloch was apparently referring to Washington’s close military and nuclear cooperation with Pakistan’s archrival India. The nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors have fought three wars, and their decades-old territorial dispute over the divided Kashmir region remains the primary source of mutual tensions.
Iran’s president arrives in Pakistan for 3-day visit amid tight security (AP)
AP [4/22/2024 2:40 AM, Staff, 456K, Neutral]
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi arrived in Islamabad for a three-day visit on Monday, during which he plans to discuss a range of issues with authorities in Pakistan’s capital, officials said.

The meeting is part of efforts by Islamabad and Tehran to mend ties which had been briefly strained in January, when the two sides carried out tit-for-tat strikes targeting militants accused of attacking their security forces.

Raisi was welcomed at the airport by Housing Minister Riaz Hussain Pirzada and other officials.

During his stay, Raisi will meet with his Pakistani counterpart Asil Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. He is accompanied by his spouse and a high-level delegation as he plans to also visit Karachi, the country’s biggest city, and Lahore.

According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the two sides will discuss a range of issues to “further strengthen bilateral ties and enhance cooperation in diverse fields including trade, connectivity, energy, agriculture and people-to-people contacts.”

Pakistan and Iran will also discuss regional and global developments, it said in a statement.

The visit comes after Iran’s airstrike into Israel, which was in response to an Israeli strike in Syria that had killed two Iranian generals in a consular building. Pakistan is among the countries that holds no diplomatic relations with Israel because of the issue of Palestinian statehood.
Iranian president lands in Pakistan for three-day visit to mend ties (Reuters)
Reuters [4/22/2024 3:51 AM, Charlotte Greenfield and Gibran Peshimam, 5.2M, Neutral]
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi arrived in Islamabad on Monday on a three-day official visit, the foreign office said, amid tight security in the Pakistani capital.

The visit, which Pakistan’s foreign office said would run until Wednesday, comes as the two Muslim neighbours seek to mend ties after unprecedented tit-for-tat military strikes this year.

"The Iranian president is accompanied by his spouse and a high-level delegation," Pakistan’s foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that the group also included the foreign minister, other cabinet members and senior officials.

Raisi will meet Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other officials, besides visiting the eastern city of Lahore and southern port city of Karachi, it added.

Major highways in Islamabad were blocked as part of the security measures for Raisi’s arrival, while the government declared a public holiday in Karachi.

Raisi’s visit is a key step towards normalising ties with Islamabad, but Iran’s supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni, not the president, has the last say on state matters, such as nuclear policy.

Tension is also high in the Middle East after Iran launched an unprecedented attack on Israel a week ago and central Iran in turn suffered what sources said was an Israeli attack on Friday.

Pakistan and Iran have had a history of rocky relations despite a number of commercial pacts, with Islamabad being historically closer to Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Their highest profile agreement is a stalled gas supply deal signed in 2010 to build a pipeline from Iran’s South Fars gas field to Pakistan’s southern provinces of Balochistan and Sindh.

Despite Pakistan’s dire need of gas, Islamabad has yet to begin construction of its part of the pipeline, citing fears over U.S. sanctions - a concern Tehran has rejected.

Pakistan said it would seek waivers from the U.S., but Washington has said it does not support the project and warned of the risk of sanctions in doing business with Tehran.

Faced with the possibility of contract breach penalties running into the billions of dollars, Islamabad recently gave the go-ahead for construction of an 80-km (50-mile) stretch of the pipeline.
Pakistan bargains hard for larger IMF deal of up to $8bn (Nikkei Asia)
Nikkei Asia [4/22/2024 12:00 AM, Adnan Aamir, 293K, Neutral]
Pakistan has made a formal request to the International Monetary Fund for a new loan package in the range of $6 billion to $8 billion under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF). The South Asian country has also asked the IMF to dispatch a review mission in May to finalize details of the new deal.

Last week, Pakistan’s delegation, led by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, attended the annual spring meetings of the IMF in Washington. The country is still waiting for the release of the final tranche of a $1.1 billion loan from the fund under the Stand-by Agreement (SBA), which was concluded this month. Now Pakistan needs another program to remain afloat for the next three years.

A political outsider, Aurangzeb was inducted into the government to secure a deal with the IMF. However, the fund is proving a tough negotiator.

In the World Economic Outlook Report 2024, the IMF named Pakistan as one of six countries facing serious conflicts this year, saying these conflicts would take a toll on their economic output. The troubled countries included Iraq, Somalia and Sudan.

Although the State Bank of Pakistan held foreign exchange reserves of $8 billion, or about a month and a half of import cover, as of as of April 12, experts stress that it is in dire need of an IMF deal.

"Pakistan badly needs an EFF because it needs to pay $75 billion in the next three years," said Abdul Rehman, a capital markets and energy expert based in Lahore. "An IMF deal is tantamount to giving a clean bill of health to Pakistan’s economy, which can [then] borrow more loans from bilateral, multilateral and other commercial creditors," Rehman added. "If Pakistan could not get the deal, then the country will default and the economy can shrink by 10% in size, triggering massive unemployment and inflation."

"IMF’s approval stamp will help [Pakistan] roll over its debt and make timely payments," Yousuf M. Farooq, director of research at Chase Securities, a brokerage in Karachi, told Nikkei Asia.

One immediate impact of a deal with IMF may be the devaluation of the Pakistani rupee, as the fund requires that a borrower’s currency value not be controlled artificially. Massive devaluations are often a condition of IMF programs globally, and they have previously accompanied some of its loans to Pakistan.

Experts say, however, that a massive fall in the rupee is not expected. "Major adjustments like devaluation were already done for the [IMF deal] in 2023," Farooq said.

Moreover, Pakistan has to pass a budget for the next fiscal year before June 30. The government will face a huge challenge in formulating a budget if an IMF deal does not go through before then.

However, Yousuf Nazar, a London-based economist formerly with Citigroup, believes a deal before June 30 is unlikely. He said that the IMF may want Pakistan to take specific actions to reduce the budget deficit before it approves the next loan.

"In a best-case scenario, Pakistan might get a staff-level agreement before the budget, but the loan tranche will be released after the fund’s board approval after the budget," Rehman, the capital markets expert, said.

While the Pakistani delegation was lobbying for a larger program, IMF officials said at a media briefing last week that the fund is focused on economic reforms in Pakistan, not on a larger deal.

Experts believe Pakistan will be able to secure a deal from the IMF, but that alone will not be enough to meet Pakistan’s annual financing needs of roughly $25 billion. "Even if the [loan amount] is enhanced to $8 billion, net inflows [after repayment of outstanding IMF loans] could be only a few billion. Pakistan has no option but to put its house in order," Nazar, the economist, told Nikkei.

Chase Securities’ Farooq believes Pakistan needs to bring untaxed sectors within the tax net, deregulate and move toward a free market, get rid of government-owned entities and fix the power sector to move forward. "Being under the IMF umbrella would help the country [to make these reforms]," he added.

Rehman agrees, saying, "Pakistan should not think of the requirements by IMF as a compulsion, but [as] an opportunity to reform the economy."

While the government negotiates with the IMF and implements the needed reforms, people will continue to suffer, experts say. "Pakistan’s problems are far from over, and it may take years for Pakistan to resume [economic] growth," Nazar said.
Pakistani province issues flood alert and warns of heavy loss of life due to glacial melting (AP)
AP [4/20/2024 2:40 PM, Riaz Khan, 22K, Negative]
A Pakistani province has issued a flood alert because of glacial melting and warned of a heavy loss of life if safety measures aren’t undertaken, officials said Saturday.

Pakistan has witnessed days of extreme weather, killing scores of people and destroying property and farmland. Experts say the country is experiencing heavier rains than normal in April because of climate change.

In the mountainous northwest province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has been hit particularly hard by the deluges, authorities issued a flood alert because of the melting of glaciers in several districts.

They said the flood could worsen and that people should move to safer locations ahead of any danger.

“If timely safety measures are not taken, there is a possibility of heavy loss of life and property due to the expected flood situation,” said Muhammad Qaiser Khan, from the local disaster management authority.

Latest figures from the province said that 59 people, including 33 children, have died in the past five days because of rain-related incidents.

At least 2,875 houses and 26 schools have either collapsed or been damaged.

The southwest province of Baluchistan has also been battered by rainfall. It said it had limited resources to deal with the current situation, but if the rains continued, it would look to the central government for help.

In 2022, downpours swelled rivers and at one point inundated a third of Pakistan, killing 1,739 people. The floods also caused $30 billion in damage.

Pakistan’s monsoon season starts in June.
2 Pakistani customs officials killed and 3 wounded in an attack in the restive northwest (AP)
AP [4/21/2024 5:49 AM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
Gunmen opened fire at Pakistani customs officials, killing two and wounding three others in the country’s restive northwest, police said Sunday.

The attack happened late Saturday night in Dera Ismail district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said police officer Nasir Khan.

The customs officials were at a checkpoint when gunmen opened fire on them, Khan said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. A gun attack last Thursday in the same district killed four customs officials.

Police and other law enforcement personnel cordoned off the area while the dead and wounded were taken to a hospital.
Gunmen kill 7 customs officials in western Pakistan in two attacks (Reuters)
Reuters [4/21/2024 3:47 AM, Saud Mehsud, 11975K, Negative]
Unknown gunmen killed two customs officers in western Pakistan, officials said on Sunday, following the killing of five other customs officials in the area in recent days.

No group has claimed responsibility for the two attacks since Thursday, which police said they were investigating.

Security in regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan has deteriorated in recent years. Attacks, some claimed by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) Islamist militant group, have risen, mostly targeting police and security officials.

"Customs officials were present for checks... when unknown persons opened fire," said the district deputy superintendent of police, Muhammad Adnan, adding that two people were injured and the area on a busy highway had been cordoned off.

"Three days ago, five officials, including an officer, of the customs department, were killed in a shooting in the same area and the attackers escaped," he said.

The rise in attacks has escalated tensions between Pakistan and the Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban administration.

Pakistan, saying militants have been using Afghan territory to launch attacks, has called on the Taliban to take action and carried out an airstrike last month on Afghan territory.

The Taliban have denied allowing the use of Afghan soil for militancy and said Pakistan’s security issues are a domestic issue for Islamabad.
India
India to Redo Voting at Polling Stations Hit by Violence (New York Times)
New York Times [4/21/2024 4:14 PM, Sameer Yasir, 831K, Neutral]
India’s election authorities have directed officials to redo voting at several polling places in the troubled northeastern state of Manipur, after armed men attacked polling stations and captured voting booths despite the presence of dozens of paramilitary soldiers.

The state of Manipur has endured ethnic conflict for months after a dispute erupted over who gets to claim a tribal status that grants extra privileges, for example preferential treatment in seeking government jobs.

The conflict, which began last May, has essentially split the region, home to about three million people, pitting two ethnic groups against each other: the mostly Hindu Meiteis, who form a narrow majority, and members of Christian hill tribes known as Kukis. More than 200 people have been killed, members of both groups. Thousands were internally displaced and still fear returning to places they once called home, seeking refuge in squalid camps.

The Election Commission of India said on Saturday that voting would be done again on Monday in 11 polling stations where voting had been held on Friday.

The order came after the region’s top election commissioner wrote to his agency describing mob violence, gunfire, damage to electronic voting machines and bogus voters entering the booths.

Video footage from the Inner Manipur constituency, one of the two seats in the state for the lower house of Parliament, showed mobs raiding a polling station and breaking electronic voting machines.

At another station, members of an armed gang were seen threatening voters. One women said that when she arrived to vote, she found that the votes of her entire family had already been cast. One person was also injured by gunfire.

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been deployed to prevent violence in different parts of the country, as the voting continues till June 1 to elect the country’s next prime minister. Local residents in Manipur said that soldiers had tried to keep order but were overpowered by people, mostly women, who rushed into the voting booths, and intimidated by the presence of armed men.

Members of opposition political groups say the problems were not confined to the 11 polling places that will get a do-over, and are calling for new voting in more than 45 polling booths in 12 areas of Manipur.

Keisham Meghachandra, a top leader of the opposition Indian National Congress in Manipur, said that members of armed gangs supportive of the incumbent government had threatened candidates and voters the day before the elections and on the day of polling even fired at a polling station.

“It was mass rigging,” Mr. Meghachandra said. “Violence happened in places where majority of voters are unhappy with both local and Modi government.”

Manipur is run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and led by Nongthombam Biren Singh. An adviser to Mr. Singh, the state’s chief minister, did not answer calls on Sunday.

Across India, the first phase of voting took place on Friday in 102 parliamentary seats, but six phases still remain, with results to be announced on June 4.
Time Is Running Out for Rahul Gandhi’s Vision for India (New York Times)
New York Times [4/20/2024 4:14 PM, Samanth Subramanian, 831K, Neutral]
Rahul Gandhi stood in a red Jeep, amid a churning crowd in Varanasi, trying to unseat the Indian government with a microphone in his hand. “The mic isn’t good,” he said. “Please quiet down and listen.” It was the morning of Feb. 17 — Day 35 of a journey that began in the hills of Manipur, in India’s northeast, and would end by the ocean in Mumbai, in mid-March. In total, Gandhi would cover 15 states and 4,100 miles, traveling across a country that once voted for his party, the Indian National Congress, almost by reflex. No longer, though. For a decade, the Congress Party has been so deep in the political wilderness, occupying fewer than a tenth of the seats in Parliament, that even its well-wishers wonder if Gandhi is merely the custodian of its end.

Gandhi called his expedition the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra — roughly, the Unite India March for Justice. He never said it in so many words, but the yatra was an appeal to voters to deny Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party a third straight term in parliamentary elections starting on April 19. Congress, the only other party with a national presence, is the fulcrum of an anti-B.J.P. coalition. Indian pundits and journalists bicker about many things, but on this point they’re unanimous: Only a miracle will halt the B.J.P. Still, it falls to Gandhi, steward of his enfeebled party, to try.

The speech lasted barely 15 minutes. Gandhi is a fidgety orator, unable to shrug off the routine disturbances of a rally. He kept calling for silence, and scolding overzealous policemen regulating the mob. He didn’t ramble, exactly, but eddied around the point he wanted to make. “This is a country of love, not of hate,” he said. He talked of two Indias, populated respectively by the millionaires and the impoverished. He laid into TV news channels, many of which have been captured by oligarchs prospering under the B.J.P.: “They won’t show the farmers, or the workers or the poor,” he said. “But they will show Narendra Modi 24 hours a day.” Then he helped onto his Jeep a member of the audience, a young man who complained that, despite spending hundreds of thousands of rupees on his education, he still had no job. His is a common story in Modi’s India. Two out of every five recent college graduates are out of work, and young people make up 83 percent of the unemployed. To his crowd, Gandhi called out: “These are the two issues facing India: unemployment and — ?” He received only a tepid response of “poverty.” When he finished, there was no applause.

The crush of people at the rally was suffocating, although in India a crowd is no index of popularity. People may gawk and then go vote for the other guy — and Gandhi is, after all, one of the country’s most recognizable men. Officially, he is no longer his party’s president, but he is undoubtedly its face. At 53, with a well-salted beard and serious eyes, he’s too old to be called Congress’s “scion,” but he still wears the sheen of dynasty. His great-grandfather, the unflinchingly secular Jawaharlal Nehru, was India’s first prime minister. His grandmother, Indira, and his father, Rajiv, both became prime ministers; both were assassinated. His mother, Sonia, steered Congress into government in 2004 and 2009, but declined the top post. Then, on the heels of several corruption scandals, the mighty party — 140 years old next year — came unstuck. Out of 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament, Congress holds just 46, compared to the B.J.P.’s 288. Gandhi embodies all this history: the triumphs as well as the failures. For the crowds, that is the fascination he exerts.

One of Modi’s successes has been not just to trounce the Congress Party but also to persuade people that the party has weakened India and emasculated its Hindus. Through his cult of personality, Modi is fulfilling a century-old project, recasting India as a Hindu nation, in which minorities, particularly Muslims, live at the sufferance of the majority. Emblematic of this is a new law offering fast-tracked citizenship to people fleeing Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan — as long as they aren’t Muslim. It is the B.J.P.’s totemic achievement: the use of religion to decide who can be called “Indian.” Opposing this law or indeed resisting the B.J.P. in any way has proved difficult. Investigating agencies mount flimsy cases against critics of the government, as Amnesty International has frequently noted. (Amnesty itself halted its work in India in 2020, in the midst of what it later called an “incessant witch hunt” by the government.) Activists are regularly imprisoned, sometimes on the basis of planted evidence; journalists are sent to jail or otherwise bullied so frequently that India has slipped to 161st out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, just three spots above Russia. Pliant courts often endorse it all. Such is the mood in India that one of the plainest sentences in Congress’s election manifesto is also one of its most resonant: “We promise you freedom from fear.”

As the election neared, the quelling of dissent grew more visible still. This year, in an unprecedented move, Modi’s administration arrested two chief ministers of states run by small opposition parties. (One stepped down hours before his arrest.) In both instances, the government claimed corruption, but many critics noted that the arrests were uncannily timed to pull two popular politicians out of campaign season in states where the B.J.P. has struggled. Income-tax authorities froze Congress’s bank accounts, supposedly over a late filing. “It has been orchestrated to cripple us in the elections,” Gandhi told reporters. If so, it feels like overkill, because it is common wisdom that Congress can’t win. Those who want nothing to do with the B.J.P. watch Gandhi with conflicted anguish. He is, by all accounts, sincere, empathetic and committed to a pluralistic India. This is a man who forgave his father’s killers, and who said on the sidelines of a private New York event last year, according to one of those present: “I don’t hate Modi. The day I hate, I will leave politics.” But he’s also the latest in a lineage under whom Congress grew undemocratic and sometimes wildly corrupt. The great liberal hope is that Gandhi can achieve contradictory things: use his dynastic privilege to resuscitate his party, and dissolve the dynasty at the same time.

That’s a steep demand, but Gandhi’s priorities are altogether more Himalayan. “He doesn’t say it,” Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who knows Gandhi well, told me, “but he’s modeling himself after Mahatma Gandhi. He doesn’t want to take any position of power.” In January, Gandhi told his colleagues that he has “one foot in and one foot out of the party,” and that he plans to be “a bridge to activists outside.” As he explained it then, the B.J.P., with its undiluted majoritarianism, “is a political-ideological machine. It can’t be defeated by a political machine alone.” His role, as he sees it, is to be the counter ideology — to go out into the country, rouse Indians to the dangers of the B.J.P. and offer them his dream of a fairer, more tolerant India instead.

The yatra is a well-worn exercise in Indian politics. Its most famous practitioner, Mahatma Gandhi, returned from South Africa in 1915 hungering to know more about his country. Go travel the land, one of his mentors told him, “with eyes and ears open, but mouth shut.” After using the yatra to gain an education, he employed it for political purpose. In 1930, he walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to protest the British monopoly on salt; hundreds of people joined him, and he spoke to thousands en route. On reaching the beach, he scooped out a fist of salty sand and announced he had broken the monopoly, setting off a wave of civil disobedience. There have been plenty of other yatras since. In 1983, Smita Gupta, a retired journalist who was then a cub reporter, walked part of a 2,650-mile yatra by a politician named Chandra Shekhar, as he tried to enlist support against Indira Gandhi. As Gupta recalled, for people who live far from the centers of power, “when a politician descends from the skies and comes to your home, it’s a big deal — I was swept away.”

Rahul Gandhi conceived of his yatra much as Chandra Shekhar did: as a way to counter the ideology of a seemingly immovable leader. There’s no place more vital for this project than Uttar Pradesh, the state through which I trailed him in February. With its 80 parliamentary seats and 240 million people, many living on incomes lower than the sub-Saharan average of $1,700 a year, Uttar Pradesh is electorally pivotal. Excelling here isn’t a guarantee of securing power in Delhi, but it’s as close to ironclad as it gets. It’s also the state that produced the Gandhis. When Nehru, born in Uttar Pradesh, ran for Parliament from a constituency near his hometown, Congress shared one advantage with other parties in post-colonial countries: the glory of having led the freedom struggle. That kept for surprisingly long without spoiling. Nehru’s heirs — Indira, then her son Rajiv, then his wife, Sonia — all won election after election from their constituencies in Uttar Pradesh. Rahul Gandhi once called Uttar Pradesh his karmabhoomi, a Sanskrit word for the land of one’s momentous actions.

But Uttar Pradesh also became the land where Congress was fated to fail. Today it’s the roiling heart of the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalism. Varanasi, Hinduism’s most sacred city, lies near the state’s eastern border, and Modi chose to represent it in Parliament — a crafty choice for a man wishing to be hailed as a defender of his faith. Around 40 million Muslims live in the state, and under its B.J.P. chief minister, they’re increasingly being erased from public life. One law jeopardizes their right to marry whom they wish. Other regulations have constricted the meat trade, in which many Muslims work. Islamic schools are in danger of being banned outright. By painting Muslims as trespassers, the B.J.P. licenses violence against them, sometimes even explicitly. (In 2015, a man was beaten to death by his Hindu neighbors in his village in western Uttar Pradesh, on the rumor that he had slaughtered a cow. The men accused of his murder have since been freed on bail and the case is still unresolved.) More than any other part of India, Uttar Pradesh shows what the B.J.P. has wrought and how successful it has been. In 2019, during the last national election, the B.J.P. swept 62 of the state’s 80 seats. Congress won just one.

A few years ago, Gandhi decided that his party needed a way to mobilize people against the B.J.P., settling on a yatra as a means to that end. He embarked on his first, walking up the spine of India, in late 2022. Even the plainness of his attire — sneakers, loosefitting trousers, white polo shirt — was a rebuke to the Olympian vanity of Modi, who once had his own name stitched, in tiny letters, to form the pinstripes of a suit. The yatras felt like campaigns, yet Gandhi’s team insists that they were not about projecting him as prime minister but rather a form of ideological resistance, almost above politics. (His staff politely refused my repeated requests for an interview.)

The Congress Party found itself divided over Gandhi’s approach. Salman Khurshid, a Congress veteran, worried that the party has strayed from bread-and-butter political strategy. We were in his office in Delhi, and he kept looking dolorously at his phone, which never stopped ringing. It was the feverish middle of the election season, and Congress was picking its candidates and negotiating alliances with other parties. Gandhi had to weigh in, Khurshid said: “We’d like him to be within shouting distance. He’s a thousand kilometers away.” Khurshid wished for a more customary system, the sort that promised, say, a 20-minute appointment at 10 a.m. to talk about three things. “That’s how ordinary political parties work,” he said. “He wants an extraordinary political party.”

Sometimes, Gandhi’s team told Khurshid and others to come on the yatra and talk to Gandhi on the bus. But it wasn’t sufficient, Khurshid told me. “There’s never enough time.” The yatra involved a lot of stopping and starting and stopping again, as I discovered. Two or three times a day, Gandhi’s Jeep — and its caravan of police cars, S.U.V.s and a vehicle bearing a device labeled “Jammer” — inched through a town, halting at a crossroads for a speech. Then the convoy would hasten to its next engagement, trying to cover vast Uttar Pradesh distances through dense Uttar Pradesh traffic, and always behind schedule. The day ended in a cordoned-off campsite, where everyone slept in shipping containers fitted with bunks. Here, in his own enclosure, Gandhi hobnobbed with local Congress functionaries or practiced jiu-jitsu with his instructor.

In Prayagraj, where we headed after Varanasi, it’s possible to traverse the distance between the party’s zenith and its rock bottom in a single evening. First, Gandhi made a speech outside Anand Bhavan, an ancestral family home, an eggshell-white mansion on an emerald lawn. Anand Bhavan is now a museum, but its chief relic is intangible: the promise of Nehruvian secularism, circa 1947. Then, while leaving Prayagraj, we passed the high court that invalidated Indira Gandhi’s election in 1975 on the grounds of electoral malpractice. The verdict provoked her to impose a state of emergency — a suspension of civic rights — for nearly two years, tarnishing Congress and strengthening its competitors. By this time too, the party had wrapped itself feudally around the dynasty. Any emergent leaders with their own base were subdued or cast off because they threatened the Gandhis. By the late 1980s, other politicians had clawed voters away from Congress by courting specific groups — members of a caste, say, or as with the B.J.P. and Hindus, of a religion.

As Congress faltered, its workers joined rival parties, including the B.J.P. In India, party workers don’t just canvass voters — they step in for an insufficient state. If a farmer needing a loan is turned away by the bank manager, or if a woman can’t pay the cost of treatment for her sick daughter, party workers use their contacts to help. These services are performed in the hope that the favors will be returned every five years, come the election. “The average party worker needs, say, 10,000 rupees a month to run his home,” an old Congress hand in Varanasi, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisal, told me. “If their party can’t get to power, how will they get paid? They’ll go work for whoever is most likely to win.”

Gilles Verniers, a political scientist, recounted taking his Ashoka University class on a trip to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital, on the day votes were counted in a state election in 2017. He distributed his pupils among the headquarters of various parties, but by midmorning, the students at the Congress office called him. “They said: ‘Can we go elsewhere?’” Verniers told me. “ ’There’s no one here, everybody left.’ The party knew they were getting spanked, but at least you could stick around, thanking workers, encouraging them. There was no one to even make tea.” Today, the Varanasi representative told me, “we just hope to God we win even one seat in Uttar Pradesh.”

Gandhi entered politics with several lifetimes’ worth of trauma packed into his 33 years. When he was 14, two of his grandmother’s bodyguards shot her dead — revenge for an assault she ordered upon a Sikh temple to root out separatist militants sheltering within. The bodyguards had taught a young Rahul how to play badminton. Seven years later, while he was a student at Harvard, his father, Rajiv, was killed by a suicide bomber — revenge again, this time by a separatist group in Sri Lanka, where he had sent Indian troops to aid the government. It became difficult for Rahul Gandhi to be Rahul Gandhi: to trust people or go anywhere ungirded by security. For a while it didn’t seem inevitable that he would choose politics. Later he would say that he made the decision on a train just as it entered Prayagraj, when he was taking his father’s cremated remains to pour into the Ganges River.

Smita Gupta, the former journalist, attended one of Gandhi’s earliest rallies, in an Uttar Pradesh town called Farrukhabad, in 2004. The road was so crowded that a 15-minute drive took three hours. Gandhi arrived in a Jeep, smiling and dimpling and waving. As he walked to the dais, the barricades broke from the masses of excited people pushing against them. “He was swept away, sailing with the crowd,” Gupta said. Soon after Congress won that election, Gandhi took charge of the party’s junior wing. The transition to the dynasty’s next generation seemed underway, and he exhibited the air of someone who knew he was the man for the job.

At the time, Gandhi often showed little patience with the orthodox figures of politics. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political scientist at Princeton, who met Gandhi back then, recalled that he made minimal eye contact and seemed distracted — unable even to feign interest as politicians usually do so well. A journalist who met Gandhi privately told me that he was, as the saying goes, eager to tell you what you thought: “It was: ‘You don’t know how the Congress works. Let me tell you.’ Or, ‘I’ll tell you about India and Pakistan.’” In his memoir “A Promised Land,” Barack Obama compared Gandhi, whom he met in 2010, to “a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.” One of Gandhi’s colleagues admits he used to be “very anxious and pushy” back in the day. “He has calmed down over a period of time.”

He had to. Congress isn’t a party you can change in a hurry. Its ways are too ossified, and it is honeycombed with fiefs. When Gandhi wanted Congress to field new faces in elections, he pushed for candidates to be selected through an internal voting system, rather like a primary. According to one former party consultant, senior politicians, worried about losing their tickets, complained to his mother, Sonia, the Congress president. Khurshid, one of the old guard, told me: “Everything that destroys democracy got in there — money, muscle, power.” It resulted in “the dedicated warriors of the Congress at the youth level” being sidelined. The primaries never took off. In 2018, Gandhi wanted young chief ministers in three states where Congress had won state elections. He didn’t get his way. But at least Gandhi tried something, a consultant to Congress told me. “If you leave it to these other guys,” he said, “they will not even change the curtains in the party office.”

These exasperations may have amplified a hesitancy about power and responsibility that Gandhi seemed always to harbor. In 2009, he declined the offer to be a cabinet minister. Perhaps even then he saw his role as that of a moral authority outside the government, Yechury said. On becoming the party’s vice president, Gandhi gave not a stirring speech but a somber one, recalling the assassinations in his family and counseling his party that “power is poison.” In 2017, he became the party’s president, but after Congress lost the 2019 election, he quit the post. According to two Congress sources, he expected other top party leaders to feel accountable and step down as well. No one did.

In a party often pilloried for being dynastic, Gandhi has been unable to stamp his will on Congress. One friend of the family described Gandhi as “timid.” When his 2022 yatra went through the state of Kerala, Yechury, the Communist leader, considered walking with him, but members of Congress’s Kerala unit protested: The Communists were their chief rivals in the state, and this show of solidarity — even against the B.J.P., a common antagonist — wouldn’t do at all. Yechury couldn’t understand it. Gandhi might not be the party’s president, but there’s no doubt he is its presiding force, Yechury said. Why didn’t he just hold fast?

Two years ago, during a protest in Delhi, Gandhi and dozens of his Congress colleagues were detained by the police. One of those present, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told me that several senior leaders were held together, and Gandhi had “really frank and open conversations” with them. A couple of these leaders “got aggressive, saying, ‘You have to take charge,’ persuading him to take back the party presidency, accusing him of running away from responsibility.” It was high-octane drama: “What do you do when you’re detained, man? We were there for six hours. He couldn’t go anywhere.” The Congress worker remembers Gandhi saying then: “I know what I have to do. My job is to do mass outreach. You guys handle the party.”

Gandhi’s two yatras have unfolded in the shadow of another, some 30 years ago — one that ultimately helped bring Modi to power. Riding in a Toyota decked out as a chariot, a B.J.P. leader named Lal Krishna Advani rode through northern and central India, advertising one of his party’s priorities: the claim that, 450 years earlier in the town Ayodhya, a Mughal ruler had knocked down a temple to build a mosque. Advani promised his audiences that the B.J.P. would restore the temple to that very spot. Two years later, the foot soldiers of the B.J.P. and other right-wing groups razed the mosque, triggering not just riots that killed 2,000 people but also a deep fracture in Indian society. After that, the B.J.P. regularly listed the construction of a temple in its election manifestos, harvesting votes out of the religious polarization around the issue. In 2019, mere months after Modi won his second term, the Supreme Court ruled that the mosque’s demolition was illegal, and that there was no evidence it had been built by knocking down a Hindu shrine. Yet the judges allowed a new temple to be erected on the site, legitimizing the majority’s abuse of disputed medieval history to its own retributive ends. In January, that temple was consecrated. Modi presided over the rites, as if he were head priest rather than prime minister.

Congress didn’t send any representatives to the temple’s inauguration, and I had expected Gandhi to speak about Ayodhya, which lies, after all, in Uttar Pradesh. But he barely mentioned it, even in Varanasi, a city facing a potential reprise of Ayodhya. The morning after his speech there, I visited a quarter called Pilikothi, following a sequence of lanes, each framed by so many tall tenements that there was something canyonlike about them. It was a Sunday, but Pilikothi echoed with the tack-tack of sari looms. The sound drifted into the basement in which Abdul Batin Nomani, the mufti of Varanasi, sat at a low desk. Behind him were shelves of theological volumes. When he pulled a book out to illustrate a point, his hand didn’t hesitate for a second.

The title of mufti, or jurist, has been in Nomani’s family since 1927, and he has filled the role for more than two decades. In that time, he said, the B.J.P. has spread so much hate that it has corroded even the possibility of amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims. You can be arrested for offering the namaz in public, or for being a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, or for running your butcher shop during Hindu festivals. You could be lynched on a whisper that you’re carrying beef, or have your house bulldozed on suspicion of being a rioter, or be hunted by mobs goaded by B.J.P. politicians calling for murder. Nomani told me about the head of a Hindu monastery nearby, and how they would invite one another to their religious functions. “Then, slowly, his mind turned,” Nomani said. “He must have been convinced that to talk to people like me is wrong.”

Nomani heads the committee of the Gyanvapi Mosque, another centuries-old structure that the Hindu right aims to replace with a temple. Weeks before I met Nomani, a court allowed Hindus to worship in the mosque’s basement, similar to what happened in Ayodhya in 1986. Varanasi’s Muslims are fearful, Nomani said. Wouldn’t the same cascade of consequences ensue? Wouldn’t other mosques surely follow? When the yatra swung by, Nomani told a local Congress representative he would welcome a meeting with Gandhi. It never transpired. Nomani wondered why Gandhi didn’t even speak about the issue and directly confront the B.J.P.’s divisive politics. “Someone could have called and reassured us: ‘Don’t worry, we’re with you,’” Nomani said. He regards Gandhi with sympathy. “I believe he wants to do the right thing, and that he is against this culture of hate,” he said. “But he’s weak. His party is weak. He can’t do anything.”

From Prayagraj, the yatra headed to Amethi, a town a couple of hours to the north. I had last visited in 2009, when it was still a stronghold of Congress’s first family, and I remembered the fields of winter mustard, yellow till the horizon, on the town’s outskirts and the wishbone layout of its three main roads. Gandhi won resoundingly that year. But in 2014, when his margin shrank, he must have seen the incoming tide of Hindu nationalism. Sanjay Singh, a local Congress worker, recalled that, on vote-counting day, Gandhi sounded dispirited as the results trickled in, telling his colleagues “the politics of this state is beyond my understanding.” In 2019, the B.J.P. flipped Amethi. If Gandhi hadn’t simultaneously run from another seat, in Kerala, he wouldn’t be in Parliament at all.

The yatra’s schedule included an evening rally, so I spent the afternoon in Singh’s house in a village nearby. A stern-eyed man with a ramrod bearing, he wore a spotless white shirt and trousers, and he had tucked a Congress streamer around his neck like a cravat. He lamented Congress’s loss of Amethi, but he wasn’t surprised. Between 2014 and 2019, Gandhi visited Amethi less and less, dispatching his advisers instead. Still, Singh felt almost guilty that Amethi voted for the B.J.P. Last year he had a chance to meet Gandhi, he said, and asked him to run from Amethi again: “I told him, ‘Whatever mistake we made, we’re ready to rectify.’” A few weeks after I met Singh, though, Gandhi declared that he would stick to his constituency in Kerala.

For the rally, the party had set up rows of chairs in a field, but the audience started dribbling out almost as soon as it began. By the time Gandhi was midway through his speech, only half the chairs were occupied. He talked about China, and riots in faraway Manipur, and the B.J.P.’s cronyism. Standing next to me, a policewoman told a videographer, “He isn’t talking about Amethi at all.” The only cheers came when he raised the plight of India’s poorer castes — the very people who made up most of his audience. As he had done throughout the yatra, he warned them they’d never get very far in the B.J.P.’s India. He may well be right, but I remembered something Mehta told me. Modi’s narrative of a resurgent Hinduism, however hollow, makes people feel good about themselves, Mehta said. “Rahul’s narrative does the opposite.”

The next day, something interrupted the yatra’s staid choreography. We were in Raebareli, the one Uttar Pradesh constituency still with the Congress Party. Halfway through his address, Gandhi invited a young man onto his Jeep to quiz him about his prospects. The man introduced himself as Amit Maurya, but he was barely audible, so Gandhi said, paternally but lightly, “First, learn how to handle a microphone.”

“I’m a little anxious, sir.”

“Don’t worry,” Gandhi replied. “You’re a lion.”

Either it was the pressure of the moment or the unchecking of a dam of frustration, but Maurya burst into tears.

In the week’s most genuine moment, Gandhi seemed nonplused, as if he didn’t know what to do with this political gift. Instinctively, he folded Maurya into an embrace and kept his arm around the sobbing man. Still, he just couldn’t abandon his routine — the statistics he’d memorized, the thesis presentation mode he was in. But even if his speech didn’t change, he sounded more passionate — angry, even — about the inequities he had lined up to narrate to his crowd.

Well after the yatra’s end, when summer hammers down and ballot machines appear in schools and colleges and municipal buildings, Gandhi may at least be able to count on Maurya’s vote. But who knows. Elections are subject to every manner of caprice, and the B.J.P. has shown itself to be peerless at swaying India’s voters. Out of hubris or audacity, Gandhi wants to persuade people to consider lofty things like morality and love, indispensable values that nonetheless make for nebulous campaign platforms. He doesn’t mind if it takes years, and perhaps he doesn’t mind if he loses his party in the process. In that time, though, he risks seeing his idea of India extinguished altogether.
A Billion Indians Are About to Vote. Many Think They Already Know the Result. (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal [4/20/2024 12:26 AM, Tripti Lahiri and Vibhuti Agarwal, 810K, Neutral]
The world’s largest democracy began voting Friday in an election that is widely expected to result in a third national victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The election will last six weeks and zigzag across the country as some 15 million poll workers and security personnel administer the vote to nearly 970 million registered voters. The election is a logistical feat carried out everywhere from the Himalayas to India’s forests and mangroves, and calibrated around agricultural seasons, school exams, festivals—and likely extreme heat.

The ruling party won a majority of 303 seats in the 543-seat lower house of parliament in 2019 and says it intends to do even better this time. Despite an undercurrent of economic anxiety in the country over unemployment and inflation, political analysts and surveys indicate Modi’s party is likely to emerge with a majority.

If Modi’s party wins, it would make him the first Indian prime minister to win a third consecutive term since the country’s first leader after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. Challengers have long been able to count on a wave of anti-incumbency to kick in at some point.

Modi’s personal appeal is central to his party’s success and stems in large part from his promise to make India a stronger nation by drawing on its Hindu identity. Many Indians say they feel their country is finally being taken seriously on the world stage.

Modi’s social-media feeds are filled with his meetings with global leaders. He was invited by the Biden administration for a state visit last year and, for the second time, addressed a joint session of Congress.

“One of the most remarkable shifts we’ve seen in the past 10 years is the way in which foreign policy has become much more of a mass issue than it ever has been,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S. think tank.

“I think what Modi has been able to do is to say, ‘Look, in order to project power abroad, we need to be strong at home,’ “ he said. “And in order to be strong at home we need to have the kind of social cohesion that this kind of Hindu solidarity affords.”

Modi first came to national power in 2014 on a campaign of fighting corruption and making India more business friendly, ousting the then ruling Congress Party from power.

Congress, which was the dominant party in India for decades, has been struggling to regain its footing ever since. Political analysts say one of the opposition’s biggest problems is its leadership. Many Indians see Rahul Gandhi, Nehru’s great-grandson and the face of the Congress Party, as a privileged member of the elite, they say. That puts the party at a disadvantage against Modi, who plays up his humble upbringing as the son of a tea seller.

The decline of the Congress Party has appeared to intensify in recent years. In the last major state elections, it lost power in two large states to Modi’s party. Last year, more than two dozen opposition parties, led by Congress, teamed up to form a bloc to take on the BJP in this year’s elections. But the coalition has been marred by infighting and it trails in the polls.

Opposition politicians have, in turn, accused Modi’s government of stifling dissent and eroding democracy, a charge the ruling party denies. Last month, Congress said tax authorities froze party accounts and seized funds, hamstringing its campaign. The ruling party said it was a routine tax-recovery action.

While the opposition has struggled to gain traction, Modi has been able to galvanize his base with some of the actions he has taken in office.

This year, Modi was at the center of religious ceremonies to inaugurate a Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Ram, one of Hinduism’s most revered figures, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. It was built on the site where a medieval mosque had stood until it was torn down by a Hindu mob, to the distress of the country’s minority Muslims. Many of Modi’s opponents have accused him of undermining India’s founding principles as a secular, pluralist republic.

Many had expected Modi’s party, which was seen as pro-business, to mark a break from the social-welfare programs of the Congress era. Instead, the party has built on initiatives begun under Congress, in many cases harnessing the power of digital payments.

“A significant part of his growth is due to his creation of a new kind of welfare state,” said Nalin Mehta, political scientist and author of “The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party.”

Last year, the government extended a pandemic-era, free food-grains program that gives rice or wheat to every adult household member, at a cost of about $30 billion a year. Other programs, including a home-building subsidy that has encouraged female property ownership, have helped the BJP win a growing share of women voters, an increasingly important demographic.

Still, economic concerns remain a worry for many, with Modi’s economic policies so far yielding mixed results.

Investment in infrastructure has improved connectivity, a boon for many small and large businesses. And Modi’s efforts to attract some of the manufacturing shifting away from China amid Beijing’s tensions with Washington have brought some major U.S. companies to India—most notably Apple. But economists say that India still isn’t creating as many jobs as it needs to, and many Indians remain on the farm eking out meager incomes, rather than entering the formal economy.

Youth unemployment is in the double digits, despite the government expecting to achieve GDP growth of close to 8% in the fiscal year that ended March 31.

“This whole second term has been light on economic reforms,” said Richard Rossow, an India policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think tank that tracks whether India is moving on measures it believes would make the economy more competitive. “They blame it on Covid. But actually most of the reforms that did happen were during Covid.”

Many voters experiencing economic woes nevertheless plan to stick with Modi.

Dilip Kumar Patidar, a 42-year-old farmer in Guda village in Madhya Pradesh state said that during Modi’s two terms his debts had risen because of food and fertilizer price increases. But he credits the local BJP candidate for improving infrastructure in his village, including building toilets and providing clean drinking water, and the Modi government for its food program.

“Though we don’t have savings, we can still manage our expenses when our food is taken care of,” he said. He also favors Modi’s promotion of Hindu culture.

Patidar’s wife Chanda Devi said she also plans to vote for Modi’s party.

“Life is not easy. But would any party make it perfect?” she said. “And who doesn’t want free food and cash handouts? Modi is giving both.”
India to rerun election at 11 places in Manipur after violence (Reuters)
Reuters [4/21/2024 2:33 AM, Manoj Kumar, 5239K, Neutral]
India, staging the world’s biggest election, will rerun voting at 11 polling stations in the northeastern state of Manipur on Monday after reports of violence and damage to voting machines in the state torn by months of ethnic clashes.

The election authorities declared the voting void at the 11 locations and ordered the fresh poll, the chief electoral officer of Manipur said in a statement late on Saturday.

Friday marked the start of voting by nearly one billion people in the world’s most-populous country, in an election running through June 1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is forecast to win a rare third term on the back of issues such as growth, welfare and Hindu nationalism.

The main opposition Congress party had demanded a rerun at 47 Manipur polling stations, alleging that booths were captured and elections were rigged.

There were scattered incidents of violence on Friday in the state, including clashes among armed groups and attempts to take over polling stations under heavy security. Voters turned out in large numbers, despite the threat of clashes that have killed at least 220 people in the past year.

Manipur has been roiled by fighting between the majority Meitei and tribal Kuki-Zo people since May. It remains divided between a valley controlled by Meiteis and Kuki-dominated hills, separated by a stretch of no-man’s land monitored by federal paramilitary forces.
Modi’s Muslim remarks spark ‘hate speech’ accusations as India’s mammoth election deepens divides (CNN)
CNN [4/22/2024 3:23 AM, Rhea Mogul, 6.1M, Negative]
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been accused of delivering Islamophobic remarks during an election rally Sunday, triggering widespread anger from prominent Muslims and members of the opposition.

The world’s most populous nation is in the midst of a mammoth weeks-long election in which Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to secure a rare third consecutive term.

Speaking in front of a large crowd in the country’s western Rajasthan state, Modi said if voted into power, the country’s main opposition, the Indian National Congress, would distribute the country’s wealth among “infiltrators” and “those who have more children,” in apparent reference to the Muslim community.

“When they (the Congress) were in power, they said Muslims have first right over resources. They will gather all your wealth and distribute it among those who have more children. They will distribute among infiltrators,” Modi said to thunderous roars from the audience.

“Do you think your hard-earned money should be given to infiltrators? Would you accept this?” Modi said.

Those remarks have been seized on by the opposition, who have long accused Modi and the BJP of using divisive rhetoric to turbo-charge their increasingly popular brand of Hindu nationalism.

Opposition members have called on the Election Commission of India (ECI) to investigate whether Modi’s comments break the body’s code of conduct.

The code states politicians must not appeal to voters based on “caste” and “communal feelings.” Activity which “may aggravate differences or create mutual hatred or cause tension” between communities and religions, is also not allowed.

CNN has contacted the ECI for comment.

Modi received widespread backlash from members of the Muslim community for his comments at a time when many fear a third BJP term will deepen the communal fissures already running through the country.

“This is not a dogwhistle, this is a targeted, direct, brazen hate speech against a community,” prominent Muslim journalist Rana Ayyub wrote on X.

Muslim lawmaker and president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said: “Modi today called Muslims infiltrators and people with many children. Since 2002 till this day, the only Modi guarantee has been to abuse Muslims and get votes.”

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge described Modi’s comments as “hate speech” and “a well thought out ploy to divert attention.”

“Today the prime minister did what he has learnt from the values of the Sangh,” referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a right-wing Hindu paramilitary organization, which Modi was once a youth member of and to which the BJP is affiliated with. “In the history of India, no prime minister has lowered the dignity of his post as much as Modi has.”

Modi swept to power in 2014 on a promise of development and anti-corruption, rising in popularity during his term and getting re-elected five years later – the second time on a more openly Hindu nationalist ticket.

Over the last decade, Modi and his BJP have been accused of driving religious polarization with their Hindu nationalist policies, giving rise to a wave of Islamophobia and deadly communal clashes in the world’s largest secular democracy.

India’s minority Muslim population is enormous – some 230 million people – and Muslims have lived in what is now modern India for centuries. But a false conspiracy voiced by some Hindu nationalists is to accuse Muslims of being somehow outsiders and spreading a false narrative that they are displacing the country’s Hindu population by deliberately having large families.

The BJP has repeatedly said it does not discriminate based on religion and treats all citizens equally.

But research, reporting and rights groups say divisions have increased in the country of 1.4 billion people.

Anti-Muslim speech has risen dramatically, a recent report by the Washington-based research group India Hate Lab showed, which documented 668 such cases in 2023. Of these cases, 75% took place in BJP-ruled states, the report said.

India prohibits hate speech under several sections of its penal code, including a section which criminalizes “deliberate and malicious acts” intended to insult religious beliefs, but rights groups say there is a lack of immediate and adequate action against the alleged perpetrators of such acts, giving right-wing extremists tacit support.
India’s Broken Education System Threatens Its Superpower Dreams (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal [4/21/2024 9:00 AM, Megha Mandavia, 810K, Neutral]
India kicked off the world’s biggest election in human history on Friday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is favored, but whoever wins has a big challenge ahead: India urgently needs jobs for its millions of young people, but its education system often produces the wrong kind of graduates.

If that can’t be remedied, India’s ambition to become a second “world’s factory floor” to rival China could unravel before it properly begins.

There are some lessons to be learned from India’s software and outsourcing boom of the 2000s. India’s famed information technology sector did a stellar job training students in software engineering and allied fields by working with universities to craft courses. It currently employs more than 5 million workers, according to government estimates.

But that is a woefully small number compared with the size of the labor force: India churns out around 10 million postsecondary graduates a year, according to Morgan Stanley.

Moreover, as India increasingly reorients its economy toward manufacturing—with investments from Apple suppliers such as Foxconn and, potentially, from Tesla—those grads won’t necessarily be the kind of workers it needs. Only 3.8% of India’s total workforce had undergone formal vocational training as of mid-2023, according to government data.

India scores decently well on basic metrics such as literacy: Around 96% of young people can read and write, according to figures from data provider CEIC, and around three-quarters of the labor force has had some high school education, according to Morgan Stanley.

But digging deeper into the figures, especially for postsecondary education, raises concerns. The 2023 India Skills Report, compiled by online testing firm Wheebox in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry and others, showed only a modest improvement in “employability” among young graduates—increasing to 50.3% in 2022 from 46.2% in the previous year. Wheebox’s test measures basic skill-sets such as numeracy and English competency, among others. Only 28% and 34% of polytechnic and industrial institute grads, respectively, were employable in 2023, according to Morgan Stanley. That bodes ill for India’s ambitions to become a manufacturing heavyweight, unless it changes quickly.

Generous agricultural subsidies also artificially inflate demand for farm laborers. In other words, many educated graduates don’t have the skills they need, while many young workers with less education have strong incentives to stay in the countryside. Nearly 83% of jobless Indians are youth, according to the India Employment Report 2024 by the International Labour Organisation.

Improving paltry budgetary allocations to education and skill development and creating better tie-ups with industry to impart up-to-date vocational training would help. India’s central government currently spends below 3% of gross domestic product on education.

And while the Indian government has taken steps to rope in the private sector, skills training remains largely government-driven. That dependence adversely affects the number and quality of trained candidates, according to the National Skill Development Corp set up by the Ministry of Finance.

India doesn’t have forever to solve these problems: Factory automation is becoming ever more sophisticated, and India’s own fertility rate is already heading down, which will eventually start chipping away at its demographic dividend.

China is already getting old before many of its people are rich, even after one of the most spectacular economic booms in history. India still has plenty of work to do to avoid the same fate.
The Indian election issue that will impact the world (and no one is talking about) (CNN – opinion)
CNN [4/20/2024 12:58 PM, Aditya Valiathan Pillai, 6098K, Neutral]
It’s hard to truly comprehend how difficult and relentless a problem climate change is for a country as large as India. One way would be to rig a drone with a very large battery pack and fly it from one end to the other.

Start in the south in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, in the fall of 2022. Fly very, very slowly northwards until you reach the Himalayas just before the national elections that started this week.

You would witness a country in constant convulsion.

Soon after take off, you’d see the swish houses and gleaming towers of Bangalore’s new tech and corporate elite submerged amid September 2022’s monsoon rains. Just a little further north and a few months on in March 2023, record breaking fires tear through Karnataka state’s forests, the smoke obscuring vision for days.

Then, on to the heaving, humid metropolis of Mumbai at summer’s onset in April 2023 to find over a dozen people dead, mostly women, due to heat exposure at a large public gathering. Next, entire stretches of Delhi under water from flooding in July.

That same summer, hospitals in the sunburnt state of Uttar Pradesh, home to over 240 million people, fill with listless, heat-stroked workers. Finally, the anticipated visual reprieve of the Himalayan snow caps that never comes — instead replaced by an almost snowless winter that continues into 2024.

The impacts of India’s extreme weather are not neatly contained within the country’s borders. This is a global worry. When India introduces wheat export bans due to a heat wave or slows its vaunted IT exports because Bangalore is underwater, the lives of seemingly unconnected millions across the world are affected.

India is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the US. It is also the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

How India handles climate change, then, is everyone’s concern. But while climate is mentioned in the election manifestos of the two main parties — the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress — it will, perhaps surprisingly, not feature as a major issue in India’s six-week-long national election that started this week. That’s unlike in Australia, the UK and US, among others, where elections can be significantly influenced by climate policy positions.

This is because climate politics looks different in the developing world; it will shape Indian elections in definitive but under-the-radar ways. Climate impacts do shape voter demands — though this tends to filter through as anxieties about livelihood and continued welfare support, rather than in a neatly defined area of politics labeled “climate.”

You can see it in farmers asking for loan waivers and irrigation facilities after years of drought, in urban families demanding reduced electricity prices to offset cooling bills and in calls for more penetrating social welfare.

Here in the world’s most-populous country, the average Indian does not emit very much at present. India’s relatively low per-capita carbon emissions of 1.9 tons per person are less than half of the global average of 4.7 tons per person — and several times lower than developed economies.

This duality — low per-capita emissions and a rapidly growing economy — also shapes India’s climate policy. The incumbent government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has both pushed the rapid deployment of renewables and domestic green manufacturing to create jobs, while continuing to rely on fossil fuels to power the economy. That’s fairly similar to previous governments.

Leaf through the BJP and Congress’ election manifestos and you will find several dozen pledges across sectors that could be filed under climate policy, with a roughly even split between the two parties (though their emphases predictably differ).

But these are listed across several chapters and rarely mention the word “climate” (though each has a separate chapter on sustainable development). Similarly, stump speeches throughout this campaign season have not featured climate change as a central issue.

Parties do however focus on climate-adjacent developmental issues — including expanding entitlements for the poorest (which could also help with weather shocks), creating jobs through green manufacturing and reconfiguring Indian agriculture.

But politics here seems to reflect the relative insignificance of climate change as a conceptual category in the Indian voter’s mind. When tens of thousands of farmers marched through Maharashtra in 2018 after several years of drought across parts of the state, they protested against rising agricultural debt, declining productivity, pests and inadequate irrigation. This was a climate protest in all but slogan.

Take for example a Muslim woman I spoke with a few years ago from the poorer reaches of North Bengal. Her small house in an informal settlement in Delhi was engulfed in a summer fire, and then a few years later her family home in Bengal was damaged in a monsoon flood.

She supports a large family of children and grandchildren as a house cleaner in Delhi’s rich neighbourhoods. Despite the fingerprint of climate impacts on her past, her main demands in previous elections were for regular water (which she gets once in two weeks from a water truck), cheaper electricity (she told me she pays around three times the price her rich employers pay because of an illegal connection), and cheaper health care.

Elections turn, then, on meeting developmental exigency. The headwinds of climate change are absorbed by the electoral machine and emerge as end-of-tailpipe policies rather than grand climate strategy.

This pattern of climate politics is reinforced by seemingly low recognition in India of climate change as a problem. In a 2022 survey of over 4,500 individuals across the country, over 50% of respondents said they knew little or nothing about climate change. Interestingly, recognition of climate change increased to over 80% in that survey when respondents were supplied with a short description of the phenomenon.

The hotch-potch of ad hoc policy fixes that emerges around climate issues will only get the country so far. It fails when put to the long-term test. Mobilizing large amounts of public finance to redesign cities to trap less heat and flood less, for example, requires a genuine public debate about a climate-ravaged future. Immediate investments are necessary to dull the blow tomorrow.

The climate crisis also deepens the case for global cooperation. India’s climate-outages are going to be hard for trading partners and global markets to ignore as its economy grows. Domestic politics that focus on immediate developmental goals rather than long-term climate-proofing creates a gaping hole that global adaptation finance must fill.

This has a moral dimension, too. The climate impacts buffeting India today are largely because of the historical emissions of developed counterparts.

Global resilience must be a priority in an interconnected world. The climate impacts buffeting the most populous nation on earth aren’t just a domestic issue — they’re an international one.
NSB
Maldives’ Pro-China President Secures Majority in Parliament (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [4/22/2024 1:32 AM, Sudhi Ranjan Sen, 5.5M, Neutral]
Maldives’ ruling People’s National Congress party won an absolute majority in parliament in elections held Sunday, giving President Mohamed Muizzu’s pro-China policies a boost.

President Muizzu’s party won 71 seats seats in 93-member parliament or Majlis, reported The Edition a local news platform, Monday. The main opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party, won 12 seats.

Muizzu won the presidential vote last year on a campaign to reduce India’s influence in the island. The president moved soon after taking office to demand the removal of Indian troops stationed on one of the country’s islets. New Delhi has agreed to withdraw its troops, who operate radars and aircraft, from the island nation by May 10.

Beijing, in the meantime, upgraded its diplomatic ties with the Maldives to a “comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership” during Muizzu’s five-day visit to China in January. China agreed to provide free military assistance to the Maldives and President Xi Jinping said China will seek to boost direct flights to the island nation. The two countries also agreed to increase cooperation in areas of trade, investment, agriculture and others.
Pro-China President Muizzu’s party sweeps Maldives parliamentary elections, preliminary results say (AP)
AP [4/21/2024 11:37 PM, Mohameed Sharuhan, 456K, Neutral]
Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu’s political party has swept parliamentary elections in a strong endorsement of his pro-China foreign policy, according to preliminary results reported Monday by local media.

The People’s National Congress won 70 out of 93 seats in Sunday’s vote, and along with three seats secured by its allies has taken absolute control of Parliament, according to the preliminary results.

The Maldivian Democratic Party, led by former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who is seen as pro-India, held 65 seats in the previous Parliament but won only 15 seats, the news site Mihaaru.com reported.

Official results are expected later Monday.

The election was closely watched by regional powers India and China, which are competing for influence in the archipelago nation, which has a strategic location in the Indian Ocean.

Muizzu’s election as president last year sharpened the rivalry between India and China as he took a pro-China stand and acted to remove Indian troops stationed on one of Maldives’ islets.

Sunday’s election was easier than expected for Muizzu, who had been expected to face a tough fight because some of his allies had fallen out and more parties entered the race.

Six political parties and independent groups fielded 368 candidates for the 93 seats in Parliament. The number of seats is six more than in the previous Parliament following adjustments for population growth.

Muizzu ran for president on a campaign theme of “India out,” accusing his predecessor of compromising national sovereignty by giving India too much influence.

At least 75 Indian military personnel were stationed in the Maldives and their known activities were operating two aircraft donated by India and assisting in the rescue of people stranded or faced with calamities at sea. Muizzu has taken steps to have civilians take over those activities.

Relations were strained further when Indian social media activists started a boycott of tourism in Maldives. That was in retaliation for three Maldivian deputy ministers making derogatory statements about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for raising the idea of promoting tourism in Lakshadweep, India’s own string of islands similar to the Maldives.

India has fallen from being the top source of foreign visitors to Maldives to No. 6, according to Maldives government statistics.

Muizzu visited China earlier this year and negotiated an increase in the number of tourists and inbound flights from China.

In 2013, Maldives joined China’s “Belt and Road” initiative meant to build ports and highways to expand trade — and China’s influence — across Asia, Africa and Europe.
Pro-China party wins Maldives election in landslide, media say (Reuters)
Reuters [4/22/2024 1:50 AM, Mohamed Junayd, 5.2M, Neutral]
Maldives voters handed President Mohamed Muizzu’s party a landslide win at parlimentary elections, media said on Monday, an outcome set to shift the Indian Ocean archipelago closer to China and away from traditional partner India.

Muizzu’s People’s National Congress (PNC) won 65 of the 93 seats up for grabs on Sunday, preliminary results from the Maldives Elections Commission and media projections show.

The main opposition Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) dwindled to just 12 seats from 65 earlier.

Both Beijing and New Delhi have wooed the Maldives as they vie for influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Elected last year, Muizzu has pledged to end the country’s "India First" policy, straining ties with New Delhi.

His government has asked dozens of Indian military personnel to leave the Maldives, a move critics say could hasten its shift towards China.

Muizzu’s post as president is not affected by Sunday’s vote, in which 368 candidates contested for five-year terms.
Qatar, Nepal, Bangladesh: Emir’s Visits Should Prioritize Migrant Worker Protections (Human Rights Watch)
Human Rights Watch [4/21/2024 6:00 PM, Staff, 190K, Neutral]
The upcoming visits of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, to Bangladesh and Nepal should prioritize labor protections for migrant workers, Human Rights Watch said today. Both are key countries for Qatar’s migrant workforce, which makes up 88 percent of the country’s population. Al-Thani is expected to arrive in Bangladesh on April 22, 2024, and in Nepal on April 24.

“It is important for Qatar, Bangladesh, and Nepal to go beyond exchanging diplomatic pleasantries over their longstanding labor ties and seize this moment to publicly commit to concrete, enforceable protections that address the serious abuses that migrant workers in Qatar continue to face,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Qatari emir should not just meet heads of state, but also visit dialysis centers filled with migrant worker returnees from Qatar and speak with the families of workers who died in Qatar to see the grave consequences of inadequate Qatari labor protections.”

Migrant workers from Bangladesh and Nepal have been indispensable to Qatar’s economy, including in the preparation and delivery of the 2022 World Cup. The Qatar-to-Nepal and Bangladesh routes that the Qatari leader is taking are well-trodden, with thousands of workers making this journey daily. As “guest workers” in a country that does not offer citizenship to most foreigners, the expectation is that workers come to Qatar to work, earn money, and, sooner or later, leave.

Qatar-based jobs have enabled migrant workers to send remittances back home to their families, but many workers leave Qatar worse off than before they migrated. They experience abuses that include wage theft, contract violations, and chronic illness linked to unsafe working conditions.

Many migrant workers do outdoor work and are exposed to Qatar’s extreme heat, and the lack of worker protections from this serious health hazard can take a devastating toll. Some workers also have been deported for demanding their contractually-owed wages and benefits. There have been thousands of unexplained deaths of young, healthy migrant workers in Qatar, and in many cases grieving familiesgrieving family members receive neither an explanation of the reasons for their loved ones’ death nor compensation justification nor compensationfrom employers or Qatari authorities.

The governments of Bangladesh and Nepal should not only highlight the importance of remittances but also the high costs that workers often bear to earn them, such as wage theft and recruitment fees. A 2020 survey found that the average recruitment costs for Bangladeshis going to work in Qatar was about US$3,863, equivalent to 18 months of earnings in Qatar. Workers take out informal loans at exorbitant interest rates to pay the fees. Research by Human Rights Watch has shown the role of Qatar-based companies in driving up worker-paid recruitment fees.

Qatar’s failure to safeguard worker rights and inadequate compensation mechanisms means that the responsibility is shifted to the origin countries’ governments to address harm originating in Qatar.

Many workers returning from Qatar are burdened with long-term diseases such as chronic kidney failure, for which the Nepali government provides free dialysis services. Families of many migrant workers who have lost their lives in Qatar rely on compensation through welfare funds set up unilaterally by countries of origin.

Human Rights Watch has documented the experiences of families who received no support from Qatari authorities or their employers despite losing their primary breadwinner, since the causes of their deaths are not classified as work-related.

Recognizing the inadequacies of the compensation system, Qatar’s own Supreme Committee urged its contractors to obtain life insurance for their employees, but this was adopted only by a handful of companies, even at the height of the 2022 World Cup when the world’s eyes were on Qatar’s migrant rights record.

The climate crisis is likely to worsen the risks to workers, which will further increase the care burden to overstretched healthcare systems in countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. These countries themselves are on the front lines of climate catastrophes despite their negligible greenhouse gas emissions.

Qatari authorities have introduced labor reforms, but Human Rights Watch has shown that they came too late and were too little and too narrow in scope. They have not abolished the abusive kafala (labor sponsorship) system that enables these abuses in its entirety.

Qatari authorities have claimed these reforms were not about the World Cup alone but a part of a process that continues beyond the tournament. Yet post-World Cup, many workers were stranded in Qatar in difficult conditions.

The labor agreements that are anticipated to be updated and signed during the emir’s visits should incorporate concrete provisions to address these issues, and the agreements themselves need to be made publicly available, Human Rights Watch said.

The significance of labor reforms or the agreements with migrant origin countries boils down to their implementation and their effectiveness in addressing widespread abuses, which requires strong enforcement mechanisms. Diplomatic visits, labor agreements, or labor reforms ring hollow if homecoming continues to be marred by unpaid wages or benefits, chronic kidney disease, and uninvestigated and uncompensated deaths.

“Public commitments by the Qatari emir to concrete, enforceable worker protections during these two high-profile visits, including compensation to workers who faced serious abuses and families of the deceased, would be the best way to mark his trips to the homes of millions of current and former workers who have helped transform Qatar,” Page said.
UN Pushes Justice For Sri Lanka’s Easter Victims (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [4/21/2024 3:35 AM, Amal Jayasinghe, 951K, Negative]
The United Nations on Sunday urged Sri Lanka to bridge its "accountability deficit" and ensure justice as the country commemorated the 279 victims of its worst-ever attack against civilians five years ago.

The UN’s top envoy to the country, Marc-Andre Franche, told a remembrance service in Colombo that there should be a "thorough and transparent investigation" to uncover those behind the Easter carnage in 2019.

Islamist bombers hit three churches and three hotels in the island’s deadliest suicide attack aimed at civilians, but grieving families say they are still waiting for justice.

Among the dead were 45 foreigners, including tourists visiting the island a decade after the end of a brutal ethnic conflict that had claimed more than 100,000 lives since 1972.

"Sri Lanka suffers from a continuing accountability deficit, be it for alleged war crimes, more recent human rights violations, corruption or abuse of power, which must be addressed if the country is to move forward," Franche said.

He noted that victims were still seeking justice despite the country’s Supreme Court holding the then president Maithripala Sirisena and his top officials responsible for failing to prevent the attack.

"Delivering justice for victims of these attacks should be part of addressing the systemic challenge," Franche said.

He said the UN Human Rights office has also called on Colombo to publish the complete findings of previous inquiries into the Easter Sunday bombings and to establish an independent investigation.

The leader of Sri Lanka’s Catholic church, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, accused President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government of suppressing new evidence and protecting those behind the jihadists.

"It is clear that Islamist extremists carried out the attack, but there were other forces behind them," Ranjith said.

"We have to conclude that the current government too is trying to protect them."

He has previously alleged that military intelligence officers engineered the April 21, 2019 attack to help the political ambitions of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a retired army officer who campaigned on security. Seven months later he won the presidency.

Since coming to power, Rajapaksa had systematically protected those behind the bombings, the Cardinal said.

Rajapaksa was forced out of office in July 2022 following months of protests over an unprecedented economic crisis that caused shortages of food, fuel and medicines.

Thousands of Sri Lanka’s Catholic minority staged a silent protest outside the capital after multi-faith services to bless the victims, who included more than 80 children.

Relatives carried photos of the dead and protested in the town of Negombo -- known as Sri Lanka’s ‘Little Rome’ because of its heavy concentration of Catholics.

Military personnel armed with automatic assault rifles watched as the protesters marched to the nearby St Sebastian’s church, where 114 people were killed in the coordinated suicide bombings.

Evidence tendered during a civil case brought by relatives of the victims showed that Indian intelligence officials warned Colombo of the bombings some 17 days earlier, but the authorities failed to act.

Then-president Sirisena and his officials have been ordered to pay 310 million rupees ($1 million) in compensation to victims and relatives.

But the ruling has yet to be fully implemented as Sirisena has appealed and a fresh hearing is scheduled for July.
Race car in Sri Lanka veers off track killing 7 people and injuring 20, officials say (AP)
AP [4/21/2024 5:14 PM, Bharatha Mallawarachi, 761K, Negative]
A race car veered off the track during a competition in Sri Lanka on Sunday and rammed into a crowd of spectators and race officials, killing seven people and injuring 20 others, officials said.

Thousands of spectators looked on as the mishap took place during a race in the town of Diyatalawa in the tea-growing central hills, about 180 kilometers (110 miles) east of the capital Colombo.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the mishap.

Police spokesman Nihal Thalduwa said one of the cars veered off the track and crashed into spectators and officials of the event. Seven people, including four officials, were killed and another 20 were being treated at a hospital, said Thalduwa. He said three of the injured were in critical condition.

Thalduwa said police have launched an investigation into the accident, which was the 17th out of 24 events scheduled. The race was suspended after the accident.

About 45,000 spectators had gathered at the race circuit at a Sri Lankan military academy. The event was organized by the Sri Lankan army and Sri Lanka Automobile Sports.
Central Asia
Floodwaters Still Invading Homes In North Kazakhstan, Southern Russia As Predicted Peak Nears (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [4/21/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 235K, Negative]
Floodwaters continue to threaten homes and residential areas in southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan on April 21 as water levels reach record highs in southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan, where sudden high temperatures have sparked massive snowmelt and the worst flooding in decades.

Authorities in Russia’s Kurgan region ordered urgent evacuations in more than 20 settlements on April 20 as the waters were "rising quickly," the Kurgan regional government’s press service said.

In northeastern Kazakhstan, a resident of the village of Vishenka told RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service on April 21 that water from the bloated Chagan River, a tributary of the Ural River, was flooding cottages there.

Kazakh regional authorities have prohibited journalists from visiting flooded areas or broadcasting images or information from the scene. They cited emergency operations to ban the use of drones.

The level of the Ishim River near the city of Ishim in Russia’s Tyumen region rose by more than 2 meters on April 19-20 to swell more than half a meter above the danger mark of 8.5 meters, the city administration there reported.

The governor of Russia’s Tyumen region, Aleksandr Moor, has called the current floods the worst in over 80 years, with dozens of cities in the flood zone.

A state of emergency has been in effect since April 8, with urgent evacuations of the Kazan and Ishim regions last week.

In Kazakhstan, the Ural River, known locally as Oral, was creeping toward the 8.5-meter level that is considered critical.

Kazakh authorities predicted that the peak of the flooding would arrive in most regions on April 20-21 but would persist until April 22–24 in the Oral region.

Officials have said that more than 100,000 people have been forced from their homes across the country because of heavy flooding.
TikTok is deemed harmful to kids’ health in Kyrgyzstan (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [4/19/2024 4:14 PM, Ayzirek Imanaliyeva, 57.6K, Neutral]
Apparently, social media personalities like MrBeast, an American producer of entertaining stunts, frighten the Kyrgyz government enough that it has decided to restrict children’s Internet access.

Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Digital Development is blocking the Chinese-owned social media channel TikTok, justifying it as a move to protect children from pernicious web-borne influences. Kyrgyz mobile operators and Internet providers began restricting access to the application on April 17. As a result, TikTok is largely inaccessible to all users in the Central Asian nation.

The ministry’s action occurred after the State Committee for National Security (GKNB), the successor to the KGB, issued a determination that TikTok harms “the health of children, their intellectual, mental, spiritual and moral development.”

The basis for the move was legislation adopted last summer that prohibits the distribution of “harmful” web content accessible to minors, including content featuring “non-traditional sexual relationships.” The amendments also target content that “denies family values,” justifies illegal behavior, encourages children to commit suicide, use drugs and alcohol, or engage in other forms of anti-social activity.

The ban has a flip side. TikTok has catapulted some Kyrgyz content creators to international stardom. One such social media sensation, 21-year-old Argen Kerimov, inspired the SigmaFace trend, which gained him over 20 million subscribers and a collaboration opportunity with one of the Internet’s mega-stars, the aforementioned MrBeast.

President Sadyr Japarov and GKNB boss Kamchybek Tashiev have not commented publicly on the TikTok ban. However, a presidential press spokesman, Dayyrbek Orunbekov, reposted a message on Facebook saying that the ban will be beneficial for youth development, ensuring “that the future generation grows in the right direction.”

Chinese officials so far have not publicly commented on the Kyrgyz move. In March, Beijing accused the United States of “bullying” after the US House of Representatives voted to either force the sale of or ban TikTok. The measure still needs Senate approval and a presidential signature before it becomes official in the United States.

As expected, plenty of bloggers and other commentators in Kyrgyzstan have used their Internet platforms to offer criticism. One popular blogger and producer, 18-year-old Rastislav Yashchenko, posted a video on Instagram on April 18, saying authorities “hurried” to implement a ban without getting input from content creators.

“There is harmful content there, just like everywhere else on the internet. On any platform there is something that children should not watch. But you should be involved in raising children, not TikTok, bloggers, etc.,” Yashchenko said. “Many will suffer because of this, and the image of the country, because videos about our country on TikTok are gaining a colossal number of views.”
The Kazakh-Uzbek ‘Tandem’: Good For Central Asia, Not So Good For Karakalpak Activists (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [4/19/2024 3:01 PM, Chris Rickleton, 223K, Negative]
The relationship between the two most-populous countries in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has arguably never been better.

That can only be good for Central Asia -- a region that has for a long time been dominated by outside countries at the expense of genuine integration.

But it has only added to the precarity of life for activists from Uzbekistan’s autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, which was roiled by deadly unrest that broke out nearly two years ago amid government proposals to revoke the territory’s unusual legal status.

In the last three months alone, three Karakalpak activists have been arrested in Kazakhstan, pending extradition requests penned by authorities in Uzbekistan.

Those arrests followed the release from Kazakh jails of five others following a year behind bars -- the longest period under Kazakh law that anyone detained on the basis of an extradition request can be held.

And they come amid warnings from Karakalpak diaspora leaders that Uzbek-Kazakh coordination over the detentions is likely to take more subtle forms, to avoid international press attention and a negative public reaction in Kazakhstan, whose state language and national culture are very similar to those of the Karakalpaks.

But first to more positive aspects of bilateral cooperation.

A ‘Tandem’ Adapting To A ‘New Reality’?

Those were on show during a fairly low key but evidently symbolic meeting between Uzbek leader Shavkat Mirziyoev and Kazakh counterpart Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev in the Uzbek Silk Road city of Khiva earlier this month, where Toqaev described the two countries’ “tandem” as “vital.”

The relationship between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan wasn’t ever the most problematic in Central Asia.

But when those countries’ respective first presidents, Nursultan Nazarbaev and Islam Karimov, were in power it was tinged by perceptions of rivalry that dated back to the period when both countries were Soviet republics.

An even more limiting factor in bilateral relations was Karimov’s approach to regional integration, which was cautious -- to put it mildly.

Uzbekistan’s second leader, Shavkat Mirziyoev, immediately signaled that he had a different view on his country’s place in the neighborhood.

From the start of his reign, which began after his mentor’s death in 2016, he mended Uzbekistan’s broken relationships with its neighbors, accelerating work to define his country’s borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, while taking a more cooperative stance on water issues with the latter two countries.

Even in the case of Afghanistan, which Karimov spoke mostly about as a threat, Mirziyoev’s administration has stressed economic opportunity over security risks.

As regards his country’s relationship with Kazakhstan, an impetus for deeper cooperation has come from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Both countries are adapting to a new reality,” Tashkent-based political analyst Anvar Nozirov told RFE/RL.

“If, before, Russia was a kind of center of communications for their trade with the European Union, now, due to sanctions, they are having to explore new avenues. They have to work out how to survive.”

Trade and transit were high on the agenda at Toqaev and Mirziyoev’s April 5 talks in the Uzbek city of Khiva.

So much so that Toqaev’s office highlighted in bold the leaders’ agreement for a joint venture between the railway administrations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which will work to organize cargo transportation “along the China-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan route” while building up traffic heading further south, through Afghanistan and on to Pakistani sea ports.

The two leaders also discussed regional cooperation in the framework of C5+ meetings, a format wherein world leaders meet with all five of their colleagues from Central Asia -- the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan -- simultaneously.

But Nozirov argued that it is likely other equally important items were simply left out of the postmeeting communiques “in order to avoid irritating Moscow.”

That means discussions about expanding access and logistics along the Middle Corridor -- an up-and-coming multimodal trade route that will connect China to Europe via Kazakhstan at the expense of overland routes through Russia -- as well as expected military exercises in Kazakhstan in July that will feature the armies of four Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan.

“With the failures in the war in Ukraine, Russia’s role as a security guarantor has come under doubt. Central Asian countries also understand that deepening military cooperation with Russia while the war is happening might expose them to sanctions,” Nozirov said, explaining the unusual example of regional military cooperation without either Russia or China that was announced on the eve of the presidents’ Khiva meeting.

No Countries For Karakalpak Activists

Was the fate of Karakalpak activists based in Kazakhstan discussed by the two leaders in Khiva?

A spokesman for the Uzbek Foreign Ministry did not directly respond to that question.

The Kazakh Foreign Ministry referred RFE/RL to Toqaev’s administration, which did not respond by time of publication.

But it is evident that neither country is a safe place for Karakalpaks to engage in activism after 21 people were killed in violence during protests sparked by proposed amendments to the Uzbek Constitution that would have downgraded Karakalpakstan’s peculiar “sovereign” status (the territory has a flag and government that is nominally autonomous from Tashkent) and withdrawn its constitutional right to hold a referendum on secession from Uzbekistan.

Mirziyoev ordered the controversial amendments scrapped in a belated bid to quell the unrest.

Yet despite the trigger for the violence being abundantly clear, it is Karakalpaks who have paid the price.

Dozens were sentenced to long jail terms in Uzbekistan last year, while only three police officers are said to have been convicted, all for abusing detainees during the unrest.

And the repression continues.

On April 16, the Vienna-based Freedom For Eurasia rights group reported that Uzbek-based Karakalpak blogger Shingys Tairov was detained and sentenced to 15 days in administrative detention for a video in which he showed signage inside the territory that had Uzbek and Russian words, but none in Karakalpak, as is required by law.

That was the kind of activism often tolerated by Tashkent prior to the July 2022 unrest -- in lieu of the relative thaw for freedom of speech under Mirziyoev -- but the rules of the game have certainly changed.

And that is bad for Karakalpaks in Kazakhstan, who are almost always Uzbek passport holders due to the difficulties of exiting Uzbek citizenship.

According to the leading Kazakh rights organization, the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law (KIBHR), at least three Karakalpak activists have been arrested in Kazakhstan in the last three months: Aqylbek Muratov in February, Rasul Zhumaniyazov in March, and Rinat Utambetov in early April.

To date, most activists have been arrested for alleged crimes against Uzbekistan’s constitutional order, which are political crimes.

Yet Koshkarbai Toremuratov, one of the five Karakalpaks to spend a year in jail in Kazakhstan following extradition requests filed by Uzbekistan in the second half of 2022, recently claimed that other Karakalpaks are now being detained for nonpolitical crimes under Kazakh law -- again in cooperation with Uzbekistan but without the noise that accompanies extradition requests and charges that carry lengthy prison terms in Uzbekistan.

While Toremuratov acknowledged that he could not yet prove these reports, he has asked international organizations to investigate the apparent trend while noting that Kazakh police have stopped releasing official information about the arrests of late.

In the case of both men, Rasul Zhumaniyazov and Rinat Utambetov, Toremuratov told RFE/RL it is likely that the detentions were part of a case related to an online campaign calling for the freedom of the main defendant in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan trial, Daulet Tajimuratov, a lawyer and journalist who was given 16 years in prison on charges of plotting to seize power by disrupting the constitutional order.

Another activist behind the campaign, Rakhim Pirnazarov, is currently serving a four-year sentence under house arrest in Karakalpakstan, Toremuratov said.

Free But Not Safe

It currently seems safe to assume that any Karakalpak activist arrested in Kazakhstan at Tashkent’s demand will spend at least a year in jail.

“Our government tends to consider the political component -- who is making the request -- first of all,” said KIBHR lawyer Denis Zhivaga told RFE/RL.

“In this case it is Uzbekistan, a country with whom we have a number of agreements on law enforcement cooperation and, of late, a lot of cooperation in general,” Zhivaga said.

Mihra Rittmann, senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told RFE/RL that Kazakh law does not envisage any noncustodial options for an individual subject to an extradition request.

“This means he or she could spend up to 12 months in detention without a trial -- a violation of his/her right to liberty and security and a fair trial.”

After the arrest of Muratov, a well-known figure who regularly gave interviews to international media, Kazakh law enforcement cited the Minsk Convention -- to which both Astana and Tashkent are party to -- as a pretext for the arrest.

But Kazakhstan’s international human rights law obligations should trump bilateral or regional agreements, said Rittmann, who called for more pressure from international actors to try and prevent the arrests.

To date, none of the Karakalpak activists detained by Kazakh police have been deported to Uzbekistan.

But Zhivaga said that his organization has warned the activists of the dangers of remaining in Kazakhstan while the Uzbek criminal cases remain open.

“We have helped them apply for asylum. But realistically, practice suggests they will not get asylum or citizenship in Kazakhstan. They would be safer in third countries,” said Zhivaga.

That is something 48-year-old Toremuratov, a noted leader in the Karakalpak diaspora in Almaty, might yet achieve.

But not without difficulty.

Toremuratov went to Poland last fall to take part in a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) where he emphasized what he called the "discrimination" against Karakalpaks on the part of the Uzbek state.

Muratov’s participation in that annual human rights conference, incidentally, forms part of the Uzbek state’s case against him.

But while Muratov flew back to Kazakhstan, Toremuratov then traveled to Austria, where he made a bid for asylum, only to be deported back to Poland, where he was detained.

Though he is now free, he must report to Poland’s border authorities twice a month while his case is handled by Poland’s office for foreign nationals.
Twitter
Afghanistan
Amrullah Saleh
@AmrullahSaleh2
[4/22/2024 1:56 AM, 1.1M followers, 9 retweets, 44 likes]
Recently the Taliban MoD announced a quota of three thousand recruits for Panjshir province. However they seems to be uncomfortable with their decision are trying to retract and reverse to mitigate the potential risk of infiltration. The intelligence unit of Afghanistan Green Trend (AGT) @AGTAfghanistan has obtained a copy of the confidential memo of the Taliban MoD instructing its relevant sections that the Panjshir recruits be all deployed to “remote bases in southern Afghanistan, be watched all the time and be ensured that they can’t and don’t do anything wrong or disruptive”. Within the Taliban’s so called security sector racism is the un-announced and unwritten policy.The access of the AGT to secrets of the Taliban has therefore nothing to do with sympathetic persons from the resistance constituency. There are other factors. Read the report to get the whole story.

Heather Barr
@heatherbarr1
[4/21/2024 6:42 AM, 62.5K followers, 84 retweets, 161 likes]
Male diplomats, including @antonioguterres, are marching down a road toward normalizing the Taliban, regardless of their abuses, and shutting Afghan women out of the discussion. Afghan women’s views are clear—they overwhelmingly oppose this process.

Heather Barr
@heatherbarr1
[4/19/2024 6:56 AM, 62.5K followers, 11 likes]
The crisis Afghan women face is being instrumentalized in all kinds of ways, including in calls for harmful engagement/normalization, by people with no genuine concern about women’s rights. Grateful to @unwomenasia @unwomenchief for helping us hear from Afghan women themselves.

Tamana Zaryab Paryani
@tamanaparyaniP
[4/19/2024 7:30 AM, 7.5K followers, 34 retweets, 89 likes]
The Taliban group is stronger due to continued weekly cash flow of dollars in the name of the humanitarian aid to people of Afghanistan. Taliban is shedding the blood of the people of with the world’s money & creating a system of #genderapartheid #StopGenderApartheidInAfghanistan
Pakistan
Shehbaz Sharif
@CMShehbaz
[4/22/2024 12:12 AM, 6.7M followers, 138 retweets, 450 likes]
Today, Pakistan joins the international community to commemorate #EarthDay. The day reminds us of our shared responsibility to protect our planet - for now and for posterity. Let us strive to be ecologically more conscious in our endeavors and fostering a greener approach in our daily life. Let us resolve to reduce our carbon and environmental footprint.

Imran Khan
@ImranKhanPTI
[4/20/2024 8:19 AM, 20.6M followers, 13K retweets, 23K likes]
Founding Chairman Imran Khan writes to the Chief Justice of Pakistan, highlighting the grave state of affairs in the country, and reminds him of his responsibility to stay true to his oath and declared belief in the principles and values espoused by Pakistan’s founding fathers & his proclamation of Supremacy of the constitution.

Imran Khan
@ImranKhanPTI
[4/19/2024 3:34 PM, 20.6M followers, 13K retweets, 23K likes]
As if harassment and coercion of judges, robbing of general elections & vandalising police stations wasn’t enough, Not so “unknowns” have now ransacked Election office & brutalised election staff in Bajaur ahead of by elections in NA 8 as detailed in a letter by RO. This represents a complete breakdown of the Pakistani state, where “Jungle ka Badashah” acts with absolute impunity, completely disregarding the rule of law in the country. Ironically, the superior judiciary seems either complicit or too hesitant to act against this lawlessness.

Anas Mallick
@AnasMallick
[4/22/2024 12:29 AM, 73.4K followers, 19 retweets, 51 likes]
Iran’s President Dr Ebrahim Raisi arrives in Pakistan for a historic visit -- A first by any Irani President since 2017 -- Upon arrival he was received by Fed Minister Riaz Pirzada, Pakistan’s Amb to Iran @AmbMudassir and Chief of State protocol @Tipuusman -- 3 day visit, lots on Agenda.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/21/2024 2:09 PM, 209.8K followers, 53 retweets, 250 likes]
Iran Pres. Raisi’s visit to Pakistan is shaping up to be a major affair, with a wide range of issues on the table over the 3-day trip. The Saudi-Iranian rapprochement deal has given Pakistan more diplomatic space to engage w/Iran, though the US factor may impose some constraints.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/21/2024 2:09 PM, 209.8K followers, 6 retweets, 29 likes]
Islamabad’s messaging suggests commercial/economic ties will be the main focus, but border security will have to figure prominently too, given the recent Jaish al-Adl attacks in Iran and the brief Iran-Pakistan military crisis earlier this year. The Mideast mess will clearly be on the agenda too; Pakistan and Iran are fully on the same page on that and we can expect strong messages of solidarity with the Palestinians and criticism of Israel.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/21/2024 10:21 AM, 209.8K followers, 10 retweets, 33 likes]
Great reportage on Iran-Pak pipeline from @zofeen28:
-In 2014, Iran gave Pakistan a decade-long deadline extension to build its part of pipeline.
-"The land in Gwadar earmarked for construction has yet to be acquired."
-Pakistan has not submitted a sanction waiver request to US.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/21/2024 10:21 AM, 209.8K followers, 10 retweets, 33 likes]
I’m quoted on what has emerged as a major Pakistani policy conundrum: “Pakistan is seemingly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – build the pipeline and risk being sanctioned, or don’t build it and get slapped with a massive fine.” https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/exclusive-assessing-the-iran-pakistan-gas-pipeline-a-solution-to-pakistans-energy-crisis/

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/21/2024 10:21 AM, 209.8K followers, 4 retweets, 28 likes]
While buying more time would be a logical step for Pakistan to take, that may no longer be an option given that Iran has already extended the deadline over such a long period of time. A telling quote from the Iran CG in Karachi re Tehran threatening to fine Pakistan if its side isn’t construted: "We are very reluctant to take this drastic step, but the gas company of Iran is a national company and belongs to the people of Iran. It invested USD $1bn years ago. Now, the Iranian parliament is pressuring the government to decide the fate of this project.”

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/20/2024 2:02 PM, 209.8K followers, 42 retweets, 256 likes]
Over the last 6 months, the US has sanctioned 6 Chinese firms for aiding Pakistan’s ballistic missile program. The US has also said it wants to cooperate with China on nonproliferation. They held arms control talks in Dec. Is the US sending a message to Beijing w/these sanctions?

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/20/2024 8:46 AM, 209.8K followers, 174 retweets, 503 likes]
The US has sanctioned 4 firms (3 of them Chinese) for aiding Pakistan’s ballistic missile program. May seem like a bolt from the blue, but perhaps linked to the Iranian President’s upcoming visit. The US sanctioned 3 other Chinese firms just last Oct., after Pakistan test fired a ballistic missile.

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[4/22/2024 2:27 AM, 8.4M followers, 6 retweets, 29 likes]
I warned two years ago in @washingtonpost that climate change is becoming a bigger threat to Pakistan than terrorism. Now the whole South Asia and Middle East is becoming a target of climate change. Think how to handle this problem. #EarthDay2024 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/pakistan-paying-price-climate-change/
India
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/21/2024 6:17 AM, 97.3M followers, 3.2K retweets, 12K likes]
Sharing my interview with Mathrubhumi, in which I speak about various issues and why Kerala is all set to support NDA! https://mathrubhumi.com/election/lok-sabha-2024/interview/interview-with-prime-minister-narendra-modi-lok-sabha-election-2024-1.9499382 https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/prime-minister-narendra-modi-interview-to-mathrubhumi-newspaper-1.9501025

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/21/2024 4:08 AM, 97.3M followers, 3.2K retweets, 11K likes]
Congress and Left are two sides of the same coin. They only indulge in vindictive politics. The people of Kerala detest this.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/21/2024 2:41 AM, 97.3M followers, 2.5K retweets, 17K likes]
Warm wishes to all civil servants on Civil Services Day. Their commitment and hard work in serving our nation are deeply appreciated. They play a pivotal role in furthering governance and public welfare. They are also at the forefront of implementing policies, overcoming challenges and driving social change. Best wishes to all civil servants for their coming endeavours.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/21/2024 1:32 AM, 97.3M followers, 5K retweets, 18K likes]
Bhagwan Mahavir’s message of peace, compassion and brotherhood are a source of great inspiration for everyone. Speaking at 2550th Bhagwan Mahavir Nirvan Mahotsav programme.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/20/2024 12:22 PM, 97.3M followers, 5.6K retweets, 45K likes]
At Bengaluru airport, I had the honour of meeting Usha Krishna Ji, who is visually impaired. She has a great passion for India’s progress. I presented her with a copy of the book written in braille I received earlier in the day.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/19/2024 12:03 PM, 97.3M followers, 14K retweets, 90K likes]
First phase, great response! Thank you to all those who have voted today. Getting EXCELLENT feedback from today’s voting. It’s clear that people across India are voting for NDA in record numbers.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[4/20/2024 11:16 PM, 3.1M followers, 277 retweets, 2.4K likes]
Best wishes to all the Civil Servants and their families on Civil Services Day. Their dedication and hard work are an essential part of our journey towards achieving the goal of Viksit Bharat. Wish them continued success in their endeavours to serve the nation with integrity and excellence.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[4/21/2024 8:22 AM, 3.1M followers, 1.5K retweets, 10K likes]
My colleague Muraleedharan ji has been a pillar of strength in the Ministry of External Affairs over the last 5 years. Call on all voters in Attingal to send him to the Lok Sabha with a resounding mandate.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[4/19/2024 10:05 AM, 209.8K followers, 34 retweets, 251 likes]
India’s election, which begins today, has the feel of a US-style presidential election. So much of it revolves around one sole person, Narendra Modi, and considerations related to his personality and policies. This is what happens when one leader so dominates national politics.
NSB
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh
@BDMOFA
[4/21/2024 11:42 AM, 35.6K followers, 15 retweets, 61 likes]
UNDP Country Representative Mr. Stefan Liller paid a courtesy call on HFM today at MOFA. They discussed about international climate financing, climate diplomacy, Blue Economy strategy, trans-boundary marine & air pollution and digital innovation in public service delivery.

Awami League
@albd1971
[4/21/2024 9:40 AM, 637.2K followers, 43 retweets, 91 likes]
Prime Minister #SheikhHasina said #Bangladesh wants to maintain friendship with everyone, but it will do whatever is needed to protect its #independence and #sovereignty. She was addressing at a darbar after inaugurating Bangabandhu Battery Complex’. https://albd.org/articles/news/41387

Awami League
@albd1971
[4/21/2024 5:05 AM, 637.2K followers, 27 retweets, 91 likes]
Reiterating #AwamiLeague’s commitment to uphold #democracy in #Bangladesh, the party’s General Secretary Obaidul Quader MP said the upazila parishad election will be held in a free, impartial, fair and peaceful environment. https://unb.com.bd/category/Bangladesh/upazila-parishad-polls-to-be-held-in-free-fair-environment-quader/134091 #LocalGovernment

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[4/20/2024 9:32 AM, 5.2K followers, 4 retweets, 45 likes]
It was a pleasure to participate in the Sinhala & Tamil New Year 2024 #Avurudu festival organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the participation of the Colombo based Diplomatic Missions.

Namal Rajapaksa
@RajapaksaNamal
[4/21/2024 10:27 AM, 437.2K followers, 15 likes]
Meetings in Puttalam and Polonnaruwa districts, discussing May Day celebrations alongside with State Ministers and MPs. Collaborative efforts set the stage for a momentous May Day!

Namal Rajapaksa
@RajapaksaNamal
[4/21/2024 8:45 AM, 437.2K followers, 1 retweet, 12 likes]
Today, we honor the victims of the Easter attacks, their memory lives in our hearts. Together, we stand united against extremism, dedicated to working tirelessly for peace and unity within our nation and beyond. #EasterAttackRemembrance

Namal Rajapaksa
@RajapaksaNamal
[4/20/2024 12:20 AM, 437.2K followers, 7 likes]
Today’s gathering at our party headquarters with #SLPP district organizers from Central, North, and East Colombo electorals was productive. Getting ready for May Day! @PodujanaParty

Namal Rajapaksa
@RajapaksaNamal
[4/20/2024 8:08 AM, 437.2K followers, 11 likes]
Joined the initiation ceremony of the chariot procession with Sri Lanka’s largest metal Sri Sumana Saman Deva statue, starting its journey from Gangarama Viharaya in Colombo to Sri Padasthana. Grateful to Mr. Ganasinghe and family from Gampola for their generous donation.
Central Asia
Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[4/22/2024 1:39 AM, 28.9K followers, 4 retweets, 9 likes]
As horrifying murder trial of ex-minister Bishimbayev, accused of beating his wife to death, continues, neighbour who called police in Astana suspecting man was beating his wife, is threatened with fine for wasting police time. Wrong message. #Kazakhstan https://tengrinews.kz/healthy/sosed-izbival-jenu-vyizval-politsiyu-potom-je-hoteli-531130/

Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[4/22/2024 1:36 AM, 28.9K followers, 5 retweets, 4 likes]
Emergency services reinforcements sent to Oral as catastrophic flooding continues in #Kazakhstan https://tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/dopolnitelnyie-silyi-srazu-neskolkih-regionov-pribyili-533052/

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 1:23 PM, 167.1K followers, 4 retweets, 16 likes]
The state visit of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan to Tajikistan has drawn to a close, marking the end of the official proceedings. President Emomali Rahmon extended his farewell to the Uzbekistan leader at the Dushanbe International Airport. Following the visit, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has returned to Tashkent.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 12:32 PM, 167.1K followers, 4 retweets, 11 likes]
While in Dushanbe, Presidents Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Emomali Rahmon explored the "Made in Uzbekistan" national pavilion. The exhibit displayed a wide selection of Uzbekistani products, featuring both ready-made and advanced technology items from the automotive industry, electrical and agricultural machinery, food products, and an assortment of goods from the chemical, textile, pharmaceutical, and various other sectors of industry. This showcase highlighted the industrial diversity and innovation of Uzbekistan’s manufacturing capabilities.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 11:17 AM, 167.1K followers, 3 retweets, 16 likes]
Amid President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s state visit to Tajikistan, a significant event took place in Dushanbe—the ceremonial opening of the new building of Uzbekistan’s embassy. In a demonstration of the close ties between the two countries, the leaders jointly inaugurated the diplomatic mission with the traditional ribbon-cutting.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 10:35 AM, 167.1K followers, 1 retweet, 9 likes]
During his state visit to Dushanbe, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev had a meeting with the Prime Minister of Tajikistan, Kohir Rasulzoda. The agenda included topics aimed at enhancing the strategic partnership and alliance between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, discussing ways to broaden the scope of their bilateral relations.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 8:22 AM, 167.1K followers, 2 retweets, 8 likes]
During his state visit to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev engaged in talks with Mahmadtoir Zokirzoda, the Speaker of Majlisi Namoyandagon of the country’s Majlisi Oli. The discussions were marked by a mutual acknowledgment of satisfaction regarding the unparalleled level of the strategic partnership and alliance spanned across various domains between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 7:56 AM, 167.1K followers, 5 retweets, 26 likes]
The "Friendship Evening" at Dushanbe’s "Kohi Borbad" Palace of Arts epitomized the celebration of unity, showcasing performances by Uzbek and Tajik artists in a cultural rendezvous. Presidents Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Emomali Rahmon attended the event together, marking the significance of this occasion. Such joint concerts have nurtured a tradition that beautifully reflects the enduring and sincere camaraderie between the Uzbek and Tajik nations.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 7:19 AM, 167.1K followers, 3 retweets, 14 likes]
Post their pivotal dialogues, Presidents Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Emomali Rahmon took the opportunity to communicate with the press, offering insights into their discussions. The leaders expressed mutual satisfaction with the progress accomplished through these high-level exchanges and noted the friendly and trustworthy ambiance under which these important conversations were held.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 6:31 AM, 167.1K followers, 1 retweet, 17 likes]
In a ceremonial tribute that underscores the deep cultural ties between their nations, the Presidents of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan conferred esteemed titles on distinguished figures from the spheres of culture and arts from both countries. This commendation served to acknowledge their dedicated work in the preservation and dissemination of their shared historical narrative, spiritual values, and traditions. The solemn ceremony of award presentation was gracefully conducted by the heads of state themselves.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/20/2024 5:58 AM, 167.1K followers, 2 retweets, 8 likes]
Following high-level negotiations, the President of Uzbekistan and the President of Tajikistan solidified their alliance by signing a Treaty on Allied Relations. The visit proved to be a highly productive one, with a total of 28 documents being signed, encompassing a myriad of sectors within the comprehensive Uzbek-Tajik cooperation framework.

{End of Report}
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