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 8, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan
Reclusive Taliban leader releases Eid message urging officials to set aside their differences (AP)
AP [4/6/2024 7:53 AM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
The Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada urged his officials to set aside their differences and serve Afghanistan properly, according to a written statement released Saturday ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

Public dissent within the Taliban is rare, but some senior figures have expressed their disagreement with the leadership’s decision making, especially the bans on female education.

Akhundzada, an Islamic scholar who almost never appears in public, rarely leaves the Taliban heartland in southern Kandahar province. He and his circle have been instrumental in imposing restrictions on women and girls that have sparked an international outcry and isolated the Taliban on the global stage.

His message was distributed in seven languages including Uzbek and Turkmen — the Taliban are courting cash-rich Central Asian countries for investment and legitimacy — and it touched on diplomatic relations, the economy, justice, charity, and the virtues of meritocracy.

Akhundzada said Taliban officials should “live a brotherly life among themselves, avoid disagreements and selfishness.”

He said the war against the Soviet invasion and communism failed due to disagreements within the Taliban and that they could not implement Shariah in Afghanistan as a result of these divisions.

While he mentioned education, he said nothing about reopening schools and universities for girls and women.

Nor did he refer to recent unconfirmed reports about him saying there would be a resumption of stoning Afghan women to death for adultery, a punishment previously carried out during the Taliban’s first period of rule in the late 1990s.

Akhundzada in Saturday’s message said security did not come from “being tough and killing more; rather, security is aligned with Shariah and justice.”

Hassan Abbas, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. and author of the “Return of the Taliban,” said Akhundzada’s message sounded “largely reasonable” and was focused on governance and anti-corruption matters.

“I believe this message is carefully crafted to dispel the negative impression created by a recently released audio of his that gives a very dogmatic and regressive message, especially about public punishments and women rights,” Abbas told The Associated Press. “I think this new message is also intended as damage control.”

Also on Saturday, the Taliban-controlled Supreme Court said six people, including a woman, were publicly flogged on adultery charges in eastern Logar province.
Afghan women deprived of rights under Taliban face mental health issues (VOA)
VOA [4/6/2024 12:30 PM, Farkhunda Paimani and Meena Barek, 761K, Negative]
The past 2½ years have been “very tough” for 28-year-old Maryam Maroof Arvin, as she has been “deprived of all her rights” under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Arvin was a master’s degree student in a private university in Kabul in December 2022 when the Taliban, the de facto government of Afghanistan, barred women from universities.

“It has created in me a feeling of depression. I am under mental and psychological pressure, and I feel very angry,” said Arvin who dreamed of becoming a politician to raise the voices for Afghan women.

A U.N. report, released in September 2023, stated that under the Taliban, who seized power in 2021, the mental health of women in Afghanistan deteriorated.

According to the report, more than two-thirds of women in Afghanistan reported “feelings of anxiety, isolation and depression” between April and June.

“Women spoke of psychological issues, including depression, insomnia, loss of hope and motivation, anxiety, fear, aggression, isolation and increasingly isolationist behavior, and suicidal ideation,” the report stated.

The Taliban have steadily imposed repressive measures against women in Afghanistan, banning them from the workplace, secondary and university education, long-distance traveling without a close male relative, beauty salons, gyms and public parks.

Arvin said that she can’t believe that all her freedoms and two decades of gains in women’s rights were lost in the past 2½ years of the Taliban’s rule.

“I wish it was a dream. And I could wake up and go back to the university,” she said.

Before the Taliban’s takeover, about 3.5 million girls out of roughly 9 million students were going to school. Thirty-three percent of about 450,000 students enrolled in universities were young women.

About 30% of the civil servants and 28% of parliamentarians in Afghanistan were women.

Mawloda Tawana, an Afghan women’s rights activist, told VOA that the exclusion of women from the workplace and society adversely affected most women’s psychological and emotional well-being.

“Women are locked up at home, and the unhappiness and frustration from this could promote domestic violence and suicide attempts,” said Tawana.

Media outlets also reported a surge in suicides by women in Afghanistan. The Taliban have not published any data on suicide rates, and they have prohibited Afghan health officials from providing information on the topic.

Sahar Fetrat, a researcher with the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, or HRW, told VOA that women’s mental health in Afghanistan has deteriorated because of the repressive restrictions imposed on them.

“Women feel as if they have essentially been banned from participating in life. They have become stripped of basic rights, such as receiving health care,” said Fetrat.

In a report released in February, HWR said the health care crisis in Afghanistan has “disproportionately” affected women.

“The Taliban’s restrictions on women’s freedom of movement and employment with humanitarian and other organizations have gravely impeded women and girls’ access to health services, while bans on education for women and girls have blocked almost all training of future female health care workers in the country,” stated the HWR report.

Fetrat said the international community should acknowledge and understand the gravity of the situation.

She says the world must listen to the Afghan women and other individuals who have risked their lives to share their messages.

“Women in Afghanistan are fighting for their basic rights,” said Arvin, urging the international community to stand behind them.
‘Without reason, I cry. I can’t sleep’: The Afghan judges trapped in hiding, fearing reprisal from the Taliban (The Independent)
The Independent [4/7/2024 5:34 AM, Maya Oppenheim, 3055K, Negative]
Aafia* is battling debilitating migraines and her teeth are falling out, possibly from stress. But she is unable to go to the dentist or the doctor because she is in hiding, living in constant fear that the Taliban will track her down and kill her.

“I am very angry,” she tells The Independent from her secret location in Afghanistan. “Without reason, I cry. I cannot sleep because of the fear and the stress.”

The 48-year-old judge had her life turned upside down when the Taliban seized control of the country following the fall of Kabul in August 2021. The group went on to release thousands of prisoners, with judges like Aafia left petrified that the criminals they had sent to jail – including terrorists and senior al-Qaeda operatives – would track them down and seek revenge.

Sadly, Aafia’s plight is not unique. Campaigner Marzia Babakarkhail, a former family court judge in Afghanistan who now lives in the UK, says more than 180 judges have escaped Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power, fleeing to countries such as the UK, US, Canada, Germany and France. Another 11 women judges are believed to have fled to Pakistan, from where it can be easier to have asylum claims for other countries processed.

But Aafia is one of more than 40 female judges who have been unable to escape the fundamentalist regime and are still trapped in hiding. Their health is deteriorating as they struggle to access food, money or healthcare, Ms Babakarkhail warns.

Aafia told The Independent she is forced to move every few days with her family to ensure they are safe.

“My teeth are falling out because of stress,” she says. “I can’t go to the doctor or dentist as I will be at risk from the Taliban. A lot of judges have lost their teeth.”

Aafia spent 14 years working in the criminal and civil court, specialising in family problems, civil rights, inheritance rights and compensation. She applied to come to the UK under the government’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS), but her application was refused last year.

ACRS, which opened in January 2022, aimed to resettle 5,000 Afghans in the first year and up to 20,000 over five years. It was designed to help those who have “assisted the UK efforts in Afghanistan and stood up for UK values” as well as vulnerable people, such as women and girls. Other female judges have been granted sanctuary in Britain under the scheme.

Aafia recalls being catapulted into a state of anxiety when the Taliban seized power of the Afghan capital.

“All the judges were scared,” Aafia adds. “It was extremely worrying. There was fear for the future. When the Taliban came to Kabul, I was at work. We were informed and we all ran from our offices. We left our files at work to save ourselves.”

She remembers running straight from her office to her relative’s house due to feeling like she would be at risk if she went to her own home.

“The Taliban started to search houses,” Aafia adds. “That is the reason why I and my colleagues have left our permanent addresses and we live somewhere different for a short period – around every 10 days we move. I am not safe in a permanent place. We don’t want to put ourselves or our children or our husbands in danger.”

Aafia, who has several children, says both herself and other judges can be forced to relocate quickly if neighbours inform them the Taliban is looking for them.

“Weeks ago, I was informed by my friend the Taliban would come to search their house so they said ‘Please leave’,” she explains. “I took my children to stay in a very cold room. It was snowing and I did not have enough clothes for my children and still, the youngest, who is five years old, is very, very unwell.”

She says she submitted an asylum application for America around a year ago but there has been no progress or update.

Since grabbing power after US and British forces withdrew, the Taliban has blocked women from the workplace, education and public spaces, as well as barring them from taking part in all sports and removing the right to travel alone. Just days ago, the Taliban announced it would resume stoning to death women who commit adultery in public.

“They move every few days,” Ms Babakarkhail says of the female judges in Afghanistan. “You send people to prison and now these people have the power... of course, you are scared. The enemy is now in power. As the days they are in Afghanistan increase, their difficulties increase. Some of the judges’ lives are broken.”

It is particularly tough moving from house to house in hiding from the Taliban while fasting during Ramadan, she says.

“Some of the judges say they don’t have enough to break their fast for Ramadan,” Ms Babakarkhail adds. “When I break my fast and eat here, I’m thinking about them and how they are coping. They have had no income for three years.”

The Independent has contacted the Home Office for comment.
Afghan kids learn in makeshift schools six months after major quake (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [4/5/2024 10:16 PM, Amin Nowroozi, 11975K, Negative]
Children sit shoulder to shoulder crammed in rows on the floor of a shipping container with lesson books in their laps, the remains of their school unrepaired in the six months since a major earthquake devastated their village in western Afghanistan.

Hundreds of schools are still damaged since a series of strong quakes jolted Afghanistan’s Herat province in October, with many students returning to lessons in tents and containers in March, according to the Herat education department.

Girls and boys in the village of Nayeb Rafi in Zindah Jan district studied in a packed container tucked between tents and small, blue homes newly built on a barren stretch of land.

"I really want to study, to have a school, and become a teacher to teach my friends," said 11-year-old Siyah Gul.

She wants to make the most of her lessons in the makeshift classroom before she is soon excluded under Taliban government rules which bar girls and women from secondary education and universities.

The October quake killed more than 1,500 people and damaged or destroyed more than 63,000 homes, according to an assessment published in February by the United Nations, the European Union and the Asian Development Bank.

Many people are still living in tents and temporary shelters, the World Health Organization said in February.

Education is the second-most affected sector, the report said, with nearly 300 public schools and other learning centres damaged and 180,000 students facing learning disruptions.

‘Completely destroyed’

In the village of Chahak, deep cracks scar the walls and ceilings of its pale blue schoolhouse. Broken windows still hang from their hinges and piles of dust fill the corners of classrooms.

"Chahak village was completely destroyed by the earthquake and we still haven’t been provided with permanent shelters," said teacher Mohammad Naseem Nasrat.

"Our school too, which was wrecked by the earthquake, has not been restored so far. I don’t know if there are plans to or not," said the 25-year-old, adding that the village’s children "face an uncertain future" without proper schools.

Decades of conflict have devastated Afghanistan’s education system, with an estimated 3.7 million children out of school, 60 percent of them girls, according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF.

Poverty and access to schools in remote areas are major hurdles, while cultural norms often prevent girls from attending school.

One in five children aged between five and 17 are engaged in child labour, according to the United Nations, in a country facing deep economic, humanitarian and climate crises.

Eleven-year-old Sefatullah’s school in Kashkak village was destroyed by the recent quakes.

"We don’t have books and notebooks to study and write in," he said.

Four children were killed when the school collapsed, said teacher Mohammad Dawood, who now gives lessons in a framed tent with a large UNICEF logo on the outside.

The makeshift school serves two villages, six classes and has only one teacher -- Dawood.

"On days when it is windy or raining, we are in big trouble, we can’t carry on with this situation for much longer," he said.
Pakistan
Pakistan denounces Indian minister’s remarks about pursuing suspects across border (Reuters)
Reuters [4/6/2024 7:11 AM, Ariba Shahid, 5239K, Negative]
Pakistan on Saturday denounced "provocative remarks" made by Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in which he said India would enter Pakistan to kill anyone who escapes over its border after trying to carry out militant attacks.

Singh’s comments on Friday came after the Guardian newspaper published a report stating the Indian government had killed about 20 people in Pakistan since 2020 as part of a broader plan to target "terrorists residing on foreign soil".

"India’s assertion of its preparedness to extra-judicially execute more civilians, arbitrarily pronounced as ‘terrorists’, inside Pakistan constitutes a clear admission of culpability," Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

Relations between India and Pakistan have worsened since a 2019 suicide bombing of an Indian military convoy in Kashmir was traced to Pakistan-based militants and prompted New Delhi to carry out an airstrike on what it said was a militant base in Pakistan.

Pakistan said earlier this year it had credible evidence linking Indian agents to the killing of two of its citizens on its soil.

India said it was "false and malicious" propaganda.

Canada and the United States last year accused India of killing or attempting to kill people in those countries.

Canada said in September that it was pursuing "credible allegations" linking India to the death of a Sikh separatist leader shot dead in June - claims that India said were "absurd and motivated".

A top Canadian official said in January that India was cooperating in the matter and bilateral ties were improving.

U.S. similarly said in November that it had thwarted an Indian plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader and announced charges against a person it said had worked with India to orchestrate the attempted murder.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said India will investigate any information it receives on the matter.
Pakistan condemns India for threatening cross-border pursuit of terror suspects (VOA)
VOA [4/6/2024 12:48 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
Pakistan on Saturday denounced Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh’s “provocative remarks” threatening to enter Pakistan and kill suspects who escape over its border after carrying out terrorist attacks in India.

Singh made the controversial remarks in an interview with an Indian TV news channel that aired Friday when asked for his reaction to a recent British media report accusing the Indian government of killing some 20 people in Pakistan since 2020.

"India’s assertion of its preparedness to extrajudicially execute more civilians, arbitrarily pronounced as ‘terrorists,’ inside Pakistan constitutes a clear admission of culpability," said a Pakistani foreign ministry statement.

It said the Indian minister’s claims backed Islamabad’s “irrefutable evidence” linking New Delhi to an alleged campaign of “extrajudicial and transnational assassinations” on Pakistani soil.

Islamabad cautioned that Indian officials’ “myopic and irresponsible behavior” could put regional peace at risk.

Singh said in his interview that his government would give a “befitting reply” to “any terrorist from a neighboring country” who tries to disrupt peace or conducts "terrorist activities” in India. “If he escapes to Pakistan, we will go to Pakistan and kill him there,” he said.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported earlier this week, quoting interviews with Pakistani and Indian intelligence officials, that New Delhi had been plotting the assassinations of individuals in Pakistan as part of a wider strategy to eliminate anti-India “terrorists living on foreign soil.”

The newspaper said the killings were carried out by operatives of the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian spy agency, which is directly controlled by the office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi is running for a third term in office in elections later this month.

Last year, Canada and the United States accused India of killing or attempting to kill people in their respective territories.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in September that his government was pursuing “credible allegations” linking the Indian government to the assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada. New Delhi rejected the charges as "absurd and motivated.”

In November, Washington said it had thwarted an Indian plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader and announced charges against a person U.S. officials said had worked with India to orchestrate the attempted murder.

New Delhi has pledged to investigate any information it receives on the matter.

Pakistan’s traditionally troubled relations with India have deteriorated since a 2019 suicide bombing of a military convoy in the Indian-administered part of the disputed Kashmir region that killed 144 Indian soldiers.

The attack was reportedly claimed by a Pakistan-based outlawed militant group, prompting India to carry out aerial strikes against what it said were militant bases in the Pakistani-administered portion of Kashmir.

Islamabad rejected Indian claims of sheltering militants and denounced the Indian military attack. It then carried out retaliatory airstrikes against several targets in Indian-controlled Kashmir. During an ensuing skirmish, Pakistan shot down an Indian fighter jet and briefly held its pilot captive before returning him to India.
Pakistan PM orders police punished after Chinese dam worker attack (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [4/6/2024 5:36 AM, Staff, 11975K, Neutral]
Pakistan’s prime minister has ordered at least five senior police officials be punished for negligence after a suicide bomber killed five Chinese engineers at a major dam site last month, the country’s information minister said Saturday.

The attack in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province forced Power China and the China Gezhouba Company to suspend work on two dam projects after the bombing killed the five workers and a Pakistani driver, sending their van into a deep ravine.

Hundreds of Chinese people are employed at the Dasu and Diamer Bhasha dam construction sites, located around 100 kilometres (62 miles) apart in the mountainous region.

Minister of Information Attaullah Tarar said a committee appointed by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif identified a regional official, three district officials and the director of security at the Dasu dam project for their "negligence" in fulfilling their duties.

"The prime minister has ordered immediate action against these officials," Tarar told a press conference in the city of Lahore, without specifying what their punishment will be.

"The prime minister himself will be monitoring the security of Chinese (nationals). Those individuals who have shown negligence will be set as an example."

Tarar said security matters regarding Chinese citizens would be "treated with utmost seriousness and any lapses will not be tolerated."

Operations by Power China have resumed at Diamer Bhasha while operations at China Gezhouba Group Company at Dasu remain closed.

Pakistani police have detained more than 12 people, including Afghan nationals, in connection with the bombing.

Beijing is Islamabad’s closest regional ally, frequently offering financial assistance to support its often-struggling neighbour and pouring more than $2 trillion into infrastructure projects.

However, Pakistanis have long complained about not receiving a fair share of the jobs or wealth generated by the projects.

The security of Chinese workers is a major concern to both countries, with nationals frequently targeted by militants hostile to outside influence.

Last week’s attack came just days after militants attempted to storm offices of the Gwadar deepwater port in the southwest, considered a cornerstone of Chinese investment in Pakistan.
A search is underway in Pakistan for attackers who ambushed a police car, killing 2 and injuring 2 (AP)
AP [4/6/2024 11:23 AM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
A search was underway in Pakistan’s northwest after gunmen ambushed and opened fire on a police vehicle, killing two people and injuring another two, an official said Saturday.

The assault took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan and has borne the brunt of militant violence since the Pakistani Taliban unilaterally ended a cease-fire with the central government in November 2022.

The province is a former stronghold of the militant group, which is also known as the TTP and allied with the Afghan Taliban.

Police officer Tariq Khan said the attackers shot and killed a deputy superintendent and a constable in Lakki Marwat district.

Heavy police reinforcements arrived at the scene but assailants fled. Khan did not say how many attackers there were.

Umar Marwat, a militant commander from the district, claimed responsibility for the attack and alleged the deputy superintendent had been active in operations against the TTP in the area.

The TTP spokesperson has not issued a statement about the assault so far.

In a separate incident, in the province’s Bajaur tribal district, one police officer was killed and another was injured on Saturday in a roadside blast. Police official Zahid Khan said the initial investigation suggested it was an improvised explosive.

Also Saturday, Pakistan’s army said that security forces killed eight militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan district.

According to an official statement, the eight men died after an intense exchange of fire in the Friday night operation. The army alleged they were actively involved in activities against security forces and the targeted killing of civilians.

The statement said that weapons, ammunition, and explosives were recovered from the slain militants.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack in Lakki Marwat and offered his condolences to victims’ families. He praised the army for its operation in Dera Ismail Khan.
Motorcycle bomb kills 2 people and wounds 5 in Pakistan’s restive southwest (AP)
AP [4/7/2024 2:35 PM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
A motorcycle bomb killed two people and wounded five in Pakistan’s southwest, a police official said Sunday.

It’s the latest unrest to hit Baluchistan province, where militants have tried to target a naval facility and a government building in recent weeks.

Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s blast in Khuzdar, which is on the main highway connecting the provincial capital Quetta with the port city of Karachi in neighboring Sindh province.

Deputy Commissioner Muhammad Arif Zarkon said a woman and two police officers were among the wounded.

For years, Baluchistan has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by groups demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. Although the government says it has quelled the insurgency, violence in the province has persisted.

Last Saturday, an improvised explosive device killed one person and wounded 14, including three soldiers.
India
India appears to confirm extrajudicial killings in Pakistan (The Guardian)
The Guardian [4/5/2024 11:40 AM, Hannah Ellis-Petersen, 12.5M, Negative]
India’s defence minister has appeared to confirm that the government carried out extrajudicial killings in neighbouring Pakistan, after a Guardian report on the alleged assassinations.

Intelligence officials from India and Pakistan who spoke to the Guardian had alleged that India’s foreign intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (Raw), had been involved in up to 20 killings of individuals in Pakistan since 2020, as part of a wider policy to target terrorists living on foreign soil.

Most of those targeted in Pakistan were convicted terrorists and militants known to be associated with Islamist militant groups that had carried out deadly attacks in India.

India has previously denied all involvement in the assassinations. But after the publication of the Guardian’s report, Rajnath Singh, the Indian defence minister, seemed to confirm that India did target terrorists hiding out in Pakistan.

“If any terrorist from a neighbouring country tries to disturb India or carry out terrorist activities here, he will be given a fitting reply. If he escapes to Pakistan we will go to Pakistan and kill him there,” Singh said in an interview to Indian TV news network News18 on Friday.

Singh said that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, had made it clear this policy was “right” and that “India has the capability to do so. Pakistan has also started understanding this.”

Singh’s comments are the first time that India has acknowledged any assassinations by its operatives on foreign soil.

Modi, who is running for a third term as prime minister in elections that will begin in two weeks, also alluded to operations abroad in a campaign speech on Thursday, stating that “today’s India goes inside enemy territory to strike”.

Indian intelligence operatives told the Guardian that the alleged shift in policy to targeting terrorists in Pakistan came in 2019, after the Pulwama attack when militants from the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. Modi was in power at the time, running for a second term in office.

The Indian intelligence officials claimed that India had drawn inspiration from intelligence agencies such as the Mossad in Israel and from incidents such as the killing of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

Officials from two separate Pakistani intelligence agencies showed the Guardian detailed evidence from investigations into seven of these killings allegedly carried out by Raw, but said they suspected India’s involvement in up to 20 deaths.

The documents appeared to show that several of the killings were orchestrated by Raw sleeper cells mostly operating out of the United Arab Emirates, where impoverished Pakistani workers were recruited and paid millions of rupees to carry out the assassinations.

In other cases, Raw operatives are alleged to have recruited aspiring jihadists through radical Islamist networks and told them they were carrying out “sacred killings” of “infidels”.

The Indian intelligence operatives also confirmed that Sikh activists living in western countries such as the US, UK and Canada, who were vocal advocates of the separatist Khalistan movement, had become a focus of Raw’s foreign operations after 2020.

India has been accused publicly by Washington and Ottawa of involvement in the murder of the Khalistani Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and of a botched assassination attempt on another Sikh, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in the US last year. India has denied involvement in the killing of Nijjar and, according to reports, an internal investigation blamed the failed assassination attempt of Pannun on a “rogue agent”.

Pakistan’s foreign office also responded to the Guardian’s report. “These cases exposed the increasing sophistication and brazenness of Indian-sponsored terrorist acts inside Pakistan, with striking similarities to the pattern observed in other countries, including Canada and the United States,” it said.
US tourist visiting Taj Mahal molested by tourist guide (The Independent)
The Independent [4/8/2024 4:34 AM, Shweta Sharma, 12.5M, Negative]
A US national who was travelling in India was allegedly molested by a tourist guide during a photography session at the Taj Mahal, police said.

The tourist guide, identified as Manmohan Arya, 54, has been arrested by police in Agra and charged with molestation, police told The Independent.

The American couple in their 50s was visiting the Taj Mahal, the iconic 17th century historical marvel, at Agra city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Saturday when the guide approached the couple to offer his services.

He was clicking their photographs near the central tank area when he allegedly tried to kiss the woman, an official at the Taj Mahal tourist police station told The Independent.

The couple confronted the guide and reported the incident to the security personnel posted at the monument. The guide was apprehended and handed over to the police.

The couple arrived to see the famous white marble architectural masterpiece from national capital Delhi. The accused would be presented in court on Monday.

The guide has been remanded to judicial custody and a complaint has been registered, the assistant commissioner of police in charge of Taj Mahal’s security, Syed Arib Ahmed, said, according to India Today.

The Unesco world heritage site, known as the symbol of eternal love, was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a testament to his grief, following the death of his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal.

The monument has been visited by top world leaders and personalities over the years, including Diana, the Princess of Wales, former US president Donald Trump, and others.

The incident happened on the same day as a police officer purportedly thrashed a man for attempting to shoot a video reel within the monument premises where filming is prohibited. The video of the incident has gone viral on social media.

The man who was visiting the monument got into a heated argument with the security officer who allegedly confiscated his phone. The security officer is seen in the video pushing the tourist to the ground. The security officer said that the man used physical violence. The incident is under investigation.
India’s opposition makes its election case, calling Modi an autocrat and promising aid to the poor (AP)
AP [4/5/2024 6:47 AM, Ashok Sharma, 456K, Neutral]
India’s main opposition party vowed to boost social spending and reverse what it views as a slide into autocracy as it laid out its campaign promises on Friday, two weeks before the start of a weeks-long, multi-phase general election.

Most polls have predicted a victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party for a third straight five-year term. But the Congress Party argues that he’s undermined India’s democracy and favored the interests of the rich in its election manifesto.

India holds elections on different days in different parts of the country, stretching over weeks. Voting for the country’s parliament this year will begin on April 19 and run until June 1, and the results will be announced on June 4.

Modi is broadly popular in India, where he’s considered a champion of the country’s Hindu majority and has overseen rapid economic growth. But critics say another term for the BJP could undermine India’s status as a secular, democratic nation, saying it’s 10 years in power have brought attacks by Hindu nationalists against the country’s minorities, particularly Muslims, and a shrinking space for dissent and free media.

Rahul Gandhi, a former Congress party president, said “this election is fundamentally a different election. I don’t think that democracy has been as much at risk, the constitution has been at as much risk as it is today.”

Congress’s president, Mallikarjun Kharge, accused the government of crippling his party by freezing its bank accounts in a tax dispute ahead of national elections. Tax authorities have demanded nearly 35 billion rupees ($426 million) from the Congress party.

The BJP said the Congress party’s bank accounts were partially frozen because it had failed to file an income tax return for cash donations it received from 2017-18 onward, and it had therefore lost the tax exemption available to political parties.

The Modi government has opened tax investigations against a number of critical voices in recent years and cited tax issues to cancel the registration of many foreign-funded non-governmental organizations.

In February last year, tax authorities carried out searches of the BBC’s New Delhi and Mumbai offices saying that it had not fully declared its income and profits from its operations in the country. The searches came after the British broadcaster aired a documentary in the U.K. that criticized Modi.

Congress also attacked Modi’s economic record, saying that despite strong growth he’s presided over a widening gap between rich and poor and that his economy has failed to provide jobs for many Indians.

The official unemployment rate was 4% in 2023, but Congress wrote that the government has under-counted unemployment, citing its own surveys.

According to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, CMIE, a leading private business information company, the unemployment rate in India stood at 8.3% in December, up from 6.5% in January 2022.

Congress laid out economic plans it said could lift 230 million people out of poverty in 10 years, targeting poverty, unemployment and low agricultural prices.

It’s promising to give each woman in a poor family 100,000 rupees ($1,200) a year, to spend a similar amount on apprenticeships for people below 25, to fill nearly 3 million vacancies in the federal government, and to boost a cap on public health insurance payments from 500,000 rupees per incident to 2.5 million.

The BJP has implemented social programs that improved access to clean toilets, health care, and cooking gas, and introduced programs that provide free grain to the poor and pay 6,000 rupees ($73) a year to poor farmers.

Congress also promised to raise incomes for farmers with policies including wider use of minimum crop price policies. Tens of thousands of Indian farmers protested in India in 2021 to demand guaranteed crop prices, and in March this year thousands went to New Delhi with renewed demands.

The BJP is expected to release its election manifesto next week.

Prime Minister Modi has been campaigning extensively across the country, promising to expand the country’s economy to $5 trillion by 2027 from around $3.7 trillion. He is also promising to put India on track to become a developed country by 2047, when the country celebrates 100 years of independence from British colonialists.
India allows exports of essential goods to Maldives despite strained ties (Reuters)
Reuters [4/5/2024 7:00 AM, Rajendra Jadhav, 5.2M, Neutral]
India has allowed limited exports of essential commodities, including sugar, wheat, rice, and onions, to the Maldives, the government said on Friday, even as ties between Male and New Delhi remained tense amid rising Chinese influence.

India, a leading exporter of rice, sugar and onions, has imposed various curbs on exports of these food commodities to keep a lid on local prices ahead of general election.

Shipments of these commodities in the 2024/25 finiancial year which started on April 1 to Maldives "will be exempted from any existing or future restriction/prohibition on export," the government said in a notification.

The South Asian country has allowed exports of 124,218 metric tons of rice, 109,162 tons of wheat flour, 64,494 tons of sugar, 21,513 metric tons of potatoes, 35,749 tons of onions, and 427.5 million eggs to the Maldives.

India has also allowed exports of 1 million tons each of stone aggregate and river sand.
The Maldives, which has traditionally had close ties to India, is pivoting towards Beijing since new President Mohamed Muizzu was elected in October on a promise to end the country’s pro-India stance.
India’s top court puts order banning Islamic schools on hold (Reuters)
Reuters [4/5/2024 6:32 AM, Arpan Chaturvedia and Saurabh Sharma, 5.2M, Neutral]
India’s top court put on hold a lower court’s order that effectively banned Islamic schools in the country’s most populous state, lawyers involved in the case said on Friday, giving a breather to thousands of students and teachers in the system.

The directive comes days before the country begins voting in a national election where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeking a third term.

The top court was responding to a challenge to the March 22 order of the Allahabad High Court which scrapped a 2004 law governing the schools, called madrasas, in Uttar Pradesh state, where one-fifth of the 240 million population is Muslim.

Saying the law violated constitutional secularism, the High Court had also directed that pupils at these institutions be moved to conventional schools.

"We are of the view that the issues raised in the petitions merit closer reflection," the Supreme Court said on Friday, news portal Live Law reported.

The matter will now be heard in July, and "everything will remain stayed" until then, lawyers said.

India’s federal election process will conclude in June.

Iftikhar Ahmed Javed, head of the board of madrasa education in Uttar Pradesh state, welcomed the court’s order, terming it a "big win".

"We were really worried regarding the future of about 16 lakh (1.6 million) students and now this order has come as a big relief for all of us," he said.

In the ten years of Modi’s tenure, members of his BJP and its affiliates have repeatedly been accused of anti-Islamic hate speech and vigilantism.

Modi, however, has denied that discrimination against minorities exists under his government, which he says is working for the betterment of all.
Muslims face dwindling representation in Modi’s India (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [4/7/2024 11:26 PM, Parvaiz Bukhari, 11975K, Neutral]
More than half the voters in the Indian city of Rampur are Muslim, but its member of parliament is a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s muscular Hindu-first agenda.

It is a situation repeated across Hindu-majority India, where many consider victory for Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in upcoming general elections a near certainty -- and see Muslim candidates as a recipe for defeat at the ballot box.

While India’s 220 million Muslims make up a little under a fifth of its 1.4 billion population, Muslim representatives in parliament have almost halved to less than five percent since the 1970s.

"Everyone wants a connect with BJP," said Ghanshyam Singh Lodhi, who is confident of re-election as MP for Rampur in Uttar Pradesh state when the six-week-long elections begin on April 19.

Lodhi, a Hindu, replaced Rampur’s Muslim MP in a 2022 by-election, jumping ship from the last lawmaker’s party to become a BJP loyalist.

Muslim leaders worry at the lack of representation. There were just 27 Muslim MPs in the 543-seat lower house in parliament -- and none of them were among the BJP’s 310 lawmakers.

Ziya Us Salam, author of a book on Muslims in India, says members of the faith had for decades placed their trust in secular parties, a process that created an "acute absence of Muslim leadership".

Today, an overtly Muslim leader would be challenged as stoking sectarian divisions, yet few question when Modi champions constitutionally secular India as a "Hindu Rashtra", or Hindu state.

"Nobody talks of (Modi) being the leader of only Hindus," Salam said.

He also argues that successive gerrymandering policies since independence in 1947 have redrawn electoral boundaries to split areas with substantial Muslim populations.

Rampur has elected Muslim MPs 15 out of 18 times since 1952.

But Kanwal Bharti, a 71-year-old activist and writer from the city, said the BJP’s dominance means that it "doesn’t seem possible anymore" for a Muslim candidate to win Rampur.

Rampur’s last Muslim MP was veteran politician Mohammad Azam Khan -- but he quit after more than 80 legal cases were brought against him, ranging from land grabbing to intimidating government officials.

His supporters said many of the accusations were years old and that charges had only been belatedly brought after the BJP won state elections in 2017.

Khan was jailed for three years in 2023 for hate speech against BJP rivals.

Past elections were marred by allegations that security forces blocked Muslims from voting.

A legal challenge that a 2022 parliamentary by-election vote was manipulated "by using every unconstitutional means" to stop voters from Muslim-dominated areas was dismissed on a technicality.

Some Muslim voters in Rampur worry about casting a ballot later this month.

"If the conditions during the last election are repeated, I will again not be able to vote," said 75-year-old Mohammad Salam Khan, reading a newspaper in his son’s electrical repair shop.

It is part of a wider shift, said Asaduddin Owaisi, one of two lawmakers in the last parliament from the All India Council for Unity of Muslims.

Owaisi believes even secular parties avoid selecting Muslim candidates because they fear they would not appeal to Hindu voters.

"They are afraid to even give a ticket to a Muslim candidate," Owaisi said, accusing the ruling party of stoking fear against Muslims.

"It is very difficult for the Muslim candidates from any political party to win".

The BJP denies "active discrimination" based on religion, pointing out that representation depends on candidates winning elections.

A handful of Muslim candidates the BJP fielded in the last two national elections all lost, with critics accusing the party of showing disinterest in their campaign.

"We have this aspiration, ideally, to have people from every community," BJP national spokesperson Mmhonlumo Kikon told AFP.

But Salam, the author, believes Muslims are being squeezed out of the democratic process.

"So, you don’t give tickets to Muslims at one place, you redraw constituencies at another place... or you don’t allow Muslims to vote," Salam said.

"It’s not just intimidation," he added. "It’s also elimination."
Farmers in India are hit hard by extreme weather. Some say expanding natural farming is the answer (AP)
AP [4/7/2024 8:55 PM, Shawn Sebastian and Sibi Arasu, 22K, Neutral]
There’s a pungent odor on Ratna Raju’s farm that he says is protecting his crops from the unpredictable and extreme weather that’s become more frequent with human-caused climate change.

The smell comes from a concoction of cow urine, an unrefined sugar known as jaggery, and other organic materials that act as fertilizers, pesticides and bad weather barriers for his corn, rice, leafy greens and other vegetables on his farm in Guntur in India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state. The region is frequently hit by cyclones and extreme heat, and farmers say that so-called natural farming protects their crops because the soil can hold more water, and their more robust roots help the plants withstand strong winds.

Andhra Pradesh has become a positive example of the benefits of natural farming, and advocates say active government support is the primary driver for the state’s success. Experts say these methods should be expanded across India’s vast agricultural lands as climate change and decreasing profits have led to multiple farmers’ protests this year. But fledgling government support across the country for these methods means most farmers still use chemical pesticides and fertilizers, making them more vulnerable when extreme weather hits. Many farmers are calling for greater federal and state investment to help farms switch to more climate change-proof practices.

For many, the benefits of greater investment in natural farming are already obvious: In December, Cyclone Michaung, a storm moving up to 110 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) brought heavy rainfall across India’s southeastern coast, flooding towns and fields. A preliminary assessment conducted a few weeks later found that 600,000 acres of crops were destroyed in Andhra Pradesh state.

On Raju’s natural farm, however, where he was growing paddy at the time, “the rainwater on our farms seeped into the ground in one day,” he said. The soil can absorb more water because it’s more porous than pesticide-laden soil which is crusty and dry. Planting different kinds of crops throughout the year — as opposed to the more standard single crop farms — also helps keep the soil healthy, he said.

But neighboring farmer Srikanth Kanapala’s fields, that rely on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, were flooded for four days after the cyclone. He said seeing Raju’s crops hold firm while his failed has made him curious about alternative farming methods.

“I incurred huge losses,” said Kanapala, who estimates he lost up to $600 because of the cyclone, a substantial sum for a small farmer in India. “For the next planting season, I plan to use natural farming methods too.”

On Raju’s natural farm, however, where he was growing paddy at the time, “the rainwater on our farms seeped into the ground in one day,” he said. The soil can absorb more water because it’s more porous than pesticide-laden soil which is crusty and dry. Planting different kinds of crops throughout the year — as opposed to the more standard single crop farms — also helps keep the soil healthy, he said.

But neighboring farmer Srikanth Kanapala’s fields, that rely on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, were flooded for four days after the cyclone. He said seeing Raju’s crops hold firm while his failed has made him curious about alternative farming methods.

“I incurred huge losses,” said Kanapala, who estimates he lost up to $600 because of the cyclone, a substantial sum for a small farmer in India. “For the next planting season, I plan to use natural farming methods too.”

While the health effects of various pesticides have not yet been studied in detail, farm workers around the world have long claimed extended exposure has caused health problems. In February, a Philadelphia jury awarded $2.25 billion in damages in a case where a weed killer with Glyphosate — restricted in India since just 2022 — was linked to a resident’s blood cancer. In India, 63 farmers died in the western state of Maharashtra in 2017, believed to be linked to a pesticide containing the chemical Diafenthiuron, which is currently banned in the European Union, but not in India.

“Right now, not many politicians are talking about natural farming. There is some support but we need more,” said Chunduru. She called for more subsidies for seeds such as groundnuts, black gram, sorghum, vegetable crops and maize that can help farmers make the switch.

Farmers’ rights activists said skepticism about natural farming among political leaders, government bureaucrats and scientists is still pervasive because they still trust the existing farming models that use fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides to achieve maximum productivity. In the short-term, chemical alternatives can be cheaper and more effective, but in the long term they take a toll on the soil’s health, meaning larger quantities of chemicals are needed to maintain crops, causing a cycle of greater costs and poorer soil, natural farming advocates say.

“Agroecological initiatives are not getting adequate attention or budgetary outlays,” said Kavitha Kuruganti, an activist who has advocated for sustainable farming practices for nearly three decades. The Indian government spends less than three percent of its total budget on agriculture. It has earmarked nearly $20 billion in fertilizer subsidies this year, but only $55 million has been allocated by the federal government to encourage natural farming. Kuruganti said there are a handful of politicians who support the practice but scaling it up remains a challenge in India.

A lack of national standards and guidelines or a viable supply chain that farmers can sell their produce through is also keeping natural farming relatively niche, said NS Suresh, a research scientist at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, a Bengaluru-based think-tank.

But because the practice helps keep the plants and the soil healthy across various soil types and all kinds of unpredictable weather conditions, it’s beneficial for farmers all around India, from its mountains to its coasts, experts say. And the practice of planting different crops year-round means farmers have produce to harvest at any given time, giving an extra boost to their soil and their wallets.

Chunduru, who’s been practicing natural farming for four years now, hopes that prioritizing natural farming in the country can have benefits for producers and consumers of crops alike, and other farmers avoid the kind of harms her husband has faced.

“We can provide nutrient-rich food, soil and physical health” to future generations, she said.
Kuleba visits New Delhi: Can India help bring peace to Ukraine? (VOA)
VOA [4/6/2024 4:34 PM, Tatiana Vorozhko, 761K, Neutral]
Ukrainian officials are cultivating closer ties with India, pursuing mutual economic benefits while hoping to nudge the Asian giant away from its historic close ties with Kyiv’s war enemy Russia.

Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba visited India on March 28-29, the first visit of a top Ukrainian diplomat to the country in seven years. Days before that, the countries’ presidents spoke by phone.

The primary task for Kuleba`s visit — Ukrainian Ambassador to India Oleksandr Polishchuk said in an interview with VOA — was to restore high-level political cooperation.

The parties agreed that a high-ranking Indian official will participate in a Global Peace Summit set for this summer in Switzerland with the goal of supporting Ukraine.

India also will work on a possible visit to Ukraine by its external affairs minister and organize other top-level mutual visits, he said. The parties also agreed to resume the work of the India-Ukraine Inter-Governmental Commission, inactive since 2018.

The two countries "agreed to restore the level of cooperation between our countries that existed prior to the full-scale war launched by Russia," Kuleba wrote on X.

"Our immediate goal is to get trade back to earlier levels," wrote his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Kuleba said that India could greatly benefit from expanding trade and technological ties with Ukraine and participate in post-war reconstruction.

Kuleba noted that India’s close ties with Russia are based on a "Soviet legacy" that is "evaporating." One such legacy is India’s imports of Russian weapons, the share of which dropped from 76% in 2009-2013 to 36% in 2019-2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Polishchuk said that since Russia cannot fulfill all of its obligations to supply new equipment and spare parts, India is trying to establish its own military production based on Western standards.

"Ukraine can partially meet the needs of the Indian armed forces, particularly the navy, since many warships use gas turbine engines produced in Ukraine," said the ambassador.

In an interview with The Times of India newspaper, Kuleba also softened Ukraine’s position toward India’s import of Russian oil, saying that Ukraine doesn’t object to it because the deal was structured in a way that Russia can’t invest the profit "in the production of tanks, missiles, and weapons."

Paradoxes of India-Ukraine relations

Mridula Ghosh, a lecturer at the Ukraine National University of Kyiv-Mohyla and a native of India, pointed to two paradoxes in the relations between the two countries.

First, she told VOA that ties between India and Ukraine are strengthening while the U.S. Congress is unable to approve aid to Ukraine and the U.S. and some European countries use the assistance to Ukraine as a bargaining chip in electoral politics. In India, she said, foreign policy is not part of the electoral debates because it is of little interest to the voters.

Second, the warming of relations between the two countries on the highest level happened while Russia increased its propaganda and influence on Indian society.

"When the full-scale war began, society was ready to condemn this aggression," Ghosh said. "The authorities, on the contrary, reacted restrainedly. Now, many people in power and intellectual circles clearly and correctly understand what is happening in Ukraine. But the media began actively disseminating Russian propaganda."

Mediator between Russia and Ukraine?

In New Delhi, Kuleba called on India to play a more active role in the peace process.

"With India’s more active involvement in this process, we expect that the number of countries looking at India and its role in this process will also grow," Polishchuk said.

However, observers doubt that India could mediate between Ukraine and Russia or influence Moscow to end the war.

While India leaned closer to the U.S. and the West in recent years, it "will not undertake steps that would significantly affect Russia strategically, just as Russia would not take an adverse position to affect India strategically in favor of China or Pakistan," Nandan Unnikrishnan, a distinguished fellow at the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said to the South China Morning Post.

Former U.S. consul general in Hyderabad, India, Katherine Hadda doubts that India would act as a mediator in a peace process where one of the parties is absent — Russia does not participate in summits based on the peace formula proposed by Ukraine.

"India has stressed that it will serve as a mediator [only] at both sides’ request," Hadda said in the same article.

In a column for the Indian NDTV news outlet, Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, writes that achieving peace in Eurasia is not India’s job.

"New Delhi would like to see a resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war soon. But ultimately, it is for the main protagonists in this conflict — Russia, Ukraine, and the West — to decide what kind of Eurasian security architecture they can live with."

Since the beginning of the full-scale aggression, India has not condemned Russia’s actions, has abstained from voting for Ukrainian initiatives at the U.N., and has not joined the sanctions against Russia. Still, Ghosh believes India is moving away from Moscow.

"The Indian elephant is slow but steady in reacting," said Ghosh. "At the beginning of the full-scale war, it was reluctant to make strong positional statements, but now it is reviewing many things. There is a decoupling from Russia."
Is India Really the Next China? (Foreign Policy – opinion)
Foreign Policy [4/8/2024 12:04 AM, Josh Felman and Arvind Subramanian, 315K, Neutral]
Will India be the next China? As China’s economy spirals downward and optimism about India’s growth reverberates around the world, that question can no longer be dismissed as the fevered fantasy of nationalists. It needs to be taken seriously—not least because the world is already behaving as if India is a major power.

Consider this: In 2023, suspicion swirled that the Indian government was connected to the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil and a plot to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil—a remarkable set of allegations. Yet even more remarkable than the allegations were the reactions. The U.S. government opted to douse the potentially incendiary fallout, saying little, merely allowing the case to wend its way through the courts. In other words, Indian hubris was accommodated, not chastised. It was a testament to India’s newfound political standing.

As for the economy, it is true that the Chinese experience of the last 40 years was a very specific type of miracle that is unlikely to be replicated. Even so, there is a case for India because it is no longer the economically constrained giant that it once was.

For the past quarter century, India’s development was hobbled by its infrastructure, inadequate to the nation’s own manufacturing needs and patently insufficient for foreign firms considering India as an export base. Over the last decade, however, its infrastructure has been transformed. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has built roads, ports, airports, railways, power, and telecommunications, in such quantities that it has rendered the country almost unrecognizable from what it was just a few years ago. To give just one example, around 34,000 miles of national highways have been built since the current government came to power in 2014.

The nation’s digital infrastructure has also been transformed. Once creaky and technologically backward, it is now cutting-edge, with ordinary Indians using smartphones to pay for even the most routine shopping transactions. Even more crucially, the digital network now serves all Indians, allowing the government to introduce programs such as direct cash transfers to those in need, while the private sector has used it as a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation.

At the same time, the Modi government’s “New Welfarism” has enhanced Indians’ quality of life. This distinctive approach prioritizes the public delivery of essentially private goods and services, providing voters with clean fuel, sanitation, power, housing, water, and bank accounts while making clear to them that the benefactor is the prime minister. As a result of these programs, the state is now able to cushion the vulnerable with employment and free food during times of hardship like the COVID-19 pandemic. The capacity of the Indian state to build and deliver better—and at scale—has been remarkable.

These are major policy achievements, the fruit of cumulative and national efforts. Many of these initiatives were, in fact, started by previous central and state governments, though the Modi government deserves important credit for their accelerating progress. And there are signs that they are producing results.

To begin with, India has received a major new impetus to its skill-based service exports. India’s services first boomed in the early 2000s but plateaued after the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Now, they have seen a rebirth. In 2022, India’s global market share increased by 1.1 percentage point (about $40 billion), reflecting an important jump up the skills ladder. (In 2023, India likely gained further global market share but at a less torrid pace.)

Indians who used to write cheap code and man call centers are now running global capability centers, with high-skilled personnel performing analytical tasks for top global companies. JPMorgan Chase alone has more than 50,000 workers in India; Goldman Sachs’s largest office outside New York is in Bengaluru. Accenture and Amazon, among many others, also have large presences. This boom, in turn, has ignited the construction of high-rise apartments, which along with cranes are now dotting the skylines of the tech cities of Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune. Sales of SUVs are soaring, and luxury malls and high-end restaurants are sprouting—all helped along by a boom in personal credit.

Next, there are signs that Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its least developed, is witnessing a revival. The state is refurbishing its decrepit infrastructure (not to mention its many temples), getting its finances under control, and reducing corruption and violence under its charismatic, sectarian leader, a vigilante Hindu monk-turned-politician. If the state can finally become an attractive investment destination, it has the potential to change the trajectory of the entire nation by dint of its sheer demographic heft. Its transformation would send the signal that India’s Hindi heartland—until recently pejoratively referred to as a bimaru, or diseased region—is not condemned to perpetual underdevelopment.

Finally, the downward spiral of the Chinese economy under President Xi Jinping has accelerated. As a result, capital is exiting that country at an alarming pace, with a net $69 billion in corporate and household funds leaving in 2023, according to official figures.

There are indications that a small share of this capital is finding its way to India. Most prominently, Apple has set up plants in a number of Indian states so that it can more readily supply the domestic market and diversify its export base, especially now that economic tensions between the United States and China are rising. And this, in turn, is helping to build a chain of domestic electronics suppliers, some of which are planning to set up large factories, especially in India’s south, employing more than 20,000 workers. This is an astonishing phenomenon in a country that has always been characterized by subscale, inefficient manufacturing firms.

If these large-scale plants prove viable, then they could spark a surge in goods exports, which would truly change prospects—not just for India’s long-beleaguered manufacturing sector but also for low-skilled workers who have not been able to enjoy the high-skill export service boom. The math is worth reflecting on. India’s low-skill exports will never reach Chinese levels of competitiveness, reflected in global market shares in excess of 40 percent. That’s because the unique set of political and economic circumstances that encouraged the advanced world to shift much of its industrial base to just one country no longer exists. But over the coming decade, it is perfectly feasible for India to increase its current share of around 3 percent by 5-10 percentage points, which would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of additional exports.

Despite the favorable portents, any declaration of India displacing China is premature. That’s because the encouraging signs are not yet convincingly reflected in the economic data, while government policies remain inadequate to realizing the new opportunities.

Consider the economic data. For some time, we have been skeptical of claims that India has really been able to put aside the lost decade of the 2010s, a period that saw modest growth, little structural transformation, and weak job creation. True, the economy has recovered post-COVID but in an unequal manner, favoring capital over labor, big firms over small, and the salaried middle class and the rich over the millions of people employed in the informal economy.

Part of the problem has been that India has so far managed to capitalize on only a small portion of the new opportunities created by the relative economic decline of China. Despite the government’s determined campaign to “Make in India,” it has not so far succeeded in convincing many firms to expand their Indian operations. In fact, inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have actually been declining. India also accounts for a smaller share of FDI flows to emerging markets excluding China.

This is not just a case of skittish foreigners. Even domestic firms have been reluctant to invest, notwithstanding the improved infrastructure that the government has created, the subsidies that it has offered, and, in some cases, the protectionism that it has lavished on the manufacturing sector. Private investment in plants and machinery has still not rebounded from the depressed levels of the last decade. And there are no convincing signs that this situation is about to turn around. In fact, new project announcements actually fell in nominal terms in 2023 compared with the previous year’s level.

Consequently, India’s manufacturing exports—the source of job creation for its vast pools of unskilled labor—remain weak. In fact, India’s global market share in key sectors such as apparel has declined since the global financial crisis. All this has been a major concern for Modi’s government and even the central bank, which recently issued a report urging the private sector to “get its act together” and relieve the government of the burden of investment.

Why have firms been so reluctant to seize the opportunities that lie so manifestly in front of them? Essentially, because they perceive that the risks of doing so are too high.

Firms’ concerns lie in three main areas. First, they are worried that the “software” of policymaking remains weak. The playing field is not level, as a few large domestic conglomerates and some large foreign companies are seen as favored firms, to the detriment of the broader investment climate. After all, for every favored firm that undertakes investments because its risks have been reduced, there are many competitors that have reduced their spending because their risks have increased. For them, the risks of being victims of arbitrary state action remain substantial.

Second, even as the government recognizes the need to boost exports, it remains viscerally attached to inwardness—that is to say, import barriers. This protectionism has a new allure because many people believe that India’s domestic market is now so large and its domestic firms so advanced that they can easily replace foreign firms, as long as they are given a boost from the government. Unsurprisingly so—economic nationalism inevitably accompanies political nationalism.

But the reality is that India’s domestic market is not particularly large, at least for the middle-class goods that global firms are trying to sell. And frequent announcements of protectionist measures actually undercut domestic investment, as firms become risk-averse, anticipating that they might sooner or later be cut off from critical foreign supplies. For example, the announcement last August that imports of laptops would be restricted sparked panic among firms in the important IT sector. In the end, the restrictions were watered down, but the fears still linger, especially as similar measures have been implemented in other sectors.

Above all looms the question of the wedge between politics and economics. Investment and growth can survive, even thrive, in the face of institutional decay as long as the political regime remains stable. And Modi’s popularity seems to portend stability. But rising disaffection and restiveness among minority communities, the southern states, the political opposition, and the farmers of northern India increase the likelihood of accidents. As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, the inevitable never happens. It is the unexpected, always.

We can glimpse hope in India’s present yet remain anxious about the future.
NSB
Why time is running out across the Maldives’ lovely little islands (New York Times)
New York Times [4/6/2024 1:37 PM, Alex Travelli and Maahil Mohamed, 441K, Neutral]
To live in the Maldives is to live in one of two worlds. Either you belong to the capital — Malé, a micro-Manhattan in the Indian Ocean — or you are out in “the islands,” among the quietest and most remote villages this side of the Arctic tundra.

It is in these places — far from the archipelago’s walled-garden resort atolls, where no Maldivians actually dwell — that the country is picking between two visions of its future, like much of the rest of Asia, but more so.

The outer islands are steadily depopulating, as the appeal of making a life through tuna fishing and coconut farming along their crushed-coral seashores shrinks. The splendid isolation may be what attracts visitors, but it seems incompatible with islanders’ aspirations in a nation modernized by global tourism.

As Maldivians give up on island life, the government feels compelled to keep building up Malé, the country’s one real city. But Malé is already pressed up hard against the limits of human habitation. By some measures, it is the most densely populated island on earth, with over a third of the country’s 520,000 people on a landmass that can be crossed by foot in about 20 minutes.

If more Maldivians are going to move there, its physical structure will need to be radically reworked. In the meantime, it is sprawling outward wherever it can: The government is surrounding Malé with sea bridges to artificial islands packed with housing projects financed by China and India.

On Jan. 22, President Mohamed Muizzu announced his otherworldly vision for an undersea tunnel between Malé proper and a land-reclamation project where Chinese investors will help build 65,000 housing units on what is now barely a sandbar.

Mr. Muizzu, a civil engineer by training, said the tunnel would “provide beautiful views of the sea” as commuters passed through it. (Feasibility to be determined.)

Humay Ghafoor, a researcher who campaigns against environmental degradation, said that “nobody does any assessments” before commissioning “massive infrastructure” projects. This allows an airport, for instance, to be built over a mangrove, destroying a whole island’s freshwater supply.

The Maldives consists of a thousand islands stretched along a 550-mile axis, each one a bit of exposed coral that grew from the rims of a prehistoric range of undersea volcanoes. These form rings called atolls — a word that comes to English from the native Dhivehi language. Most of the 188 inhabited islands have fewer than 1,000 residents.

The resorts — those airy villas floating over turquoise seas — are all on technically “uninhabited” islands. The guests are foreign, and most of the staff is, too, mainly from India and Bangladesh. In some ways, the resorts are like offshore oil rigs, pumping out nearly all of the country’s income. By design, they are divorced from Maldivian culture and abstracted from their South Asian location.

The typical inhabited island is likewise rich in sunshine and warmth and has access to a shallow lagoon, palm trees and maybe a mangrove forest. The inhabitants are highly literate, many are English-speaking and they are connected to the rest of the world by the internet, mobile data and long ferry routes.

Their traditions survive, still. Perhaps every island except Malé has a holhuashi, a covered seating platform at its harbor, sometimes circled by hanging woven chairs. Men gather to rest at midday and exchange gossip.

There is little doubt that climate change will eventually bring doom to this country, most of which is just a meter or two above sea level. But that catastrophe is thought to be a century or more away.

Instead, Maldivians are leaving the islands for the sake of their children, looking to Malé and the world beyond. When it comes to education and health care, there is no substitute for city life.

Nolhivaranfaru, a fishhook-shaped bit of powdery white sand, with a green and fertile core between its beaches, is like many of the Maldives’ inhabited islands. Flowering frangipani stand over an Islamic cemetery near its piers, centered around a centuries-old shrine to an Arab pilgrim. It takes 25 minutes by speedboat to reach the nearest landmass and two airplanes from there to get to neighboring India.

That is a journey that Maryam Asima, a 30-year-old mother of twins, made at great cost and personal hardship. She and her husband, the captain of a tourist yacht that docks 175 miles away, near Malé, had been unable to conceive. Two years ago, Ms. Asima and her sister, who was in a similar position, traveled to Kochi, India, a city of 2.1 million, where they made do on their own during 11 months of IVF treatment.

Health care remains rudimentary even on the better connected of the outer islands. Staff at the local clinic scoff at the idea of someday providing IVF. They say quietly that even most emergency care is beyond them: Any patient who needs a ventilator must be flown hundreds of miles away.

Ms. Asima, now back on the island with her 6-month-old twins, says she is satisfied with the results of her ordeal. Her sister has given her a nephew, too. With her encouragement, two other women from the island have become pregnant in the same way. The government has started offering $500 subsidies and the possibility of free air travel for families that need to go abroad for IVF.

She likes the “home feeling” of her island and hopes to send her children to school there, even if they need to travel to a nearby island to see a pediatrician. But this is not her first home: Ms. Asima was born on an even smaller island, Maavaidhoo, which was abandoned after being swamped by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

Many Maldivians have been on the move for a generation or more, leaving smaller communities for larger ones. More than anywhere else, those who can afford it go to Malé.

Thirty years ago, it was not unusual for families to send unaccompanied minors on long ferry journeys, of 20 hours or more, to live in Malé. They would stay with distant relatives or even strangers and work as pint-size housekeepers to pay for their room and board as they attended one of the country’s better schools.

Island families still send their children to study in Malé, but usually now they travel as teenagers; better primary schooling is available even in remote places.

The cramped conditions of the capital are the first challenge they face. A compact grid of streets jams pedestrians, motorbikes, workshops and luxury perfumers together like a miniature version of central Hong Kong. One-bedroom apartments rent for five times the starting salary of a government office worker.

Ajuvad, a nervous, soft-spoken 23-year-old, came to Malé at 16 to join his older siblings, six people crammed into three bedrooms. They are all professionals, with jobs as teachers and technicians. But they were raised in another world, a 36-hour ferry ride away. There, the beach was a five-minute walk away with no roads and no motorbikes, and their home was a four-bedroom house that their father, a fisherman, built himself. Their mother made fish paste and sold it to neighbors.

Ajuvad, who asked that his last name be withheld to protect his privacy, remembers the transition as being “quite a challenge.” Having to live without his parents, and without an inch of space to study alone in quiet, he said, “I thought my world had collapsed.”

Ahmed Abbas, a 39-year-old hardware salesman, had an easier time moving into Malé’s urban sprawl from a distant southern island 12 years ago. His family of six shares a two-bedroom apartment in a complex built by Chinese developers, across a sea bridge from the city proper. They spend only half of their income on rent, and he drives to the city, 25 minutes each way, twice a day.

Mr. Abbas studied and worked around South India for many years before settling down. He has seen enough of the world to appreciate his family’s perch, which they share with two love birds: Small, exotic pets are a big business in little Malé.

But he still misses the island life. Back home, it was “nice because the people are nice,” he said, “normal country people, all smiling.”
Coral reefs are vital to the Maldives. This is how travelers can help restore them. (USA Today)
USA Today [4/7/2024 5:06 AM, Kathleen Wong, 4261K, Neutral]
The coral fragment from the seafloor off the coast of the resort Siyam World Maldives in the Noonu Atoll had a stark contrast. One inch of the coral’s light brown tips was bumpy with living polyps, while the rest was dull white, resembling a dead tree branch.

This coral species, known as acropora hemprichii, grows in the shallow reefs of the Maldives in tapered branches which eventually look like a bush or dome as they grow.

That piece of coral I spotted broke off from its home likely due to a powerful wave or a careless snorkeler. Once it fell into the sand, it began to die off. To the untrained eye, it seemed like there was no hope for that little coral fragment.

However, that fragment was far from dead, and the solution to reviving it was simple.

Coral planting is a simple act of fastening a coral fragment to a metal frame and placing it in a safe, shallow area of the ocean. In mere months, the coral has the potential to flourish once again. As the corals regenerate, the reef becomes more habitable for fish, that swim through and make the frames part of their home. Over 25% of the world’s fish inhabit and get their food from coral reefs.

As climate change and human activity continue to threaten coral reefs, tropical destinations such as the Maldives are turning to coral restoration initiatives, such as coral planting, to save the ocean, which they heavily rely on for tourism and the local way of life.

Resort guests are encouraged to get involved and protect the very ocean that drew them to the Maldives in the first place – and the call is being answered. According to Booking.com’s Sustainable Travel Report 2023, two-thirds of its 33,000 survey respondents said they “want to leave the places they visit better than when they arrived.”

“Ninety-nine percent of people come to the Maldives for the ocean because they want to snorkel,” said Mariyam “Thuhu” Thuhufa, marine biologist at Siyam World Maldives, which offersoffers marine conservation activities for guests including coral planting and lagoon clean ups. “A lot of them do get very curious, a lot of them are keen to understand what they can see and how they can help.”

How important are coral reefs to the Maldives?

The Maldives is an archipelago made up of over 1,000 islands sitting mere feet above sea level, which means the country is 99% ocean. And that’s where most of the natural diversity exists, from manta rays in the north to hammerhead sharks in the south.

“Without the ocean, the Maldives just can’t exist,” said Thuhufa.

All Maldivians depend on the ocean in some way, 71% rely on it for their primary source of income. Maldivians get their food from line fishing at coral reefs, such as snapper or emperor fish. Fishing for big game fish like tuna is also the second largest industry, following tourism.

Without healthy coral reefs, the islands wouldn’t even exist. “If you go to a local island, you’ll see a lot of the houses are built very close to the ocean, right next to the beach,” said Thuhufa. During monsoon season, from May to November, big swells wash away the beaches, but a healthy reef can break the wave energy before it reaches the island, she said.

The fate of coral reefs are in resorts’ hands

To Thuhufa, coral bleaching is one of the most pressing issues for the islands and “something the whole world is experiencing.” The last mass bleaching event, which occurred between 2014 and 2017, saw 15% of the world’s reefs die off. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts a fourth, even worse mass bleaching this year.

"It’s looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year," said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.

“We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet,” he said. Up to 90% of the world’s corals could be lost.

Thuhufa recalled an uninhabited island she visited for volunteer research work in high school. “The reef was so beautiful with so many vibrant colors,” she said. After the 2016 bleaching, she returned to the island to see how it was affected. “It was the most devastating thing I’ve seen,” she said. “Everything was bleached, everything was covered in algae.”

With tourism as the country’s biggest industry, resorts play a vital role in the protection of coral reefs.

Although construction and increased human activity can damage the fragile eco-systems of reefs, many resorts in the Maldives are working to protect their house reefs by hiring in-house marine biologists and creating nurseries for coral planting. New resorts in the Maldives need to undergo an impact assessment before they can break ground (or sand in their case).

A 2018 study analyzing the direct impact of seven luxury Maldivian resorts on coral reef health found that the amount of live coral and the size of colonies increased over time if the resort had conservation initiatives in place.

“Your reef is protected in the sense that there’s no fishing, and guests are told not to touch corals,” Thuhufa said. “A lot more is put into the reefs to keep them healthy.”

However, the study also revealed that resorts with poor management practices and more sedimentation and runoff can harm the reefs.

What is it like to plant coral?

I tried coral planting for the first time during my stay at Siyam World Maldives, and it was surprisingly easy and engaging.

Guests can book the experience via the resort app, which they download during check-in, or their resort ambassador can arrange it for them.

Coral planting is an emerging type of coral restoration, and since it’s only been done on a small scale, it doesn’t tackle the root of the problem of coral bleaching or warming temperatures. It can, however, help make a specific reef a bit more habitable and spread awareness of the condition of coral reefs.

The marine biology team met me on the beach with a hexagon-shaped metal frame and two containers filled with coral fragments they found. One by one, we attached the coral pieces to the frame using zip ties, ensuring they were flush with the metal. This way, the coral will merge and regrow over the frame.

We splashed water on the corals every half hour to ensure they didn’t dry out during the process. When the frame was finished, we placed it in a shallow snorkeling area to join over 100 other coral frames. The marine biology team checked on the frames and removed any algae so the coral could breathe. The frames come in shapes like hearts or rays but remain rather open for fish to swim through them.

Although coral is sensitive, it’s also a resilient animal – yes, corals are technically considered tiny animals since, unlike plants, they don’t make their own food. Sometimes as small as a pencil tip, polyps make up the coral structure we see and attach to rocks, the seabed or, in this case, a metal frame.

Depending on the species of coral – and there are hundreds – the coral can take around five months to attach to the frame and then a few more months to regrow, according to Thuhufa.

As I dove underwater to explore the coral nursery, I noticed batfish, triggerfish and other colorful reef fish seamlessly swimming between anemones and among the coral frames.
Sri Lanka’s debt repayments to be suspended until 2028 (Nikkei Asia)
Nikkei Asia [4/6/2024 6:18 AM, Satoshi Iwaki, 293K, Positive]
Sri Lanka and a group of its creditors are in final negotiations to suspend debt repayments until 2028, Nikkei has learned, as country creditors including Japan seek to prevent China’s influence from expanding in the debt-ridden island.

"Negotiations [with the creditor nations] have concluded. We are hoping that it [a detailed announcement] will take place in the next few weeks," Sagala Ratnayaka, Sri Lanka’s national security adviser to the president, told Nikkei in a recent interview. The repayment period will be 15 years, from 2028 to 2042, with the interest rate newly set at around 2%. He said that there will be no further debt reduction, despite a request by the island nation.

Sri Lanka in April 2022 announced a temporary suspension of public external debt payments, in effect putting the country into default. A meeting of creditor nations was set up in April 2023. Japan, which is the largest creditor country after China, is serving as the chair in the talks along with India and France.

Sri Lanka and the creditor nations have reached a basic agreement on a repayment moratorium and a reduction in interest. The provision of financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund, which was conditional on debt restructuring agreements being struck with major creditor countries, has also begun.

China, the biggest creditor, has only joined the meeting as an observer. However, the restructuring of debt from China via loans of the Export-Import Bank of China would be "similar," Ratnayaka said. "We have a saying which means ‘everyone will be treated equally’," implying that the terms of debt repayment to China would be similar to those agreed at the creditors’ meeting.

As of the end of 2023, Sri Lanka’s outstanding debt was $37.3 billion, of which China accounted for $4.7 billion.

Sri Lanka handed over control of its southern Hambantota Port to China in 2017. This was seen as a typical example of a "debt trap," where infrastructure rights are taken away amid delayed debt repayments. Some creditors, including Japan and India, are wary of China expanding its influence into the Indo-Pacific, with Sri Lanka as its base.

Ratnayaka explained that "this is all purely commercial. There is nothing military [about the port agreement]. Sri Lanka is open to investment and we don’t pick and choose on the basis of what country, unless it affects national security." He added, "But in the north and areas which would affect the security of India, we are conscious."
Central Asia
‘Worst floods in decades’ hit Kazakhstan and Russia (BBC)
BBC [4/7/2024 10:20 AM, Vicky Wong, 5429K, Negative]
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from 10 northern regions in Kazakhstan because of floods in the area, the authorities have said.

The worse than usual seasonal floods have been caused by melting snow.

Across the border in Russia, an oil refinery in the city of Orsk, 1,800km southeast of Moscow, has stopped operations because of the floods.

The Kremlin has warned that water levels in some areas are rising faster than at any time in the last 100 years.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Putin had ordered the governors of the Siberian regions of Tyumen and Kurgan, further to the east, to prepare for "expected sharp rise in water levels" and "inevitable" floods.

Russian authorities said on Saturday that they had evacuated almost 4,500 people in Orenburg region in the area around Orsk.

During a visit to Orsk on Sunday, Russian Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, warned that "a critical situation" had developed after a dam was breached on Friday.

Russia’s weather monitor has warned that water levels on the Ural river in the city of Orenburg will reach dangerous levels over the next three days.

Regional authorities said they expected the "peak" of the flood on Tuesday and for the situation to stabilise after 20 April.

Meanwhile in Kazakhstan, the emergency ministry said on Sunday that some 12,000 people were being housed in temporary shelters.

It said rescuers also managed to move about 60,000 farm animals to safe areas.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said on Saturday that it was the worst natural disaster to hit Kazakhstan for 80 years.

In a televised address to the nation, Mr Tokayev said the government had ramped up efforts to mitigate the impacts of the floods and that all necessary assistance would be provided.
Leading Kazakh Sinologist Jailed On Treason Charge Released On Parole (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [4/5/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 235K, Negative]
A leading Kazakh sinologist and former senior government adviser, Konstantin Syroyezhkin, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on high-treason charges in 2019, has been released on parole five years early.

Political observer Anton Morozov wrote on Facebook late on April 4 that the 67-year-old scholar was released from a maximum-security prison. No further details were immediately available. Syroyezhkin has not commented publicly.

Syroyezhkin was sentenced on October 7, 2019. Details of the charges were not made public, but some local media outlets, as well as The Wall Street Journal, reported then that Syroyezhkin was accused of passing classified information on to Chinese nationals for cash.

It is unknown if Syroyezhkin has the right to remain in his native Kazakhstan, as some reports said at the time of his conviction that he was stripped off his Kazakh citizenship and banned from residing in Kazakhstan for five years after his release.

Kazakh authorities were reluctant to officially announce his arrest more than five years ago. Questions about Syroyezhkin’s whereabouts started circulating in the media after he failed to show up at two conferences in Kazakhstan he was scheduled to attend.

Syroyezhkin was born in the southeastern Kazakh city of Almaty, which between 1927-1997 was the capital and is now its largest city.

In 1981, Syroyezhkin graduated the Highest School of the Soviet KGB in Moscow with a specialization on China.

From 2006 until his arrest in 2019, Syroyezhkin worked as a leading expert and analyst at the presidential Institute for Strategic Research.

Syroyezhkin is the author of more than 1,000 analytical and research works on China and Kazakh-Chinese relations, written in Russian, Chinese, and English.

In the past, when current Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, who is a trained sinologist as well, served as prime minister, Syroyezhkin was his adviser on Kazakh-Chinese relations, including during talks on delimiting and demarcating the Kazakh-Chinese border.
Law Targeting Foreign-Funded NGOs Sends Chill Through Kyrgyz Civil Society (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [4/5/2024 5:03 PM, Chris Rickleton, 235K, Negative]
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov has signed a controversial law allowing officials to register organizations as "foreign representatives," ending a decade-long campaign to pass a law echoing Russian legislation on "foreign agents."

That these efforts spanned three different Kyrgyz administrations -- one, albeit, cut short by political unrest -- has strengthened the belief of many that the law that will enter into force next week exemplifies Moscow’s influence over its smaller, Central Asian ally.

But the move against foreign-funded civic groups also fits neatly with the political agenda of Japarov’s power-centralizing government, which has already proven its willingness to crack down on critics harder and more often than its recent predecessors.

Neither of these trends portends well for local civil society or Kyrgyzstan’s already tattered reputation as an exception in a deeply authoritarian region.

But for the career activists that now find themselves in the crosshairs of the new law, there are other questions to be asked -- both immediate and long-term.

‘Now They Will Start Working Openly’

After signing the On Noncommercial Organizations law on April 2, Japarov hit back at suggestions by international advocacy groups that NGOs might be persecuted under the new legislation and accused local nonprofits of lying to their foreign partners about the intentions behind the bill.

Japarov’s words in a Facebook post should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, though, given that he accompanied these comments with others about NGOs that were patently false -- including that such organizations had never before registered with the government or reported their earnings.

"Now they will start working openly," wrote the president, who did not provide any examples of these transgressions. "There won’t be a mess like before."

Under the wording of the new law, local NGOs that receive foreign funding and carry out "political activities" in Kyrgyzstan will now be recognized as "performing the functions of a foreign representative" and should register as such.

This designation will make them eligible for unannounced inspections from law enforcement, which inevitably makes them more vulnerable to getting shut down.

Organizations carrying the "foreign representative" brand should, moreover, report quarterly to relevant government agencies on the use of funds received from abroad, as well as on their general activities and management every six months. Meanwhile, officials from the Justice Ministry will have the right to sit in on their meetings and events.

Dinara Oshurahunova, a longtime rights defender and election monitor, told RFE/RL that the main focus of the law would be "organizations that deal with political rights" like her own organization, Civic Initiatives, which monitors and works with parliament.

Now Oshurahunova has decided to begin the laborious process of liquidating her group, due to her belief that the foreign-representative designation will put staff at risk and lead to further degrees of discrimination and ostracization.

"The term ‘political activities’ can be applied to anything -- it can be applied to research, public polling, and activities that are enshrined as rights under the constitution. My organization informs citizens how to appeal to lawmakers, so that is a political activity. Training also qualifies as a political activity."

The law’s text lists a number of spheres where NGO work would not be considered political, including science, culture, art, health care, and social support for disabled persons.

At the same time, it is unclear whether even organizations such as these, what Oshurahunova calls "social NGOs," will be able to pursue advocacy that could be construed as "forming public opinion" without earning the foreign-representative badge.

And the law’s definition of "dissemination, including using modern information technologies, of opinions on decisions made by government bodies and policies" would appear to make it impossible for any media outlet registered as a nonprofit to apply for foreign grants without automatically becoming a "foreign representative."

There are currently around 29,000 noncommercial organizations of various types in Kyrgyzstan, more than half of which are registered in the capital, Bishkek.

More Cooperation With Russia, Less With Other Countries?

In addition to criticism from international rights organizations, the new law has been rebuked by the United States and the European Union.

Washington said the law "has the potential to limit or end the operation of organizations that are delivering critical assistance to the Kyrgyz people -- including U.S. assistance that is implemented by local and international NGOs."

The European Union said that "legislation that restricts civil society organizations’ ability to operate freely could have a negative impact on the Kyrgyz society and their cooperation with international partners, like the European Union."

The New York-headquartered rights monitor Human Rights Watch on April 4 criticized the EU for "dithering" over the Kyrgyz bill, as well as failing to respond adequately to renewed attempts in fellow ex-Soviet republic Georgia to pass a similar law.

"The EU had ample opportunity to press the authorities to reject this bill. Kyrgyzstan benefits from privileged access to the EU internal market tied to respect for international human rights conventions: conventions this law clearly contravenes," the HRW wrote.

One country that the raft of international statements on the law will not bother much is Russia.

Moscow has openly railed against the "pro-Western, anti-Russian" activities of NGOs in neighboring countries, with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu name-checking Central Asia in particular and noting in February that Moscow had taken "preventative measures" in the region.

Analyses of the Kyrgyz law carried out by the legal clinic Adilet and the media fact-checking outlet Factcheck.kg found that it had been overwhelmingly cribbed from the Russian "foreign agents" law passed in 2012.

In a report four years after the Russian law’s passage, Amnesty International wrote that "more than a [100 Russian] organizations have seen their funding shrink, their reputations tarnished, and their staff intimidated," and reported that 27 of the 148 organizations that had been included on Russia’s registry of foreign agents had disbanded over that period.

And there have been many more closures and liquidations since then.

From ‘Foreign Representatives’ To ‘Undesirable Organizations’?

At the moment, there is a key difference between the Kyrgyz and Russian legal definitions.

That is because in 2022, just months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law that expanded the "foreign agent" net to include individuals instead of just organizations.

Kyrgyzstan has not gone that far yet, and lawmakers removed one of the most criticized aspects of the law -- stipulating punishment of NGO leaders and their staff of up to 10 years in prison in regards to particular crimes -- ahead of the final reading of the bill last month.

But civic activists see plenty of potential for copycatting in the near future.

Leila Nazgul Seiitbek, a Kyrgyzstan-born rights campaigner who chairs the Vienna-based Freedom for Eurasia nonprofit, points out that the Kyrgyz law in its current state would not be enough to prevent individual citizens cooperating with larger international rights groups.

"For this reason I think they may eventually pass an ‘undesirable organizations’ act, which Russia passed [in 2015] after the law on foreign agents," Seiitbek told RFE/RL. (Note: The Russian Justice Ministry has included Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on its register of "undesirable organizations," a decision made by the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office on February 20.)

Nurbek Toktakunov, a human rights lawyer who has represented some of Kyrgyzstan’s most famous political prisoners, agrees that the crackdown on civil society and free speech in Kyrgyzstan might not have peaked yet.

"Japarov and [national security chief Kamchybek] Tashiev are tough politicians. They tested us, and saw that people got frightened. And so they went a little further. They understood that our civil society is mostly cowardly, mostly just talk and grant-eating."

Toktakunov, whose rights organization Precedent has received money from Western donor organizations in the past, says he now plans to cease cooperation with foreign donors in order not to be subject to the law.

But that doesn’t mean he is giving up his cause.

"I’m a citizen, which means I’m a politician. I’ll keep criticizing. I’ll search for internal resources to continue our work. I’ll work with local businessmen. They need human rights and the rule of the law in Kyrgyzstan more than the West does. In fact, I think all of us Kyrgyz citizens need human rights and the rule of law," he told RFE/RL.
Tajikistan rejects Russian claim that Ukraine is recruiting its citizens (Reuters)
Reuters [4/6/2024 10:17 AM, Alexander Marrow, 5239K, Negative]
Tajikistan’s foreign ministry on Saturday rejected a claim by a top Russian security official that Ukraine’s embassy in the Tajik capital was recruiting mercenaries to fight against Russia.

"We note that this assertion by the Russian official has no basis to it," Russian news agencies quoted Tajik Foreign Ministry spokesperson Shokhin Samadi as saying.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, a top ally of President Vladimir Putin, said on Wednesday, without providing evidence, that "Ukrainian special services" were behind last month’s deadly concert shooting near Moscow and that the Ukrainian embassy in Tajikistan was recruiting fighters, state media reported.

Ukraine has denied having anything to do with the attack that killed at least 144 people, and the United States has said Islamic State militants bore sole responsibility.
Perspectives: Officials in Turkmenistan make questionable choices when moral policing (EurasiaNet – opinion)
EurasiaNet [4/5/2024 4:14 PM, Karlgash Kabatova, 57.6K, Negative]
Authoritarian excess is nothing new in Turkmenistan. But a recent government mandate that all female high school students in a seaside province undergo “virginity testing” marks another low point. The tests are not just an outrageous violation of individual rights, they are ineffective in determining whether a woman is sexually active.

Turkmen authorities in Balkan Province, which sits astride the Caspian Sea, are forcing girls to endure gynecological exams without the consent of parents or guardians, RFE/RL has reported. Officials contend the tests are needed to ensure “moral” behavior. Those deemed by the tests to have been sexually active are being reported to local Interior Ministry officials, as well as the National Security Ministry.

The testing in Balkan Province is not a novel practice in Turkmenistan. Authorities in other provinces, including Mary and Dashagouz, have gone on morality crusades in recent years.

Beyond the ethics of such state action, and the humiliation it causes to girls, medical studies confirm that “virginity is not an anatomical feature,” meaning that a woman’s virtue cannot be determined without doubt via any sort of gynecological examination.

A 2019 article, titled The little tissue that couldn’t – dispelling myths about the hymen’s role in determining sexual history and assault, published in the Reproductive Health Journal, systematically discredits the methods being used by Turkmen authorities to determine who is moral and who is not.

“The hymen is a membranous tissue that surrounds the vaginal orifice,” and despite common beliefs, it does not fully cover the opening to the vagina, the article states. In rare cases when it does, it is called an imperforate hymen, a medical condition that, in an adolescent girl, can lead to accumulation of menstrual blood in the vagina (hydrocolpos) and potentially cause kidney damage, infertility and other issues. Imperforate hymen occurs in 1 out of 1,000 female newborns and tends to be treated through surgery.

The tests being used by Turkmen authorities to confirm virginity of a girl/woman are supposed to detect “an intact hymen.” Unless it is imperforate, hymen cannot be “intact.” As already mentioned, it is normally a membranous tissue and it varies in shape, elasticity, thickness and size.

Reproductive health researchers have established that “an examination of the hymen is not an accurate or reliable test of a previous history of sexual activity, including sexual assault.”

In one study on adolescent sexual assault, “only 19 percent of victims between the ages of 14 and 19 years – who identified as not having had prior sexual intercourse before the alleged sexual assault – had acute hymenal tears.” In a different study of 132 women “without prior [sexual intercourse] experience, only 9.1 percent had hymenal perforation” after sexual assault.

In an international study “of 1,500 girls aged from birth to 17 years old with a history of sexual abuse, 93 percent had an unremarkable genital examination, while 7 percent had one or more diagnostic findings.”

The data is definitive: virginity testing or hymen examination is unreliable as a means of determining an individual’s sexual history, even of a rape.

The consequences of being labeled as “non-virgin” or “immoral” for a girl in a conservative patriarchal society such as Turkmenistan’s range from stigmatization and social isolation to suicide and honor killing. The effect on an individual’s mental health and emotional well-being is impossible to pinpoint.

Another important question to consider is the competency of the Turkmen public health officials conducting the tests? The Turkmen public health system is notoriously underfunded. There is little way of telling whether a gynecologist in Turkmenistan is adequately trained to make such life-altering conclusions.

To put Turkmenistan’s training system in perspective, in the United States, medical students have very limited opportunities to get educated about hymen as they “receive only a few hours of pelvic examination training” which “involves mostly adult volunteers and standardized patients, as well as pelvic models.” In one study “only 64 percent of 139 pediatric chief residents identified correctly the hymen on photographs of pre-pubescent female genitalia.”

Unfortunately, the moral policing of female sexual behavior in Central Asia extends beyond Turkmenistan. Virginity tests are commonly administered to brides-to-be in Tajikistan, the region’s poorest state. The involuntary testing of school-age girls also was reported in Uzbekistan in 2017. In a related development, private information relating to sexual activity of university students in Kazakhstan was recently leaked, according to a Tengrinews report.

When a government insists on upholding the morality of underage girls by violating the privacy of those girls, forcing them to go endure inaccurate, invasive and traumatizing procedures, what does it say about the morality of that government?
Melting glaciers, drying sea highlight Central Asia’s water woes (VOA)
VOA [4/7/2024 2:48 AM, Navbahor Imamova, 761K, Neutral]
Climate change and water scarcity are harsh realities facing Central Asia. Glaciers in the east, in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are rapidly melting, while in the west, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea has turned into a desert.

According to the World Bank, almost a third of the region’s 80 million people lack access to safe water, highlighting the urgent need to modernize outdated infrastructure. Afghanistan is building a canal that could exacerbate the crisis.

Shrinking rivers, drying sea

Last summer and fall in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, people living along the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers described to VOA extreme weather conditions — droughts and floods posing existential dangers.

“It’s all about water, our constant worry,” said Ganikhan Salimov, a cotton farmer in Uzbekistan’s Ferghana region, bordering Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

“This water is not just for us, but a source of life for the entire region,” he said, pointing to a muddy canal near his crops.

The Syr Darya River originates in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, flowing more than 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) west through Tajikistan and Kazakhstan to the northern remnants of the Aral Sea, which has been gradually disappearing for five decades.

The Amu Darya stems from the confluence of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers. Separating Tajikistan and Afghanistan, it runs for 2,400 kilometers (almost 1,500 miles) northwest through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into the southern remnants of the Aral.

“We don’t fool ourselves with this magnificent view,” said a local resident who introduced himself only as Bayram, enjoying a hot day with his family on a bank of the Amu Darya in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan Republic, adjacent to Turkmenistan.

“It continuously shrinks and becomes nothing by the time it winds its way to the Aral Sea, which is nowhere to be found,” he said.

Bayram is right. The Amu Darya and Syr Darya have shrunk by a third in little more than 70 years. The Aral Sea, once a vast inland sea, has diminished by 90% since the 1960s, as pointed out in a recent U.N. report. The northern end of the sea, bordering Kazakhstan, is more vibrant, but life has become nearly impossible around all its shores.

Authorities insist they are working with international institutions to revitalize the local ecosystem, but VOA mainly heard stories of disillusionment from residents.

A new water deal?

Aggravating the situation, Taliban-run Afghanistan is building a 285-kilometer (177-mile) canal off the Amu Darya, which could draw off 20% to 30% of the water that now goes to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Tashkent and Ashgabat have been in separate talks with the Taliban, who have argued that the purpose of the canal, called Qosh Tepa, is not to deprive their neighbors of a strategic resource but to provide more water for Afghans.

Central Asian experts express concern over the quality of the Qosh Tepa construction, which started in 2022. Officials in Tashkent say they have offered Kabul technical assistance.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev calls the Taliban “a new stakeholder” not bound by any prior obligations to their northern neighbors. Last September in Tajikistan, at a meeting on the Aral Sea, he proposed a dialogue of riparian countries.

“We believe it is necessary to set up a joint working group to study all aspects of the construction of the Qosh Tepa canal and its impact on the water regime of the Amu Darya involving our research institutes,” Mirziyoyev said.

No progress has been made since then, but Eric Rudenshiold, a former U.S. official with decades of experience working with Central Asian governments, believes the best outcome would be a new water-sharing agreement.

“Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, all are facing water shortage issues, and so cooperation is really the only answer. And the question is, at what point these countries do that. Cooperation is much better than conflict,” he told VOA.

They would not even talk to each other on these issues until recently, Rudenshiold said.

“We’ve seen Central Asian states lean forward to engage with the Taliban, and I think that’s a big step,” he said.

While optimistic about the prospects for regional dialogue, Rudenshiold said he doubts Western governments will participate, given their strong opposition to the Taliban and its repressive policies.

“I think the region is going to have to resolve this issue itself, not relying on international organizations or other powers, but actually having the countries come together,” Rudenshiold said.

He sees enough leverage to negotiate: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan provide power to Afghanistan. “The question is, how do you add water into that equation?”

“Yes, Afghanistan can take water for agriculture and drinking water. The problem is it’s still depleting, and Afghanistan needs to be part of the solution,” Rudenshiold said.

America’s offering

At a recent forum at the Wilson Center in Washington, U.S. officials and Central Asian diplomats highlighted growing water demand and worsening environmental conditions.

Tajikistan’s ambassador, Farrukh Hamralizoda, said that “more than 1,000 of the 30,000 glaciers” in his country have already melted.

“Every year, we suffer from floods, landslides, avalanches and other water-related natural disasters,” Hamralizoda said, adding that his mountainous country generates 98% of its electricity from hydropower.

Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador, Baktybek Amanbaev, said glaciers have also been vanishing in his similarly mountainous country, which he said hosts 30% of the clean water in the five former Soviet republics that make up Central Asia.

“We need effective water management to be able to estimate water reserves and flows,” Amanbaev said.

To that end, the U.S. Agency for International Development is funding MODSNOW, a digital program for hydrological forecasting that uses satellite imaging to monitor snow depth and melt and water flows from the mountains.

By providing governments and local stakeholders with accurate and timely data, the U.S. hopes to enable informed decision-making and sustainable management of resources.

“With accelerated snowmelt and heavy rainfall events also comes the greater risk of landslides and other severe natural disasters,” said Anjali Kaur, the agency’s deputy administrator, also speaking at the Wilson Center.
Indo-Pacific
India and Pakistan tried to meddle in Canada elections, spy agency says (The Guardian)
The Guardian [4/5/2024 11:50 AM, Leyland Cecco, 12.5M, Neutral]
Canada’s spy agency has declared that the governments of India and Pakistan probably attempted to meddle in its elections.

As a closely watched public inquiry investigates the scope of foreign interference, on Thursday night the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) released a report suggesting a growing number of countries see Canada – and particularly its large diaspora populations – as a target for subterfuge.

It said India had “intent to interfere and likely conducted clandestine activities” in the 2021 Canadian federal election, including the use of a government proxy agent who attempted to provide illegal financial support to pro-Indian candidates, according to reporting from CBC News.

Proxy agents are a “specific individual who takes explicit and/or implicit direction from a foreign state while obfuscating the link between influence activities and a foreign state”, CSIS said.

It also suggested India targeted electoral districts in which Indo-Canadian voters sympathized with Pakistan or the Khalistan separatist movement.

In 2019, Pakistani government officials in Canada “attempted to clandestinely influence Canadian federal politics with the aim of furthering the Government of Pakistan’s interests in Canada”, CSIS wrote, calling the south Asian country a “limited foreign interference actor”.

The spy agency said the Canadian government conducted a “threat reduction measure” meant to blunt the threat posed by the Pakistan government.

“The situation was monitored and assessed to have effectively reduced the threat of interference,” CSIS said.

Both documents are unclassified summaries and in some cases could be incomplete or rely on uncorroborated, single sources.

The revelations from Canada’s spy agency come as the former Conservative party leader told the inquiry he believed his party lost as many as nine seats because of a foreign misinformation campaign spearheaded by China.

Erin O’Toole resigned as leader after failing to improve his party’s electoral standing.

“The small number of seats would not have impacted the minority government that Canada has right now, but the difference of two, three, five seats may have allowed me more of a moral justification to remain as leader,” O’Toole said, adding he believed some citizens were “intimidated” from voting because the party had a “more traditional, or a more aggressive, foreign policy posture with respect to China”.

The inquiry itself has been the subject of intense public debate. Initially, following reports of Chinese meddling in Canadian elections, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, appointed David Johnston as special rapporteur to investigate the issue.

Johnston, who previously served as Canada’s governor general, initially caused widespread frustration after he suggested a public inquiry would not be useful because much of the relevant material would remain secret. He later resigned from his role, citing a “highly partisan atmosphere” as political leaders questioned his ties to the prime minister.

In September, the federal government chose Marie-Josée Hogue, a Quebec appeals court judge, to lead a public inquiry “tasked with examining and assessing foreign interference by China, Russia and other foreign states and non-state actors”.

The release of documents suggesting India has sought to undermine the integrity of Canada’s elections does little to ease tensions between the two countries. In September, Trudeau told parliament his government had “credible allegations” that Indian officials were behind the assassination of a prominent Sikh leader in Canada.

The commission has so far heard from lawmakers, the heads of CSIS and the RCMP, the department of global affairs and Canada’s electronic spy agency.
Twitter
Afghanistan
Nilofar Ayoubi
@NilofarAyoubi
[4/7/2024 7:29 PM, 64.6K followers, 63 retweets, 128 likes]
338 women have been liberated from a Taliban-controlled prison! It’s hard to fathom the experiences they endured, all while the world remained largely unaware of their arrest and even their presence.

Amrullah Saleh
@AmrullahSaleh2
[4/7/2024 2:34 AM, 1.1M followers, 79 retweets, 371 likes]
The intelligence unit of Afghanistan Green Trend (AGT) @AGTAfghanistan has done a commendable job in profiling 96 senior leaders of the Taliban in the ministry of interior run by Khalifa Seraj Haqqani. The unit has stated that it has also profiled thousands of low level and hundreds of mid level operatives loyal to Haqqani in the so called ministry of interior. Reminder: The United States of America, calling him a notorious terrorist, has since many years put ten million dollars bounty for any information leading to arrest or liquidation of Khalifa Seraj Haqqani. Majority of the leaders profiled in this report are former members of Miram Shah Shura and Peshawar Shura. The Haqqani faction generally known as Haqqani network (HQN) used to maintain training bases, safe houses and support infrastructure in Pakistan prior to August 2021 also known and coined as Miram Shah Shura (North Waziristan) and Peshawar Shura. Without the Doha Agreement and particularly its secret annexes which backstabbed the Afghan army and security forces of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIROA), the Taliban militia would have not been where they are now. The security sector of the Taliban structure in which Haqqani’s ministry of interior is a part spends up to 70 percent of the budget which of course is decided without slightest regard to actual needs of the Afghan society. The Taliban security sector is focused on domestic repression and consolidation of the worst and most cruel type of clerical dictatorship the history has even seen. Should the flow of weekly cash from the United States and its allies be halted the Taliban will lose bigger part of Afghanistan very quickly. The so called humanitarian assistance which is passed to Kabul in cash on weekly basis assists the Taliban and the Haqqani faction to spend the income from the domestic sources solely for purposes of repression and crushing of internal dissent and resistance which is growing day by day.

Bilal Sarwary
@bsarwary
[4/5/2024 6:44 PM, 252.8K followers, 32 retweets, 57 likes]
The Taliban’s MOFA worked on a concept to control and influence Afghan diaspora through some proxies in the West. This came after some failed efforts to take over Afghan diplomatic missions in those countries. It seems that the Taliban created a list of Afghan community organizations in some countries and then established some contacts. A voice leaked by an official of the Taliban’s MOFA indicated that the Taliban would use those organizations as proxies.

Lina Rozbih
@LinaRozbih
[4/7/2024 11:47 AM, 408.1K followers, 9 retweets, 38 likes]
Taliban’s decision to ban Facebook.. Facebook is the most popular social media platform in Afghanistan & Afghans use this platform to share videos about the Taliban’s atrocities or criticize the Taliban’s regime or share information about resistance against the Taliban. #Facebook

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[4/6/2024 7:44 PM, 23K followers, 4 likes]
Public dissent within the Taliban is rare, but some senior figures have expressed their disagreement with the leadership’s decision making, especially the bans on female education. @AP https://www.voanews.com/a/taliban-leader-s-eid-message-urges-officials-to-set-aside-differences/7559561.html
Pakistan
The President of Pakistan
@PresOfPakistan
[4/7/2024 2:50 PM, 733K followers, 24 retweets, 63 likes]
In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (1) of Article 54 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari has summoned the Senate to meet in the Parliament House, Islamabad on Tuesday, the 9th April 2024 at 09:00 am.

Imran Khan
@ImranKhanPTI
[4/6/2024 2:53 PM, 20.6M followers, 21K retweets, 36K likes]
PTI founding chairman Imran Khan’s conversation with journalists at Adiala Jail: “The entire nation is aware that General Asim Munir is driving the state affairs. It was him, General Asim Munir, who implicated me and my wife in the Tosha Khana reference in an attempt to stifle my spirits. Let it be known that if anything happens to me or my wife, it’ll be him who will be responsible. The London Plan was plotted with the nexus of General Asim Munir and Nawaz Sharif, and in order to execute it, judges were on-boarded, and they were appointed by the ISI. When I was arrested in August, the police entered my bedroom and took away my passport and cheque book. Then the ISI forced Inam Shah & an employee of Tosha Khana to become witnesses against me. To sentence me in the Tosha Khana case, financial evaluation of the jewellery set was obtained from a part-time salesman in Dubai. I will sue Chairman NAB and Inam Shah for propping up this bogus Tosha Khana reference against me. Fawad Chaudhry had held a press conference & denounced PTI. However, he was still kept in detention in an attempt to force him to become a witness against me. If Pervez Elahi and Shah Mahmood Qureshi hold a press conference today, all charges against them will be dropped. The CJP is prioritising Faizabad dharna and Bhutto cases, but has turned a blind eye to the fact that the innocent civilians are incarcerated in military prisons. There was a plan to assassinate me in the Judicial Complex on March 18, 2024. The charge of Judicial Complex was taken over by men in plain clothes 24 hours before my hearing. Why isn’t the CCTV footage of the Judicial Complex being brought forth? What happened in East Pakistan is being replicated here. Mujeeb ur Rehman’s mandate was stolen and the country was split into two. Mujeeb’s majority would have diminished Yahya Khan’s power. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission report clearly states that Mujeeb ur Rehman had won the elections. As had happened in East Pakistan, our mandate is being stolen to control us. Now, the “king” is covertly handling the affairs, while Mohsin Naqvi is operating as a viceroy.

Meanwhile, Shahbaz Sharif commands no power. An economic catastrophe is imminent. The Judges are revealing that intelligence agency operatives are blatantly threatening them. Asif Zardari and Sharif family have billions of dollars stashed abroad. Asif Zardari claimed that a political party is tarnishing the military’s image. When we were in power, the military was held in high regard by the people of Pakistan. The image was tarnished when they sided with the crooks. Zardari and Sharif families’ corruption was also exposed by ISI and General Bajwa. Both of them took cars from Tosha Khana [in a clear violation of the law].

Why isn’t their case being investigated? Before General Asim Munir’s appointment, a message was sent through Arif Alvi that we are not your enemies. I called Asim Munir through Arif Alvi to inquire about his London Plan. Ali Zaidi was also in contact, and through him, a message was sent to remain neutral and let the country run. We were told not to worry; and that they would remain neutral. I will not accept anyone’s slavery and would prefer death over it.

On a question from a journalist to Founder Chairman Imran Khan, asking if he has any hope for justice from Chief Justice Qazi Faiz Esa, Imran Khan remained silent for a while and then said, "The nation is witnessing everything, I don’t want to comment on it." The country has changed today, and people are cognisant. We were deceived and through a false flag operation on 9th May, there was an attempt to portray us as traitors, but the nation clearly rejected the narrative and on February 8th, showed where it stands. Several judges, Mohsin Naqvi, the Chief Election Commissioner, and others from the caretaker setup were part of the London Plan. I have never fought with or maligned the army despite General Bajwa stabbing us in the back.

Imran Khan
@ImranKhanPTI
[4/6/2024 2:54 PM, 20.6M followers, 8.9K retweets, 14K likes] I could have denotified General Bajwa, but I didn’t. Despite all this, we formed a committee to meet General Bajwa. Army Chief alone is not the institution; he didn’t come to that position through elections. General Yahya also destroyed the country for his lust of power. Had General Yahya talked to Mujeeb ur Rehman, we wouldn’t have to surrender. The country fell apart in 1971, and today the country’s economic backbone is breaking. At present, PTI is the strongest political force, and no other party even comes close. I challenge to hold elections again today; and they will prove the fact. If I can meet General Bajwa twice despite the fact that he toppled my government, I can talk to anyone, because I don’t have any personal issue, rather I am fighting for the cause of Pakistan. For the sake of Pakistan, I can speak to anyone.

In the current situation, the judiciary is not independent at all. Until an endoscopy of Bushra Bibi is performed, how can anything be known for certain? The tests must to be done at Shaukat Khanum Hospital. The army chief targeted my wife unnecessarily when she had nothing to do with politics. A nation that is not willing to die for its freedom should be ready to become a slave.

If I step back from politics today, my life will go back to being normal. The status quo forces will continue with their loot and plunder. The ruling elite is completely apathetic; all their money is stashed abroad. PML-N will further get politically decimated when more inflation hits the nation.

At this time, the only hope is from the judiciary. I commend and salute those six judges who took a stand. All the judges know what is happening in the country Judges should save the country’s future because investment can only hail if the rule of law is established. In a country where judges are being threatened, who will invest? At this time, the nation is looking up to the judges. The judges have to establish the supremacy of law for political and economic stability, and only then can we attract investment into the country. I want to send a message to General Asim Munir, "There’s one plan that a human makes, and then there’s a plan made by Allah. And ultimately, only Allah’s plan prevails”

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[4/7/2024 4:18 AM, 8.4M followers, 644 retweets, 1.5K likes]
Project failed. 2500 cameras worth $125 million were installed in Islamabad in 2016. A big number of these expensive cameras are now missing. The monitoring room of @ICT_Police have only 125 screens. They don’t know how many cameras are missing. https://www.dawn.com/news/1826184

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[4/7/2024 2:53 AM, 8.4M followers, 687 retweets, 2K likes]
We exposed the role of Indian intelligence in target killings inside Pakistan in September 2023. At that time many “ patriotic” people disliked our journalism. Then the Guardian endorsed us and now governments of India and Pakistan saying the same. https://theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/indian-government-assassination-allegations-pakistan-intelligence-officials
India
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/7/2024 10:06 AM, 97M followers, 6.2K retweets, 47K likes]
Upon landing in Jabalpur, had the opportunity to meet Dr. MC Dawar, Padma Shri awardee and respected doctor, at the airport. Several people in Jabalpur and nearby areas admire him for his efforts to cure the poor and marginalised sections.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/7/2024 9:55 AM, 97M followers, 3.8K retweets, 22K likes]
Come to Jalpaiguri to see the direction of the political wind in West Bengal…people want BJP!

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/7/2024 5:33 AM, 97M followers, 3.6K retweets, 12K likes]
Speaking at a huge @BJP4Bengal rally in Jalpaiguri. People of West Bengal are fully aware that the TMC, Left and Congress have formed an alliance to shield their corrupt leaders.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/6/2024 2:13 PM, 97M followers, 3.5K retweets, 18K likes]
I bow to Shree Shree Harichand Thakur Ji on the special occasion of his Jayanti. I reiterate our Government’s commitment to keep working to fulfil his ideals. I also convey my best wishes for #MatuaDharmaMahamela2024. I am proud of the rich culture and contributions of the Matua community. Our Government has also ensured the well being of the community through various schemes and legislations. I am also sharing glimpses from my visits to Thakurnagar and Orakandi in Bangladesh. I will always cherish these visits. Joy Haribol!

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/6/2024 10:03 AM, 97M followers, 3.6K retweets, 16K likes]
In the coming years, we want to do even more for Ghaziabad. Our focus will be on how to further improve quality of life, enhance facilities for healthcare, education, transportation and more. We want youngsters from Ghaziabad to shine in diverse areas and enrich India’s growth trajectory.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 19K retweets, 44K likes]
Today, on the Sthapana Diwas of @BJP4India, I extend my greetings to all fellow Party Karyakartas from across the length and breadth of India. I also recall with great reverence the hardwork, struggles and sacrifices of all those great women and men who built our Party over the years. I can say with great confidence that we are India’s preferred party, which has always served with the motto of ‘Nation First.’

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 693 retweets, 1.6K likes]
It is a matter of great joy that @BJP4India has made a mark for its development oriented outlook, good governance and commitment to nationalistic values. Powered by our Karyakartas, our Party embodies the aspirations and dreams of 140 crore Indians. The youth of India see our Party as one which can fulfil their aspirations and provide leadership to India in the 21st century.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 589 retweets, 1.4K likes]
Be it in the Centre or the states, our Party has redefined good governance. Our schemes and policies have given strength to the poor and downtrodden. Those who were left on the margins for decades found a voice and hope in our Party. We have worked towards providing all-round development which has boosted ‘Ease of Living’ for every Indian.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 548 retweets, 1.3K likes]
Our Party has also freed India from the culture of corruption, cronyism, casteism, communalism and vote bank politics, which was the hallmark of those who ruled the nation for the longest time. In today’s India, emphasis is on clean and transparent governance which ensures the fruits of development reach the poor without any discrimination.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 1.2K retweets, 3K likes]
We are also proud to be an integral part of the NDA, which manifests a perfect harmony between national progress and regional aspirations. The NDA is a vibrant alliance, encapsulating India’s diversity. We cherish this partnership and I am sure it will get even stronger in the times to come.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[4/5/2024 11:33 PM, 97M followers, 1.3K retweets, 3.4K likes]
India is all set to elect a new Lok Sabha. I am confident that the people are going to bless us with another term so that we can build on the ground covered in the last decade. I also convey my best wishes to all our BJP and NDA Karyakartas as they are working among people and elaborating on our agenda.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[4/6/2024 3:02 AM, 3.1M followers, 1.1K retweets, 9.3K likes]
Modi ki Guarantee works for all at home and abroad. 17 Indian workers, lured into unsafe and illegal work in Laos, are on their way back home. Well done, @IndianEmbLaos. Thank Lao authorities for their support for the safe repatriation.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[4/5/2024 6:37 AM, 3.1M followers, 683 retweets, 5.3K likes]
Delighted to join my friend and colleague @VMBJP ji as we flagged off his Lok Sabha campaign tour. The people of Attingal will find him a great representative. His presence in the Lok Sabha will strengthen the hands of PM @narendramodi ji.

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[4/7/2024 2:02 AM, 263.2K followers, 455 retweets, 1.5K likes]
An aging Biden seems unable to grasp that the US-India partnership is too important to lose. While needling India, he has prioritized outreach to China, resumed coddling of Pakistan, and stayed mum on China’s encroachments on Indian lands, including the ensuing military standoff.
NSB
Moosa Zameer
@MoosaZameer
[4/5/2024 3:04 PM, 13K followers, 298 retweets, 1.1K likes]
I sincerely thank EAM @DrSJaishankar and the Government of #India for the renewal of the quota to enable #Maldives to import essential commodities from India during the years 2024 and 2025. This is truly a gesture which signifies the longstanding friendship, and the strong commitment to further expand bilateral trade and commerce between our two countries. @HCIMaldives @MEAIndia

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[4/5/2024 7:55 AM, 5.2K followers, 9 retweets, 40 likes]
Sri Lanka’s Official Reserve Assets increased by 9.5% to USD 4.95 billion in March 2024, compared to USD 4.52 billion in February 2024; This includes proceeds from PBOC SWAP equivalent to USD 1.4 billion, which is subject to conditionalities which is subject on usability - CBSL-
Central Asia
MFA Kazakhstan
@MFA_KZ
[4/6/2024 5:41 AM, 51.2K followers, 10 retweets, 13 likes]
Address of the Head of State, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in connection with the difficult situation due to floods https://gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa/press/news/details/743635?lang=en

Koshkarbay Toremuratov
@ToremuratovK
[4/8/2024 12:00 AM, 124 followers, 4 retweets, 4 likes]
There is information about ongoing extradition arrests of Karakalpak activists in Kazakhstan. According to available information, it is increasingly common practice for local police, at the request of their Uzbek colleagues, to formally detain a person for violating Kazakhstan’s migration rules, rather than on the basis of a criminal request from #Tashkent. One of the first such cases was Zhetkerbai Abdiramanov’s case. He was first detained on June 29, 2022 (two days before the start of the protests in Karakalpakstan), when he took the initiative to collect signatures against making amendments to the constitution of Uzbekistan among Karakalpak migrants in Almaty. Abdiramanov was arrested for allegedly overdue registration, meanwhile he was kindly requested not to carry out civil activism and was released. However, he continued to criticise the actions of the #Mirziyoyev regime in the Republic of #Karakalpakstan on social media. As a result, a year and a half later, Zhetkerbai was again detained by Kazakhstan’s migration police and was forcibly deported to neighbouring #Kyrgyzstan. It is rather strange that for the deportation of Zhetkerbai Abdiramanov was allocated a whole police crew, which travelled by car over 400 km from Almaty to the #Korday border point and back. All the while Zhetkerbai was facing pseudo-migration problems, Uzbek security forces were intimidating his parents in Karakalpakstan and demanding they return their son back to his home country. In January 2024, leaflets were posted in the town of #Kanlykol, in the districts where Zhetkerbai’s mother lived and worked, stating that he was wanted for calling for mass disorder and for attempting to attack the constitutional order of Uzbekistan. These wanted notices were of no practical use, as the Uzbek Interior Ministry had long been aware of his whereabouts in Europe. The purpose of such actions was an attempt to "shame" the activist’s mother in his hometown. The security agencies of Uzbekistan do not shy away not only from false accusations, torture and murder, but also from such low acts of psychological terror towards the activists’ relatives.

As for the last two detentions of representatives of the Karakalpak diaspora, which occurred after the arrest in mid-February of Aqylbek Muratbai (Muratov) @muratbaiman, there is still limited information and no official statements from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan. Rasul Zhumaniyazov in #Astana, according to current knowledge, was arrested on March 26, also (as in Zhetkerbai’s case) formally for violating Kazakhstan’s migration laws, but actually at the request of the Uzbek police. At the beginning of April, Rinat Utambetov was detained in #Almaty, against whom, apparently, a case under Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of #Uzbekistan "Infringement on the constitutional order" has been initiated, but there is still no exact information.

Furthermore, according to those close to Aqylbek Muratbai, the arrested Karakalpak activist reports that he has heard several times from other inmates of the Almaty pre-trial detention centre about other ethnic Karakalpaks who are being held behind bars for long periods of time at the request of Uzbekistan - formally on "Fraud" and other non-political charges, but actually their detention related to their participation in the July 2022 protests in Karakalpakstan. We hope that the media and human rights organizations will pay attention to these reports and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of #Kazakhstan will more promptly give official comments on each of these arrests. @Freedom4Eurasia @l_seiitbek @hrw @MihraRittmann @osce_odihr @nhc_no @Marius_Fossum @LemkinInstitute @AlgaQara

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[4/6/2024 12:54 AM, 4.6K followers, 1 retweet, 3 likes]
Meeting of the Minister of Foreign Affairs with the UN Resident Coordinator in Tajikistan https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/14768/meeting-of-the-minister-of-foreign-affairs-with-the-un-resident-coordinator-in-tajikistan

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 11:02 AM, 165.1K followers, 8 retweets, 49 likes]
The convergence of Presidents in the historic city of Khiva stands as a testament to the robust friendship, strategic cooperation, and alliance that continue to strengthen and unite Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 10:58 AM, 165.1K followers, 6 retweets, 37 likes]
The working visit of Kazakhstan’s President to Uzbekistan has successfully reached its culmination. In a gesture of respect and hospitality, the distinguished visitor was bid farewell by our state leader at Urgench International Airport. Subsequently, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev set off for the capital, Tashkent.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 10:16 AM, 165.1K followers, 18 retweets, 63 likes]
The encounter between Presidents Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in the storied environs of Khiva was a profound exploration of the city’s historical and cultural tapestry, highlighting the significance of heritage and tradition in the strong bilateral ties between two nations.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 10:12 AM, 165.1K followers, 8 retweets, 38 likes]
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, accompanied by our nation’s leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev, toured the historical monuments within the Ichan-Kala complex and the magnificent Nurullaboy palace in the ancient city of Khiva.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 9:44 AM, 165.1K followers, 10 retweets, 53 likes]
In the historical city of Khiva, Presidents Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev convened for in-depth talks. Their dialogue centered on reinforcing the strategic partnership and alliance between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and broadening practical cooperation in various fields. They also exchanged views on regional concerns, including the prudent management of water resources, intensifying collaboration within the context of the Consultative meetings of Central Asian state leaders

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 8:27 AM, 165.1K followers, 4 retweets, 28 likes]
Presidents Shavkat #Mirziyoyev and @TokayevKZ toured the "Khiva Gilamlari" carpet factory together, avidly observing the production process and perusing the showroom. Additionally, they attended an exhibition of Uzbek products branded "Made in Uzbekistan" set up within the factory. Following their visit, relevant ministries and departments were instructed to facilitate the exchange of expertise and to foster enhanced cooperation and trade between the two nations.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 7:43 AM, 165.1K followers, 4 retweets, 26 likes]
Upon President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s invitation, the President of Kazakhstan, @TokayevKZ Tokayev, landed for a working visit in Uzbekistan. The dignitary was warmly welcomed by our nation’s leader at #Urgench International Airport.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 6:57 AM, 165.1K followers, 1 retweet, 15 likes]
The anniversary of laying New Tashkent’s foundation marks significant progress, with a coordination council and directorate established to guide the city’s design and construction from the ground up. A year later, a significant ceremony heralded the beginning of construction on the initial buildings. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev activated the commencement with a symbolic button press, propelling the city of Tashkent into a transformative development phase.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 6:24 AM, 165.1K followers, 1 retweet, 8 likes]
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has toured the historic Gulbozor makhalla in the Shaykhantakhur district, near the famed Chorsu market in Tashkent—a popular destination for foreign tourists all year round. The area is mentioned as a key part of the developing "touristic ring" in the district. President has directed officials to further enhance the "touristic ring," aiming to foster growth and employment opportunities within the tourism industry.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 4:44 AM, 165.1K followers, 11 likes]
The Tashkent City Council of People’s Deputies convened for a pivotal session attended by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Deliberations centered on assessing the economic and social development prospects for the capital city.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 5:10 AM, 165.1K followers, 3 retweets, 19 likes]
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev visited School No. 5 in the Yunusabad district of Tashkent. It was noted that in the "Uzbekistan – 2030" Strategy, reforms in the education system are defined as a top priority, and great importance is placed on the professional orientation of the youth from an early age. Instructions were given to fully utilize the capabilities of the schools, enhancing the quality of education to the level of presidential schools.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[4/6/2024 5:38 AM, 165.1K followers, 1 retweet, 14 likes]
The state leader graced Tashkent Children’s School of Music and Arts No. 1 with a visit, affirming that the arts are crucial in shaping a spiritually profound youth. Art appreciation, he urged, must be instilled early. He highlighted the need for merging general and music education curriculums as pivotal. To further this aim, he mandated the reinforcement of partnerships between art schools, higher education, theaters, and cultural organizations.

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[4/7/2024 11:44 PM, 23K followers, 1 retweet, 2 likes]
Climate change and water scarcity are harsh realities facing Central Asia. Glaciers in the east, in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are rapidly melting, while in the west, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea has turned into a desert. Almost a third of the region’s nearly 80 million people lack access to safe water, highlighting the urgent need to modernize outdated infrastructure. Afghanistan is building a canal that could exacerbate the crisis. @eRudenshiold @VOANews https://voanews.com/a/melting-glaciers-drying-sea-highlight-central-asia-s-water-woes/7558838.html

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[4/6/2024 5:47 PM, 23K followers, 2 retweets, 11 likes]
Tashkent-based designer Dilnoza Umirzakova, who showcased #Anor collection in DC this week, says that at least half of her clientele consists of Uzbek immigrants in US. She told VOA that other designers in Uzbekistan also cater to Uzbek Americans.

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[4/6/2024 12:31 PM, 23K followers, 17 likes]
Penn State Uzbek LLM students. Wishing them good luck as they graduate soon and head back to Uzbekistan hoping to practice law in various sectors. As Uzbekistan-funded fellows (El-yurt umidi), they have commitments to pay the system back through professional contribution for supporting their American experience and education. @PennStateLaw @penn_state @elyurtumidi

{End of Report}
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