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:
Tuesday, January 23, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan
Four survivors of Russian plane crash in Afghanistan in ‘good health’ says Taliban (Reuters)
Reuters [1/22/2024 8:05 AM, Mohammad Yunus Yawar, 5239K, Neutral]
Four survivors of a crash in northern Afghanistan of a charter plane on its way to Moscow were in good health, the Taliban administration said on Monday.

It also said that the bodies of two passengers killed in the accident were being moved to the Afghan capital from the remote crash site.

Russian aviation authorities said on Sunday the plane with six people thought to be on board disappeared from radar screens over Afghanistan on Saturday night and Afghan police said they had received reports of a crash in mountainous Badakhshan province.

"Four people from the crashed plane in Badakhshan were transferred to Kabul, the medical and rescue teams of the Ministry of Aviation and the Ministry of Defence have provided them with first aid," Taliban administration spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement.

Video footage released by Mujahid’s office showed the four men, some of whom had bruising visible on their faces and one with blood stains on his clothes, stepping off a helicopter with Taliban officials clad in winter jackets.

The video showed an unnamed Taliban official saying the health of the survivors was good.

"Alhamdulillah (praise be to God) last night we found that place (the crash site), a total of six people were in the plane, four of them are alive and two are dead," he said, adding that the bodies had been transferred to the northern provincial city of Fayzabad and were being brought to Kabul.

The flight that crashed had been carrying out a private medical evacuation from Thailand’s Pattaya, a popular tourist destination for Russians, to Moscow, Russian state-run TASS news agency reported, citing the Russian embassy in Bangkok.

About 25 minutes before the plane vanished from radar screens, the pilot warned that fuel was running low and that the plane would try to land at an airport in Tajikistan, Russian news outlet SHOT reported, citing an unnamed source.
Afghan Journalist Detained In Taliban’s Continued Crackdown On Independent Media (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [1/22/2024 1:57 PM, Staff, 223K, Neutral]
The Taliban has detained another Afghan journalist in the country’s capital, Kabul, in a continuing crackdown on independent media in Afghanistan.

Media watchdog the Afghanistan Journalist Center (AFJC) said Taliban intelligence officers detained Ehsan Akbari, an Afghan reporter for Japan’s Kyodo news agency.

"The arrest of this journalist shows that the ruling group is trying to suppress the media and freedom of expression," Samia Walizadeh, the head of the communications and litigation at AFJC, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi on January 22.

The organization says the arrest violates the country’s media law that was crafted by the previous, pro-Western Afghan republic.

After returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban suspended Afghanistan’s constitution and most of the laws adopted over the two decades the militants were out of power. The hard-line Islamist group has issued a vague guideline for journalists, which requires them not to violate Afghan and Islamic values, since it came back to rule.

"We demand his immediate and unconditional release," the AFJC added in a statement.

The organization has demanded that the Taliban, and in particular its intelligence agency, "should respect the country’s media law and end the process of suppressing journalists and free media."

Sayed Amir Akbari, a brother of the detained journalist, said that Ehsan Akbari was detained in the government’s media and information center on January 17 after he was called there for questioning.

"The next morning, the Taliban intelligence officers took Ehsan Akbari to the news agency’s office [in Kabul] and took away his laptop and camera," he told the AFJC.

He added that the militants forced him to call his family to hand over his mobile phone to Taliban officials when they arrived.

As per the Taliban’s practice, the group has neither confirmed nor denied his arrest.

The detention of journalists has started to become more commonplace in Afghanistan.

On January 18, the Taliban detained journalists Jawad Rasouli and Abdul Haq Hamidi. Both worked for a local news agency, Gardesh-e Etilat.

They were released on January 20 after their families handed over an affidavit, which typically guarantees that they would not violate Taliban rules.

The AFJC said the Taliban arrested 61 journalists in 2023. While most were released after weeks or months of detentions, some were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Overall, the AFJC documented 168 cases of violence and intimidation against journalists during the past year, highlighting the extensive censorship the authoritarian rulers are exercising over the media.
Half A Million Afghans Return From Pakistan: IOM (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [1/22/2024 12:36 PM, Staff, 163K, Negative]
More than 500,000 Afghans have fled Pakistan in the four months since Islamabad ordered undocumented migrants to leave or face arrest, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Monday.

According to the latest figures reported by the UN migration agency, 500,200 Afghans left Pakistan between September 15, 2023 and January 13, 2024.

Most rushed to the border in the days leading up to a November 1 exit deadline Islamabad set for the 1.7 million Afghans it said were living illegally in Pakistan, and as police opened dozens of holding centres.

"Since the initial peak around November 1, the number of individuals crossing these official border points have consistently decreased but remains higher than pre-September 15th," an IOM statement said.

Pakistan defended the crackdown by pointing to security concerns in its regions bordering Afghanistan and pressure on its struggling economy.

"Some Afghans forced to return may be at risk of persecution, arbitrary arrest and detention and/or torture or ill-treatment," the UN’s Afghan mission said in a report on Monday.

Meanwhile, the busiest border crossing between the two countries remained closed for the tenth day running in a dispute over document rules for commercial drivers.

The row centres on demands for drivers from both sides to have visas and passports -- documents many Afghans do not have -- as Pakistan cracks down on cross-border movements.

More than 400 trucks were stranded on the Pakistan side of the Torkham crossing on Monday, according to a border official who asked not to be named.

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have grown increasingly fraught in recent months, with Islamabad accusing the Taliban government of failing to root out militants staging attacks in Pakistan from their soil.

Kabul has always rejected the allegations.

Millions of Afghans fleeing conflict have poured into Pakistan over the past four decades, including some 600,000 since the Taliban ousted the US-backed government and imposed its harsh interpretation of Islamic law.

Some of the Afghans crossing into Afghanistan as a result of Islamabad’s eviction scheme were entering the country for the first time, having lived their whole lives in Pakistan.

Upon arrival, migrants have received modest assistance from the government and NGOs in a country contending with one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Taliban enforcing restrictions on Afghan women: UN (The Hill)
The Hill [1/22/2024 11:40 AM, Sarah Fortinsky, 1592K, Negative]
The United Nations published a quarterly report Monday detailing concerns about the human rights situation in Afghanistan, specifically focusing on the limited rights women are awarded under Taliban rule.

The report detailed the “lack of clarity” on the legal mechanisms in place for women to bring concerns about gender-based violence and which Taliban authority “is responsible for each action along the justice chain regarding such complaints.”

Many women seek “traditional” means of resolving the issues “because of fear of the [Taliban] de facto authorities.”

The report noted that complaints are predominantly dealt with by men, who often seek “mediation” instead of prosecution and trial.

The report also focuses on restrictions of rights for women, specifically noting that the Taliban “continue to enforce and promulgate restrictions on women’s rights to work, education and freedom of movement.”

It mentions increased enforcement of the requirements that women wear a hijab and travel with a guardian — either a husband or male blood relative.

The report cites an example where three female health workers were detained because they went to work without being accompanied by a mahram, or a person with whom marriage would be forbidden.

The report says significant actions have been taken to enforce the hijab decree, and Taliban authorities have taken measures “involving arbitrary arrests and detentions and verbal warnings of a substantial number of women and girls accused of ‘not wearing proper hijab.’”

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which published the report, said it is “looking into allegations of instances of ill-treatment, longer periods of detention, incommunicado detention and demands for payment of money in exchange for release.”

“Enforcement measures involving physical violence are especially demeaning and dangerous for Afghan women and girls, carrying a stigma that places them at even greater risk,” the report added.

The report also details “targeted attacks against Hazaras,” an ethnic minority that has long faced discrimination in the region.

Additionally, it raises concerns about the “forced expulsion of Afghans from Pakistan,” noting that this decree particularly affects Afghans who have fled the country after the Taliban took control.

In August 2021, the Biden administration withdrew all troops from Afghanistan, concluding that U.S. involvement in the region was not sustainable and not producing any positive effect on the region. Soon after the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban took control swiftly and has slowly begun to enforce restrictive policies on its people, specifically hampering women’s rights and freedoms in the region.
UN: Taliban Dismiss 600 Female Afghan Workers Over Edict Violations (VOA)
VOA [1/22/2024 1:56 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
The United Nations said Monday that the Taliban government in impoverished Afghanistan had recently forced hundreds of females out of their jobs for allegedly not adhering to Islamic law requirements imposed on women nationwide.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, documented the job dismissals in its latest report on human rights, covering the last quarter of 2023 in a country where millions of people need humanitarian aid.

“The de facto authorities continue to enforce and promulgate restrictions on women’s rights to work, education, and freedom of movement,” according to the report.

UNAMA noted that the Taliban’s Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had taken the enforcement role, impeding women from working or accessing services because they were unmarried or did not have a male guardian.

It said that a lack of compliance with the hijab or dress code, absence of a mahram, or male relative, and other restrictions imposed on women visiting public places, offices, and educational institutions had apparently led to at least 600 women losing jobs in two Afghan provinces during the reported period.

The provincial chapter of the ministry banned 400 women from working in a pine-nut processing plant in eastern Nangarhar province in October without providing any reasons, while men were allowed to continue working, the report stated.

It added that a Taliban-run power plant in northern Balkh province in November dismissed 200 women allegedly due to financial reasons, yet no male employees faced the same action. In one instance, the vice and virtue ministry officials “advised an unmarried female staff at a healthcare facility to get married or risk losing her job, stating that it was inappropriate for an unmarried woman to work,” the report said.

Last month, the ministry officials visited a bus terminal in southern Kandahar city to ensure that women were not traveling long distances without a male relative and instructed drivers not to allow female passengers to board buses if they are not accompanied by a chaperone, according to the UNAMA findings.

The report said that women without male relatives in the eastern Paktia Province have been denied healthcare access since early December, with authorities from the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice continuing to visit provincial health facilities to ensure compliance.

UNAMA stated that while there is no general ban on women’s employment in Afghanistan, the mahram requirement effectively limits their right to work if they do not have a male relative who can accompany them to workplaces.

The report recorded instances of arbitrary arrests and detentions, sentencing, and some releases of human rights defenders and journalists, including women, from October to December.

“The de facto authorities continue to infringe the right to freedom of expression by limiting the public’s opportunity to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas,” UNAMA said.

The report also documented growing suicide bombings and other attacks on members of the country’s predominantly Shiite ethnic Hazara community over the past three months. The violence, mostly claimed by Islamic State militants, killed nearly 50 Afghan Shiite Muslims and wounded many more.

The U.N. mission said its human rights workers continued to record extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and torture and ill-treatment of former Afghan government officials and security forces. The Taliban have persistently denied the charges, saying they are adhering to a general amnesty their leadership announced after seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021.

The fundamentalist Taliban have since imposed their strict interpretation of Islamic law, banning Afghan girls from receiving an education beyond sixth grade and most female employees from public as well as private workplaces.

The international community has denounced the Taliban curbs on women and demanded they be removed immediately. No foreign country has recognized the de facto Afghan government, mainly over human rights concerns and the treatment of women.

The Taliban rejected Monday’s U.N. report, claiming it shows the world body’s “ignorance” about Sharia or Islamic law.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief Taliban spokesman, asserted in an English-language statement that denouncing Islamic rules as “an act against human rights…is obviously an insult to people’s beliefs.”

Mujahid advised UNAMA to desist from criticizing the Afghan nation’s religious matters.

“Women’s hijab, the necessity of Sharia mahram with women, Sharia environment for women’s work and education….these are all the commitments and responsibilities of a responsive and Islamic government,” he said.
Pakistan
Pakistan, Iran Envoys to Return to Their Posts as Relations Thaw (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [1/22/2024 6:24 AM, Ismail Dilawar, 5543K, Positive]
Pakistan and Iran agreed on Monday to normalize diplomatic ties, following last week’s tit-for-tat missile strikes that saw tensions spiral and relations between the neighbors plunge to a new low.

The ambassadors of the two countries will return to their respective posts by Jan. 26, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said in a joint statement on its website. Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian will also visit Pakistan on Jan. 29, it said.

The decisions were taken following a call between Abdollahian and his Pakistani counterpart, Jalil Abbas Jilani.

Islamabad and Tehran have been working to de-escalate the situation arising from missile attacks targeting militant hideouts in their border regions last week. After the Iranian attack, Pakistan recalled its ambassador to Iran and barred Tehran’s envoy from re-entering the country over the “unprovoked and blatant breach” of its sovereignty.

The US and China urged the two countries to show restraint and avoid the situation spiraling out of control at a time of rising turmoil in the Middle East over the Israel-Hamas war. The United Nations urged them to address their security issues peacefully.
Pakistan, Iran Agree to Resume Full Diplomatic Ties (VOA)
VOA [1/22/2024 1:27 PM, Sarah Zaman, 761K, Neutral]
Envoys of Pakistan and Iran will return to their posts by the end of this week, Pakistan and Iran announced Monday.

The latest sign of de-escalation comes almost a week after Iran struck alleged terror targets inside Pakistan and Islamabad responded with counterstrikes against purported terror hideouts across the border. The strikes killed at least 11 civilians, 9 in Iran and 2 in Pakistan.

Amid unprecedented tensions Islamabad recalled its ambassador from Tehran last Wednesday and told the Iranian envoy, who was on a trip to his home country, to not return. Islamabad also suspended all high-level visits between the two countries.

Monday’s press release, issued jointly by the foreign ministries of both the countries, said Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian will visit Pakistan on January 29 at his Pakistani counterpart Jalil Abbas Jilani’s invitation.

In a phone call Friday, the top diplomats of both countries agreed to defuse tensions and reestablish full diplomatic ties.

Analysts VOA spoke to say that while smoothing over ruffled ties is necessary and welcome, Iran’s unprovoked attack on Pakistan may have opened a Pandora’s box in the region.

Messaging tool

Iran has said it was targeting Sunni separatist group Jaish al-Adl’s hideouts on Pakistani soil.

Anti-state insurgents targeting Pakistan and Iran have been active along the 900-kilometer border between the two countries for years. They frequently mount deadly attacks against security forces.

The terrorist threat in the region has also expanded with hardline Sunni terrorist group Islamic State or IS targeting Shiite Muslims in both countries. The group claimed responsibility for twin blasts at an event near the tomb of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani on January 3. The blasts in southeastern Iranian city of Kerman killed more than 100 people.

While Pakistan acknowledges the IS presence in the country, the group has a bigger, highly organized structure in Afghanistan.

Washington-based security affairs expert Kamran Bokhari told VOA Iran’s strikes were not necessarily a response to rising terrorism but meant to send a message to Washington in the context of the bloody Israel-Hamas war that has killed thousands in Gaza.

Since the war started last October, Washington has targeted Iranian proxies in the Middle East and the Red Sea while Tehran has struck U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria several times.

“They [militant hideouts in Pakistan] provided an excuse for Iran to do something different, which is basically to telegraph to the United States that look, we know that you are talking about a direct confrontation with us…. But, if you do that, then we have the capability to further expand this war,” said Bokhari who serves as a senior director of Eurasian security and prosperity at the Newlines Institute.

Bokhari believes Tehran picked Pakistan, as it’s a U.S. ally but mired in economic, political and security crises, and therefore, less likely to engage in a massive confrontation.

Pakistan’s counterstrike marked the first time Iran faced a direct attack since the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988.

While the Biden administration condemned the Iranian action, Bokhari thinks those in Washington who favor a direct confrontation with Tehran may say, “We’ve never struck on Iranian soil. Now that the Pakistanis have done it, it sets a precedent.”

Islamabad-based security affairs expert Syed Muhammad Ali told VOA that while Pakistan and Iran managed to de-escalate quickly, any other country contemplating to attack Iran should not expect the same outcome.

“Even if it gives some ideas to some other countries, I think, they will have to factor in Iranian possible response options based on their own bilateral history and geostrategic convergences or divergences,” Ali said.

Pressure tool

While Tehran and Islamabad work to normalize ties, some are concerned sectarian groups may be exploited as a pressure tool.

Pakistan has a history of sectarian violence as Saudi-funded Sunni and Iran-funded Shiite armed groups came head-to-head in the 90s. Targeted killings on sectarian basis still occur.

On Sunday Pakistani officials claimed apprehending a “terrorist trained by a foreign country.” Authorities said he was getting support from a “neighboring country” and linked him to Zainabiyoun Brigade, an Iranian-backed militia.

“Pakistan is, both, being cautious not naming Iran, but also talking about perpetrators that may be linked with Iran,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, a military affairs expert and senior fellow at King’s College London.

Siddiqa said Pakistan and Iran have no choice but to continue to de-escalate tensions to avoid possible sectarian strife.

Shrinking space for militants

On Monday Pakistan armed forces’ media wing announced the military killed seven “terrorists” in an operation near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Baluchistan. The statement did not specify which outfit the slain militants were from.

In Pakistan’s counterstrike across the Iranian border, Islamabad claimed killing Baloch insurgents.

Ali told VOA he believes the space for anti-state actors that target Iran and Pakistan might shrink after last week’s events.

However, he said military operations are only a part of Pakistan’s multi-layered counterinsurgency strategy — that also relies on other incentives to encourage separatists to lay down arms.
Iran’s foreign minister will visit Pakistan next week after tit-for-tat airstrikes (AP)
AP [1/22/2024 8:31 AM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
Iran’s foreign minister will visit Pakistan next week, the two countries said Monday, following unprecedented attacks on either side of the border last week that appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals.

The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.

Pakistan’s military and political leadership last Friday moved to de-escalate tensions with Iran. Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency said that Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian spoke to Pakistani counterpart Jalil Abbas Jilani to defuse the flare-up.

Pakistan said in a statement Amirabdollahian that would visit the country on Jan. 29. The statement also said that the two foreign ministers agreed that the ambassadors from both countries could return to their posts by Jan. 26.

Pakistan recalled its ambassador amid the brief crisis and stopped Iran’s envoy from returning to his post.
High Stakes For China Amid Simmering Iran-Pakistan Tensions (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [1/22/2024 2:56 PM, Reid Standish, 223K, Negative]
Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan have raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region amid growing fears the upheaval sweeping across the Middle East could spread.

Since the tit-for-tat strikes on January 16 and 18 against militant and separatist groups, Islamabad and Tehran have signaled they want to de-escalate the situation and that their foreign ministers will hold talks in Pakistan on January 29.

But the attacks have exposed the fine line between peace and conflict in the region and put the spotlight on China, a close partner of both countries, to see if it can use its sway to ramp down tensions and avoid a conflict that would jeopardize Beijing’s economic and geopolitical interests in the region.

"For China, the stakes are high and they really can’t afford for things to get any worse between Iran and Pakistan," Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told RFE/RL.

China has tens of billions of dollars of investments in Iran and Pakistan and both countries are high-level partners that benefit from Chinese political and economic support.

Following the missile-strike exchange, China’s Foreign Ministry called for calm and said it would "play a constructive role in cooling down the situation," without giving details.

Beijing is now expected to step up its engagement to head off another crisis in the region, in what analysts say is yet another test for China’s influence after recently hitting its limit with the war in Gaza, shipping attacks in the Red Sea by Iranian-backed Huthi militants, and the growing instability across the Middle East these events have caused.

"We’re yet to see anything really concrete where China has stepped in to solve an international crisis," Sari Arho Havren, an associate fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL. "[But] China has a reputational image at stake where it’s presenting itself as the alternative to the United States, even though assumptions about how powerful it really is in the Middle East are now being scrutinized."

What’s Going On Between Iran And Pakistan?

The Iranian strikes in Pakistan were part of a series of similar attacks launched by Iran that also hit targets in Iraq and Syria.

In Pakistan, Tehran said it was targeting the Sunni separatist group Jaish al-Adl with drones and missiles in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan Province. Jaish al-Adl operates mostly in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan Province but is also suspected to be in neighboring Pakistan. The group claimed responsibility for a December 15 attack on a police station in southeastern Iran that killed 11 officers.

In response, Islamabad said its military conducted air strikes in Sistan-Baluchistan targeting the Baloch Liberation Front and the Baloch Liberation Army, two separatist groups believed to be hiding in Iran.

The exchange of strikes was followed by Pakistan recalling its ambassador from Iran and blocking Tehran’s ambassador to Islamabad from returning to his post.

On January 21, the Counterterrorism Department in Pakistan’s southwestern Sindh Province announced it had arrested a suspect in a 2019 assassination attempt on a top Pakistani cleric who is a member of the Zainebiyoun Brigade, a militant group allegedly backed by Iran.

But since the strikes on each other’s territory, Iran and Pakistan have cooled their rhetoric and signaled that they intend to de-escalate, echoing sentiment through official statements that the neighbors are "brotherly countries" that should pursue dialogue and cooperation.

Basit says this stems largely from the fact that the countries see themselves spread too thin in dealing with a host of pressing foreign and domestic issues.

Tehran has grappled with a series of attacks across the country, including a January 3 twin bombing that killed more than 90 people, and is engaged across the region directly or through groups that it backed such as Yemen’s Huthis and Lebanon’s Hizballah.

The tit-for-tat attacks, meanwhile, come as Pakistan is embroiled in an economic crisis and prepares to hold high-stakes elections on February 8, the first since former Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed in a vote of no confidence in April 2021, setting off years of escalating political turmoil.

"Between the economy, elections, and always-present tensions with India that could grow, Pakistan simply can’t afford another front," Basit said.

Islamabad and Tehran are now pushing to cool down the situation, though Basit adds that the situation remains tense. "There is peace and calm now, but the animosity is ongoing," he said.

How Much Leverage Does China Have?

Following a week of tensions, China has leverage to push for a diplomatic settlement to the dispute, although experts say Beijing may be reluctant to intervene too publicly.

"China looks to be quite measured here in its response and that raises some questions about where China stands in using its influence," Basit said. "China knows it can influence the situation, but Beijing also usually shies away from situations like this because they worry that if they try and fail, then the West will look at it differently."

Beijing raised expectations in March 2023 it would play a larger political role in the Middle East when it brokered a historic deal between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, says China’s willingness to be a mediator shouldn’t be underplayed. "It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves," he told RFE/RL. "But China was willing to do the Iran-Saudi deal, which is a more fraught relationship to get involved in. So, they might be relieved now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t step up if needed."

China also holds other cards if it needs to calm the situation between Iran and Pakistan.

As China’s "iron brother," Islamabad has a close partnership with Beijing, with cooperation ranging from economic investment to defense. Pakistan is the largest buyer of Chinese weapons and is also home to the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship series of infrastructure projects within China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

CPEC is part of Beijing’s efforts to connect itself to the Arabian Sea and build stronger trade networks with the Middle East.

A centerpiece of the venture is developing the port of Gwadar in Balochistan, which would strengthen shipping lanes to the region, particularly for energy shipments from Iran.

For Tehran, China is a top buyer of sanctioned Iranian oil, and Beijing signed a sprawling 25-year economic and security agreement with Iran in 2021.

Arho Havren says that given both Iran and Pakistan’s economic dependence on China, Beijing will do all it can, should tensions rise, but will likely do so behind the scenes. "China [is unlikely] to take a stronger public stake in the conflict, but will instead use its back-channels," Arho Havren said.

What Comes Next?

While the situation between Iran and Pakistan is moving towards de-escalation, the recent tensions highlight the often tenuous footing of regional rivalries that China’s ambitions to lead the Global South rest upon.

Both Pakistan and Iran are members of the Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which also includes India, Russia, and Central Asia (minus Turkmenistan). The SCO has been an important part of Beijing’s bid for leadership across parts of Asia and the Middle East while looking to bring together countries to work together on economic and security issues.

China has invested in growing the bloc and is in discussion to add more countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Belarus, but further conflict between its members could derail those moves and damage the SCO’s credibility.

Arho Havren says Beijing will still have to grapple with the lack of trust between Islamabad and Tehran and is facing similar issues elsewhere in the Middle East as it walks a tightrope between simultaneously raising its international influence and limiting any diplomatic exposure that could hurt its reputation.

"Cooperation may be easy, but the relations between the countries in the region are complex, and China’s journey [in the Middle East] is still in its beginning," she said.
Trade resumes as Pakistan and Afghanistan reopen Torkham border crossing after 10 days (AP)
AP [1/23/2024 1:31 AM, Staff, 456K, Neutral]
Trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan resumed Tuesday after the two sides reopened a key northwestern border crossing shut for more than 10 days.

Truckers for years have been able to cross the border without documents, so they generally do not have them. But Pakistan began mandating truck drivers get visas last week.

The two sides after a series of meetings agreed to reopen the Torkham border crossing but Pakistan set a new deadline of March 31 for the truck drivers to get visas, said Ziaul Haq Sarhadi, a director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Abdul Basir Zabali, the Taliban-appointed spokesman for the police chief in Nangarhar province, said the Torkham crossing was reopened after the two sides talked, but he didn’t give details.

The Torkham border crossing has been closed a number of times in recent months, mainly following clashes between the security forces for varied reasons including repairs of the border fence by Pakistan.
Pakistan Reopens Key Border Crossing With Afghanistan (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [1/22/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 235K, Neutral]
Pakistan on January 23 reopened the Torkham border crossing with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, a critical access route for trade and transportation between the two countries, after a 10-day closure prompted by Islamabad’s imposing of a requirement for passports and visas for Afghan drivers.

A Pakistani customs official in Torkham told RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal on condition of anonymity that the border was reopened at 10 a.m. local time, allowing the flow of trucks and people once again.

The move came after a meeting between Pakistani and Taliban officials on January 22 in Torkham during which the two sides agreed to reopen the crossing, the official said.

The Torkham border crossing links Pakistan’s western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province to Nangarhar, an eastern Afghan province, through the historic Khyber Pass.

The Torkham closure on January 12 caused huge commercial losses to both countries, blocking the entry of hundreds of trucks carrying tens of tons of oranges and tangerines, according to Afghan trade officials.

lslamabad’s move to impose tighter controls requiring drivers from both sides to have visas and passports -- documents many Afghans do not have -- came amid a deterioration of relations between the two neighbors, with Pakistan accusing the Taliban of allowing militants to stage attacks across the border from Afghan territory.

Since October, Pakistan has expelled more than a half-million undocumented Afghans over the Taliban’s failure to rein in the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban.

Islamabad blames the group for escalating attacks on security forces and accuses the Taliban government of sheltering TTP militants.

Officials say TTP attacks have killed more than 2,000 Pakistanis since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.

Pakistan says that more than 1.7 million undocumented Afghans reside on its territory.
Pakistan’s Military Kills 7 Militants Near Afghanistan (VOA)
VOA [1/22/2024 7:14 AM, Staff, 761K, Neutral]
Pakistan’s military said seven militants were killed Monday in an exchange of fire with security forces in Pakistan’s volatile southwest region near Afghanistan.

The brief military statement said munitions were also recovered after the shoot-out in the Zhob district of Baluchistan province.

Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper, reported munitions included arms, ammunition and explosives.

Militants in the mineral-rich region have for years called for a share of Baluchistan’s mineral resources but are now calling for the province’s independence.
India
Modi Opens a Giant Temple in a Triumph for India’s Hindu Nationalists (New York Times)
New York Times [1/22/2024 4:14 PM, Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar, 831K, Neutral]
They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.

These foot soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, collected millions of dollars to be socked away for a long fight to build a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in northern India. Across 200,000 villages, ceremonies were arranged to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram.

The bricks, the campaign’s leaders declared, would not just be used for the temple’s construction on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the foundation for a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India’s birth as a secular republic.

Nearly four decades later, the cornerstone of that sweeping vision has been laid.

Mr. Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya on Monday — the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.

“Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”

The moment is both one of triumph for Hindu nationalists and one of jubilation for many others who care little for politics. Ram has a wide following in India; excitement around the temple’s consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram advertising the event everywhere.

But for the country’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation.

The Babri Mosque, which the Hindu side argued was built after Muslim rulers destroyed an earlier Hindu temple in the spot, was brought down in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The manner in which the mosque was razed set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad” and — in an echo of Ayodhya — “bulldozer justice” in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions.

The Hindu right wing has ridden the Ram movement to become India’s dominant political force. The opening of the temple, built over 70 acres at a cost of nearly $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Mr. Modi’s campaign for a third term, in an election expected in the spring.

That it was Mr. Modi who was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — captures the right’s blurring of old lines.

India’s founding fathers took great pains to keep the state at arm’s length from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country’s cohesion after the communal bloodletting wrought by the 1947 partition that cleaved Pakistan from India. But Mr. Modi has unabashedly normalized the opposite.

After completing the consecration rituals alongside priests on Monday, Mr. Modi prostrated in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and bedecked in jewels. The prime minister then emerged at the edge of the temple steps in his signature style for big moments: the powerful leader, alone in the frame, striding forward and bowing to the thousands of handpicked guests — celebrities, seers and business leaders — seated below.

Mr. Modi’s public image is simultaneously one of statesman and god-man. His party chief recently described him as “the king of gods.” Ahead of the inauguration, the town was covered in posters and billboards, of Ram and of Mr. Modi.

Just as they did in the 1980s, volunteers from right-wing Hindu organizations went door to door across hundreds of thousands of villages in the days before the temple’s consecration. This time, the effort was a reminder of the immense network Mr. Modi has at his disposal, one that the political opposition can come nowhere close to matching.

In preparation for his role in Ayodhya, Mr. Modi embarked on an 11-day Hindu purification ritual. The prime minister was seen temple-hopping across the country, and when his office put out pictures of him at his residence feeding cows, which are seen as holy by many Hindus, fawning television channels ran them as breaking news.

In between his expressions of religious devotion, Mr. Modi attended to the work of the state, inaugurating huge projects that perpetuate his image as a champion of development.

The omnipresent leader, in mixing religion and politics and tapping into the vast resources at his service, has achieved what his predecessors could not: turning a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him. To question him is to question Hindu values. And that is akin to blasphemy.

Manoj Kumar Jha, an opposition lawmaker, said that while Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., might be toppled someday, the transformation of the state and society would take decades, at least, to undo.

“Winning elections could be arithmetic. But the fight is in the realm of psychology — the psychological rupture, the social rupture,” Mr. Jha said. Just as Muslim Pakistan was founded as a state for one religious group, India is “now emulating Pakistan, a little late.”

“The toxic mix of religion and politics is idealized,” he added. “Nobody is bothered to see what such a toxic mix has done.”

In many ways, India’s birth as a secular republic was an idealistic project undertaken by its founding leaders, including Mohandas K. Gandhi and the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. With India’s diversity in mind, they defined a secular state not as one that keeps out religion, but as one that keeps an equal distance from all religions.

Muslims who remained in India after the creation of Pakistan amounted to the world’s third-largest Muslim population. There were also millions of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists. Hinduism itself contained multitudes, distinguished not just by devotion to 30 million distinct deities, but also by rigid caste hierarchies and regional cultural identities.

Members of the Hindu right were appalled that the departure of the British had left Muslims with a nation of their own in Pakistan but had not afforded the same for Hindus in India. It was, to them, just the latest inequity for the religious majority in a country that had endured several bloody Muslim invasions and was ruled for centuries by the Mughal Empire.

Initially, these Hindus struggled to turn the anger over partition into a political movement not just because of the event’s trauma, but also because of the taint from a grave act of terrorism. In 1948, one of their foot soldiers, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi, who had amassed a huge following as an icon of nonviolence and an advocate of India’s diversity.

Gandhi’s last plea, after receiving three bullets from close range during his morning prayer meeting, was to the same deity that the Hindu right would later rally around at Ayodhya.

“O Ram,” he said as he collapsed.

The founders’ secular vision remained in place largely because of Nehru’s nearly two decades in power. But it rested on a thin foundation. There was no major project of historical reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims, said Abhishek Choudhary, the author of a recent book on the ascent of the Hindu right, as Nehru — “a terribly overworked politician” — focused on the immense work of ensuring the country’s immediate survival.

The opening for the right wing came in the decades after Nehru’s death. When his descendants — first his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and then his grandson Rajiv Gandhi — toyed with appeasement of fundamentalists on both sides in the 1980s to keep themselves in power, they walked into a game for which the Hindu right was much better prepared.

The right’s fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., which will be 100 years old next year, has many offshoots, all working closely for the same goal. When one sibling in the R.S.S. faced a state crackdown, the others could continue organizing.

But what the right wing lacked was political power. One group related to the R.S.S. had already been agitating around the issue of a Ram temple. The B.J.P., the political arm of the R.S.S., got on board.

The Babri Mosque had been built by a military commander of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century after the destruction of a Ram temple, the Hindu right argued. The movement to build a temple for Ram at the same spot was not just about the return of a deity with crosscutting popularity as a just ruler and moral exemplar, but also the toppling of a symbol of conquest.

After turning the Ram movement into a participatory affair across the country, the B.J.P. saw its political fortunes shoot up in elections in 1989, and again in 1991. There was no turning back.

The campaign gained such confidence that even as the dispute over the plot was being heard in court, tens of thousands of foot soldiers gathered at the spot in December 1992 and, in the presence of top right-wing leaders, destroyed the mosque with ropes, sledgehammers and their bare hands.

Alok Kumar, the president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the R.S.S. offshoot that has led the decades-long temple movement, said the destruction of the Mughal structure — which he asserted the Muslim rulers had erected to drain Hindu “willpower and self-respect” — and the building of the temple were crucial to a Hindu revival.

“I believe that when that structure in Ayodhya was brought down,” Mr. Kumar, a soft-spoken lawyer, said in an interview, “the inferiority complex of the Hindu race went away.”

As the court case dragged on, the issue remained a communal tinderbox. When more than 50 Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya in 2002 were burned to death in a train fire in Gujarat, it unleashed days of brutal violence that left more than 1,000 people dead in the state, a majority of them Muslims.

Mr. Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, was accused of complicity in the riots, though the courts later cleared him of wrongdoing.

Twelve years later, he would become prime minister. While he campaigned first on the economy and then, in his re-election bid five years later, on national security, his focus remained on the Hindu right’s priorities. Victory in the temple fight was sealed with a Supreme Court ruling in 2019.

Mr. Modi has continued the uphill task of uniting Hindus into a powerful monolith, through outreach to lower castes and welfare handouts that expand his base. In the process, secularism has been redefined as the suppression of public expressions of other faiths, while Hinduism has increasingly been displayed as the religion of the state.

Muslims are demonized as the “other” against whom the Hindu consolidation is being pursued.

Ziya Us Salam, who documented patterns of violence and marginalization against India’s Muslims in a recent book, said the right-wing campaign had reduced Muslims to the worst deeds of Mughal rulers from long ago while overlooking Muslims’ contributions.

“What matters to you is to project the Muslim as a villain in the past, and to pass off that villainy to the modern contemporary Muslim who is supposed to atone for what happened in the 13th and 14th century,” Mr. Salam said.
India’s Modi Marks Triumph for Hindu Nationalism by Opening Temple Where Mosque Was (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal [1/22/2024 11:26 AM, Krishna Pokharel and Tripti Lahiri, 810K, Neutral]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi consecrated a grand Hindu temple at the site where a 16th-century mosque was destroyed by a mob, a key milestone in the Indian leader’s reshaping of the country from a secular republic into a Hindu nation.

The event—imbued with religious reverence and the scars of Hindu-Muslim strife that has lasted centuries—blanketed Indian television channels Monday and spotlighted Modi as pivotal to fulfilling Hindu nationalist demands.

The site in this northern Indian city that is claimed as the birthplace of one of Hinduism’s most revered figures, housed a historic mosque, the Babri Masjid, until 1992, when a Hindu mob razed it. Months of deadly communal riots followed.

“Our Ram has arrived after waiting for centuries,” said Modi as he listened to priests chant Sanskrit verses and made offerings before the black stone statue of the Hindu deity Ram as a child. Past prime ministers of India have rarely made a public display of their faith.

The temple, known as the Ram Mandir, and the city were decorated with strings of marigolds and festooned with lights as thousands of Hindus arrived in the city to witness the inauguration. In other parts of the country, Hindu activists went door-to-door asking residents to celebrate Monday as if it were Diwali, a major Hindu festival celebrating Ram’s return from exile to begin a golden age of governance.

Passengers on a flight heading to Ayodhya on Sunday erupted with slogans hailing Ram several times. Private planes brought Indian billionaires and Bollywood stars to the invitation-only event via the city’s new airport, part of a multibillion-dollar project to turn the city into what some say will be the Hindu equivalent of the Vatican or Mecca.

Hindu nationalists describe the installation of a temple to Ram in this spot in Ayodhya as part of a more than 500-year quest to undo centuries of colonial humiliation under first the Mughals, and then the British. The mosque that was destroyed was built in 1528 by the troops of emperor Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty that ruled India for hundreds of years. Still, many Indians see the Mughal empire’s legacy as a valuable part of Indian culture.

For Muslims, the razing of the mosque and the placing of a temple on a spot they consider hallowed ground, is a painful loss. For many it is symbolic of India reversing its promise of being a secular republic, where all faiths are equal.

Modi, who has held power since 2014, has longstanding links with the Hindu nationalist movement and faces elections later this year. He urged Hindus not to rush to Ayodhya and overwhelm the city with crowds. But many came anyway, some of them turning it into a pilgrimage by foot.

College freshman Kanha Kacher started walking to Ayodhya on Jan. 17, from central Madhya Pradesh state, a journey of 160 miles, along with a group of friends. They arrived on Sunday night.

“I didn’t feel tired even after walking such a long distance,” said the 17-year-old. “We all have grown up hearing about Ram and he is our ideal for the kind of life we want to live.”

The modern version of the dispute over the site went to court in 1950, and took seven decades to be settled eventually by the Supreme Court. Many Muslims had hoped the judges would allow for the rebuilding of the mosque. Instead, the court in 2019 granted permission to construct a temple.

Iqbal Ansari, an Ayodhya resident and son of one of the main original Muslim litigants to the suit, said he had accepted the ruling and was among the 7,000 invited guests at the inauguration. He said he connected with remarks made by Modi and others at the inauguration that referred to the golden era of Ram’s rule as an epoch of equality.

“Now it is up to them what they will do with their actions,” he said.

Modi has many times said he governs on behalf of everyone, and Hindu nationalists often insist there is no contradiction between India’s status as a secular republic and a country built around Hindu beliefs.

But legal efforts to replace mosques at other locations with temples, and the retaliation in some cases against Muslim protesters by the razing of their homes or shops, have made many doubt the sincerity of the statements. An updated high-school history book is also set to change the way Indians are taught about the role of Mughals and Hindu nationalism in Indian history.

Sanjay Kumar, an expert on Indian electoral politics, said that efforts to keep alive a sense of grievance against Muslims are a part of Hindu nationalism.

The feeling is Muslims “should be shown their place,” said Kumar, co-director of a program focused on Indian democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a New Delhi research institute. “That’s a very dominant narrative.”

The opening of the temple, an integral part of the ruling party’s campaigns since 1989, is set to boost Modi and the Hindu nationalists in elections due in the first half of this year. Some political experts called the inauguration of the not-yet-finished temple, the start of the election campaign of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and predicted the BJP would add to its already sizable majority in Parliament in an election where they say Hindu nationalism will be far more prominent than the previous two such ballots.

At a speech after the ceremony, Modi asked a question on the minds of many Indians from all shades of religious belief.

“The grand temple of Lord Ram has been built,” said Modi. “So what’s next?”

Despite the temple’s controversial history, Modi described the inauguration as a joyous moment for the country as a whole, and a sign of the cultural rejuvenation of a rising India as it embraces its Hindu identity under his watch.

“Our generation has been chosen,” he said. “The generation to come in a thousand years will remember our efforts of nation-building today.”
Modi opens Hindu temple built on ruins on razed mosque, in political triumph for prime minister (AP)
AP [1/22/2024 10:59 AM, Biswajeet Banerjee, Sheikh Saaliq, and Krutika Pathi, 1071K, Neutral]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday opened a controversial Hindu temple built on the ruins of a historic mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya, in a political triumph for the populist leader who is seeking to transform the country from a secular democracy into a Hindu state.

The temple is dedicated to Hinduism’s Lord Ram and fulfills a long-standing demand by millions of Hindus who worship the revered deity and extoll him for the virtues of truth, sacrifice and ethical governance. Modi’s party and other Hindu nationalist groups who seized on the demand have portrayed the temple as central to their vision of reclaiming Hindu pride, which they say was suppressed by centuries of Mughal rule and British colonialism.

Modi and his governing Bharatiya Janata Party hope that opening the temple will help catapult the prime minister to a record third successive term in elections expected this spring. But with the temple still under construction, critics accuse Modi of a hurried opening to woo voters.

Modi, dressed in a traditional kurta tunic, led the opening ceremony as Hindu priests chanted hymns inside the temple’s inner sanctum, where a 1.3-meter (4.3-foot) stone sculpture of Lord Ram was installed last week. A conch was blown by a priest to mark the temple’s opening and Modi placed a lotus flower in front of the black stone idol, decked in intricate gold ornaments and holding a golden bow and arrow. He later prostrated before the idol.

Nearly 7,500 people, including elite industrialists, politicians and movie stars, witnessed the ritual on a giant screen outside the temple as a military helicopter showered flower petals.

“Our Lord Ram has arrived after centuries of wait,” Modi said in a speech after the ceremony, receiving a resounding applause from thousands of attendees. He said the temple was built after “countless sacrifices” and is testament to a rising India “breaking the shackles of slave mentality.”

“Jan. 22, 2024, is not merely a date but marks the dawn of a new era,” Modi said.

Modi’s government turned the event into a national occasion by organizing live screenings across the country and closing offices for half a day. Saffron flags — the color of Hinduism — adorned the streets of various cities where government party workers had gone door to door handing out religious pamphlets.

Television news channels ran non-stop coverage of the event, portrayed as a religious spectacle. Some movie theaters broadcast the event live with complimentary popcorn. Many states declared the day a public holiday. In a rare step, stock and money markets were closed for the day.

“Ram Rajya (rule) begins,” a TV news headline said. Ram Rajya is a Sankrit phrase that means just and ethical governance in Hinduism but has also been used by Hindu nationalists to signify Hindu domination in an officially secular India.

Modi has been the face of an unprecedented and unapologetic fusion of religion and politics in India. Ahead of the temple opening, he set the tone by visiting numerous Ram temples over 11 days as part of a Hindu ritual.

Analysts and critics see Monday’s ceremony as the start of the election campaign for Modi, an avowed Hindu nationalist and one of India’s most consequential leaders. They say the pomp-filled display led by the government shows the extent to which the line between religion and state has eroded under Modi.

“Prime ministers prior to Modi have also been to temples, been to other places of worship, but they went there as devotees. This is the first time that he went there as somebody who performed the ritual,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an expert in Hindu nationalism and author of a book on Modi.

The temple, located at one of India’s most vexed religious sites, is expected to embolden Modi’s chances of returning to power by drawing on the religious sentiments of Hindus, who make up 80% of India’s population of 1.4 billion.

Ayodhya, once crowded with tightly packed houses and rundown stalls, has undergone an elaborate makeover in the lead up to the temple’s inauguration. Narrow roads have been turned into a four-lane pilgrimage route leading to the temple, tourists are arriving at a new airport and sprawling railway station, and major hotel chains are building new properties.

Jubilant devotees from across the country have arrived to celebrate the opening, with groups of them dancing to religious songs that blare from speakers on roads bedecked with flowers. Huge cut-outs of Lord Ram and billboards of Modi are ubiquitous across Ayodhya, where the borders have been sealed to prevent more people from coming in. Some 20,000 security personnel and more than 10,000 security cameras have been deployed.

The moment will be remembered as momentous and historic by many of the country’s Hindu citizens.

“I am here to see history unfolding before our eyes. For centuries, the story of Lord Ram has resonated in the hearts of millions,” said Harish Joshi who arrived in Ayodhya from Uttarakhand state four days before the ceremony.

Built at an estimated cost of $217 million and spread over nearly 3 hectares (7.4 acres), the temple lies atop the debris of the 16th-century Babri Mosque, which was razed to the ground in 1992 by Hindu mobs who believed it was built on temple ruins marking the birthplace of Lord Ram.

The site has long been a religious flashpoint for the two communities, with the demolition of the mosque triggering bloody riots across India that killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

The dispute ended in 2019 when, in a controversial decision, India’s Supreme Court called the mosque’s destruction “an egregious violation” of the law but granted the site to Hindus while giving Muslims a different plot of land.

The fraught history is still an open wound for many Muslims, who have increasingly come under attack in recent years by Hindu nationalist groups and see the construction of the temple as a testament to Modi’s Hindu-first politics.

Officials say the temple, a three-story structure made of pink sandstone, will open to the public after the ceremony and they expect 100,000 devotees to visit daily. Builders are still working to finish 46 elaborate doors and intricate wall carvings.

But not all are rejoicing. Four key Hindu religious authorities refused to attend, saying consecrating an unfinished temple goes against Hindu scriptures. Some top leaders from India’s main opposition Congress party also boycotted the event, with many opposition lawmakers accusing Modi of exploiting the temple for political points.

Neighboring Pakistan condemned the consecration, saying a temple built on the site of a demolished mosque would remain a blot on India’s democracy.

“There is a growing list of mosques (in India) facing a similar threat of desecration and destruction,” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It urged the international community to help save Islamic heritage sites in India from “extremist groups” and ensure that minority rights are protected.

At least three historical mosques in northern India are embroiled in court disputes overclaims by Hindu nationalists who say they were built over temple ruins. Hindu nationalists have also filed cases in Indian courts seeking ownership of hundreds of historic mosques.
India Hindu Temple Opening Stokes Religious Minority Fears (Human Rights Watch)
Human Rights Watch [1/22/2024 3:24 PM, Meenakshi Ganguly, 190K, Neutral]
Saffron flags and posters of religious deities and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are dotting streets across India to mark the January 22 consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh state. However, public euphoria around the ceremony has also raised fears of violence and discrimination against India’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims.

The occasion is widely seen as a culmination of Hindu majoritarian and political demands led by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliates. The temple was constructed around the site where the 16th century Babri Mosque stood until a Hindu mob demolished it in 1992. Many Hindus believe that the mosque had been built on the ruins of a previous temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. Thousands died in religious clashes and riots across the country following the demolition, including deadly violence in Gujarat state in 2002.

While the authorities secured the area during the ceremony, Ayodhya’s Muslim residents expressed concerns for their safety. One group wrote to the police requesting law enforcement remain vigilant as devotees from throughout India visit the city over the coming weeks. Some have sent their families away from the city. Many Indian Muslims on social media have also cautioned against impending violence and have called for community members to avoid traveling by public transportation.

Hindu religious processions in India have turned violent when triumphalism transforms into provocation and violence. While the event passed peacefully, the previous day a group of men in Madhya Pradesh state shouted religious slogans, climbed atop a Christian church, and affixed a flag representing the new temple to the church’s cross.

Prime Minister Modi performed numerous pilgrimages and rituals ahead of the temple’s inauguration. Aware of global criticism of the BJP’s failure to protect religious minorities, he said that those celebrating the temple should “show faith, not aggression.”

However, while many businesses remained closed to join the celebrations, others stayed shut to prevent vandalism. BJP supporters committing violence in the past have often done so with impunity and been emboldened by political patronage.

The temple has come at a cost, as many Indians now simply fear each other.
India to Ask EU for Measures to Align Emission Trading Systems (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [1/22/2024 1:53 AM, Shruti Srivastava, 5.5M, Neutral]
India will ask the European Union for concessions that will help align its planned national carbon market with the bloc’s emissions trading system, according to people familiar with the matter.

New Delhi plans to raise the potential impacts of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, on domestic industries at the seventh round of negotiations on a proposed free trade agreement from Feb. 19 to 23, according to the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions are private. India wants to try and shield its companies from the full impact of the levy, they said.

The EU tax is aimed at preserving the integrity of its emission trading system by preventing European firms from importing goods with a high carbon footprint without incurring the related cost — a practice known as carbon leakage. Exporters such as India argue that it will make their products more expensive and dent their competitiveness.

India’s government has several proposals it will raise with the EU, according to the people. These include a tax exemption for small- and medium-sized enterprises, to enable credits generated by a local fossil fuel tax to be regarded as equal to Europe’s emissions allowances, and that Brussels recognizes Indian-accredited energy auditors.

An Indian trade ministry spokesperson didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. An EU spokesperson for CBAM also didn’t respond to emailed questions.

As much as 40% of the roughly 4 million tons of steel India exports annually to Europe would be exposed to CBAM, according to a report by rating agency ICRA Ltd. India has already raised its opposition to the EU’s carbon levy at the World Trade Organization.

Indian exporters of steel and aluminum started collecting data on the emissions embedded in their production processes in October 2023 to share with their European trading partners. The first reporting period for that exercise will end on Jan. 31.

Following the European Union’s lead, nations including the UK and Australia have also started consultations on carbon border taxes to mitigate carbon leakage.

The aim of harmonizing India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme with the EU’s Emissions Trading System would be to help Indian companies cope with the threat posed by the border tax, the people said, conceding that the process would be a drawn out one.
Myanmar military plane overshoots runway in India, eight injured (Reuters)
Reuters [1/23/2024 4:37 AM, Krishn Kaushik, 5.2M, Neutral]
At least eight people were injured after a Myanmar military aircraft that was supposed to fly back dozens of soldiers fleeing conflict at home overshot the runway of an airport in northeastern India on Tuesday, officials said.

The injured were among 14 people on board the aircraft that was heading to Mizoram state’s Lengpui Airport to take home the soldiers who had entered India last week, Indian police and military officials said.

Footage from local media showed the plane’s cracked fuselage resting in a bushy area near the airport.

Nearly 700 Myanmar soldiers have crossed into northeast India in the past two months after anti-junta groups in Myanmar, backed by a pro-democracy parallel government, seized control of several military posts and towns near its borders.

Indian authorities have been sending back the troops within days of them crossing over.

An Indian military source said 276 Myanmar troops entered India last week after intense fighting close to the border, out of which 184 returned home on Monday.

Since a coup in Myanmar in 2021, hundreds of civilians and troops have fled to Indian states where communities between the two countries share ethnic and familial ties. This has worried New Delhi because of risks of tensions spreading to India.

Visiting India’s northeastern region on Saturday, Home Minister Amit Shah said the government would fence the entire 1,600 (1,000 mile)-long border with Myanmar. India is also considering ending the free movement of people between the two countries, he said.
Caught in India-Maldives spat, Lakshadweep islands want jobs, then tourists (Al Jazeera)
Al Jazeera [1/22/2024 4:14 PM, Salahuddin, 2.1M, Neutral]
Sitting on a cane chair at the edge of the Indian Ocean, then strolling on the pristine white sand of a Lakshadweep beach, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi advertised in late December for the federally governed archipelago.

“Those who want to visit different beaches around the world, and are enamoured by them — I request them to first come to Lakshadweep and take a look,” Modi said, in a video widely shared on social media platforms.

That message has triggered a diplomatic crisis between India and the Maldives, South Asia’s smallest nation and a tourist paradise where some ministers hit back in coarse language on social media at what they perceived as an Indian attempt to woo tourists away from their resorts. In turn, Indian social media influencers — including Bollywood stars and ex-cricketers — went into overdrive, pitching Lakshadweep islands as tourist destinations, and others criticising the Maldives.

The Maldives suspended the ministers who had badmouthed India and Modi in the wake of the advertisement. But when President Mohammed Muizzu, who was visiting Beijing — New Delhi’s archrival — at the time, returned to the Maldives, he had a warning for his giant neighbour on his lips. “We may be small, but that doesn’t give you the licence to bully us,” he said on Saturday.

But back in Lakshadweep, many people do not want their islands caught up in a tourism tussle between India and the Maldives. They have more fundamental questions for their government — and for Modi.

Lakshadweep has 36 islands, 10 of which are inhabited. Once served by seven ships, its population of 64,000 people must now make do with just two ships that ferry them between their islands and the mainland once every week or 10 days.

“The prime minister wants to invite everyone to Lakshadweep, but if the people of Lakshadweep want to go outside, we have no ship tickets to the mainland,” said Ayisha Sultana, an activist and film director.

“Improve that first, then talk about big plans.”

It is just one of the many concerns shaping the popular response in Lakshadweep to the prospect of tourists from India and beyond flooding their islands.

Limited representation

Unlike states and many federally governed territories, Lakshadweep has no democratically elected government. It elects a legislator to parliament and is governed by an administrator appointed by the federal government.

The current Lakshadweep administrator, Praful K Patel, has been accused by many locals of riding roughshod over their concerns. Under him, the local administration demolished fishermen’s sheds in capital Kavaratti as part of a process to beautify beaches. The fishermen’s union contested this move in the High Court of Kerala, the nearest mainland state, and the case remains unresolved.

“We are not against the development of tourism, especially in the uninhabited islands. But if they are considering tourism in inhabited islands like Kavaratti, will the authorities be ready to share the beaches with us,” asked Nijamudheen, the president of the Lakshadweep Fisheries Association, who goes by a single name. “Tourism must be restricted to small areas in the inhabited islands and uninhabited islands; otherwise, it will be a potential threat to the fishermen.”

Most Lakshadweep youth go to college on the mainland, predominantly in Kerala. But travelling back and forth is a challenge.

“Even we students can’t reach the islands on time,” said Sayed Mohammed Anees, a 28-year-old from Androth Island who is contemplating enrolling for a PhD after completing his master’s degree in education from Kerala. “Getting tickets and all is a Himalayan task in all the vocations. How will they turn this place into the Maldives? That is not an easy task.”

‘Easy to implement their agendas’

Any contest over tourists is also complicated for Lakshadweep by the fact that one of its islands, Minicoy, is geographically and culturally very close to the Maldives. They speak the same language — the ancestors of Minicoy locals came from the Maldives, which is closer than any other Lakshadweep island.

Still, tourism could help bring jobs and much-needed cash. At the moment, though, Lakshadweep is in no position to compete.

Traditionally, the economy of Lakshadweep relied on copra and dry tuna exports to other parts of the country. Post-Independence, modern education was introduced by teachers from nearby Kerala. Literacy rates have significantly increased, now ranking second in the country.

Yet the pinnacle of ambition for many young women and men is to secure a government job.

Currently, there are approximately 5,000 permanent government employees in Lakshadweep. Despite its geography, tourism does not figure among its top revenue sources.

Tourism in Lakshadweep is managed by a society named SPORTS, owned by the Lakshadweep administration. Currently, tourism operations are active in inhabited islands such as Agatti, Kalpeni, Kavaratti, Kadmat, Minicoy, and the uninhabited island of Bangaram. Agatti has the only airport, where a daily flight carrying up to 68 passengers lands and takes off.

Shipping-based tourism is minimal: one government-run initiative, Samudram, accommodates 180 tourists weekly on a ship. The itinerary covers three islands during the day, with passengers spending nights on the ship.

All of Lakshadweep has only about 100 hotel rooms. The Maldives, on the other hand, has more than 1,000 resorts and hotels, many of them among the most exclusive holiday destinations in the world.

Plans for resorts by luxury hotel groups like the Taj, one of India’s most prominent chains, remain on paper. A project on developing water villas — hotel rooms perched on stilts in the shallow water — is also in the works, despite more than 100 scientists signing a petition cautioning of damage to fragile coral reefs.

Construction in Lakshadweep must subscribe to what is known as the Integrated Islands Management Plan (IIMP), which emphasises sustainable development and local interests, including livelihood.

But the administrator and his team could try to bypass the IIMP, alleged M Ali Akbar, the Lakshadweep president of the Youth Congress, the youth wing of India’s biggest opposition party. “This is a union territory, and we have no elected government; hence it is very easy to implement their agendas,” he said.

‘How can he clean beaches by firing cleaners?’

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, SPORTS fired more than 800 contractual workers. Currently, less than 100 people are employed in SPORTS.

The Lakshadweep administration has terminated more than 3,000 employees since December 2020, when Patel took office. Ajmeer Khan, a former employee under the Lakshadweep administration, said he had no hope that he and his fired colleagues would be hired again. “If they have such intentions, they would have rolled out a tourism policy that promotes employability,” he said.

But the retrenchments have also affected Lakshadweep’s tourism potential.

Under Patel’s rule, more than 450 sanitation workers who collected waste from inhabited parts of the islands and brought it to incinerators were let go. Today, visible hills of plastic waste dot every island. Incinerators that were installed on all islands no longer work. Many are partially covered by plastic waste.

“Even though the administrator is saying that he is cleaning the islands, it is not true,” said Abdul Salam from Kiltan island, who coordinated the legal fight for the payment of pending wages to the fired sanitation workers. “How can he clean the islands by disengaging the people who are actually cleaning them?”
Making Sense of India’s Muted Response to the Red Sea Crisis (The Diplomat)
The Diplomat [1/22/2024 9:43 AM, Rushali Saha, 201K, Neutral]
The global repercussions of the recent Houthi attacks on international maritime vessels in the Red Sea are becoming apparent. As shippers globally are rerouting away from the Red Sea route – which is the shortest and most efficient trade route for ships moving from Asia to Europe – increased freight costs are likely to impact energy prices and inflation.

In a globalized world, no country is immune from such geopolitical incidents, no matter how distant they might be. India in particular has been directly impacted by the attacks, forcing it to increase its maritime presence in the region – while refraining from joining the U.S.-led coalition.

On November 19, Houthi rebels hijacked an Israeli cargo ship in the Red Sea, to “express solidarity with Palestine” over the ongoing war between Israel with Hamas in the Gaza strip. Since then, more than 28 ships have been attacked.

Following continued, frequent attacks by the Houthis, exactly a month later, the United States announced a “defensive coalition” of nations – Operation Prosperity Guardian – to aid the safe movement of ships in the Red Sea. Around 20 countries reportedly joined the Operation, some of which are not “willing to publicly declare themselves as partners.”

A more aggressive move followed when the United States and United Kingdom, supported by Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands, first launched military strikes against Houthi targets on January 12. Subsequently, the U.S. has continued with retaliatory strikes, relisted the Houthis as “specially designated global terrorist group” and is now calling for a “world response” to deal with the crisis.

Initially, the Houthis were attacking ships with direct links to Israel; however, the more recent attacks have attacked ships of countries which they saw as “providing support” to Israel. India, which has so far officially maintained a neutral position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, was directly drawn into the crisis when a commercial ship heading toward Pipavav, in India’s Gujarat state, was hijacked, allegedly by the Houthis. In another instance, a ship docked at the Mangalore Port, MV Chem Pluto, was attacked by a projectile launched by Houthi rebels. Just a day later, a Gabon-flagged vessel with Indian crew onboard was struck by a one-way attack drone only 200 nautical miles off the Indian coast.

In response, the Indian Navy has deployed sophisticated maritime assets including surveillance drones, patrol aircrafts, off-shore patrol, guided missile destroyer ships, and frigates. In one of the largest exercises in the Arabian Sea in recent years, the Indian Navy carried out a complex exercise involving twin-carrier operations and coordinated deployment of over 35 aircrafts in the Arabian Sea on January 10. The Indian Navy also responded to a distress call by a Marshall Island-flagged vessel and provided timely assistance to ensure the ship and its crew were safe and free.

At the international level, India refrained from joining the multinational Operation Prosperity Guardian, despite an invitation from the United States. This led some to point out that India needs to do more diplomatically, including working with the U.S. and other countries, to provide an effective response, especially in light of its aspirations to become a security provider in the Indian Ocean. However, India’s fairly passive response reflects a careful assessment of the evolving situation, allowing New Delhi the time and space to respond in a manner which allows it to maximize its own interests.

At the outset, it is important to understand the domestic factors at play behind the Houthi attacks. Despite their proclaimed objective of expressing support for Palestine, for the Houthis, the war in Gaza is nothing more than an opportune moment to raise their profile at home. Their domestic legitimacy is being questioned in Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen after years of failing to pay public service employees. In a rare display of disaffection, since August 2023, teachers in Houthi-controlled areas have been staging several protests to demand fair compensation.

This has even caused disaffection among the ranks, as Houthi leaders have taken to hunger strikes to demand payment of salaries to employees. The Houthis had taken to responding to criticisms with arrests or “investigations,” which further aggravated discontent among citizens. The level of dissatisfaction was so high that ordinary people even began to question how long the Houthis would remain in power. Therefore, drawing on the ideas of diversionary theory of war, it is not a stretch to assume that the attacks come as an attempt to divert attention away from the domestic political situation.

Another important related dynamic is the special relationship between Iran and the Houthis. While the Houthis cannot be considered a “proxy” for Iran – the way Hezbollah is in Lebanon – they are more integrated than ever before in the Iranian armed network. Experts assess that Tehran is likely providing both material support and training to carry out the complex drone and anti-ship missile attacks in the Red Sea.

Amid the Houthi attacks, Iran sent a warship to the Red Sea, as a show of force. While Tehran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the Red Sea attacks, it was among the first nations to strongly condemn the U.S.-U.K. strikes in Yemen, describing them as “arbitrary” and in violation of international law.

While Tehran will refrain from any active involvement in the crisis, two things are clear. Iran will continue to reject, and possibly hamper, any possible Western attempts at resolving the Red Sea, and Iran is arguably the only country with covert, if not overt, backchannel links with the Houthi militia.

These two factors play an important role in understanding the efficacy of the retaliatory, largely Western, response to the attacks. With their attacks on the Houthis, Washington and London tried to send the message that they are militarily prepared to take any action to protect people and the free flow of commerce. But the reality is that the Houthis still have the ability to carry out attacks. Indeed, the Houthis have continued with retaliatory attacks, including a missile strike which hit a U.S. owned ship. In what can only be described as a double whammy, the Houthis seem to have achieved their objective of distracting citizens from the pressing domestic issues, who have now taken to the streets to protest against the U.S. and U.K.

As the United States does not want to get embroiled in a larger regional conflict in the Middle East, President Joe Biden reportedly sent a “private message” to Iran about the Houthis. While the contents of the message are obviously classified, it sends a strong message about the role Tehran can play in deescalating, if not ending, the crisis. This is where the pragmatic prudence of India’s seemingly muted response to the crisis lies.

In a recent visit by Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to Tehran, he raised the issue of the attacks with his Iranian counterpart, highlighting how the “fraught situation” is “not to the benefit of any party.” According to a press release from the U.S. Department of State, before the visit, Jaishankar had a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, where both sides expressed “shared concerns over reckless Houthi attacks in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.” Such diplomacy is characteristic of New Delhi’s tightrope balance between Iran and the United States.

In light of India’s seemingly pro-Israel posture as the crisis in Gaza intensifies, some see New Delhi as getting enmeshed into the “U.S.-led security ecosystem” in a move away from its traditionally nonaligned position. However, the Red Sea crisis comes as a stark reminder that pragmatic flexibility is, and likely will remain, a feature of India’s policy approach to the Middle East.
NSB
Chinese research vessel heads to Maldives, could concern India (Reuters)
Reuters [1/22/2024 8:34 AM, Krishn Kaushik, 5239K, Neutral]
A Chinese research vessel is on its way to the Maldives, according to an Indian military official and an independent researcher, as new Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu deepens ties with Beijing, distancing from New Delhi.

It is likely to raise concern in New Delhi, which has previously viewed the presence of such vessels close to its shores, including in Sri Lanka in 2022, as problematic.

These vessels are not military ships, officially, but India and others worry about the military use of their research.

Relations between traditional friends New Delhi and Male have soured since President Muizzu took office in November riding an ‘India Out’ campaign.

Both New Delhi and Beijing vie for influence on the tiny Indian Ocean nation but the new government in Male is pivoting towards China and has asked India to withdraw its nearly 80 troops stationed there.

The Chinese vessel is en-route to Male, open source intelligence researcher Damien Symon wrote on social media platform X, saying Xiang Yang Hong 03 “is entering the Indian Ocean Region, displaying its destination as Male, the vessel is expected to run an ocean survey operation in the Indian Ocean Region raising concern in #India”.

An Indian military official confirmed Symon’s finding and said they are monitoring its movement.

The Maldivian president’s office, India’s foreign ministry and China’s defence ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

New Delhi has in the past flagged similar visits by other Chinese research vessels with its other littoral neighbour Sri Lanka, which has denied permission for such vessels to dock on its ports since 2022.

In 2019, India expelled another Chinese research vessel from its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) after it entered without permission.

A senior Indian security official said China’s research vessels are “dual use” which means the information gathered by them can be used for both civilian and military purposes, including the deployment of submarines.

Both the Indian military and security officials spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly on the subject.

Earlier this month, state-affiliated Chinese media warned against calling its maritime research in the Indian Ocean Region a threat, after an American think tank said China’s navy could "leverage the insights gained from these missions" for deployment of naval forces.

Vietnam and Indonesia have previously claimed that similar Chinese research vessels had entered their EEZ.
Sri Lanka Keeps Interest Rates Unchanged as Economy Rebounds (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [1/22/2024 9:54 PM, Anusha Ondaatjie, 5543K, Positive]
Sri Lanka’s central bank kept its benchmark rate unchanged for the first time in five months as the economy gradually rebounds and inflation starts to pick up.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka left the standing lending facility rate at 10%, in line with most of the forecasts from economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The bank lowered the rate four times by a total of 650 basis points in 2023. The deposit rate was also held at 9%.

“The Board arrived at this decision following a comprehensive assessment of domestic and international macroeconomic developments in order to maintain inflation at the targeted level of 5% over the medium term, while enabling the economy to reach its potential,” the bank said in a statement.

Sri Lanka’s economy expanded for the first time in nearly two years in the July-September quarter, gradually recovering from an unprecedented crisis and historic debt default in 2022. The South Asian nation received a $3 billion financial bailout from the International Monetary Fund and is in the process of restructuring its debt.

“The Board was of the view that there is space for market interest rates to continue to adjust downwards in line with past monetary policy easing measures and the falling risk premia attached to government securities,” the central bank said.

Inflation has come down sharply from a peak of 70% last year, although it’s started ticking up in recent months, hitting 4% in December. Tax and food price increases are likely to fuel inflation further in January.

Acceleration of inflation in the near term is expected to be short-lived, and the spillover effects of one-off adjustments are likely to be muted due to subdued underlying demand conditions, the central bank said on Tuesday. Over the medium term, headline inflation is expected to gradually stabilize around the 5% target level “supported by appropriate policy measures,” it said.

The central bank had previously signaled a monetary policy pause, although Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe said earlier this month the stance will remain accommodative for the economy to reach its potential growth.
Sri Lanka central bank keeps policy rates unchanged to tame inflation (Reuters)
Reuters [1/22/2024 10:32 PM, Uditha Jayasinghe and Sudipto Ganguly, 5239K, Neutral]
Sri Lanka’s central bank kept interest rates steady on Tuesday, in line with market expectations, forgoing a rate cut as a new tax threatened upward pressure on expenses and fuelled concerns about inflation.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) maintained the Standing Deposit Facility Rate at 9% and the Standing Lending Facility Rate at 10%, as predicted in a Reuters poll.

The central bank said the decision was aimed at maintaining inflation at the targeted level of 5% over the medium term, while enabling the economy to reach its potential.

"The Board took note of the effects of the recent developments in taxation and supply-side factors that are likely to pose upside pressures on inflation in the near term," it said in a statement, adding that any such uptick in inflation this year was expected to be short-lived.

The central bank slashed interest rates by 650 basis points last year as Sri Lanka’s economy began a painful recovery from its worst financial crisis in more than seven decades, helped by a bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Improvements in the economy need to be translated into improved living conditions for Sri Lankans, the IMF said last week, wrapping up a technical staff visit to the country.

At the start of 2024, the island nation raised its value added tax (VAT) to 18% from 15% to meet revenue targets under the four-year $2.9 billion IMF programme.

That could spark a renewed rise in Sri Lanka’s key inflation rate, which had eased to 4% at the end of 2023 from a high of 70% in September 2022.

The central bank expects the VAT increase to add 2 percentage points to the inflation rate, while analysts predict it will add up to 4 percentage points.

"The uptick in inflation is rightly explained as caused by transitory factors of weather impacts on food prices and tax changes. And they find the rate cuts already done as sufficient to cause interest rates to ease further in the current context," said Thilina Panduwawala, head of research at Frontier Research.

Past monetary policy easing measures and a decline in the risk premium on government securities have created further space for market lending interest rates to decline, the central bank said.

Sri Lanka will need to secure agreements with creditors in the next few months to get past the second review of the IMF programme, due in the first half of 2024. The country’s total external debt is $36.4 billion, according to the latest data released by the finance ministry.

Panduwawala expects the central bank to forgo any further easing for the time being "unless there are some visible delays on external debt restructuring".

"Rates of government securities will keep coming down, especially in the short term and risk premia will keep adjusting down with the improvements in the fiscal position and completion of external debt restructuring," said Udeeshan Jonas, chief strategist at equity research firm CAL Group.
Central Asia
World Bank eyes Central Asia to expand renewable energy project (Nikkei Asia)
Nikkei Asia [1/22/2024 7:16 AM, Sayumi Take, 293K, Positive]
The World Bank is looking into expanding a new project that aims to diversify renewable energy supply chains in Central Asia and Latin America, President Ajay Banga told reporters Monday.

Together with Japan, the multilateral lender launched the Resilient and Inclusive Supply-chain Enhancement initiative last October. The initiative aims to help emerging economies that produce critical minerals used in batteries, solar panels and other green equipment to build capacity by offering them financial and technological assistance.

"We are working with two African countries already on trying to get them to line up for this," Banga said during his first official visit to Tokyo as chief of the bank. "We think that some Central Asian countries could be good candidates, as well as some in Latin America," he added.

The initiative aims to reduce the risks of overreliance on China, which dominates key stages in the manufacture of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.

The idea is to encourage countries with "the blessing" of minerals and other natural resources "to not only have an extractive economy where the minerals are taken ... [but] to help build value-added manufacturing in these countries, so they get to earn more from the value chain," Banga said.

The former CEO of Mastercard started his five-year term as chief of the World Bank last June. He has pledged to reform the organization so it can meet its fundamental goal of ending poverty, while at the same time confronting the climate crisis, among other challenges, as the two issues are increasingly interconnected.

Banga said that part of the answer to these challenges is to get more private-sector investment into emerging-market projects that can generate more electricity from renewable energy to supply local populations.

Days into his role as president, Banga set up a team of senior leaders from BlackRock, HSBC and other asset management companies to address the barriers hindering corporate investment for such purposes.

The team has found that "wind and solar [energy] are now technology-at-scale. ... The per unit cost of electricity generated from wind and solar is cheaper than that from fossil fuels, without subsidy." But companies are not "breaking down the doors of even the middle-income countries to invest in renewables," due to uncertain regulatory policies, political risks and difficulty in foreign exchange hedging, said Banga.

The bank is working to address these issues. Encouraging the private sector to fulfill its role will help "build trust between the Global South and the Global North. ... The Global South needs to see things getting done," he said.

The bank chief, who was born in India, was nominated by U.S. President Joe Biden after his predecessor, David Malpass, resigned nearly a year before his term was set to expire following criticism that he was a climate-change denier.

Malpass was nominated by former President Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump’s reelection in November is stoking fears that a second Trump administration would backtrack on multilateral efforts to tackle climate and other challenges. The U.S. is one of the top contributors to global warming.

The impact on the world economy of a second Trump term is "impossible to predict," said Banga. But, he added, "I believe that he understands the need for development. ... President Trump being a businessman -- just like President Biden knows this fact -- they know the best use of a capital dollar."
Powerful 7.1 earthquake strikes Kyrgyzstan-Xinjiang border, several injuries reported (Reuters)
Reuters [1/22/2024 8:28 PM, Gnaneshwar Rajan, Olzhas Auyezov, and Bernard Orr, 60K, Neutral]
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the Kyrgyzstan-Xinjiang border region on Tuesday with reports of several injuries and collapsed houses, Chinese state media reported.

The epicentre of the quake struck at 2:09 a.m. (1809 GMT) and at a depth of 22 km (13 miles) in the mountainous border area of Wushi County in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, according to the China Earthquake Administration.

According to the Xinjiang Earthquake Agency, the epicentre is about 50 km (31 miles) from Wushi, with five villages located within a 20-km (12 miles) radius around the epicentre, Xinhua News reported.

As of 8 a.m. (0000 GMT), 40 aftershocks have been recorded, according to China Earthquake Networks Center.

Netizens on China’s Weibo social media platform reported that the earthquake was felt strongly in Urumqi, Korla, Kashgar, Yining and surrounding areas.

The Xinjiang railway department immediately stopped operations and 27 trains were reportedly affected by the earthquake, Xinhua said.

China’s Earthquake Administration said it immediately activated emergency response services in conjunction with the Office of the Earthquake Relief Headquarters and the Ministry of Emergency Management, dispatching a group to guide local rescue efforts.

China’s Ministry of Emergency Management said several departments coordinated relief efforts, providing cotton tents, coats, quilts, mattresses, folding beds and heating stoves, Xinhua said.

Over the past 24 hours, Xinjiang has been struck by a few sizeable earthquakes.

In nearby Kazakhstan, the emergencies ministry reported the latest earthquake at a magnitude of 6.7.

In Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, residents fled their houses and gathered outside despite cold weather, some dressed in pyjamas and slippers. No damage has been reported.

The tremors, followed by aftershocks about 30 minutes later, were also felt in Uzbekistan.
Major Earthquake Hits China-Kyrgyzstan Border (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [1/22/2024 8:27 PM, Staff, 163K, Negative]
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck along the mountainous China-Kyrgyzstan border on Tuesday, injuring at least three people.

Local authorities dispatched a team to the quake’s epicentre, Beijing’s Xinhua state news agency said, while some 800 people were on standby for any large disaster relief mission.

The major quake was registered just after 2:00 am (1800 GMT Monday) at a depth of 13 kilometres in China’s Xinjiang region, some 140 kilometres (85 miles) west of the city of Aksu.

Two residential houses and livestock sheds collapsed in the area near the epicentre, in rural Wushi County, Xinhua reported, while electricity was temporarily knocked out.

Three people in a nearby county were injured and have been hospitalised, state media said.

Video circulating on Chinese social media showed household appliances crashing to the floor as wild shaking rocked homes.

More footage shared by state broadcaster CCTV showed firemen entering a damaged building with cracked walls and police helping an injured local.

Local TV channels in the Indian capital New Delhi reported strong tremors in the city, about 1,400 kilometres away.

One Aksu resident told Xinhua that people rushed outside for safety amid the shaking despite the frigid early morning temperatures hovering around -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit).

Cao Yanglong, in the city on a business trip, told the state news agency that while on the 21st floor of a hotel, he felt like he was "going to be shaken out of bed."

People also fled their homes to seek refuge in the street in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, according to an AFP reporter, after the quake caused walls to shake and furniture to shift.

Bohobek Azhikeev, head of the Kyrgyz Ministry for Emergency Situations, said in a video message that "no casualties or damage have been registered in the city of Bishkek".

Five villages are located within 20 kilometres of the epicentre, according to Xinhua, and a slew of small aftershocks followed in the area, with magnitudes as high as 5.5.

Authorities in Kazakhstan also reported tremors, though without any casualties or major destruction confirmed so far.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, citizens streamed outside following the quake, images posted on social media and by local news outlets showed.

Tuesday’s earthquake came the day after a landslide buried dozens of people and killed at least eight in the southwest of China.

A December quake in the northwest of the country killed 148 people and displaced thousands in Gansu province.

That quake was China’s deadliest since 2014, when more than 600 people were killed in southwestern Yunnan province.

In the December earthquake, subzero temperatures made the aid operation launched in response even more challenging, with survivors huddled around outdoor fires to keep warm.
Twitter
Afghanistan
UNDP Afghanistan
@UNDPaf
[1/22/2024 4:49 AM, 73.8K followers, 11 retweets, 26 likes]
2 years after the power shift, #Afghanistan faces a bleak socio-economic scenario, with a stagnant economy, impaired banking system & restrictions on women’s rights. Explore @UNDPAf’s #Afg2YearsInReview to learn abt development trends, facts & challenges. https://t.ly/EthJ7

Beth Bailey
@BWBailey85
[1/22/2024 8:11 AM, 6.1K followers, 14 retweets, 19 likes]
.@heatherbarr1 shared her expertise and passion for supporting Afghan (and all) women’s rights on Ep. 39 of The Afghanistan Project Podcast - to learn about past, current, and future events impacting Afghan women, tune in here: https://youtu.be/dYKAOUDo2ZU?si=FxJI5pPaSPgZ8xQr
Pakistan
BilawalBhuttoZardari
@BBhuttoZardari
[1/22/2024 6:59 AM, 5.1M followers, 8.5K retweets, 9.2K likes]
Sahiwal has spoken! Laborers, farmers, women, the poor, and the youth stand with our message of a new way forward for Pakistan. The people demand a brighter future, one free of the vindictiveness and victimisation of the past. The Pakistan Peoples Party is the only party capable of ending the politics of hate and divisiveness. Join us, and we can build a peaceful, progressive, and prosperous Pakistan for all.

Madiha Afzal
@MadihaAfzal
[1/22/2024 10:17 AM, 41.7K followers, 18 retweets, 133 likes]
Pakistan’s caretaker govt says "technical" issues are responsible for recent internet outages... such peculiarly precise timing for those technical issues.

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[1/23/2024 1:56 AM, 8.3M followers, 88 retweets, 371 likes]
Each instance of internet closure costs the Pakistani economy at least Rs1.3 billion, with grave impact on the telecommunication & financial sectors, online cab services, food delivery services, inter-city transport services,postal services & couriers. https://www.dawn.com/news/1807825

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[1/23/2024 12:04 AM, 8.3M followers, 72 retweets, 276 likes]
The Pakistani courts have used restrictive interpretations on freedom of expression laws to shut down criticism of courts and erodes their credibility to uphold it against other organs of the state: reported by Institute of Research,Advocacy & Development. https://www.dawn.com/news/1807887

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[1/23/2024 1:37 AM, 261.8K followers, 4 retweets, 31 likes]
This year’s elections in Pakistan and Myanmar are unlikely to weaken the viselike grip of their militaries on domestic politics. Take Pakistan: Its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments have never been answerable to any civilian-led government. https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/South-Asia-is-still-struggling-to-deliver-on-promise-of-democracy
India
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[1/22/2024 10:16 PM, 94.7M followers, 7.8K retweets, 34K likes]
Greetings to the people of India on Parakram Diwas. Today on his Jayanti, we honour the life and courage of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. His unwavering dedication to our nation’s freedom continues to inspire.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[1/22/2024 11:11 PM, 94.7M followers, 22K retweets, 89K likes]
What we saw in Ayodhya yesterday, 22nd January, will be etched in our memories for years to come. https://twitter.com/i/status/1749645944881287268

President of India
@rashtrapatibhvn
[1/22/2024 10:22 AM, 23.9M followers, 208 retweets, 2.1K likes]
President Droupadi Murmu presented Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar. The President said that children and youth are the leaders of the future of our country. It is our duty to make them aware of Indian culture and life values ​​along with providing them modern education. https://presidentofindia.gov.in/press_releases/president-india-presents-pradhan-mantri-rashtriya-bal-puraskar

Sadanand Dhume
@dhume
[1/22/2024 10:19 PM, 170.5K followers, 27 retweets, 62 likes]
Two contrasting reactions to the new Ram temple in Ayodhya: Mukul Kesavan is miserable: “It’s worth remembering that the ethno-nationalism that the temple at Ayodhya embodies isn’t the handiwork of an erratic, populist tycoon; it is a century-old political project backed by militant cadres that number in the millions.” https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/22/modi-ram-temple-hindu-right-project @sreemoytalukdar is elated: “The glorious Ram Mandir at Ayodhya isn’t just a temple, but a symbol of reclamation that speaks of resilience, of the rebound of a wounded civilization, of a people that was dispossessed but never gave up hope, faith in the divine or sanatan dharma.” https://firstpost.com/opinion/january-22-is-the-true-discovery-of-india-as-bharat-reconnects-with-its-sanatan-past-13640362.html

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[1/22/2024 9:27 AM, 261.8K followers, 36 retweets, 105 likes]
The PRC has stepped up its survey of the Indian Ocean, including the seafloor, to facilitate submarine operations in India’s maritime backyard. If China were to open a potent maritime front against India, it would complete India’s strategic encirclement.
NSB
Awami League
@albd1971
[1/22/2024 5:41 AM, 635.2K followers, 47 retweets, 117 likes]
.@UN Secretary-General @antonioguterres congratulated Prime Minister #SheikhHasina and commended her leadership. He made the remarks while Foreign Minister @DrHasanMahmud62 met him on Sunday afternoon on the sidelines of the Third South Summit in Kampala, Uganda. During the meeting, the UN secretary-general also appreciated Bangladesh’s vital role in the call for reforming global financial architecture. He also praised Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for championing several UN-led global processes. https://tbsnews.net/bangladesh/un-secretary-general-lauds-sheikh-hasinas-leadership-778946 #NAMSummitUg2024

Sabria Chowdhury Balland
@sabriaballand
[1/23/2024 2:26 AM, 5K followers]
The #Bangladesh Bank has taken a step by printing money to provide loans to five crisis-hit Shariah-based banks, which are all controlled by Chattogram-based S Alam Group. Despite having no money in their current accounts, these banks are still conducting transactions, surviving only with the crucial support or lifeline provided by the central bank, financial experts said. https://newagebd.net/article/223548/bangladesh-bank-prints-money-to-feed-s-alams-banks

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[1/22/2024 11:42 PM, 106.5K followers, 126 retweets, 147 likes]
President Dr @MMuizzu attended the oath-taking ceremony of the Malé City Council’s newly elected Mayor and council members. Supreme Court Justice Uz Mahaz Ali Zahir administered their oath of office at a ceremony held at Dharubaaruge.

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[1/22/2024 8:55 AM, 261.8K followers, 69 retweets, 260 likes]
Maldives’s new pro-China, Islamist president, upon returning from a Beijing visit, fired the opening salvo by ordering India to withdraw its 88 non-combat military personnel by March 15. Now, he will host a PRC ship on a dual-purpose oceanographic mission.

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[1/23/2024 12:10 AM, 256.2K followers, 7 retweets, 27 likes]
Foreign Minister Hon @NPSaudnc addressed today the Asia-Pacific Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Fourth Review Conference on the Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons jointly organized by Government of Nepal and UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament.

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[1/23/2024 12:10 AM, 256.2K followers]
Here are the highlights of FM’s statement: 1. "This meeting is taking place in a sacred land, the birthplace of Lord Buddha whose profound message of peace, compassion, and non-violence aligns fully with the objective of the meeting on the agenda of disarmament."

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[1/23/2024 12:10 AM, 256.2K followers]
2. "In more than two decades of the adoption of the Programme of Action, the illicit trade and use of small arms and light weapons persists as a widespread security challenge."

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[1/23/2024 12:10 AM, 256.2K followers, 1 retweet, 1 like]
3. "Nepal’s commitment to disarmament is total and unequivocal. It is one of the objectives of our foreign policy as well. Nepal refrains from aligning with any security alliances."

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[1/23/2024 12:10 AM, 256.2K followers, 1 retweet, 2 likes]
4. "In order to succeed in preventing and eradicating illicit trade and use of small arms, we must strengthen national capacity, enhance regional initiatives and coordination, adapt strategies to address challenges posed by emerging technologies and engage all stakeholders."

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[1/23/2024 1:02 AM, 355.4K followers, 15 likes]
Speaker of #Parliament didn’t recognize me for my intervention to insist by passing this Bill objective of dealing with real crimes online will not be met as platforms will not comply at the very least without a safe harbor condition. Now vote to decide to proceed w debate or not

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[1/22/2024 11:10 PM, 355.4K followers, 10 retweets, 74 likes]
Almost all opposition parties in @ParliamentLK met Speaker now to urge him to postpone proposed debate on #OnlineSafetyBill scheduled for later today (34/56 clauses unconstitutional) Pointed out grave consequences of passage of this draconian legislation. Let’s see what he does…

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[1/22/2024 11:30 PM, 355.4K followers, 3 likes]
He just now adjourned @ParliamentLK to discuss the matter once again w party leaders.

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[1/22/2024 11:49 PM, 355.4K followers, 5 likes]
So Speaker @ParliamentLK is trying to go ahead with debate w 42 clauses to be amended as per below. This is the position of the #SriLanka government. Standing orders dictate that Oversight Com Report must be tabled, but no such report.
Central Asia
Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[1/22/2024 10:02 PM, 28.7K followers, 9 retweets, 25 likes]
Panic in Almaty as earthquake tremors hit - and they were scarey, flat and furniture shaking. People running out into snow barefoot in nightwear, traffic jams (of course, it’s Almaty) and queues at petrol stations as people rush out of town #Kazakhstan

Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[1/23/2024 12:25 AM, 28.7K followers, 7 likes]
Don’t fall for fake news, hotlines working, emergency centres open in schools after last night’s #earthquake in Almaty, say latest "don’t panic" SMS messages from emergency services. 44 injured, some after jumping out of windows, not clear how much damage yet #Kazakhstan

Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[1/22/2024 10:08 PM, 28.7K followers, 5 retweets, 17 likes]
Modernist architecture all the rage in #Uzbekistan, better known for Timurid domes, but preserving Soviet legacy co-exists with destruction in Samarkand - great read by @pashab05 @NikkeiAsia w @caravanistan @UZAmbassador @MatyakubowaMira @Diyora_Rafi

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[1/22/2024 9:07 AM, 152.3K followers, 1 retweet, 15 likes]
Today, the President of #Uzbekistan reviewed the presentation of proposals on accelerating reforms in the #healthcare sector.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[1/22/2024 9:04 AM, 152.3K followers, 2 retweets, 21 likes]
Also, President Shavkat #Mirziyoyev was briefed on the results achieved in the field of #sports and progress in preparations for international competitions.

Furqat Sidiqov
@FurqatSidiq
[1/22/2024 9:09 PM, 1.2K followers, 1 retweet, 8 likes]
The historic day for the #EmbassyRow. We’re proud to open the #Beruni’s monument, an outstanding scientist, who lived in the 10th cent. I’m confident that this monument for one of the world’s geniuses will inspire everyone to seek knowledge and make our world a better place.

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[1/22/2024 5:15 PM, 22.5K followers, 3 retweets, 2 likes]
Russia: Usman Baratov, currently in pre-trial custody, heads the interregional Uzbek association called “Vatandosh.” He was also a shadow/alternative presidential candidate in Uzbekistan years ago, during the Karimov era.

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[1/22/2024 4:44 PM, 22.5K followers, 4 retweets, 3 likes]
As much as we enjoy debating with Fred Starr @CACI_SilkRoad on current affairs in Central Asia and America’s role in the region, this afternoon talk in snowy Washington about medieval science in what is now #stans was both educational and relaxing. He stressed on Biruni’s arguments on #numbers and Ibn Sina’s arguments on #logic. Stimulating. @UZEmbassyDC

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[1/22/2024 4:31 PM, 22.5K followers, 5 retweets, 14 likes]
This could have been a monument to Amir Temur or some legendary warrior. Always imagined Uzbeks would put out something like that. But @UZEmbassyDC chose to showcase a scientific genius. So, now they could make this a trio - Biruni, Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980-1037) and Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) Science history #CentralAsia tour on Mass Ave, Washington

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[1/22/2024 4:12 PM, 22.5K followers, 5 retweets, 14 likes]
Scientist Abu Rayhon Biruni (973-1048) in front of the #Uzbekistan Embassy in Washington. The bust came from Tashkent, made by a local talent there. http://Amirsoy.com is the sponsor. @UZEmbassyDC @uzbekmfa

{End of Report}
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