NEW DELHI: India’s decision to abstain from voting on a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Russia cease its invasion of Ukraine does not mean support for Moscow, experts said, but reflects New Delhi’s reliance on its Cold War ally for energy, weapons and support in conflicts with neighbors.
India on Friday regretted countries giving up the path of diplomacy but refrained from voting along with the United States on the resolution that would have meant altering its ties with Russia spanning over seven decades. Russia vetoed the resolution while China also abstained.
“We have not supported what Russia has done. We have abstained. It is the right thing to do under the circumstances,” said G. Parthasarthy, a retired Indian diplomat.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday appealed for an “immediate cessation of violence.” Modi called for efforts to return to diplomacy, saying the “differences between Russia and the NATO group can only be resolved through honest and sincere dialogue.”
In the past, India depended on Soviet support and its veto power in the Security Council in its dispute over Kashmir with its longtime rival Pakistan.
The Himalayan territory is divided between India and Pakistan, but both claim it its entirety. India accuses Pakistan of supporting armed rebels in Kashmir in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and pushed the nuclear-armed rivals to fight two wars. Pakistan denies the accusations.
India warily watched as Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan landed in Moscow as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. Putin met with Khan for nearly three hours in the middle of the crisis.
The war in Ukraine not only added to challenges faced by New Delhi in Kashmir but also along its restive mountain frontier with China. Both Pakistan and China are seen to be on the Russian side, and India believes Moscow has leverage to change Beijing’s hard stance on the border issue.
A confrontation in June 2020 along the disputed China-India border dramatically altered their already fraught relationship as the rival troops fought with rocks, clubs and fists. At least 20 Indian troops and four Chinese soldiers were killed. Tensions have since persisted despite talks.
As the fighting continued in Ukraine, several organizations held protests in the Indian capital for a third day Saturday, demanding an end to the Russian aggression and pressing the Indian government to evacuate thousands of Indians, mostly students, stranded there.
Pratap Sen, a 20-year-old student, said India’s decision to abstain from the Security Council vote may not be ideal but it was a better option in the circumstances.
“International politics is like the wild, wild west. (India) has to balance between the US and western world and Russia, a close ally of India for decades,” he said.
C. Raja Mohan, a senior fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the problem was India’s continued reliance on Russian weapons.
“This is not just an abstract question. But the fact is that India is in the middle of a war with China. India is locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with China over a disputed frontier,” he said.
India and Russia have set a target of $30 billion in bilateral trade by the end of 2025. India is also dependent on Russian oil and gas.
It imported 1.8 million tones of thermal coal from Russia in 2021, and accounts for about 0.2 percent of Russia’s natural gas exports. State-run Gas Authority of India Limited has a 20-year deal with Russia’s Gazprom for 2.5 million tons of liquefied natural gas a year, which started in 2018, according to Indian media reports.
Modi and Putin met last year to discuss defense and trade relations, and signed an agreement to extend their military technology cooperation for the next decade.
India’s acquisition of Russian S-400 missile systems, which it considers to be critical in countering China, could also prove to be an irritant in Indo-US ties. The S-400 is a sophisticated surface-to-air defense system and is expected to give India strategic deterrence against rivals China and Pakistan.
New Delhi has sought support from Washington and its allies in confronting China, a common ground for the Indo-Pacific security alliance known as “the Quad” that also includes Australia and Japan.
And India has been diversifying its weapons purchases with US equipment as well. During the Donald Trump presidency, the US and India concluded defense deals worth over $3 billion. Bilateral defense trade increased from near zero in 2008 to $15 billion in 2019.
As the Ukraine crisis deepens, the real problem for India is how it navigates international sanctions against Russia.
The missile system deal with Moscow has put India at risk of US sanctions, after Washington asked its partners to stay away from Russian military equipment.
“The problem for India has just begun. The urgent need for it is to break out of dependence on the Russian weapons,” Raja Mohan said.
Noor Ahmed Baba, a political scientist, said that Western countries will be unhappy with India, but they probably can’t afford to entirely alienate New Delhi.
“After all, countries balance principles with real politicking and diplomacy,” he said. “It’s not only India’s advantage to be with the West, but they also need India.”
India walks tightrope over calls for Russia’s isolation
https://arab.news/mwm27
India walks tightrope over calls for Russia’s isolation
- On Friday, New Delhi regretted countries giving up the path of diplomacy
- Refrained from voting on resolution that meant altering its ties with Russia
Amnesty urges halt to Ethiopia evictions for urban development
- PM Abiy Ahmed's “corridor project”, which aims to renovate and widen streets, has seen homes, shops, and offices razed in Addis Ababa and at least 58 other cities since its launch in December 2022
ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia is conducting forced evictions on an “unprecedented” scale, Amnesty International said on Monday, urging authorities to “immediately pause” urban renewal projects.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in power since 2018, is spearheading a “corridor project” in which streets in the capital and in cities across the country have been renovated and widened.
Launched in December 2022, the project has seen homes, shops, and offices razed in Addis Ababa and at least 58 other cities, leaving parts of the capital resembling a giant building site.
Ethiopian authorities have “failed to adequately consult with affected communities, provided insufficient notice, and none of the people reported receiving compensation,” Amnesty said in their report.
The international NGO urged a pause in evictions and suspension of the project “until a human rights impact assessment is conducted.”
Authorities did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.
The scale of the evictions is “unprecedented in Ethiopia,” the report said, describing a climate of fear among residents, who are “uncertain if they will be the next to be displaced.”
The NGO interviewed 47 families who were evicted in Addis Ababa between January and February of this year. All requested anonymity, citing security reasons.
Family members told Amnesty that only a week after a public meeting, local officials came to their doors, “asking them to leave their homes within three days and warning them that their homes would be demolished.”
“The 47 respondents stated that their homes were demolished within 24 to 72 hours after officials delivered the door-to-door notice,” Amnesty said, with families forced into rental properties on the city’s outskirts.
“My child is suffering because his school is now too far,” said one parent, saying they were grappling with mental health issues as their social lives had been “ruined.”
“Life has also gotten expensive due to additional transport and house rent costs,” another said.
Two journalists contacted by Amnesty also said they were “victims of harassment” when they attempted to report on the corridor work. They did not provide further details.
International partners “should engage Ethiopian authorities to end forced eviction with no further delay,” Amnesty researcher Haimanot Ashenafi told AFP.
Authorities in Ethiopia, home to some 130 million people, are regularly criticized by global organizations and NGOs for human rights abuses and the repression of dissenting voices.
Indian shrimp industry sails in troubled waters after Trump tariffs
- Farmers are seeing demand dry up amid the uncertainty as exporters have cut offer prices by a tenth since the tariffs
GANAPAVARAM, India/GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador: Turbulence unleashed by President Donald Trump’s tariffs could rock global shipments of shrimp to the United States, with exporters in biggest supplier India saying they endanger 2,000 containers packed with the frozen delicacy.
But Ecuador, thousands of kilometers nearer to the United States faces a lower tariff rate and stands to benefit, the exporters say, as shrimp is its most important export after oil.
India’s shrimp industry is staring at a tariff of 26 percent under Trump’s July plan, which threatens a thriving $7-billion seafood export market heavily reliant on US supermarket chains such as Walmart and Kroger as buyers look to renegotiate rates.
Farmers are seeing demand dry up amid the uncertainty as exporters have cut offer prices by a tenth since the tariffs.
“We are suffering huge losses,” said S.V.L. Pathi Raju, 63, standing by the aquaculture pond where he feeds and grows shrimp in India’s southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh.
“We don’t know who can resolve our price issues,” added Raju, one of several families in the state’s remote village of Ganapavaram grappling with dwindling sales to exporters.
Many also face high payments for shrimp feed and rentals for the land where the saline ponds have been set up.
“I am not sure how I will sustain prices,” said another farmer, 60-year-old Uppalapati Nagaraju, adding that he had been entirely unaware of the concept of tariffs.
“Had I known, I would not have started my cultivation.”
In the face of erratic demand from exporters, he now regrets having begun shrimp cultivation just 15 days before the tariff news. Although Trump has delayed the 26 percent rate until July, even the current rate of 10 percent has made exporters skittish.
The United States and China are among India’s major markets for seafood exports that touched $7.3 billion last year, on a volume of 1.8 million metric tons that was an all-time high.
Shrimp formed the major component, with the 300,000 farmers of Andhra Pradesh contributing the most to industry supplies, accounting for 92 percent of India’s seafood exports of $2.5 billion last year to its biggest market, the United States.
Industry representatives have joined a state government panel weighing the impact of tariffs and looking for ways to boost exports to other countries, such as China.
But the exporters fear Ecuador’s competitive edge from Trump’s planned lower tariff rate of 10 percent for the South American nation, particularly since it is much closer to the United States, its second biggest market for shrimp.
Yet Ecuadorean producers, with $1.55 billion in shipments in 2024, are less optimistic.
Although US consumers have fueled growth in the area of processed shrimp, Ecuador has yet to attain the capacity to replace India’s production, said Jose Antonio Camposano, president of its National Chamber of Aquaculture.
India “will be obliged to look for other markets where Ecuador is selling, like China and the European Union, so we’ll have more pressure in other markets,” Camposano added.
JOURNEY OF 40 DAYS
Reuters visited one Indian factory where shrimp was washed and machine sorted automatically by size before a manual quality check by workers in masks and gloves. Then a conveyor belt whisked the seafood away to be quick-frozen.
Thousands of tons of frozen shrimp leave Andhra Pradesh each year on a voyage that usually takes 40 days to arrive at ports in New York, Houston and Miami, en route to restaurants and the shelves of retailers such as Safeway and Costco.
The chief of India’s seafood exporters group, G. Pawan Kumar, said he was worried about shipping containers already packed with frozen produce at previously agreed rates now set to be renegotiated by US buyers following the tariffs.
“Ten percent is high, we exporters operate on a 3 percent to 4 percent margin,” said Kumar, president of the Seafood Exporters Association of India, which is pushing the government to win the industry exemptions in trade talks with the United States.
“It’s game over” for the Indian industry if the tariff rate of 26 percent takes effect in July, said one shrimp exporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He was in talks with US clients who did not want to fully absorb the 10 percent tariff, he said, pointing to the risk of earning no profit if he had to sell 130 shipping containers already packed.
In Texas, the seafood section at a Walmart supermarket was piled high with packs of frozen shrimp, among them a “jumbo” variant labelled a product of India and priced at $7.92, under Walmart’s own “Great Value” brand.
“We have built long-lasting and deep relations with suppliers over the years,” said Latriece Watkins, the chief merchandising officer for Walmart in the United States. “We expect that to continue, going forward.”
Xi warns protectionism ‘leads nowhere’ as starts SE Asia tour
- Beijing is trying to present itself as a stable alternative to an erratic Trump
BEIJING: Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned Monday that protectionism “leads nowhere” and that a trade war would have “no winners,” state media said, as he was due to kick off a tour of Southeast Asia with a visit to Vietnam.
Xi’s first overseas trip of the year will see him visit Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia as Beijing seeks to tighten regional trade ties and offset the impact of huge tariffs unleashed by his US counterpart Donald Trump.
He will meet his three Southeast Asian counterparts on a tour that “bears major importance” for the broader region, Beijing has said.
Writing in an article published Monday in Vietnam’s major Nhan Dan newspaper, Xi urged the two countries to “resolutely safeguard the multilateral trading system, stable global industrial and supply chains, and open and cooperative international environment,” Beijing’s Xinhua News Agency said.
He also reiterated Beijing’s line that a “trade war and tariff war will produce no winner, and protectionism will lead nowhere,” the agency added.
Beijing is trying to present itself as a stable alternative to an erratic Trump, who announced — and then mostly reversed — sweeping tariffs this month that sent global markets into a tailspin.
Vietnam was Southeast Asia’s biggest buyer of Chinese goods, with a bill of $161.9 billion, followed by Malaysia, which imported $101.5 billion worth in 2024.
Xi will be in Vietnam on Monday and Tuesday, his first trip there since December 2023.
Vietnam has long pursued a “bamboo diplomacy” approach, striving to stay on good terms with both China and the United States.
The two countries have close economic ties, but Hanoi shares US concerns about Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the contested South China Sea.
China claims almost all of the South China Sea as its own, but this is disputed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brunei.
The Chinese leader in his Monday article insisted Beijing and Hanoi could resolve those disputes through dialogue.
“We should properly manage differences and safeguard peace and stability in our region,” Xi wrote, according to Xinhua.
“With vision, we are fully capable of properly settling maritime issues through consultation and negotiation.”
Zelensky urges Trump to visit Ukraine to see war devastation: CBS
- The invitation comes as Trump pushes for a quick end to the more than three-year war, with the United States holding direct talks with Russia despite its unrelenting attacks on Ukraine
WASHINGTON: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged US counterpart Donald Trump on Sunday to visit his country to better understand the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion.
“Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead,” he said according to a transcript of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview to be broadcast Sunday.
With a visit to Ukraine, Trump “will understand what (Russian leader Vladimir) Putin did.”
The invitation comes as Trump pushes for a quick end to the more than three-year war, with the United States holding direct talks with Russia despite its unrelenting attacks on Ukraine.
Washington has also held talks with Ukrainian officials on a potential truce.
Zelensky’s invitation follows the heated row at the White House in late February between the Ukrainian president, Trump and US Vice President JD Vance, which played out in front of press.
Vance at the time accused Ukraine of hosting foreign leaders on “propaganda tours” to win support.
Zelensky repeated his denial of that allegation, and told CBS that if Trump chose to visit Ukraine, “we will not prepare anything. It will not be theater.”
Gabon junta chief Oligui Nguema wins presidential election deemed to be fair
- Seeking to shed his military strongman image, Oligui allowed foreign and independent media to film the ballot count
- The new president faces a litany of problems in the oil-rich country, from crumbling infrastructure to widespread poverty
LIBREVILLE: Junta chief Brice Oligui Nguema celebrated a huge victory in Gabon’s presidential election Sunday after provisional results gave him 90.35 percent of the vote.
Oligui, who ended more than five decades of corruption-plagued rule by the Bongo family in August 2023, assuming the role of transitional president, had promised to return the country to democratic rule.
“God does not abandon his people,” Oligui told hundreds of delighted supporters at his campaign headquarters, paying tribute to what he called “the maturity of the Gabonese people.”
Interior Minister Hermann Immongault said earlier that Oligui had won a seven-year mandate with more than 575,200 votes, or 90.3 percent, of the votes counted so far.
His main rival, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, took three percent of the vote and six other candidates failed to win more than 1 percent in Saturday’s election.
Even before the count was completed, the official Gabonese media had that announced Mr. Oligui was “far ahead.”
Voters in the nation of 2.3 million people flocked to the ballot boxes on Saturday to take part in an election officially marking the end of military rule. The interior ministry put the participation rate at 70.4 percent.
French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated Oligui on his win and the conduct of the election in a telephone call, his office said.
The day after voting, the streets of the capital Libreville were calm — in contrast with elections in 2016 and 2023 marked by tensions and unrest.
“I hadn’t voted in a long time, but this time, I saw a ray or something that made me go out and vote,” 58-year-old Olivina Migombe told AFP while en route to church on Sunday.
“I believe in change this time,” the professed Oligui voter added.
The new president faces a litany of problems in the oil-rich country, from crumbling infrastructure to widespread poverty, all while laboring under a crushing mountain of debt.
Oligui had sought to shed his military strongman image and even ditched his general’s uniform to run for a seven-year term.
The junta leader dominated the campaign, with his seven challengers, led by ousted leader Ali Bongo’s last prime minister, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, largely invisible by comparison.
Critics accuse Oligui of having failed to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, whom he served for years.
For the first time, foreign and independent media were allowed to film the ballot count.
International observers at polling stations across the country did not see major incidents, according to first reports.
In total, some 920,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots at 3,037 polling stations, of which 96 were abroad.
Already, in the first results released by state media on Sunday morning, Oligui was the overwhelming favorite to win in around 30 polling stations, some of them returning results of 100 percent of the vote in his favor.
