Author: Manish Chand

India’s Security Council dream get wings: Will it fly?

- by Manish Chand

It’s a leap of faith, uplifting spirits and bringing much cheer to India’s diplomatic establishment. In a milestone of sorts, the UN General Assembly has finally adopted a negotiating text for reform and expansion of the UN Security Council, ending a thousand visions and revisions that marked the process for over two decades. The adoption of the negotiating text by consensus is a big boost for India’s quest for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and the larger drive to make the global body more reflective of the tectonic power shift from the West to the rest.

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Branding SDGs: Star power blitz & glitz to tell world about UN Global Goals

- by Manish Chand

Seven billion people, seven days and 17 goals. Call it Mission 7717, if you like, or simply Mission 17. Blending glamour, glitz, star shower and snappy story-telling, the staid United Nations, known for pompous well-meaning speeches, has launched an audacious path-breaking campaign to tell the world about its “Global Goals” of weeding out poverty, combating inequality and climate change by 2030.

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Blending strategy with economic ballast, India, UAE raise the bar

- by Manish Chand

There is a new upswing in India’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, home to 2.6 million-strong Indian community and New Delhi’s third largest trading partner after China and the US. Barely weeks after the successful trip of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the Gulf state in August, UAE’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdulla Bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited India on September 2 and 3, imparting a fresh momentum to multilayered bilateral ties.

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UNGA president-elect in India: Modi to push for fast-tracking UNSC expansion

- by Manish Chand

Ahead of the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), India’s top leadership is set to engage the President-elect of the UNGA Mogens Lykketoft and impress upon him the imperative of fast-tracking reforms of the UN Security Council.

Mr Lykketoft, a former speaker of Denmark’s parliament, will succeed Uganda’s Sam Kuetsa and will begin his UNGA presidency in September at the commencement of the 70th General Assembly session. He will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

The reforms of the UNSC have languished for years due to procedural quibbles and indifference of the permanent members of the UNSC, who are not keen to let emerging powers inside this exclusive club. India is hoping for for the launch of the text-based negotiations at the 70th anniversary of the founding of the UN, and this will be the key point of discussions between Mr Modi and Mr Lykketoft.

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India-Iran ties set to fly high: Energy partnership, enhanced trade on agenda

- by Manish Chand

India’s multi-faceted ties with Iran are set to move into a higher trajectory, with a spate of significant outcomes emerging from Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s day-long visit to New Delhi. The proposals firmed up during the visit will scale up economic ties and transform the buyer-seller relationship to a genuine energy partnership.

Indian private investors got a shot in the arm with Mr Zarif announcing in New Delhi that Iran is open to Indian private companies investing in the Chabahar Port. Mr Zarif is on his first visit to India after the historic nuclear deal struck between Iran and the P5+1 member countries last month.

“Both India and Iran are eager to engage in this. I believe we will soon start serious work,” Mr Zarif said in New Delhi, adding that the two countries already have an agreement in place. The deal to develop the Chabahar Port was signed between India and Iran in May 2015.

India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met her Iranian counterpart and discussed a host of “forward-looking proposals” that are set the stage for accelerating bilateral relations across the spectrum, which suffered due to a spate of Western sanctions imposed on Tehran to curtail its nuclear programme suspected of developing atomic weapons.

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Is India punching below its weight? NSA Doval thinks so, what about you?

- by Manish Chand

Is India punching below its weight? It’s the mother of all questions for contemporary practitioners of statecraft and diplomacy, and the country’s strategic thinking elite.

One can go on debating this proposition endlessly, and the country’s diplomatic-strategic establishment can delude itself into comforting clichés about the emergence of India as a major power in the shifting global geopolitical landscape. But National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is a staunch realist, and he has rearticulated what has been spoken often in the strategic circles – yes, India has been underperforming when it comes to leveraging its growing economy, its status as the world’s most populous democracy, and its indubitable soft power strengths.

“India has a mentality to punch below its weight. We should not punch below our weight or above our weight, but improve our weight and punch proportionately,” Mr Doval said in his address entitled ‘State Security, Statecraft, and Conflict of values’ at the 21st Lalit Doshi Memorial Lecture in Mumbai.

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Gujarat/Goa connection: Why India-Mozambique ties matter

- by Manish Chand

In Maputo, being Indian is not an oddity – it’s not just 20,000 persons of Indian origin living in this picturesque Lusophone country that make you feel at home, but a sense of deep cultural connections that hark back centuries, predating Vasco da Gama’s voyages. It does not matter if you don’t understand a word of Portuguese; the sensuous lilts of music, spicy food and rich emotions draw you in. And it’s a relationship that is literally shining in the sun — drive around 20 miles away from Maputo to the India-assisted Solar Photovoltaic Manufacturing Plant set up in Matola Rio Administrative Post, and you get a sense of what’s bringing the Gujarat-educated Mozambique President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi to India on a five-day visit (starting August 4).

The solar panel plant, which was built with India’s Line of Credit and technical assistance over two years ago, is now literally bringing clean light into the lives of thousands of people in villages, and also generating new employment opportunities. “The solar panel factory represents an important milestone on the development of our country,” said Castro José Elias, Provincial Director for Maputo.

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India-China ties: Forging a new idiom of major powers relations

- by Manish Chand

It’s a transformational moment in the history of India-China relations, marked by an infusion of fresh energy, dynamism and creativity in the way the two neighbours engage with each other. This is the first time the leaders of the two Asian giants have visited each other’s country within nine months, signalling their resolve to proactively cooperate in fashioning an emerging Asian century. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s May 14-16 visit to three cities in China – Xian, Beijing and Shanghai – was unique in many ways and cohered multiple strands of variegated relationship between the two Asian juggernauts that comprise one-third of the world’s population and boast of a collective GDP of over $12 trillion.

Prime Minister Modi’s visit to China consolidated the momentum generated by President Xi Jinping’s maiden visit to India in September 2014. Put together, these twin visits, and initiatives taken during the tenure of the previous government in Delhi, crystallize the emerging alphabet of India-China relations: A for Asia; B for Business; C for Culture; and D for Diplomacy and Development. This new vocabulary and semantics is set to script afresh new pathways of cooperation between the two neighbours, which are often portrayed as rivals and competitors in the Asian hemisphere, but are incrementally forging an ambitious and all-encompassing cooperative partnership straddling diverse areas.

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