New Delhi: US President Donald Trump might be on the verge of losing one of his strongest supporters, says an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, warning against alienating India.
Instead of a “deepening friendship”, India has received a series of “disagreeable surprises” on “trade, tech cooperation, immigration and student access to American education”, writes columnist Walter Russel Mead.
“Team Trump can do better. Alienating the most important world power that viewed his return to office favorably isn’t in Mr. Trump’s best interest. Needlessly needling an important international partner won’t make America great again,” he adds.
Meanwhile, just about a month after Operation Sindoor, another chapter in the India-Pakistan conflict, Islamabad is increasing its defence budget, Shaiq Hussain and Rick Noack report for The Washington Post.
“Defence should be prioritised, [Pakistani Finance Minister Muhammad] Aurangzeb told lawmakers, to meet what he called a “historic moment.” Pakistan’s Parliament still needs to approve the budget, but the vote is viewed by analysts as a formality,” the report says.
It further reports that “Pakistani officials said they have been offered a range of new military equipment by China—their chief international backer—including fighter jets, missile defence systems and high-tech monitoring aircraft.”
The Financial Times also reports on the new budget, noting that to fund this uptick in defence spending, the government is cutting spending expenditure by 6.9 percent and increasing tax take by 18 percent.
“After defeating India in a conventional war, we now have to surpass it in the economic field as well,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told his cabinet as he approved the budget. India has said last month’s clashes demonstrated its military superiority over its smaller neighbour,” according to the report.
Meanwhile, India’s ‘Tiger Man’ Valmik Thapar, who lost a battle with cancer last month, has been eulogised by The New York Times. “Mr. Thapar was a big man with a loud, hyperarticulate and uncompromising style, which he channelled in service of tigers,” writes obituaries reporter Richard Sandomir.
According to the article, “Ranthambhore was the foundation of Mr. Thapar’s knowledge of tigers; it’s where he tracked their behaviour—using observational and writing skills comparable to those of the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s—and photographed and filmed them.”
The Fremont Gurdwara Sahib, a “fulcrum” of the American Sikh community, is urging the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to launch a full scale investigation into the activities of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) to decide whether it should be registered as an “Indian foreign agent,” Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports for The Guardian.
“The HAF denied the claims,” the article reports. In the statement, it said it was a “non-partisan tax-exempt charity that is wholly independent and American and has ‘absolutely no affiliation or ties to any organisation or political parties in the US or abroad’.
HAF “also hit out against what it called ‘coordinated campaigns’” against it “by the Khalistan separatist movement, which is seeking to establish an independent Sikh state,” says the report.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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