New Delhi: India’s denial of business and employment visas to thousands of Chinese engineers and technicians is a “potential hurdle” to its emerging as a manufacturing hub, writes Financial Times correspondent John Reed, pointing out that India put strict curbs on Chinese businesses amid border tensions in 2020.
While global businesses “search” for alternative factory sites and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make-in-India champions indigenous manufacturing, India’s scrutiny of Chinese foreign direct investment and visas has slowed the country’s manufacturing growth in some cases, writes Reed. “This is not hurting only Chinese companies, but predominantly hurting American, British, Taiwanese, Japanese and Indian companies too, who are building capabilities in India,” Pankaj Mohindroo, the India Cellular & Electronics Association chair, tells Reed.
However, India has expedited Chinese visas for some projects under the production-linked incentives scheme, Reed further writes, giving the instance of a joint venture between China’s SAIC Motor and India’s Jindal South-West Steel for making and selling electric vehicles in the country.
Claiming “low-income Indians” are dissatisfied with their share of the country’s growth, The Economist report — ‘Narendra Modi needs to win over low-income Indians‘ — details how residents of Ayodhya and Uttar Pradesh, voted for the Opposition out of a belief that the Ram temple and the infrastructure around it has only benefitted “outsiders”.
Modi’s promise of anti-elitism and job creation has been contradicted by the “lopsidedness of India’s economy that is the source of their (people’s) dissatisfaction”, says the report. “Fixing those problems is the biggest challenge that his new coalition government will face.”
“Just over half of working-age Indians in the labour force, 80% still make a living in the informal economy,” says the report, adding that though cash payments, subsidies, and free food rations have “saved many from destitution”, even people “who support the BJP are unhappy with their lot”. People need jobs, not just free food, the piece notes, wondering, “Will the government deliver?”
‘Why is Arundhati Roy being prosecuted for a 14-year-old speech?‘ — asks author Siddhartha Deb in the headline of an opinion piece for the Washington Post, writing about the charges brought against Roy for a speech she gave criticising the government for “torture, extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, imprisonment and the suspension of civil liberties” in Jammu and Kashmir 14 years ago.
Calling the move “a blatant show of force by a weakened BJP” and the government’s attempt to send a “message”, Deb writes, “These are old, tested tactics from the Hindu-right playbook, part of a long-standing and antidemocratic history of targeting critics and journalists alike.”
“Over two consecutive terms, Modi has transformed India into a violently majoritarian state shoring up the ruins of a broken economy,” Deb writes, listing lynchings, assassinations, imprisonments without bail, targeting of minorities, and stripping of states’ autonomy under the PM’s rule.
In The Guardian report, ‘India’s supreme court to rule on new penal code permitting marital rape‘, Amrit Dhillon discusses the absence of laws criminalising marital rape in India.
From 1 July, a new set of criminal laws will replace the penal code from the British times. However, they continue with the idea that “sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his wife, the wife not being under 18 years of age, is not rape”, writes Dhillon.
Quoting the Home Minister’s statement from last year, Dhillon claims, “He said the criminal justice system was informed by Victorian-era ideas of morality, particularly in relation to homosexuality and marital rape”. However, “marital rape” has still not been criminalised, with scholars and activists suggesting to Dhillon that it’s so the government can keep its hold over “more conservative voters”.
“The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, has often called for “women-led development”. But for many women, the new penal code undermines this aspiration,” Dhillon writes.
Elections in the US and Iran
In the first US presidential debate before the November elections, incumbent President Joe Biden was unable to erase concerns over his age and health while Donald Trump stuck to his “wild claims”. To know more, read six takeaways from The New York Times.
Polling to elect a new president began in Iran Friday after two out of six candidates withdrew from the race hours earlier. To keep track of what’s happening, check this live blog on Al Jazeera.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Also read: India as future of manufacturing after China & New Delhi ‘exporting munitions to Tel Aviv’