New Delhi: United States President Donald Trump has once again reiterated that India agrees with slashing its purchase of Russian crude, reports Nikita Yadav in the BBC. The report details what Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly said after a phone call between them.
While Trump said that Delhi “was not going to buy much oil from Russia”, adding that PM Modi wants the Russia-Ukraine war to end, PM Modi did not comment on any discussion on Russian oil in the call with the US President.
In The Wall Street Journal, Tripti Lahiri and Shan Li take on a challenge—they attempt to map the rise of RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) from a fringe entity to a mainstream powerhouse. A hundred years since its foundation, the Hindu paramilitary organisation and ideological counterpart of the Bharatiya Janata Party is finally stepping out of the shadows, they write.
According to the report, “the group is profoundly shaping Indian institutions and government policies, cementing a Hindu-nationalist vision for the country that will outlast the prime minister, political experts say. People schooled in the RSS’s thinking have risen to become Members of Parliament, state leaders, university deans and judges, and sit on government bodies.”
“During Modi’s more than a decade in power, the RSS’s ideas have moved from the periphery to the center of political power,” Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asian programme of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been quoted as saying. Vaishnav also tells the WSJ that the RSS has “no real analogue in the West”.
The WSJ report attempts to delve into how the RSS influences government policy and has infiltrated society. Last year, a ban on civil servants, who were RSS members, was overturned. The Jawaharlal Nehru University, referred to as a “bastion of leftist thinking”, has also been overrun by the RSS, notes the report.
“The RSS has sought to overhaul how history has been taught in Indian schools, saying it was biased against Hindus and shaped by colonial thinking. A recent revision of history textbooks has pruned chapters on the Mughal era: the Muslim dynasty that came from central Asia and ruled swaths of northern India for centuries,” the WSJ adds.
The Financial Times‘ investment column, Lex, spotlights the Indian Initial Public Offering (IPO) boom. After a slow start owing to a neighbourhood conflict and geopolitical churn, India’s IPOs are “likely to surpass last year’s record 21 billion dollars”.
“India’s relatively steady progress up the IPO league tables in recent years suggests some maturing of its capital markets rather than a one-off boom. About two-thirds of the funding for floats has been domestic, says Bernstein, helped by a tax break-inspired push by local savers into mutual funds,” says the newsletter.
“Local funding helps lessen any reliance on flighty foreigners, while deeper markets should help attract further investment as those with the money feel confident the market will provide an exit route.”
China’s state media Global Times situates India and China side by side, as developing nations pitching a multipolar global order.
“China hopes to build a community with a shared future for humanity, while India hopes to achieve a ‘multipolar Asia and world’, with multipolar Asia being the prerequisite for a multipolar world. From this perspective, India’s vision for multipolarity has grown increasingly apart from the US,” says the opinion piece by Liu Zongyi, which also looks at the “cautious” rebuilding of India-China ties.
“Modi’s attendance at the SCO Summit in China in early September is largely seen as the culmination of efforts by India and China to reset bilateral relations. Direct flights between the two countries are set to resume at the end of October for the first time in five years. Actually, such rapprochement offers greater space for India’s role in the future global order,” says the article.
India, of course, also has to account for another global power, the US.
“Any country’s hope of exploiting China-US geopolitical competition to achieve ‘rising amid chaos‘ may never be realised. But sticking to the global trends of multilateralism and aiming to build a fairer and more just global order can certainly help reinforce a country’s position in this order,” says the Global Times. “The choice is in India’s hands.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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