Bhalki: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused the ruling BJP and RSS of attacking democracy and spreading hatred and violence in the country.
He also appealed to the people to support the Congress and ensure that the party wins at least 150 seats in the May 10 Assembly polls in Karnataka, and comes to power with a full majority.
“Bidar is Basavanna’s (12th century social reformer) ‘karma bhoomi’. If someone first spoke about democracy and showed the path towards democracy it was Basavanna. It is sad that today across the country, people from RSS and BJP are attacking democracy,” Gandhi said.
Addressing a public meeting here, he alleged that BJP and RSS are attacking Basavanna’s ideals of- equal partnership, equal opportunities, and that everyone should move ahead together.
“They are spreading hatred and violence in Hindustan, and they are taking away money from poor and weaker section people and giving it to two or three rich people,” he added.
AICC General Secretaries K C Venugopal and Randeep Singh Surjewala (in-charge of Karnataka), KPCC working president and candidate from Bhalki Assembly seat Eshwar Khandre were among those present.
Expressing confidence about the Congress coming to power, Gandhi said the party government’s first cabinet meeting will take a decision on implementing its poll guarantees.
The Congress party has announced four poll ‘guarantees’ — 200 units of free power to all households (Gruha Jyoti), Rs 2,000 monthly assistance to the woman head of every family (Gruha Lakshmi), 10 kg of rice free to every member of a BPL household (Anna Bhagya), and Rs 3,000 every month for graduate youth and Rs 1,500 for diploma holders (both in the age group of 18-25) for two years (YuvaNidhi), on coming to power in the state.
He said the Congress will not make false promises like Prime Minister Narendra Modi did regarding depositing Rs 15 lakh in every bank account, and war against black money, among others, and will fulfill its promises immediately after coming to power.
“Whoever becomes the Chief Minister of Karnataka, will convert guarantees into law, on the first day after coming to power,” he added.
In the meantime, Donald Trump had happened. However one felt about candidates winning without majorities, ranked choice voting’s potential to reduce extremism and encourage broad-based appeals suddenly made it feel much more urgent. And Minnesota had run out of new cities to enroll. In 2020 Massey approached her board with an audacious plan to identify state legislators and candidates of either party who would embrace ranked choice voting and do everything possible to put them over the top in the coming election.
Maureen Reed, a retired physician who chairs the board, recognized the logic. “I was not an emergency room physician,” she told me over lunch in the Rathskeller, the vaulted basement restaurant of Minnesota’s stately Capitol. “I did internal medicine and geriatric care. I was trying to keep people healthy.” In her own search for root causes, Reed had migrated from medicine to public health to public policy. Her own work on health care had convinced her that “the rhetoric of hyper-partisanship has led to gridlock.” The board authorized Massey’s plan. The organization received large gifts for its lobbying and education program from local, regional and national foundations; by far the biggest, $1,755,000 over three years plus $150,000 for More Voices Minnesota, FairVote’s PAC, came from John Arnold, a Houston hedge fund manager and philanthropist. Arnold is indeed located out-of-state, but the funds were publicly disclosed. He does not appear to have any connection to George Soros.
The Covid-era election of 2020 proved to be a warm-up exercise. In the 2022 election, FairVote dispensed $140,000 in political donations to Democratic candidates, a significant sum for statewide races, while also conducting its energetic door-knocking campaign. Ranked choice voting was hardly the chief issue that year; abortion and criminal justice issues in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death mattered far more. But FairVote’s money and energy helped flip the state Senate and produced a “trifecta” — a Democratic House, Senate and governor. Many of those Democrats have reason to feel grateful to FairVote. While I was trailing Massey across the State Capitol, I asked why state Sen. Heather Gustafson had agreed to speak at the rally the next day. “She’s a big supporter,” Massey explained. “We targeted swing districts” — including hers. (Gustafson did not, in fact, show up for the rally.)
The trifecta made ranked choice voting legislation possible — but just barely. Though prominent moderate Republicans in the state, including former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and ex-Gov. Arne Carlson, endorsed the idea, the Minnesota GOP, like the party almost everywhere, has become both more conservative and more truculent. Today’s Republicans treat almost all facially neutral political reforms, whether eliminating gerrymandering, reducing the influence of money or instituting nonpartisan primaries, as a plot to elect Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that not a single Republican legislator in the state has publicly supported ranked choice voting.
When I asked Mark Koran, a Republican member of the state House and leading critic, why he opposed the bill, he first told me about the out-of-state dark money, though without repeating the Soros canard. Koran disputed the ranked choice voting talking points. “There’s a claim that we can create a kinder, gentler electoral system,” he said. But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said, progressive candidates had run inflammatory campaigns. Minnesota already had high turnout and a wide diversity of candidates, he added. Why fix what isn’t broke? If there was a problem, he said, it was “transparency.” Outside dark money, he claimed, had been deployed to defeat county prosecutors prepared to investigate vote fraud. Koran told me about the 2008 U.S. Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken had defeated Republican Norm Coleman thanks, he said, to “11,000 fraudulent votes,” including 340 ineligible felons. That was the real electoral issue — and no one was looking at it.
Jeanne Massey had lined up a star witness for the House Elections Committee hearing — Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who had defeated Palin for Congress last year. Peltola had won only 10 percent of the votes in the state’s open primary, but that had been enough to vault her into the general election, where she defeated Palin largely because 15,000 people who had voted for more moderate Republican Nick Begich had listed Peltola rather than Palin as their second choice. At the same time, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, finished in a virtual dead heat with Trumpist Kelly Tshibaka and then retained her seat thanks to votes she received after a Democrat was eliminated. Alaska was providing proof of concept — and vindication of the fears on the right.
The room in which the committee met had tables, chairs and microphones in the center with seats rising up on either side. As if by an unspoken prior design, the blue shirts filled one set of seats and the oranges the other. The hearing thus bore an odd resemblance to a college football game, though refs do not typically have to silence fans as the presiding member did to the blues during testimony from an ranked choice voting opponent. Democratic state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, the sponsor of the bill in the House, spoke first. Frazier, who is Black, argued that ranked choice voting encourages ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other outsiders, to run for office since they might win in later rounds.
Then Peltola took a seat beside him. A native Yup’ik, Peltola has a warm smile and an air of gentle dignity. She spoke of the lawn-placard dynamics of ranked choice voting. “I could not afford to alienate my opponents’ supporters,” she said, “because second- and third-choice voters were critical in determining who would win. I could not take any vote for granted or write any voter off.” In testimony later that morning before a state Senate Committee, Peltola made a striking point about nonpartisan primaries. “I would not have made it out of a primary,” she said, “because I’m not liberal enough.” With partisan primaries, she complained, “We go farther to the right and farther to the left.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
For Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, next month’s election is of massive historical significance.
It falls 100 years after the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular republic and, if Erdoğan wins, he will be empowered to put even more of his stamp on the trajectory of a geostrategic heavyweight of 85 million people. The fear in the West is that he will see this as his moment to push toward an increasingly religiously conservative model, characterized by regional confrontationalism, with greater political powers centered around himself.
The election will weigh heavily on security in Europe and the Middle East. Who is elected stands to define: Turkey’s role in the NATO alliance; its relationship with the U.S., the EU and Russia; migration policy; Ankara’s role in the war in Ukraine; and how it handles tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The May 14 vote is expected to be the most hotly contested race in Erdoğan’s 20-year rule — as the country grapples with years of economic mismanagement and the fallout from a devastating earthquake.
He will face an opposition aligned behind Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi,” who is promising big changes. Polls suggest Kılıçdaroğlu has eked out a lead, but Erdoğan is a hardened election campaigner, with the full might of the state and its institutions at his back.
“There will be a change from an authoritarian single-man rule, towards a kind of a teamwork, which is a much more democratic process,” Ünal Çeviköz, chief foreign policy adviser to Kılıçdaroğlu told POLITICO. “Kılıçdaroğlu will be the maestro of that team.”
Here are the key foreign policy topics in play in the vote:
EU and Turkish accession talks
Turkey’s opposition is confident it can unfreeze European Union accession talks — at a standstill since 2018 over the country’s democratic backsliding — by introducing liberalizing reforms in terms of rule of law, media freedoms and depoliticization of the judiciary.
The opposition camp also promises to implement European Court of Human Rights decisions calling for the release of two of Erdoğan’s best-known jailed opponents: the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Selahattin Demirtaş and human rights defender Osman Kavala.
“This will simply give the message to all our allies, and all the European countries, that Turkey is back on track to democracy,” Çeviköz said.
Even under a new administration, however, the task of reopening the talks on Turkey’s EU accession is tricky.
Turkey’s opposition is aligned behind Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi” | Burak Kara/Getty Images
Anti-Western feeling in Turkey is very strong across the political spectrum, argued Wolfango Piccoli, co-founder of risk analysis company Teneo.
“Foreign policy will depend on the coherence of the coalition,” he said. “This is a coalition of parties who have nothing in common apart from the desire to get rid of Erdoğan. They’ve got a very different agenda, and this will have an impact in foreign policy.”
“The relationship is largely comatose, and has been for some time, so, they will keep it on life support,” he said, adding that any new government would have so many internal problems to deal with that its primary focus would be domestic.
Europe also seems unprepared to handle a new Turkey, with a group of countries — most prominently France and Austria — being particularly opposed to the idea of rekindling ties.
“They are used to the idea of a non-aligned Turkey, that has departed from EU norms and values and is doing its own course,” said Aslı Aydıntaşbaş a visiting fellow at Brookings. “If the opposition forms a government, it will seek a European identity and we don’t know Europe’s answer to that; whether it could be accession or a new security framework that includes Turkey.”
“Obviously the erosion of trust has been mutual,” said former Turkish diplomat Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank, arguing that despite reticence about Turkish accession, there are other areas where a complementary and mutually beneficiary framework could be built, like the customs union, visa liberalization, cooperation on climate, security and defense, and the migration agreement.
The opposition will indeed seek to revisit the 2016 agreement with the EU on migration, Çeviköz said.
“Our migration policy has to be coordinated with the EU,” he said. “Many countries in Europe see Turkey as a kind of a pool, where migrants coming from the east can be contained and this is something that Turkey, of course cannot accept,” he said but added. “This doesn’t mean that Turkey should open its borders and make the migrants flow into Europe. But we need to coordinate and develop a common migration policy.”
NATO and the US
After initially imposing a veto, Turkey finally gave the green light to Finland’s NATO membership on March 30.
But the opposition is also pledging to go further and end the Turkish veto on Sweden, saying that this would be possible by the alliance’s annual gathering on July 11. “If you carry your bilateral problems into a multilateral organization, such as NATO, then you are creating a kind of a polarization with all the other members of NATO with your country,” Çeviköz said.
A protester pushes a cart with a RRecep Tayyip Erdoğan doll during an anti-NATO and anti-Turkey demonstration in Sweden | Jonas Gratzer/Getty Images
A reelected Erdoğan could also feel sufficiently empowered to let Sweden in, many insiders argue. NATO allies did, after all, play a significant role in earthquake aid. Turkish presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın says that the door is not closed to Sweden, but insists the onus is on Stockholm to determine how things proceed.
Turkey’s military relationship with the U.S. soured sharply in 2019 when Ankara purchased the Russian-made S-400 missile system, a move the U.S. said would put NATO aircraft flying over Turkey at risk. In response, the U.S. kicked Ankara out of the F-35 jet fighter program and slapped sanctions on the Turkish defense industry.
A meeting in late March between Kılıçdaroğlu and the U.S. Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake infuriated Erdoğan, who saw it as an intervention in the elections and pledged to “close the door” to the U.S. envoy. “We need to teach the United States a lesson in this elections,” the irate president told voters.
In its policy platform, the opposition makes a clear reference to its desire to return to the F-35 program.
Russia and the war in Ukraine
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Turkey presented itself as a middleman. It continues to supply weapons — most significantly Bayraktar drones — to Ukraine, while refusing to sanction Russia. It has also brokered a U.N. deal that allows Ukrainian grain exports to pass through the blockaded Black Sea.
Highlighting his strategic high-wire act on Russia, after green-lighting Finland’s NATO accession and hinting Sweden could also follow, Erdoğan is now suggesting that Turkey could be the first NATO member to host Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Maybe there is a possibility” that Putin may travel to Turkey on April 27 for the inauguration of the country’s first nuclear power reactor built by Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom, he said.
Çeviköz said that under Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, Turkey would be willing to continue to act as a mediator and extend the grain deal, but would place more stress on Ankara’s status as a NATO member.
“We will simply emphasize the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO, and in our discussions with Russia, we will certainly look for a relationship among equals, but we will also remind Russia that Turkey is a member of NATO,” he said.
Turkey’s relationship with Russia has become very much driven by the relationship between Putin and Erdoğan and this needs to change, Ülgen argued.
Turkey brokered a U.N. deal that allows Ukrainian grain exports to pass through the blockaded Black Sea | Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
“No other Turkish leader would have the same type of relationship with Putin, it would be more distant,” he said. “It does not mean that Turkey would align itself with the sanctions; it would not. But nonetheless, the relationship would be more transparent.”
Syria and migration
The role of Turkey in Syria is highly dependent on how it can address the issue of Syrians living in Turkey, the opposition says.
Turkey hosts some 4 million Syrians and many Turks, battling a major cost-of-living crisis, are becoming increasingly hostile. Kılıçdaroğlu has pledged to create opportunities and the conditions for the voluntary return of Syrians.
“Our approach would be to rehabilitate the Syrian economy and to create the conditions for voluntary returns,” Çeviköz said, adding that this would require an international burden-sharing, but also establishing dialogue with Damascus.
Erdoğan is also trying to establish a rapprochement with Syria but Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he will only meet the Turkish president when Ankara is ready to completely withdraw its military from northern Syria.
“A new Turkish government will be more eager to essentially shake hands with Assad,” said Ülgen. “But this will remain a thorny issue because there will be conditions attached on the side of Syria to this normalization.”
However, Piccoli from Teneo said voluntary returns of Syrians was “wishful thinking.”
“These are Syrians who have been living in Turkey for more than 10 years, their children have been going to school in Turkey from day one. So, the pledges of sending them back voluntarily, it is very questionable to what extent they can be implemented.”
Greece and the East Med
Turkey has stepped up its aggressive rhetoric against Greece in recent months, with the Erdoğan even warning that a missile could strike Athens.
But the prompt reaction by the Greek government and the Greek community to the recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey and a visit by the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias created a new backdrop for bilateral relations.
A Turkish drill ship before it leaves for gas exploration | Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images
Dendias, along with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, announced that Turkey would vote for Greece in its campaign for a non-permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council for 2025-26 and that Greece would support the Turkish candidacy for the General Secretariat of the International Maritime Organization.
In another sign of a thaw, Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos and Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi visited Turkey this month, with Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar saying he hoped that the Mediterranean and Aegean would be a “sea of friendship” between the two countries. Akar said he expected a moratorium with Greece in military and airforce exercises in the Aegean Sea between June 15 and September 15.
“Both countries are going to have elections, and probably they will have the elections on the same day. So, this will open a new horizon in front of both countries,” Çeviköz said.
“The rapprochement between Turkey and Greece in their bilateral problems [in the Aegean], will facilitate the coordination in addressing the other problems in the eastern Mediterranean, which is a more multilateral format,” he said. Disputes over maritime borders and energy exploration, for example, are common.
As far as Cyprus is concerned, Çeviköz said that it is important for Athens and Ankara not to intervene into the domestic politics of Cyprus and the “two peoples on the island should be given an opportunity to look at their problems bilaterally.”
However, analysts argue that Greece, Cyprus and the EastMed are fundamental for Turkey’s foreign policy and not much will change with another government. The difference will be more one of style.
“The approach to manage those differences will change very much. So, we will not hear aggressive rhetoric like: ‘We will come over one night,’” said Ülgen. “We’ll go back to a more mature, more diplomatic style of managing differences and disputes.”
“The NATO framework will be important, and the U.S. would have to do more in terms of re-establishing the sense of balance in the Aegean,” said Aydıntaşbaş. But, she argued, “you just cannot normalize your relations with Europe or the U.S., unless you’re willing to take that step with Greece.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Kaushambi: Attacking Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over his recent remarks in the UK, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said that it’s not democracy that is in danger, but “your family” and the idea of dynasty politics that is under threat.
At two public meetings in Uttar Pradesh during the day, he also slammed the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. In Azamgarh, which has a sizeable Muslim population, he said under the previous state governments, 24-hour power supply was available “only during Ramzan”. “Now the BJP government has ensured power to entire Uttar Pradesh and heralded a new period of development,” he added.
Shah inaugurated the Kaushambi Mahotsav and honoured several players of the ‘Sansad Khel Spardha’. Later, he laid the foundation stone for the Harihar music college in Azamgarh.
He said Azamgarh was earlier known as the “centre of terrorism”, a reference to some of the accused in terror cases like the 2008 Ahmedabad serial bomb blasts hailing from the district.
But now its identity has changed to a hub of development, Shah said.
“I was the home minister of Gujarat when there were bomb blasts in Ahmedabad. The police had caught the main ‘sutradhaar’ (culprit) of it from Azamgarh,” he said.
“I want to congratulate Yogi ji (CM Yogi Adityanath). In Azamgarh, which was considered the centre of terror across the country, he got the foundation of a music college laid to give respect to its heritage,” Shah said.
In Kaushambi, Shah hit out at Gandhi for claiming in the UK that democracy is under threat, accusing his party of surrounding the Indian democracy with three “naasuron” (ulcerous wounds) casteism, dynasty politics and appeasement. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi defeated all three and hence “you are afraid,” he added.
“They say democracy is in danger. Brother, democracy is not in danger, your family is in danger. It is not the idea of India which is in danger, it is the idea of dynasty, your politics of ‘parivarvad’ (dynasty), which are in danger. It is not the democracy of India, but the autocracy of your family, which is in danger,” the senior BJP leader said.
The BJP has accused Gandhi of “insulting” the country on foreign soil and demanded an apology, but the Congress leader has said his position that India’s democracy was under attack “was known” to all.
Shah also accused the Congress party of not allowing Parliament to function.
“Yesterday, the Parliament was adjourned. In the history of independent India, it has never happened that the Budget Session ended without a sitting and discussion… What was the reason? Rahul Gandhi was disqualified as Lok Sabha MP,” the Union minister said.
On March 18, a Surat court sentenced Gandhi to two years in jail in a defamation case over his Modi surname remark. A day later, the Lok Sabha Secretariat suspended his Lok Sabha membership.
Congress accused the BJP of indulging in “vindictive politics” but the ruling party said it was the law.
On Friday, addressing the gathering in Kaushambi, Shah asked, “Who brought the law?”
He also said Gandhi was not the only leader whose membership has “gone” after sentencing by a court. “So far, the membership of 17 MLAs-MPs has gone, including that of Rahul Gandhi.”
Recalling his earlier visits to UP, before the BJP government came to power in the state, Shah said in Azamgarh there was hardly a night when power was available in rural areas. He also said it was difficult to imagine UP being “riot-free” but the Adityanath government has made it possible.
Slamming SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, who contested and won from Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat in the previous election, Shah asked the people whether he “was he seen” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Had he come here to give vaccination doses? The prime minister got the entire country vaccinated, provided foodgrains to the poor,” the Union minister said.
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: Echoing the Opposition’s apprehensions, former Maharashtra Chief Minister and Shiv Sena (UBT) President Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday cited the example of Israel on how to protect democracy from authoritarianism in India.
“Look at Israel! How the people there have taken to the streets to protest against certain laws there… even the police joined the demonstrations and Israeli embassies all over the world shut down in solidarity with the people there. After it became impossible for their leader (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), the laws were withdrawn,” Thackeray said.
Addressing a mammoth rally of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), Thackeray lauded the people of Israel and asserted that “this is called democracy, unlike India where anybody who speaks against the government is targeted in different ways”, and the Constitution of the country is being trampled upon.
“It’s heartening to note that democracy is still strong in India… the farmers’ protests (2020-2021) saw the (Bharatiya Janata Party) government finally withdrawing the farm laws. Even the workers of the country are very much alert,” said Thackeray in a veiled warning.
He cautioned that those who try to trample the Constitution of Bharat Mata “will be kicked out”, and said the MVA will do everything to protect democracy in the country.
Thackeray lamented how his (original) Shiv Sena had erred for 25 years with the BJP, and nothing was done though the two parties came together in power twice (1995-1999 and 2014-2019), and gave examples of the major decisions of the MVA government of Shiv Sena (UBT)-Congress-Nationalist Congress Party did during its two-and-half years in office before it was unceremoniously toppled in June 2022.
Hammering at the BJP as ‘the most corrupt party’, the former chief minister said its name should be changed to ‘Bhrasht Jana Party’, since wherever they see any corrupt leaders, “they grab them”, but teach others lessons in public morality, as the massive gathering roared its approval more than half-dozen times during his speech.
Thackeray attacked the BJP on its brand of ‘Hindutva’, how Hindus feel insecure and are compelled to take out ‘Hindu Janakrosh Yatra’ though ruled by “the most powerful Hindu leader in the world, but his power means nothing”, and joining hands with any party irrespective of ideologies to bring down duly elected governments for grabbing power as in Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir, and Bihar.
NCP’s Leader of Opposition Ajit Pawar demanded to know what the Shiv Sena led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and BJP’s Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis have done for the youth, unemployed, farmers, or problems like inflation.
“Ever since this government took over, industries are fleeing from Maharashtra, the political atmosphere is vitiated and big projects are not ready to come here. This will be very damaging for the state’s economy and youth who will be deprived of jobs,” warned Pawar.
On the Shiv Sena-BJP’s ‘Savarkar Gaurav Yatra’ taken out in the state on Sunday to protest against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s utterances, Pawar pointedly asked that when the ex-governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari and many other BJP leaders insulted Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule, no action was taken, and how the Supreme Court recently labelled the state government as ‘impotent’.
“You only talk and do nothing. You are taking out ‘Savarkar Gaurav Yatras’, if you have the guts, then announce the Bharat Ratna immediately for Swatantryaveer Savarkar,” dared Pawar.
Congress Legislative Party Leader Balasaheb Thorat said that calling anybody ‘chor’ (thief) is now a crime and the country has witnessed what happened to Rahul Gandhi.
“He was not allowed to speak in Parliament as he was raising issues of corruption, even (Congress President) Mallikarjun was denied permission to speak, and even if they spoke, their speech records were erased. The people are watching everything. The latest opinion polls suggest that MVA will get 38 out of 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra,” said Thorat.
Taking pot-shots at the Central government, NCP senior leader Dhananjay Munde said that the BJP is simply playing a “fraud’ on the masses and it’s an “April Fool government”. He said that April 1 (All Fools Day) should be celebrated as the BJP’s birthday.
He also slammed the BJP for misusing the central investigation agencies like ED, CBI or I-T to scare and silence the Opposition but declared that “the people will not sit quiet now”.
Congress’ ex-CM Ashok Chavan said the manner in which the Shinde-Fadnavis regime grabbed power by breaking the Shiv Sena MLAs was “unprecedented in the state’s history” and will not be tolerated by the people here.
“Its not just about the MVA government, but a question of preserving democracy. The state is reeling under multiple crises, has piled up a debt burden of Rs 7 lakh crore, but they are busy in propaganda and wasting money on ‘yatras’ now,” said Chavan.
He also lauded Thackeray terming him as a humble leader who took decisions on merits in public interest without any bias on party lines, and called upon the people not to forget the treatment meted out to Rahul Gandhi in the next elections.
Elaborating on Israel, Thackeray said that Netanhayu, who is a friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attempted to control that country’s judiciary, and said “similar efforts are on by the BJP to undermine the justice system in India, and we must be on our guard”.
“Democracy will end the day the judiciary goes down. In Israel, Netanyahu took back the laws due to public anger. The people vote, and the people should also keep a watch on the PM. We have the power to defend the Constitution,” said Thackeray.
This was the first mega-public meeting of MVA after it lost power nine months ago and various leaders vowed that many more similar rallies would be held in the coming days, sounding the bugle for the upcoming civic polls, and next year’s Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections.
SRINAGAR: National Conference Chief Spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq on Saturday expressed disappointment at the apathy of the central government in restoring democracy in Jammu and Kashmir. Speaking to the media at the party headquarters Nawa-e-Subha, Tanvir said that the long-standing undemocratic rule has increased the hardships of the people.
“Recently, even the CEC had acknowledged the deepening void in J&K due to the lingering undemocratic rule. If he is aware of this fact, then why aren’t elections being held? They have been citing one excuse after another – first it was security, then it was weather, and then the run-up preparations for the election process. Now, when the weather is clear and the situation is admittedly normal, not holding the polls despite the ECI nod indicates that the BJP is afraid of the polls,” he said.
“We had an impression that the Election Commission doesn’t want to have polls in Jammu and Kashmir,” he added, saying, “When our representatives asked the Chief Election Commissioner why the ECI wasn’t holding the polls in J&K, the visiting delegation members were told that the commission has completed the delimitation exercise, the voter list is also prepared, polling booths are also identified, and election staff is also prepared, and that ECI is waiting for two things – weather and security clearance. It had made it clear to the delegation members that they were only waiting for weather and security. What holds them now from going with the exercise? Security, we are being told, has improved significantly, and the weather is clear.”
Sadiq contended that any further delay in the restoration of an elected legislator in J&K will make the democratic recovery of the beleaguered region unattainable. “The new model in place in Jammu and Kashmir is bereft of democratic moorings with no say of locals including Dogras, Kashmiris, Paharis, Gujjars in the decision-making process. Consequences of denying democratic rights to people would not augur well for the prized freedom, stability, and strength of our country. It will put the entire region on the path of terminal alienation,” he added. (GNS)
Journalism is a tool of democracy. While I had gone to attend the annual Ram Nath Goenka Awards for the journalists, I thought that it would be just like another five star elitist function as per the Persian idiom, “Nashistan, do guftan, khurdan, v barkhastan, meaning, “Meeting, discussing, eating and finally departing! It wasn’t that, at least for me, it was a day of reckoning! Nevertheless, the kind of inimitable topics for which the scribes were chosen, did confirm that this was just the address on the envelope and much was in store for the eager visitors, all very prominent people in the form of the addresses by Justice DY Chandrachud and Raj Kamal Jha, The Indian Express editor! For example, the bare youth, Tarun Rawat, the shutterbug of the Times of India, who had shot the pistol-shot of a man during the Jamia Millia Islamia CAA protests, walked away with the covetous award! All the 43 odd awards were for unique dedication and devotion of the pen smiths and shutterbugs, with reportages with even at the cost of their lives for bringing truth to the world.
A full to capacity, Kamal Mahal of ITC Maurya Hotel in Chanakyapuri, was bubbling with intellectuals and scholars from all walks of life, eagerly waiting for the propitious moment, when Justice Chandrachud would address the gathering and I vouch, he took the floor with words pouring out of his mouth like petals of fragrant flowers of all hues amidst non-stop clapping! Since the day he has sat on the seat of judgment, people’s faith has been restored in the cliché, “Justice dawns from Heaven,” owing to his bold and brave judgments daring into the eyes of the top notch managers of the present governance!
The real soul-stirring and churning time came, when the Chief Justice of the Apex Court, Justice DY Chandrachud and Raj Kamal Jha took charge. Both of them delivered the treatises that reminded me of a similar struggle faced India’s highly revered Freedom fighter, first minister of education and Bharat Ratna, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, about whom, once in a 2005 PIL by me, for opening the locks of Maulana Azad mausoleum near Jama Masjid, mostly occupied by anti-social elements indulging in consuming smack and marijuana, Justice Vijendra Jain, in the High Court of Delhi (court No. 6), to my astonishment and of course, joy, had stated in his Order that the sacrifices of Maulana Azad for the freedom of India were even greater than those of Mahatama Gandhi and Pandit Nehru! This great statesman of India too had suffered a lot both as a journalist and editor as he was jailed many times for building bridges between Hindus and Muslims against the English perpetrators and his weekly Urdu newspapers, Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, that were sold like hot cakes, the moment they were on the stands in markets, like The Indian Express today, were closed down by the English.
Abul Kalam Azad who was a great Indian nationalist and patriot, criticized the British for racial discrimination and ignoring the needs of the common Indians plus the Muslim politicians who held communal views to support the demand of the All India Muslim League for the vivisection of India on communal lines. Azad furiously opposed the division of Bengal in 1905 which was against the national integration of India.
A year after the publication of the last issue of Al-Hilal on 18th November 18, 1914, Maulana Azad brought out another weekly Al-Balagh. It was apparently confined to religious issues but in essence it was discussing the broader issues of man’s emancipation and freedom in the Islamic and Indian historical context. In this paper Azad was discussing religious issues with political overtones for uniting Hindus and Muslims. The colonial administration found it unbearable and Maulana Azad was finally detained at Ranchi where he remained for the next few years. When he came out in 1919 the entire political scenario had changed. There was complete Hindu-Muslim unity and mass upsurge against the British, which finally resulted in the non-cooperation movement started by Gandhi on August 1, 1920.
Nobody can forget Arun Shourie, the former editor of The Indian Express,who, during the infamous Emergency during 1975-76, put his foot down, and had the temerity never to buckle under pressure during those trying and testing days while I was in class 10, witnessing some havocs perpetrated by the arrogant government of that time with my own eyes, the embers of at least one of them are still smoldering, I mean the, demolished Urdu medium Qaumi Senior Secondary School, razed to the ground on June 30, 1976 for which as well, a PIL was filed by the author where Justice Geeta Mittal, in a historic landmark judgment, had allotted 4000 meters of land for building a designer, state of the art and exemplary school for the poor walled city Muslim students. It’s another thing that in collusion with the DDA and other agencies, meant for allotting the land, 2400 meters has been illegally annexed that raises the eyebrows at the Constitutional body like these Delhi High Court. How the said court allowed only 1600 meters for building a senior secondary school when as per the Delhi Education Act, not less than 4000 meters is required. Lamentably, the land is available in that campus but has been given for the parking lot. This too will be brought to the notice of the “North Star”!
The historic session also reminded me of the travails faced by India’s highly revered Freedom fighter, first minister of education and Bharat Ratna, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, about whom, once in a case for opening the locks of Maulana Azad mausoleum near Jama Masjid, mostly occupied by anti-social elements indulging in consuming smack and marijuana, in the High Court of Delhi, court No. 6, Justice Vijendra Jain, to my astonishment and of course, joy, had stated in his Order in 2005 that the sacrifices of Maulana Azad for the freedom of India were even greater than those of Mahatama Gandhi and Pandit Nehru! This great statesman of India too had suffered a lot both as a journalist and editor as he was jailed many times for building bridges between Hindus and Muslims against the English perpetrators and his weekly Urdu newspapers, Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, that were sold like hot cakes, the moment they were on the stands in markets, like The Indian Express today, were closed down by the English.
Clubbing the similarity in the professions of law and journalism, Chandrachud stated that persons of both professions are fierce believers of the aphorism that the pen is mightier than the sword. Simultaneously, they also share the occupational hazard of being disliked by virtue of their professions — no easy cross to bear. Nevertheless, trusting the tough path of honesty, members of both professions carry on calling a spade a spade with the hope that one day, the reputations of their professions will receive a makeover.
This session, that was a defining moment of my life, in which, I identified myself with the golden words of wisdom and truth by the Chief Justice of India and The Indian Express editor, personally confirmed one thing that sans all shady profiteering and promotion, honesty, uprightness, rectitude and calling a spade a spade, are the lifelong paradigms. As the chancellor at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad where I found the rambling financial corruption, rampant nepotism, continuous scams, gender discrimination, heinous sexual harassment of ladies working in the campus and girl-students, no regard for Constitution, illegal appointments galore, ambience of fear psychosis for students, being a journalist and a whistle blower, I raised my voice and write about it, only to be told by the so-called “worldly wise” people that I had closed all my avenues for further uplift but I didn’t waver. I found that the entire system was rotten and nobody was concerned, including the top notch officers of the ministries of Education and Social Justice and Empowerment. Truth is that legal journalism is the storyteller of the justice system, shedding light on the complexities of the law.
Very truly, Raj Kamal Jha too pointed out the similar excesses when he said that for journalists and journalism, year after year, case after case, their starlight has illuminated the road and added that in case of the dimming of lights, when a reporter is arrested under a law meant for terrorists, when another is arrested for asking a question, when a university teacher is picked up for sharing a cartoon, a college student for a speech, a film star for a comment, or when a rejoinder to a story comes in the form of a police FIR, the only resort was the “North Star” (Supreme Court).
Finally, Justice Chandrachud words took us back to the August 11, 1912 issue of Al-Hilal where the similar views are published by Azad, the editor, that the media is the fourth pillar in the establishment of the State, and thus an integral component of democracy. A vibrant democracy must encourage space for equanimity with dissent. The vivacity of any democracy is bargained when the press is not allowed to ask questions. The press must remain free if a country is to remain a pulsating democracy. Of course, nothing should be in closed and concealed envelopes!
On Tuesday night, Biden said Israel had gotten itself into “a difficult spot” and that he hoped Netanyahu “walks away from it.”
Netanyahu, however, released a rather defiant statement indicating he would press ahead with some form of judicial change and that Israel “makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”
Underlying the fear inside the White House was a sense that the Netanyahu-led far-right coalition now governing the once-stable democracy in the Middle East has authoritarian leanings. Those concerns have deepened as Washington tries to hold together a democratic alliance against dictatorships in places including Russia, China and Iran, an archrival of Israel.
There are domestic considerations as well. The turmoil in Israel has given Biden a foreign policy headache right in the run-up to the 2024 presidential race. A longstanding public backer of Israel, Biden now heads a party in which a growing number of members are openly critical of the country.
Some of those Democrats say Biden needs to set aside his affection and go beyond rhetoric to pressure Israel on everything from safeguarding democracy to establishing a Palestinian state.
“Joe Biden has personally made clear repeatedly that there’s going to be no consequences, so why should Netanyahu change his behavior based on anything the United States says?” said Matt Duss, a leading progressive voice and Middle East analyst who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on foreign policy.
Despite Netanyahu’s push for the judicial overhaul, Israel was invited to participate in the summit, the second of which Biden has convened since taking office. But the Israeli leader was not expected to attend the leader-level meetings that Biden will helm on Wednesday, White House aides said. A person familiar with the issue said that Netanyahu was instead slated to speak on a panel during the week, but it was not clear if even that was finalized.
The White House tried to tamp down tensions with Israel on Tuesday. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said Netanyahu would at some point be invited to Washington, although a White House spokesperson said no meeting had been decided. Aides said that while they were encouraged Netanyahu paused his plan for the judiciary, they were still in “wait and see” mode about whether he would return to them in the next session of the Knesset. Allies do not expect Biden to be hurt politically by his handling of the matter.
“Where he has expressed differences with Israel — on West Bank settlements and on a judicial overhaul that could weaken Israel’s democratic foundations — he is on solid ground with the vast majority of Americans, and those in his party,” said Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel under then-President Barack Obama. “I suspect any rival, from any side, would find this issue to be hardly worth taking on.”
Even before the judicial overhaul plan was introduced, the Biden administration had grown alarmed by Netanyahu’s coalition government, which includes several figures with racist, homophobic, misogynist and religiously extreme ideologies.
For Netanyahu, a veteran Israeli pol, it was a means of getting back into the prime minister’s office as he tries to evade corruption charges in Israel’s courts. But inside Biden world, it appeared to be more than just an alliance of convenience. Some of Netanyahu’s allies back legislation making it harder to remove him from office, and his statement Tuesday suggested he was worried that his coalition might fracture if he is seen as kowtowing to Washington.
Biden and Netanyahu have known each other for decades and share a personal warmth and familiarity. “Hey man, what’s going on?” is Biden’s standard greeting to Netanyahu, aides said.
But they also have had sharp differences.
Their ties were strained by Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to Congress in which he castigated the Iran nuclear deal worked on by the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president. And Biden has expressed private dismay that Netanyahu became such a fawning acolyte of ex-President Donald Trump and that Israel has largely stayed on the sidelines during Russia’s war on Ukraine.
White House aides arranged a call between the two men earlier this month with the hopes that Biden could nudge the prime minister toward abandoning his judicial overhaul.
Despite firm words from Biden, Netanyahu proceeded with the plan, rattling many American Jews concerned about Israel’s future. Administration officials, keenly aware of the importance of America’s security relationship with Israel, proceeded carefully, both publicly and privately warning Netanyahu that he should seek a compromise with those who oppose the overhaul.
Over the weekend, Netanyahu fired his defense minister for criticizing the judicial plan. The White House released a statement that echoed its past ones, reminding Netanyahu that “democratic societies are strengthened by checks and balances, and fundamental changes to a democratic system should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”
Yet the huge protests were what appeared to have forced Netanyahu to back down, at least temporarily.
Ahead of the Summit for Democracy, White House aides say that Netanyahu’s decision to relent on the judicial reform push was proof that Israel’s democracy was responsive and worked.
But the push itself still raises questions about the future of Israeli politics and injects more uncertainty into an already unstable region.
Israel is hardly the only country invited to the summit facing internal strife. India, for example, has seen serious democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Poland, too, is facing questions about its democratic strength, as are countries such as Mexico and Brazil. The United States’ own democracy has been tested in the wake of the Trump presidency.
But the tension with Israel is the one with the most direct ties to Biden’s own political future as he eyes a re-election decision and possible rematch with Trump.
Biden has long been a traditionalist on U.S.-Israel relations. He has remained close to reflexively pro-Israel advocacy organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He has declined to return the U.S. Embassy to Tel Aviv after Trump relocated it to Jerusalem. And he has refused to impose conditions on the billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance the United States provides to Israel.
Those moves by the president — who has also received the backing of the more progressive pro-Israel advocacy group J Street — has run counter to the budding sentiment within the Democratic Party.
A growing number of liberal voices are critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. And a Gallup poll released this month showed that Democrats’ sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49 percent versus 38 percent
These are shifts that could prove an annoyance to Biden on the campaign trail.
“At the end of the day, this issue is not a voting issue for 99.999 percent of people, right?” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street. “But I don’t think the majority of the Democratic Party is going to be okay if Israel takes steps that provoke tremendous outbreaks of violence and lots of people are getting hurt. I don’t think they’ll be okay as Israel undoes its judicial independence and the underpinnings of its democracy.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hi, China Watchers. Today we look at the fraught politics of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s U.S. visits, do a deep dive into TikTok’s tangled web of government lobbying and check in on President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy. And with President Tsai in New York City today, we point her in the direction of Brooklyn’s unofficial culinary diplomatic outpost for the self-governing island and profile a book that renders a street-level exploration of its woefully underreported “out-of-bounds artistic creativity.”
Let’s get to it. — Phelim
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will arrive in New York today | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
WELCOME TO AMERICA, PRESIDENT TSAI. PARDON OUR BICKERING
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen lands in New York today for the first of two layover visits in the U.S. as she travels to and from Latin America. She’ll be in New York for one day Thursday to receive a leadership award from a conservative think tank and will meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on April 5.
Tsai’s presence in the U.S. puts the administration of President Joe Biden in a bind. Biden needs to roll out a warm but unofficial diplomatic welcome mat to Taiwan’s leader without unduly infuriating the Chinese government which interprets any U.S.-Taiwan contacts as an affront to Beijing’s claim of sovereignty over the self-governing island.
Beijing is already signaling that Tsai’s presence in the U.S. will further damage already frosty U.S.-China ties. Tsai’s visit “could lead to another serious, serious, serious confrontation in the China-U.S. relationship,” the chargés d’affaires in the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., Xu Xueyuan, told reporters on Wednesday. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xu warned.
Biden’s thornier dilemma is balancing the demand of GOP China hawks wanting deeper and more official military, economic and diplomatic links to Taiwan — starting with engagement with Tsai — to discourage Beijing from considering a military invasion of the island.
Read my full story here.
POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas
HOW TIKTOK BUILT A ‘TEAM OF AVENGERS’ TO FIGHT FOR ITS LIFE
TikTok finds itself under siege in the U.S. and in Europe. Congressional calls for a TikTok ban are picking up steam. Influencers have descended on Washington as part of a last-ditch effort to save the company, paid for by TikTok. And the company’s CEO met bipartisan denunciations before a Congressional committee last week.
TikTok’s battle for survival has become a vivid study in how a wealthy, foreign-owned corporation can use its financial might to build an impressive-looking network of influence. It also provides some insight into the limitations of what lobbying can do to protect a company at the center of a geopolitical firestorm. Beyond closed doors, an army of operatives have been preparing for this moment. Former members of Congress — including a former member of Democratic House leadership — helped the CEO get meetings on the Hill ahead of the hearing. Former aides to Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi helped prepare him.
SKDK, a firm that worked for the Biden campaign, has been assisting with policy communications. But the preparations for TikTok’s fight date back years, to at least 2018. With more than two dozen sources, we paint a picture of how TikTok amassed a network of operatives that connect the company to power centers across the world.
POLITICO’s Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard and Daniel Lippman have the full story here.
BEIJING SNEERS AT BIDEN’S DEMOCRACY SUMMIT
Today marks the conclusion of President Biden’s three-day Summit for Democracy.
Biden said the gathering — to which he invited the leaders of 120 countries — was a testament to his vision of democracies “getting stronger, not weaker.”
Biden put his money where his mouth is by announcing that his administration will channel — if Congress cooperates — $9.5 billion over the next three years to fund “efforts to advance democracy across the world.” And he’s creating a Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance operating out of USAID to allocate that cash.
Beijing is unimpressed. The U.S. insists that “only American and Western democracy is good and right, which is in itself at odds with the spirit of democracy,” the Chinese embassy’s Xu told reporters on Wednesday. That made Biden’s summit “much more about group politics than democracy,” Xu said.
Xu may be half-right. “The problem with the summit is it’s an issue of ‘who’s in, who’s out’ — who gets chosen and who doesn’t and that’s an unfortunate way it’s been organized,” said Derek Mitchell, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and the president of the National Democratic Institute. But Beijing’s criticism “shows China’s vulnerability and insecurity on the issues of real democracy,” Mitchell said.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Zelenskyy to Xi Jinping: Come to Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday invited Xi Jinping to Ukraine, for what would be the first direct communication between the two leaders since the beginning of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine. “We are ready to see [Xi] here,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Associated Press on a train to Kyiv, adding, “I want to speak with him.” POLITICO’s Nicolas Camut has the full story here.
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— DOJ: SURVEILLANCE NEEDED TO ‘FIGHT’ CHINA: Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Justice Department’s surveillance authority — known as Section 702 — as an essential weapon against Chinese espionage. “This is what we need in order to fight the Chinese — we’re getting information about their cyber attacks, about their efforts to export our military information … [and] about their efforts to control dissidents who have fled China and now are in the United States,” Garland told a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday.
— SULLIVAN, WANG YI TALK BILATERAL RELATIONS: National security adviser Jake Sullivan called China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, last Friday, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment and the Chinese embassy said in a statement that it had “no information” regarding the reported call. But if accurate it suggests that the Biden administration is on a diplomatic outreach spree given that deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan, Rick Waters, made a low-key visit toHong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing from March 18-26 (a State Department spokesperson confirmed the details). The visit was devoted to “internal discussions with the U.S. embassy and consulates in China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Wednesday.
— RICHARD GERE DEFENDS TIBET IN D.C.: The actor Richard Gere lent some star power to a congressional hearing on Tuesday with sharply-worded criticism of China’s policies in Tibet. CCP control of Tibet has been “characterized by cruelty, collective violence and extreme persecution,” Gere told a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. The committee timed the hearing — whose panelists included Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s special coordinator for Tibetan issues, and head of the Tibetan government in exile, Sikyong Penpa Tsering — to coincide with the 64th anniversary of the CCP’s overthrow of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government. Gere has asserted that China-leery Hollywood studio executives placed him on a blacklist due to his blamed his advocacy for Tibet over the past three decades
— TAIWAN REP SLAMS HONDURAS’ DIPLOMATIC DEFECTION: Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry announced on Saturday — and Beijing confirmed on Sunday — that the government of Honduras had broken diplomatic relations with the self-governing island in favor of Beijing ties. Honduras’ decision followed Taiwan’s refusal to provide $2.45 billion in aid to the Central American country, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters. Honduras’s new ties with Beijing will render “nothing but empty promises and malign influence,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the U.S., Bi-khim Hsiao, tweeted on Saturday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning shot back by accusing Taiwan’s government of “dollar diplomacy.”
TRANSLATING EUROPE
EU’S HARD-HITTING SPEECH TO CHINA: Europe needs to be “bolder” on China, which has become “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” according to the president of the European Commission.
Von der Leyen, who will be visiting China next week together with French President Emmanuel Macron, warned Beijing not to side with Moscow in bringing compromised peace to Ukraine, saying: “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward.”
She implied, for the first time, that the EU could terminate pursuing a landmark trade deal with China, which was clinched in 2020 but subsequently stalled by the European Parliament when its members were sanctioned by Beijing authorities. “We need to reassess CAI [agreement] in light of our wider China strategy,” she said. Read our full story here.
ANTI-COERCION: EU negotiators have reached a major breakthrough in new rules that will allow the bloc to retaliate when foreign governments (read: China) try to use economic blackmail against one of its members (read: Lithuania). In the early hours of Tuesday, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU struck a deal on the anti-coercion instrument, after 11 hours of negotiations.
The instrument is “not a teeth-less tiger; it’s a tiger with teeth. It’s not a water pistol, it’s a gun,” said Bernd Lange, the lead lawmaker on the file. “Sometimes, it’s necessary to put a gun on the table, even knowing it is not used day by day.” Camille Gijs has the full story here.
LONDON SEALS DEAL: Britain will today be welcomed into an Indo-Pacific trade bloc called CPTPP (the successor to the one from which the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out), as ministers from the soon-to-be 12-nation trade pact meet in a virtual ceremony across multiple time zones, Graham Lanktree reports.
Meanwhile, the opposition Labour Party of the U.K., which is hoping to return to power after next year’s general elections, will pursue legal routes toward declaring China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims a “genocide,” according to the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy. Here’s the report by Eleni Courea.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
Apple CEO Tim Cook gladhands with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao on Monday | China’s Ministry of Commerce
— APPLE CEO GETS ‘OPENING UP’ EARFUL: Apple CEO Tim Cook got a whack of Chinese government sweet talk about the country’s rosy investment climate in Beijing on Monday.
China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao told Cook that China has “steadfastly pushed forward a high level of opening up … and is willing to provide a good environment and services for foreign-funded enterprises, including Apple,” said a statement posted on the ministry’s website on Monday. That rhetoric echoed pledges that the Chinese government has been making for more than two decades — with questionable follow-through. Cook is one of a gaggle of U.S. senior corporate executives who have converged on Beijing this week for the 2023 China Development Forum to try to revive in-person business ties effectively suspended for three years due to China’s now-defunct zero-Covid policy.
TRANSLATING CHINA
The Taiwanese General Store in Brooklyn has become an East coast outpost of Taiwanese culinary, cultural and political identity | Lanna Apisukh
— BROOKLYN’S TAIWAN CULINARY CULTURE OUTPOST: Don’t be surprised if visiting Taiwan President Tsai’s motorcade makes a detour to Brooklyn during her layover in New York today. The likely destination: The Yun Hai (雲海 — “sea of clouds”) Taiwanese General Store. Since the online specialty store opened its brick and mortar location in 2022 it has become an East coast outpost of Taiwanese culinary, cultural and political identity. It led an initiative to support Taiwanese farmers during a 2021 Chinese import ban on Taiwanese pineapples and has become the Lunar New Year snacks supplier of choice for Taiwan’s unofficial diplomatic outpost in the Big Apple. China Watcher spoke to Lillian Lin, who co-owns Yun Hai with Lisa Cheng Smith, about the tasty intersection of Taiwanese food and politics.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What was the idea behind Yun Hai?
There are still a lot of people who don’t know what Taiwan is and confuse it with all sorts of other places. Including Thailand. Through the lens of food we’re shedding light on Taiwan’s history and bringing an awareness of Taiwan as a distinct place versus just some other random place they might have heard of in Asia.
We’re trying to share specific foods and dishes from Taiwan that have a holistic story about the people that are making it. It’s inevitable that when we talk about the history of where it all comes from, it acknowledges Taiwan as something that has its own identity. And that in itself should not be political, but unfortunately it is. We explain the history of Taiwanese foods and why it is Taiwanese and how you can’t find this stuff in China anymore.
What do Americans need to know about Taiwan?
All the politics make people question whether Taiwan is a country or not. But there’s a president, there’s a telephone country code, there’s a Taiwan website domain. It’s really a country, but that’s shrouded in the politics. And people are surprised when I tell them how progressive Taiwan is. Taiwan has gay marriage and press freedom that a lot of people don’t usually associate with Asia. And Taiwan is the only Mandarin-speaking democracy out there. So it’s a place where you can access Chinese history in a very open way and that’s of huge value.
How did Yun Hai get involved in the Chinapineapple export dispute?
When Taiwan’s pineapples got banned by China, there was a huge “freedom pineapple” movement where everybody in Taiwan was trying to eat as many pineapples as possible to help offset that canceled trade. In the U.S., there was a lot of interest in helping with that, but there wasn’t really an easy way to do that. So we thought — why don’t we try doing dried fruits instead? The goal was to create a new export channel for Taiwanese farmers so that they can diversify their export options and not solely rely on China. So we did a Kickstarter, raised about $110,000, bought 14 tons of fruit and now we’ve reordered from the farmers three times and are growing the quantity every time.
HEADLINES
WNYC:Rep. Jamaal Bowman Says Republicans Are Scapegoating TikTok. Agree?
Associated Press:Amid strained US ties, China finds unlikely friend in Utah
New York Times: How China Keeps Putting Off Its ‘Lehman Moment’
HEADS UP
— CHINA’S BOAO FORUM FLAGS ‘UNCERTAIN WORLD’: The annual Boao Forum for Asia opens today in Hainan’s Boao city and its organizers are channeling the global zeitgeist by making “an uncertain world” its central theme. The four-day event — Beijing’s attempt at a regional Davos — will host world leaders including Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS
Formosa Moon | Tobie Openshaw
The Book: Formosa Moon.
The Authors: Joshua Samuel Brown is a former journalist and author of more than a dozen Lonely Planet guides. Stephanie Huffman is an artist who earned her masters in Asian studies from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from your book?
That cross-strait tension doesn’t define Taiwan. Despite the precariousness of its geopolitical situation, Taiwan’s zeitgeist isn’t one of anxiety and endless preparation for a conflict that’s been called various stages of “imminent” since 1949. Taiwan’s story is infinitely more complex and nuanced than the boilerplate — and historically dubious at best — “breakaway island” narrative that’s been dutifully copy-pasted into nearly every article published about Taiwan over the last 30 years.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book?
The out-of-bounds artistic creativity of the Taiwanese. We encountered dozens of strange, wonderful and highly improbable venues seemingly willed into existence by folks with the energy, enthusiasm — and capital — to bring their dreams to life. From an inland hotel boasting an indoor scuba diving tank to a tourist village based entirely on the concept of cats, from the nearly endless array of colorful temples and food streets in every conceivable configuration to dozens of absolutely bonkersannual festivals that oversaturate the senses in every way.
What insights does your book offer about Taiwan that can’t be found in travel guides?
Travel guides generally stick to where to go, how to get there and what things should cost. There’s a bit of pragmatic logistics in the book — old habits die hard because I spent 10 years writing guidebooks for Lonely Planet. But we focused more on the 人情味 (rén qíng wèi: human warmth, friendliness) we experienced. By taking a more experiential travelogue approach, we hope to inspire readers to visit Taiwan, make their own discoveries and come to their own conclusions about the nation.
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].
MANY THANKS TO: Heidi Vogt, Christian Oliver, Matt Kaminski, Jamil Anderlini, Stuart Lau, Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard, Daniel Lippman, Nicolas Camut, Josh Gerstein, Camille Gijs, Graham Lanktree, Eleni Courea, and digital producers Tara Gnewikow and Jeanette Minns.Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected].
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Bengaluru: Supreme Court judge Justice B.V. Nagarathna, who is poised to become India’s first woman Chief Justice in 2027, said on Saturday that the issue of delay in the appointment of judges could have serious effects for democracy in general, and judiciary in particular.
Delivering the inaugural address at the fifth conference of Central government counsels from southern states in Bengaluru, Justice Nagarathna said, “The adequate manning of the judiciary at all levels by independent and fearless judges is necessary to ward off any semblance of interference from any quarter. I must say, in my most humble way, that government or executive’s inaction or delay in critical matters concerning the judiciary such as the appointment of judges could have serious effects for democracy in general, and judiciary particular.”
She added, “In fact, in my humble view, there is a Constitutional obligation upon the executive to effectively process appointments and transfer of judges recommended by the collegium of the Supreme Court within the earliest possible time, so that there are no vacancies in courts, which could hamper effective judicial functioning. If empowerment of the judiciary is to be seriously considered, I feel that vacancies must be filled and transfers must be affected at the earliest possible time.”
Her statement is crucial against the backdrop of increasing friction between the Supreme Court collegium and the Central government over the delay in the appointment and transfer of judges of the high courts.
Earlier this week, the apex court collegium headed by Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud, had taken a serious view of the delay by the Centre in taking a decision on the names reiterated by it for appointment as judges to the high courts.
“Reiterated names ought not to be withheld or overlooked as this disturbs their seniority whereas those recommended later steal march on them. Loss of seniority of candidates recommended earlier in point of time has been noted by the collegium and is a matter of grave concern,” the SC collegium had said.
