Why Are Indians Unhappy With Modi's Reception in Washington?
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington on September 23rd for a bilateral meeting with President Joseph R. Biden followed by a 4-nation summit involving Australia, India, Japan and the United States. An unhappy meme of his visit went viral on social media as Mr. Modi wrapped up his visit to the United States.
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| Modi Washington Visit Meme |
It highlights four key complaints about how the Indian prime minister was treated by the White House:
1. President Biden did not receive Prime Minister Modi at the White House porch. This is in sharp contrast to the reception President Donald J. Trump gave Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan during the latter's visit in 2019. President Trump greeted Prime Minister Khan in the driveway as the latter emerged from his car.
2. US media did not cover Modi's visit. (Pakistan's Imran Khan was on the Newsweek cover while Modi was in Washington). The media coverage Modi did receive in the US media was about lectures from the US leaders.
3. Kamala Harris reminded Modi of the pressing need for real democracy in India. Here's an excerpts of the US Vice President's remarks released by the White House: "Finally, as democracies around the world are under threat, it is imperative that we defend democratic principles and institutions within our respective countries and around the world and that we maintain what we must do to strengthen democracies at home. And it is incumbent on our nations to, of course, protect democracies in the best interest of the people of our countries".
4. Joseph Biden lectured Modi on tolerance. The President said to the Prime Minister: "As the world celebrates Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday next week, we’re all reminded that his message of non-violence, respect, tolerance matters today maybe more than it ever has".
President Biden offered a back-handed compliment to the Indian media when he said at the White House: "The Indian press is much better behaved than the American press...And I think, with your permission, we should not answer questions because they won't ask any questions on point" .
Biden may have said this to help Modi evade tough questions from the press that the Indian Prime Minister can not answer. He has never held an open press conference nor has he ever agreed to be interviewed by independent journalists.
Here's a video clip of Biden's statement to the White House press corps before the beginning of the closed-door meeting with Mr. Modi:
https://youtu.be/scY3O3WM8Mg
Here's a video clip showing what Modi doesn't like about facing tough questions like why he didn't even express regret about massacre of Muslims in Gujarat:
https://youtu.be/S5dkpUn5tNo
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Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani: America Does Not Respect India
Fareed Zakaria Never Misses Any Opportunity to Bash Pakistan
Retired Justice Markanday Katju on Modi's India
Lynchistan: India is the Lynching Capital of the World
73 Year After Independence, Caste-Ridden India Dominated By Brahmins
Lying Indian Media
Is Pakistan's Response to COVID19 Flawed?
Pakistan's Computer Services Exports Jump 26% Amid COVID19 Lockdown
Coronavirus, Lives and Livelihoods in Pakistan
Vast Majority of Pakistanis Support Imran Khan's Handling of Covid19 Crisis
Pakistani-American Woman Featured in Netflix Documentary "Pandemic"
Coronavirus Antibodies Testing in Pakistan
Can Pakistan Effectively Respond to Coronavirus Outbreak?
Obama: Quickest Route to Indian Unity is Expressing Hostility Toward Pakistan
Pakistan Fares Marginally Better Than India On Disease Burdens
Trump Picks Muslim-American to Lead Vaccine Effort
Democracy vs Dictatorship in Pakistan
Pakistan Child Health Indicators
Pakistan's Balance of Payments Crisis
Panama Leaks in Pakistan
Conspiracy Theories About Pakistan Elections"
PTI Triumphs Over Corrupt Dynastic Political Parties
Strikingly Similar Narratives of Donald Trump and Nawaz Sharif
Nawaz Sharif's Report Card
Riaz Haq's Youtube Channel
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by Debashish Roy Chowdhury
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-for-muslims-in-modi-s-india-echoes-of-1930s-germany-are-growing-louder-1.10241729
In reality, the radicalization of the majority is a much bigger threat confronting India than minority extremism.
Lynching of Muslims by Hindu mobs have become so normalized that they rarely make news anymore. New laws against beef and interfaith love – termed "love jihad" by Modi’s party – now allow Hindu vigilante groups to attack Muslims with impunity. A pliant civil administration and police force mostly look away, if they’re not actively collaborating with the vigilantes.
Ever since Modi’s thumping re-election in 2019, he has doubled down on the Hindu majoritarian project of remaking India’s secular republic as a Hindu state, and arm’s-length vigilante groups allied with the ruling party’s Hindu-first world view play a significant role in asserting the new order.
by Debashish Roy Chowdhury
Anything short of a convincing victory in Uttar Pradesh will jeopardize Modi’s dream march. Be it the COVID catastrophe, the farmers’ protests or the crashing economy, Modi has so far weathered it all.
But the slightest sign of cracks in Uttar Pradesh will undo the carefully crafted image of invincibility, built in large measure by a combination of docile media coverage, ruthless use of force, surveillance and intimidation against dissenters and a steady drip of ever more audacious levels of bigotry that act to both distract and divide voters.
With not much to show for its last five years in the state, the memories of COVID losses and hardships still raw, and an intensifying farmers’ protest that threatens splits in its captive Hindu voter base, the BJP is left with no choice but to escalate its campaign of hate. Accordingly, radical supremacists calling for genocide are becoming increasingly common. Videos of small groups of self-appointed saviors of Hinduism tormenting lone Muslims are showing up on social media more often than before.
Many of these attacks are now aimed at driving Muslims out of their livelihoods and businesses. While Modi waxes eloquent on global forums on the need for "rational thinking" to counter radicalization, Hindu fanatics linked to his party have been warning salons and shops against hiring Muslim men.
A group of Hindu men set upon a Muslim bangle seller in the northern city of Indore last month. They did not take kindly to him interacting with Hindu women.
The bangle seller was guilty of just the kind of "dangerous" encounter a prominent supremacist leader connected to the BJP (whose self-declared mission is to "remove Muslims from the face of Earth") has been warning of – Muslim vendors, plumbers and electricians visiting Hindu homes and gaining proximity to the women of the household while the men are away at work.
A screenshot of what looks like the front page of the US daily The New York Times, featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been doing the rounds on social media and WhatsApp groups.
The screenshot features a large photograph of PM Modi along with the headline “Last, Best Hope of Earth” and the strap “World’s most loved and most powerful leader is here to bless us”, referring to Modi’s US visit on 24-25 September. The edition is dated 26 September 2021.
The image of the purported NYT front page was circulated en masse on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp group chats, with messages like “Proud of my PM” accompanying it.
National general secretary of the BJP Youth Wing, Rohit Chahal, who has over 76,000 followers, also retweeted the screenshot posted by another user.
One WhatsApp forward of the photograph states: “Modi ji on the frontpage of the United States’ biggest newspaper. What could be a greater matter of pride than this?”
Fact check
The screenshot in circulation, however, is not the front page of The New York Times. In fact, the 26 September front page of the newspaper did not feature any story on PM Modi.
Furthermore, none of the social media posts provided an accompanying URL that linked to the newspaper page.
A closer look at the screenshot itself, as well as the pattern of social media posts, also reveals that the image is morphed.
The font style of the headline in the screenshot does not match the NYT stylesheet, which proves that the image has been altered. The date of the story also features a typo — 26 “Setpember” instead of 26 September.
The image of PM Modi used in the fake front page appears to have been taken from a Zee News story published last month, titled, “PM Modi to chair UNSC high-level open debate on enhancing maritime security.”
A major world event and a huge success — but only by the Indian media for their audience back home.
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The media reactions to the visit and its aftermath followed the usual playbook. Republic TV made it sound like Modi was the only foreign dignitary to speak at the UNGA. Zee News ran with silly stories of “Josh high in Washington,” and breathless accounts of a grand welcome home. Aaj Tak was keen to emphasise how this trip had many firsts. Times Now presented it as a pivotal geopolitical moment.
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Some things do not change. Even in 2019, PM Modi’s visit was presented as a major world event and a huge success but only by the Indian media for their audience back home, but it barely registered as a footnote in the US media. Then too, as Shoaib Danyal put it, “jingoism took precedence over factual reporting about the UN session”. There was barely a mention of the Modi visit in the US media save a brief mention in the context of the QUAD meeting, much to the surprise of Aaj Tak anchor Anjana Om Kashyap who tried flicking through a selection of US papers on air to spot coverage of the Modi visit.
Indeed very few Indian media outlets, if any at all, took the trouble to research what the 76th UNGA was about, and what the stand was of the other world leaders who also addressed the General Assembly. A cursory search on Google would have led even a rookie journalist to a wealth of information about the agenda, background papers, and issues before the UN.
Instead they focused exclusively and breathlessly on the 20-minute long address by PM Modi on September 25. The speech itself was as might have been expected. It sounded like a robust and combative defense of the Indian Government’s record in office in the last seven years; set against a backdrop of statements about India as an ancient democratic civilisation that inherently valued diversity, individual freedom, development, trade, openness and peace.
There was the obligatory reference to terrorism, of course, and how a certain neighbour sought to rely on terrorism rather than development to further its political aims.
Speaking in Hindi with instantaneous translation by the UN team into several languages, Modi’s speech at the UN was not the eagerly anticipated address that Indian media channels would have you believe. It was left to social media and Twitter handles to point out the preponderance of vacant seats in the assembly Hall
In the final analysis, it depends very much on the newspaper you read or the TV news you watch to get a feel for how important or influential the Indian PM’s visit to the US was. Perhaps, the truth is somewhere between the breathless fawning coverage of the TV channels that are beholden to the Government for its largesse and the somewhat cynical view expressed in this tweet thread.
Such visits by the head of the country’s government to gatherings of major world leaders are important and necessary, even if not essential — because not to make the effort to travel and be seen would be an own goal. But part of the magic is to manage expectations, say the right things at the right time, but to do so in an understated manner that does not make the audience cynical. But perhaps the most important thing is to be accessible to the world’s press.
This visit to the United States was the 6th by Mr Modi. And while there were many ‘firsts’ that his supporters claimed for it, regrettably it was not the first foreign trip in which the Indian Prime Minister gave a press conference.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3150762/ganging-china-doomed-fail-beijings-ambassador-tells-india
India should maintain “strategic autonomy” instead of joining any exclusive alliances against its neighbour, Beijing’s top envoy in New Delhi said, days after leaders of the Quad gathered in Washington for their first in-person summit, with Beijing a veiled target.
Without naming the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or its members, Sun Weidong said any attempts to “gang up for containing and suppressing China” would “be doomed to fail”.
“It is worth noting that a few countries are going against the trend,” Sun told more than 100 representatives from business, culture and academic communities in India during a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
“Out of selfishness, they hold a zero-sum cold war mentality, vigorously seek closed and exclusive ideological ‘small cliques’ and military alliances targeting a third party, stoke arms races, tension, division and bloc confrontation, turn the Asia-Pacific into an arena of major powers’ game and destabilise the world,” he said, according to a transcript published on the embassy’s website.
“These activities will find no support and lead nowhere.”
India should “maintain its strategic autonomy and refrain from joining closed and exclusive ‘alliances’ or ‘quasi-alliances’ against each other”, Sun said.
During the summit in Washington last week, the four leaders of the United States, Australia, Japan and India repeated their commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific region “undaunted by coercion”, a thinly veiled criticism of China.
“We stand for the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values and territorial integrity of states,” the Quad leaders said in a joint statement after the summit.
Beijing is deeply concerned about “cliques” that it sees as part of Washington’s strategy to contain China’s growing influence in the region.
Relations between India and China have worsened since June last year when Chinese and Indian troops engaged in a deadly hand-to-hand skirmish on their disputed border in the western Himalayas. At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died in the clashes, the deadliest in decades. Little progress has been made since the two militaries started negotiations – with the latest round in August – and a stand-off continues.
There have been reports that the two sides have been stepping up military build-up along the disputed borders, fuelling fears they could clash again before winter.
On Wednesday, Sun said that although it was normal for the two countries to have differences, they should manage disputes and move towards stability together.
“We should place the border issues in the right place in bilateral relations and seek a fair and reasonable and mutually acceptable solution through equal consultation,” Sun said.
He called for further efforts to boost cooperation on the pandemic fight, energy security and climate change as well as bilateral trade, which reached US$78.5 billion in the first eight months of the year, up 52 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Indian leaders love to talk up Mahatma Gandhi when they travel abroad. It plays well to the popular notion of India as a land of peace and love, and boosts its moral authority as a responsible democracy on the world stage. So, Gandhi and his ideas came up a lot as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped out of India recently for the first time in about one and a half years.
Meeting Modi at the White House on Sept. 24, President Joe Biden said Gandhi’s “message of non-violence, respect, and tolerance matters today maybe more than it ever has.” In his own speech to the United Nations, Modi rued that “the world faces the threat of regressive thinking and extremism,” and underlined his country’s democratic credentials. To reinforce his point, he even coined a new sobriquet for India: “the mother of all democracies.”
No one knows what that means, least of all one Indian mother still trying to make sense of the death of her 12-year-old boy. He was felled by a stray police bullet in the northeastern state of Assam at the same time as Modi was pontificating in America.
“They killed my son,” a dazed Hasina Bano kept repeating between sobs when journalists visited her at a remote village on the banks of the Brahmaputra river. The boy, Sheikh Farid, was hit when police opened fire at Bengali Muslim villagers protesting the forced eviction from their land that the government now wants to give to Assamese Hindus, whom it calls the “indigenous community.” Ironically, moments before Farid died, he had collected from the post office a national biometric identification card establishing his own indigeneity.
The death of a child in such a manner should be the stuff of national disgrace. But the same eviction drive resulted in even more horror when a neighbor of Farid charged at the police with a stick, in a blind rage after they dismantled his home along with those of 5,000 others. The heavily armed policemen, who far outnumbered Moinul Hoque and could have easily subdued him, instead shot him dead at point blank range.
It was all captured on a widely circulated video [Warning: Graphic and distressing scenes]. The images show police raining baton blows on him even as he collapsed, taking turns with Bijoy Baniya, a Hindu photographer accompanying the police team. As Hoque’s life ebbs away, Baniya fiendishly jumps and stomps on his motionless body in an “act of performative depravity.”
Baniya is merely the latest face of India’s state-driven Hindu radicalization. In a country where 84% of the population is Hindu, and just 14% Muslim, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has achieved the astonishing feat of creating a deep sense of Hindu victimhood, stoking the othering of Muslims via disinformation, hate speech, opening old religious wounds, manipulating a servile media, silencing progressive voices, and empowering Hindu supremacist vigilante groups. “Hindu khatre mein hain” (Hindus are in danger) is a right-wing refrain that resonates deeply today.
As a result, many Hindus have now been persuaded to believe that India’s biggest problem is its Muslims. Before Modi took over in 2014, most citizens thought their chief concerns were poverty, insufficient economic growth and corruption. He rode to power on the promise to fix all that. But as the economy has continued to worsen, and unemployment and poverty have risen under him, the BJP has increasingly fallen back on supremacist politics to deflect attention and evade responsibility. To keep winning elections, it needs to keep polarizing Hindu voters against Muslims, and spinning ever more outrageous campaigns to demonize Muslims.
It could put every fat cat in Power Delhi and Khan Market to shame even as taxpayers foot Narendra Modi’s astronomical, wasteful bill.
https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/05/14/narendra-modi-a-humble-chaiwallahs-billion-dollar-lifestyle
For starters, if the country’s humble prime minister really wants to lead by living a life of humility and austerity—in deference to the millions of poor and impoverished people he constantly refers to with such touching sympathy—he could perhaps exit from his grand, five-house official residence in the intoxicating world of Lutyens’ Delhi, that not only takes up the entire road, but is spread over 12 acres, in the leafy boulevards of the Capital state. While the layout of the five-mansion residence is secret for security reasons, there are private quarters, guest rooms for visitors, and accommodation for family members, apart from salons to entertain. It’s all run efficiently by a staff of over 50 gardeners, chauffeurs, housekeepers, cooks, and electricians. There are barbers, hairdressers and tailors on call, apart from doctors and nurses on duty round the clock with a state-of-the-art fitted ambulance on stand-by. It’s a household expense that runs into crores of rupees.
Imagine if humble Modi had downsized his personal quarters to a functional minimum, not necessarily outside Lutyens’ zone but in a more modest house—hasn’t he tired of telling the world how he works a punishing 20-hour work schedule, barely sleeping for three-four hours? It would have sent a slap to the slothful and entitled Lutyens’-Khan Market gang he so reviles, and would have also revealed the prime minister’s true beginnings of not just being a chaiwallah’s son (the fable flip-flops from Modi being a tea-seller to being the son of one) but as an ascetic RSS pracharak too, brought up on a rigid and rigorous discipline of life.
I suppose it takes a lot of money to keep Modi humble and poor.
If there are five bullet-proof BMW sedans to ferry him around in the city—though he’s reportedly switched to Range Rovers—there’s Air India One, the plush Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which Modi uses whenever he flies on official visits abroad. It made sense to have the jumbo when prime ministers ferried officials, business delegations, and a sizeable media contingent on tours. But a media-averse Modi travels without them, and with only a bare minimum of officials. As RTI queries have revealed, Air India has sent a whopping bill of ₹443.4 crore for the PM’s trips abroad so far, on aircraft maintenance and setting up a secure hotline, though the airline is yet to calculate the expenses for Modi’s trips to five more countries stretching from Argentina to Japan. The Prime Minister’s Office has declined to give any calculation on Modi’s domestic trips, saying it does not keep an account of it.
Now, couldn’t the humble PM opt for a business jet, with less opulence and luxury, and save taxpayer’s money? Instead, the poor and humble PM has splashed out on his trips abroad with an astronomical bill of ₹2,021 crore in the last five years, which amounts to ₹400 crore a year. His fans say that previous prime ministers too blew up similar amounts of money, but aren’t we dealing with a frugal and ascetic RSS pracharak today?
But Modi’s vanity doesn’t end here: it’s in the publicity sweepstakes that expenses have blown through the roof. As RTI queries reveal, Modi spent nearly ₹4,400 crore on publicity alone (footed by the government and taxpayer) in just four years, until 2018, to bolster his image along with the schemes launched by him. Unfortunately, reports on the performance of the schemes fade in the blaze of Modi’s publicity blitzkrieg. In election year now, the mind boggles with the campaign bill, as reports say Modi’s BJP got 94 per cent of election bonds issued (running into ₹210 crore). Its Facebook and other social media is a multi-million dollar industry.