South Asia Investor Review

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully transformed routine rotational G20 presidency into an extravagant personal  PR exercise  this week. The Indian mass media and the general public saw Mr. Modi's face plastered all over the Indian capital. Some analysts described it as the kickoff of  the Indian leader's political campaign for national elections scheduled for next year. As Mr. Modi spoke of "one earth, one family, one future", his right-wing Hindutva allies continued their unhindered campaign of murder and mayhem against the Christian community in the Indian state of Manipur.  Globally, too, Mr. Modi lived up to his reputation of " Divider In Chief " as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Russian leader Vladimir Putin chose to stay away from the gathering attended by all the western leaders. Both China and Russia stand in the way of the continuation of centuries-old unchallenged western hegemony of the world.  Modi: Hero of Hatred at G20. Sour...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's campaign to show normalcy in the Indian occupied territory of Jammu and Kashmir has backfired.  Three member countries of the G20 boycotted the tourism event in Srinagar. The rest of them sent local embassy staff to attend. The event also drew negative worldwide media coverage of the brutality of India's "settler colonialism" in the disputed territory. It elicited strong condemnation from the United Nations. Prior to the event, India’s tourism secretary, Arvind Singh had promised that the meeting will not only “showcase (Kashmir’s) potential for tourism” but also “signal globally the restoration of stability and normalcy in the region.” The Modi government failed to achieve both of these objectives. G20 Meeting in Indian Military Occupied Kashmir  Meeting Boycott: China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey did not attend the G20 event in Srinagar. Rest of the G20 members sent diplomats posted in New Delhi to attend it.  It's not unusual for fore...

Forget Chinindia , G7 , or even G20 . Consensus is growing that it's G2, the governments of China and the United States, that will lead the world out of the current global economic crisis. The combined behemoth of China and America has been labeled by Harvard business school professor Niall Ferguson as "Chimerica" . Ferguson believes "we are living through a challenge to a phenomenon Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica.” In this view, the most important thing to understand about the world economy over the past decade has been the relationship between China and America. If you think of it as one economy called Chimerica, that relationship accounts for around 13 percent of the world’s land surface, a quarter of its population, about a third of its gross domestic product, and somewhere over half of the global economic growth of the past six years." The Group of 20 finance ministers (G2) gathering this weekend in England are of various minds but the U.S....