NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India has urged the United States to reconsider its decision to ban a Hindu-nationalist leader blamed for failing to halt the bloody 2002 Gujarat Hindu-Muslim riots.
Washington's move to revoke Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's visa has sparked a storm of protest in India, rallying many of his critics as well as supporters behind him and raising the prospect of a diplomatic spat.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, from the Congress party which has fiercely opposed Modi, told parliament's upper house on Saturday his government had pressed Washington to reconsider.
"It is not a matter of partisan politics, it is a matter of principles," Singh said. "Our government has very clearly pointed out our deep concern and regret over the U.S. decision.
"We have observed that this uncalled for decision (can) be traced to a lack of sensitivity and due courtesy to an elected authority."
About 500 activists from Modi's Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP) marched on the U.S. embassy in protest on Saturday, some shouting "Denial of a visa to Narendra Modi is an attack on Indian sovereignty." The rally later broke up peacefully.
Human rights groups say about 2,500 people, most of them Muslims, were hacked, burned or beaten to death in Gujarat in early 2002 after 59 Hindu pilgrims and activists died on a train in a fire some blamed on a Muslim crowd.
The Supreme Court slammed Modi for turning a blind eye to the carnage. He denies any wrongdoing. The BJP held power at the federal level at the time and is now the main opposition party.
The U.S. embassy said on Friday Modi's tourist/business visa had been revoked under a law banning foreign officials deemed responsible for severe violation of religious freedom.
The announcement came immediately after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's first official visit to India, during which she declared relations had never been better as the former Cold War foes seek to rewrite their relationship.
Congress, which lost ground to Modi in a bitter 2002 state poll fought over communal divisions and bloodshed, condemned the U.S. decision to block Modi's planned visit to meet the large Gujarati expatriate community in the United States and deliver a keynote speech at an Asian-American hoteliers conference.
The embassy said a separate application for a diplomatic visa had been rejected because state chief ministers did not qualify.
Modi, who travels often to seek investment in one of India's most industrialized states, has visited the United States before.
The U.S. decision came after Muslim and liberal groups campaigned there against the planned visit and petitioned the State Department to revoke his visa.
Critics of the decision say it has turned India's most controversial politician into a martyr and accuse the United States of hypocrisy.
In an editorial headlined "Modi, martyr!," Saturday's The Indian Express said: "The U.S. government has achieved the impossible: Modi can now play the persecuted."
The Express said Washington was not as concerned about religious freedoms in other countries, including Iraq, and said one of Washington's closest allies, Saudi Arabia, denied its people religious freedom as a matter of course.
As usual, the current Indian government handled this just the way it was thought they would. Spinelessly.
All the talk about 'religious freedom and democracy' is for lip service only. Of course, US never denied a visit to any of the Saudi officials, where practicing any other religion apart from Islam is forbidden. Even figurines and amulets are confiscated at the airports.
But this is not US's fault. It is a powerful country and whether it has the right or not, it can bully other countries if it likes. It is up to other countries to stand up to it. And of course, the current Indian government, the spineless bunch that they are, never can.
M.
"Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood.
US unready for rising threat
World > Terrorism & Security
posted April 8, 2005, updated 1:40 p.m.
Footsteps heard at sea
As Indians and Pakistanis cross Kashmir's 'peace bridge', US and Chinese admirals take note
By Jim Bencivenga | csmonitor.com
For the first time in decades Thursday, Kashmiris from India and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir took steps towards each other across a 220-foot-long bridge rebuilt in the last two weeks. The bridge, now called the Peace Bridge, was destroyed 50 years ago in a battle during the first of three wars fought between these rivals on the Asian subcontinent.
History will record that American and Chinese admirals took special note of those footsteps.
Normalized bus service, albeit involving a mere 59 passengers, signals a highly symbolic "warming trend between Delhi and Islamabad," reports The Christian Science Monitor.
For military planners around the globe, the significance of any long-term easing of tensions between Pakistan and India lies in allowing India to shift a greater proportion of its defense budget to the pursuit of a more assertive maritime strategy, says Express India.
Considering that India is half-circled by the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean that is a virtual gateway for all trade between the East and West, the policy shift may well herald a muscle-flexing exercise vis-à-vis other nations.
Given that Chinese and American fleets have begun seriously taking the measure of each other as the The New York Times notes, it is little wonder that signs of an increased Indian naval presence on the seas surrounding Asia, echoed from the Straits of Formosa, to the Sea of Japan, all the way to Pearl Harbor.
04/07/05
Iraq is becoming 'free fraud' zone
04/06/05
Whose side am I on now?
04/05/05
Kashmiris defy bombs to take local route
Naval buildups don't happen overnight. They take decades. Nations marshal industrial, military and political might.
Currently, by any standard of engagement the US rules the world oceans. Its carriers and nuclear submarines can, as Alfred Thayer Mahan counselled President Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, drive any foreign navy, like a "fugitive" from the seas.
But, like ocean tides, naval strength constantly rises and falls. Such is the case with China according to the Times.
While the American military is consumed with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism, and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America in the western Pacific, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, Pentagon and military officials say.
A decade ago, American military planners dismissed the threat of a Chinese attack against Taiwan as a 100-mile infantry swim. The Pentagon now believes that China has purchased or built enough amphibious assault ships, submarines, fighter jets and short-range missiles to pose an immediate threat to Taiwan and to any American force that might come to Taiwan's aid.
In the worst case in a Taiwan crisis, Pentagon officials say that any delay in American aircraft carriers reaching the island would mean that the United States would initially depend on fighter jets and bombers based on Guam and Okinawa, while Chinese forces could use their amphibious ships to go back and forth across the narrow Taiwan Strait.
The history of western civilization and the clash of navies intertwine. Naval strength and victory at sea proved pivotal factors in the advancement of Europe and America.
A quick summary of five major sea battles bears this out.
•When Rome destroyed its archrival, Carthage, it did so first at sea before finishing the job on land. Roman supremacy on the Mediterranean meant the great Carthagian army under the command of Hannibal became isolated in France, then Gaul.
Hannibal, his troops and his elephants, would starve if not resupplied from sea. Forced to take his elephants and cross the alps in 218 BCE in a desperate strike at Rome, Hannibal was defeated. The end of Carthage as a sea power in the Mediterranean ultimately lead to its total destruction in the the Third Punic war, in 149 BCE.
•The Greek and Persian fleets fought at Salamis, in the coastal waters of Greece, in 480 BCE. The victorious Greeks defeated the invading Persians. Having saved their independence, the Athenian fleet set the stage for the ensuing Golden Age of Greece which allowed for the eventual emergence of individual liberties in a democratic polity, one of the greatest legacies of the West.
•Lepanto was a great naval battle pitting the Papal States, Venice, and Spain against the Ottomans. It was fought at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras, off Lepanto, Greece. It was decisive in the sense that the Christian victory denied the Ottoman Empire its goal of supremacy in the Mediterranean like the Romans before them had held over Carthage.
•In 1805 it seemed that Napoleon would invade England, the foe that had stood in the way of his complete domination of Europe. Napoleon thought the French and Spanish fleets, if united, would destroy any ships the English could put to sea in opposition. The British Admiral Lord Nelson, concentrated his ships at the point of attack off Trafalgar, Spain. In the shadow of Gibraltar and at the mouth of the Mediterrean, Nelson crushed Napoleon's intent to invade England, saved his nation from invasion, and Europe from the loss of representative democracy.
•The Battle of Midway, fought over and near the tiny US mid-Pacific base at the Midway atoll occurred at the high water mark of Japan's Pacific Ocean war. After Pearl Harbor, Japan held general naval superiority in the Pacific. It could choose where and when to attack. After Midway, and the destruction of four Japanese aircraft carriers the two opposing fleets were essentially equal. In time, the greater US industrial might could put to sea a fleet that would destroy the Japanese navy.
Which kind of navy India develops is still an open book, writes Thomas P.M. Barnett of the US Naval War College.
But clearly, for India to achieve a world-class navy, its leaders have to move beyond viewing the fleet as a supplemental tool in New Delhi's long-standing rivalries with its neighbors, toward an expansive security vision that takes into account the nation's global economic status as an emerging information-technology superpower
In the meantime, not only admirals will keep listening for footsteps on the Peace Bridge spanning Pakistani and Indian-controlled Kashmir
03-19-2005 03:52 PM
