India Now And Asia

Wednesday 27 January 2016

Diversification to Asia now weighs on India's exports - Livemint

The biggest contributors to the slowdown in India’s exports have been the UAE, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan—most of these countries have seen exports contract in the double digits.

India’s export growth has been contracting, given the slowdown in the global economy. Exports have fallen around 17.6% since the beginning of fiscal 2016 after declining marginally in fiscal 2015.
What is worrying is that exports to Asia are also declining. In the past few years, India diversified its exports towards the Asian markets, especially after the financial crisis hit North America 2008-09.
Asia accounts for around half of India’s total exports so far in 2015-16, which is more than the combined share of Europe and the US at 31.8%.

Friday 25 December 2015

PM Mosi Made a Suprise Stop in Pakistan

Narendra Modi to meet counterpart Nawaz Sharif in the first visit by an Indian premier to Pakistan in more than a decade The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, has arrived in Pakistan in a surprise stopover to meet his counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in what is the first visit by an Indian premier to the country in more than a decade.

Modi and Sharif resumed high-level contacts with a brief conversation at climate change talks in Paris last month, part of efforts to restart a peace dialogue plagued by militant attacks and distrust according to the Guardian

Modi, who inaugurated a new parliament complex built with Indian help in the Afghan capital, Kabul, spoke to Sharif on Friday to wish him a happy 66th birthday.

Mistrust between India and Pakistan runs deep, and in Afghanistan many believe that Islamabad sponsors the Taliban insurgency to weaken the Kabul government and limit the influence of India.
Pakistan rejects the accusation but it has struggled to turn around perceptions in Afghanistan, where social media users sent out a stream of glowing commentary on Modi’s visit, contrasting the parliament building with the destruction wrought by Taliban suicide bombers.

Nalin Kohli, a spokesman for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party, said India was ready to take two steps forward if Pakistan took one to improve ties between the countries, which have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part.

Wednesday 23 December 2015

India PM Heads for Mosco on State Visit

PM Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin

Prime Minister Modi is visit Russia official for the very first since becoming head of Indian government. The expectations are high but the greatest of them all as reported by India Today is the "hope that India and Russia will take big steps to boost their flagging strategic partnership". This will be a win-win situation for both if this is done particularly if it done in the area of IT and Industries.

Friends fear for Chinese Christian lawyer spending Christmas behind bars

Human rights activist Zhang Kai, who was fighting the Com

Church members put up a banner opposing the removal of crosses at a Catholic church in China’s Zhejiang province. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

munist party’s removal of church crosses, was snatched four months ago by the authorities#
#

Zhang Kai will not make it home for Christmas.In late August, the Christian human rights lawyer was snatched in eastern China as he prepared to denounce a Communist party cross-removal campaign to the United States ambassador-at-large for religious freedom.He has not been seen since.“Nobody knows where he is. That is really something that is very hard,” said Yang Fenggang, a US-based academic and friend. “His family doesn’t know. His own lawyer doesn’t know … It is beyond understanding.”In the years leading up to Zhang’s enforced disappearance, the 36-year-old lawyer had built a reputation as an uncompromising defender of China’s needy and poor.A quick-tongued, Bible-carrying attorney, he made it his mission to stand up for the rights of earthquake victims, destitute migrant workers, landless farmers and women whose lives had been torn apart by the infamous one-child policy.He used social media to denounce human rights abuses and racked up thousands of air miles, travelling as far as Tibet and Xinjiang to represent clients.“[He] saw himself as a spokesperson for all of those who were suffering, all of those who were victims of the worst that contemporary China has produced for hundreds of millions of victims,” said Terry Halliday, a professor at the American Bar Foundation who has known the missing lawyer for almost a decade.Zhang converted to Christianity, China’s fastest-growing faith, in 2003 and became an energetic critic of Beijing’s treatment of religious communities, including the underground “house church” movement to which he belonged.“One might say he had emerged as the most prominent and persuasive spokesperson for house churches in China,” said Halliday.AdvertisementThat work, exhausting and at times dangerous, brought the Beijing-based lawyer into frequent contact with China’s violent underbelly: an underworld of threats, intimidation and torture often perpetrated by agents of the state.

In 2009, during a work trip to the southwestern city of Chongqing, Zhang reported being viciously beaten by police after he tried to investigate the suspicious death of a practitioner of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong at a Chinese prison camp.
The following year, a convoy of cars without number plates filled with unidentified men pursued him through the streets of Beijing, leaving the lawyer badly shaken.
Exhausted, Zhang sought a temporary respite, and in 2013 he enrolled for a year at Indiana’s Purdue University.
Yang, a Purdue sociologist who helped arrange the sabbatical, said his friend used his time to organise a conference on religious freedom, where Christian leaders and lawyers gathered to debate the plight of China’s church.
But Zhang also “spent part of the time just relaxing and recovering”, he added. “He did some sightseeing, travelling around. He needed that.”
Zhang visited Washington DC, New York, Boston and Maine during his gap year from the punishing travails of life as a human rights lawyer in a one-party state.
But last year, as a Communist party cross-removal campaign gained pace in the eastern province of Zhejiang, he decided it was time to return home.
“It’s more exciting to be in China,” he told Yang. “Life in the US is too easy – there’s no excitement.”
Chinese Christians are still grappling with the significance of the cross-removal campaign, which activists say has affected more than 1,200 churches since it began in late 2013.
Some believe it is the result of an overzealous politician’s personal vendetta against the church in Wenzhou, a city known as “China’s Jerusalem” for its large Christian population.
Many more, however, fear it is part of a deliberate and coordinated campaign that has the blessing of the country’s top leaders and is designed to slow Christianity’s growth.
As evidence of Beijing’s support, they point to president Xi Jinping’s ties to Zhejiang – where he was governor and party chief from 2003 to 2007 – and the recent promotion of key officials linked to the campaign.
Halliday said Zhang had become increasingly fearful for the church’s position in China and believed the situation had deteriorated since Xi became leader in late 2012. “He definitely saw a turn since Xi Jinping came to power,” he said.
In October 2014, as the anti-church campaign escalated, Zhang relocated to Zhejiang to offer legal support to congregations battling to save their crosses.
On one occasion, he camped outside a detention centre where Huang Yizi, a pastor who had been jailed for protesting against the cross removals, was being held.
More than 100 Zhejiang churches enlisted Zhang’s help as government officials continued to strip crosses from their places of worship.
Then, friends say, the Communist party decided it had had enough. “He became too difficult to be handled normally so they decided to take some extraordinary measures,” said Yang.
On 25 August, the day before Zhang was due to meet David Saperstein, the US ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, the Chinese lawyer was spirited into custody by police.
Speaking in October, Saperstein described Zhang’s detention as “deeply discouraging”.
“We have continued to ask questions, we will continue on this and we hope that we will get answers [from Beijing],” he told reporters.
Nearly four months after he vanished, there has been no news from Zhang Kai, who has a wife and baby daughter.
“I have no reason to be optimistic [that he will be home for Christmas],” said Zhang Lei, a lawyer who has represented the missing attorney.
Some fear Zhang’s connections to churches in the US could see him charged with spying.
“If that is the case, at the extreme it might involve the death penalty, [or] at the very least a very long sentence,” said Halliday.
Halliday, who last saw Zhang in June, described his friend’s disappearance and the destruction of crosses as “part of a much larger drama for the survival of the one-party state in China”.
Beijing saw church leaders and Christian lawyers as potential threats to the Communist party’s grip on power that had to be dealt with, he said.
Yang said China’s economic might meant international criticism over Zhang’s disappearance had been muted and fruitless. “It seems the whole world is powerless in dealing with this situation,” he said.
Halliday said his friend would look to God for support during his continued incarceration. “I would expect that he will be drawing deep on his reserves of belief, that he will be praying the kinds of pleas that you read about in the psalms,” he said. “Desperate pleas for mercy, for freedom.” Courtesy the Guardian