Trump tells Modi India ‘a true friend and partner’, invites PM to US ‘later this year’

January 25, 2017

Washington, Jan 25: In a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the US considers India a “true friend and partner in addressing challenges around the world”, according to a White House statement.

Modifriend

The two leaders also discussed opportunities to “strengthen the partnership between the United States and India in broad areas such as the economy and defense”, the statement said without citing specific areas, sectors or goals.

Modi and Trump, who were speaking for the first time after the new US president took charge last Friday, also discussed “security in the region of South and Central Asia” and, once again the statement left out details.

South and Central Asia cover many areas of mutual interest to both India and the United States including Pakistan and Afghanistan and it could not be immediately confirmed if they discussed the drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan.

But the two leaders resolved, according to the White House statement, “that the United States and India stand shoulder to shoulder in the global fight against terrorism”, which has been a priority for both of them and both countries.

Trump is hosting Modi later in the year, but it was, once again, not immediately clear if that will be in September-October when the Indian prime minister comes to the US for the UN general assembly meeting, or some other time.

But the two, who first spoke in November when Modi was among the first foreign leaders to call Trump on his election, are likely to meet during the next meeting of the G-20, which is scheduled to take place in Hamburg, Germany in July.

Since that first call, India engaged with Trump on two separate occasions: The first was a meeting between Indian foreign secretary S Jaishankar and then Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, and the second on December 19 when Ajit Doval, national security adviser to PM Modi, met Trump’s NSA Michael Flynn.

And now the call. The US statement contained no details and it was not known if trade in services, read H-1B, came up during their phone call, as many had expected, since it being the one issue that had agitated New Delhi the most about Trump.

The fate of the temporary US visa programme for high-skilled foreign workers, which is at the heart to India’s burgeoning IT exports to the US, seemed uncertain, given the president’s own reservations about it, and those of leading members of his team.

They believe the H-1B programme is being abused by the US companies to outsource American jobs to temporary foreign workers, a large number of them from India, and they have been considering ways to make it harder for that to happen.

“There is no other area of potential dispute or differences with the United States under President Trump,” said an Indian official, who spoke strictly on background. He added, “H-1B is the only problem for us as of now.”

In response to a question about India-US relations, White House press secretary Sean Spicer had said Monday that as with other countries, the Trump administration is focussed on access to markets in manufacturing and services.

Since being sworn-in last Friday, the new president has begun engaging with world leaders and has spoken to prime minister and president of neighboring Canada and Mexico first — with whom he plans to renegotiate the NAFTA trade deal.

He has also talked since with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who he has invited to to a meeting in early February. And he meets Teresa May, prime minister of America’s closest ally the United Kingdom, on Friday.

The Tuesday call with Modi, on the second day of Trump’s first week in office, is being taken as sign of the priority he is attaching to the relationship, after an unprecedented outreach to the Indian American community during election.

At an election rally in New Jersey, Trump had said on his watch as president that India and the US will be “best friends” and, added in a typically Trumpian hyperbole that “there will be no relationship more important to me”.

At the suggestion of the Republican Hindu Coalition founder Shalli Kumar, who had organised the rally, Trump recorded a campaign call modeled on Modi’s election slogan “Abki baar Modi sarkar”, replacing Modi with Trump.

Also, Prime Minister Modi appears to have an admirer in Steve Bannon, chief strategist and senior counseller to the president, who had in 2014 called Modi’s election a “great victory … very much based on … Reaganesque principles”.

Bannon was then chief executive officer of Breitbart News, a stridently conservative news publication, and would become in 2016 a leading and early supporter of Trump, and later went on to head his campaign in August.

Comments

ali
 - 
Wednesday, 25 Jan 2017

Modi is happy, because after a long time after leaving his wife, he got the life partner in trump.

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
March 16,2024

AIE.jpg

Budget carrier Air India Express has launched a new fare family, offering travelers the option to save on flight tickets by traveling light, with an increased baggage allowance of up to 40kg or no check-in luggage at all.

The new fare categories, applicable to flights to and from the UAE and other international destinations, are:

•    Xpress Lite
•    Xpress Value
•    Xpress Flex
•    Xpress Biz

Xpress Lite offers cabin baggage-only fares, making it the most economical option for passengers traveling with the airline.

Xpress Value fare includes 15 kg check-in bag fares, while Xpress Flex offers unlimited changes with no change fees. Xpress Biz features business class seats, complimentary meals, and priority services.

A subsidiary of Air India and a part of Tata Group, the airline introduced Xpress Lite on February 20 for UAE passengers who prefer traveling without check-in baggage.

Xpress Biz fares are accessible on all the new Air India Express Boeing 737-8 aircraft. Travelers can benefit from increased baggage allowances of 25kg for domestic flights and 40kg for international flights when booking Xpress Biz fares. This fare offers priority check-in, baggage, and boarding services.

Air India Express is already operating aircraft with Biz seats across 70-plus routes in India.

In a previous interview with a news channel Aloke Singh, managing director of Air India Express, stated that the carrier was looking to increase capacity to the Gulf region, including the UAE, as well as to provide better connectivity to Gulf travelers.
 

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
March 27,2024

keralaCMdaughter.jpg

The Enforcement Directorate has filed a money laundering case against Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's daughter Veena Vijayan, her IT company and some others to probe a case of alleged illegal payments made by a private mineral firm to her and the company, official sources said Wednesday.

The agency has registered a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and is expected to summon the people involved, the sources said.

The ED case has been booked after taking cognisance of a complaint filed by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO), an investigative arm of the Union corporate affairs ministry, they said.

The case stems from an Income Tax Department investigation that alleged that a private company called Cochin Minerals And Rutile Ltd (CMRL), made an illegal payment of Rs 1.72 crore to Veena's company-- Exalogic Solutions-- during 2018 to 2019, even though the IT firm had not provided any service to the company.

The Karnataka High Court had last month dismissed a plea filed by Exalogic Solutions against the probe initiated by the SFIO.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
March 21,2024

billionairs.jpg

New Delhi: India has now become more unequal in terms of wealth concentration than the British colonial period as income and wealth of the top 1% of the country’s population have hit historical highs, according to a paper released by World Inequality Lab.

By 2022-23, the top 1 per cent income share in India was 22.6 per cent and the top 1 per cent wealth share rose to 40.1 per cent, with India’s top 1 per cent income share among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil and the US.

Co-authored by economists Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, the paper stated that the “Billionaire Raj” headed by “India’s modern bourgeoisie” is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces. 

The paper said there is evidence to suggest the Indian tax system might be “regressive when viewed from the lens of net wealth”. A restructuring of the tax code is needed, the paper said, adding that a levy of a “super tax” of 2 per cent on the net wealth of 167 wealthiest families would yield 0.5 per cent of national income in revenues and create space for investments.

“A restructuring of the tax code to account for both income and wealth, and broad-based public investments in health, education and nutrition are needed to enable the average Indian, and not just the elites, to meaningfully benefit from the ongoing wave of globalisation. Besides serving as a tool to fight inequality, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest families in 2022-23 would yield 0.5% of national income in revenues and create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the paper said. 

The paper has analysed data based on the annual tax tabulations published by the Indian income tax authorities to extract the distribution of top income earners between 1922-2020.

The share of national income going to the top 10 per cent fell from 37 per cent in 1951 to 30 per cent by 1982 after which it began steadily rising. From the early 1990s onwards, the top 10 per cent share increased substantially over the next three decades, nearly touching 60 per cent in the most recent years, the paper said. This compares with the bottom 50 per cent getting only 15 per cent of India’s national income in 2022-23.

 The top 1 per cent earn on average Rs 5.3 million, 23 times the average Indian (Rs 0.23 million). Average incomes for the bottom 50 per cent and the middle 40 per cent stood at Rs 71,000 (0.3 times national average) and Rs 1,65,000 (0.7 times national average), respectively.
The richest, nearly 10,000 individuals (of 92 million Indian adults) earn on average Rs 480 million (2,069 times the average Indian). “To get a sense of just how skewed the distribution is, one would have to be at nearly the 90th percentile to earn the average income in India,” the paper said.

In 2022, just the top 0.1 per cent in India earned nearly 10 per cent of the national income, while the top 0.01 per cent earned 4.3 per cent share of the national income and top 0.001 per cent earned 2.1 per cent of the national income.

Enlisting the probable reasons for sharp rise in top 1 per cent income shares, the paper said public and private sector wage growth could have played a part till the late 1990s, adding that there are good reasons to believe capital incomes likely played a role in subsequent years. For the shares of the bottom 50 per cent and middle 40 per cent remaining depressed, the paper said, the primary reason has been the lack of quality broad-based education, focused on the masses and not just the elites.

“One reason to be concerned with such high levels of inequality is that extreme concentration of incomes and wealth is likely to facilitate disproportionate influence on society and government. This is even more so in contexts with weak democratic institutions. After largely being a role model among post-colonial nations in this regard, the integrity of various key institutions in India appears to have been compromised in recent years. This makes the possibility of India’s slide towards plutocracy even more real. If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” it said.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.