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India and Egypt signed a strategic partnership agreement as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi held one-on-one talks in Cairo.
The strategic partnership agreement is a follow-up to the decision arrived at after the two leaders met in January this year, when El-Sisi visited India as the Chief Guest for the Republic Day celebrations this year. At that time, they had decided to elevate India-Egypt bilateral relationship to “strategic partnership”.
It is significant that the Prime Minister’s visit comes weeks after Egypt skipped the G20 working group meeting in Srinagar, which was held early June.
Editorial
The new deal (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Fifteen monsoons ago as rain clouds arrived over New Delhi, the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faced turbulent political weather.
The Bharatiya Janata Party joined hands with the communist parties to table a no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha seeking to unseat Dr Singh’s government and prevent him from signing the India-United States civil nuclear energy agreement.
It was an agreement that was truly “historic” and symbolised the beginning of a “strategic partnership” between the two nations. Ironically, though, last week the BJP celebrated enthusiastically Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking yet another step forward in furthering that very partnership.
Irony does not lie in this fact alone. The “nuclear deal”, as it came to be known, was also a recognition of not just India’s domestic scientific and technological capability, but also of India’s global status as a nuclear power.
India, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, defied Big Powers including the US, in pursuing its independent nuclear capability and emerged as a nuclear weapons power in its own right and on its terms.
It was a moment of great pride for the entire country that the global community had finally ended what Dr Singh termed as “nuclear apartheid” discriminating against India.
A code for Gender Justice (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
Though the 21st Law Commission had suggested that a nationwide Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is neither necessary nor feasible, its successor has sought views from the public on the issue.
Always a contentious idea, the UCC today has become a highly politicised matter. While the BJP is eager to enact the UCC, the conservative Muslim leadership views it as a direct interference with their faith.
With the general elections approaching, we are likely to see heightened polarisation and politicking over it. The original purpose of gender justice and equality could be lost.
Although UCC concerns all citizens across gender, faith and ethnicities, it is made to appear as a predominantly Muslim concern. Hindutva politics and the Muslim leadership’s resistance to reform have contributed to this impression.
Indian Muslims are confronted by the politics of hate. Reform of family law and the UCC are certainly not a priority for most. But there is nothing called the right time for gender justice.
This ought to have happened under governments of the past. Today, a majoritarian and gender-biased party appears progressive with its agendas like the UCC.
One need look no further than the remission to rapists of Bilkis Bano and the disregard of the women wrestlers’ protest as evidence of the BJP’s views on gender justice.
Yet, if the party were to bring in a UCC, anyone who believes in gender justice must engage with the process. As a Muslim woman, I must engage because I see no hope of reform in Muslim personal law.
Ideas Page
Old friends in a changing world (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Watching Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the US Congress a second time, and talking to the Indian diaspora, one thing is very clear: US-India relations are deepening and widening.
And if one goes by PM Modi’s speech to the Congress, this is a momentous development that will benefit not just the US and India, but the world at large.
The cooperation in defence, space and high-tech chip-making may just be the beginning. The potential in many other sectors is enormous. Modi’s pitch for inclusive and sustainable growth has to be seen in that context.
His emphasis that growth has to be pro-people and pro-planet is clear and commendable, and so is his appeal to include the African Union in the G-20 grouping.
But one may be curious to know what has brought the US and India so close at this juncture.
The short answer may be that it is a mix of all these three factors. But my discussions with the Indian diaspora living in the US for decades suggest that the China factor may be the most important one for the current bonhomie.
China’s meteoric rise on the economic front over the last four and half decades, with accompanying military power, is being seen as a threat to global security by many nations.
Explained
Why Punjab and Haryana matter in poor monsoon years (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
Punjab and Haryana have been India’s breadbasket and lynchpins of its food security, especially post the Green Revolution.
Over the last two decades though, the two states’ combined share in total wheat procurement for the Central foodgrain pool has fallen from 90% or more, to hardly 70%. It’s been more, from 43-44% to 28-29%, for rice.
The diversification of procurement – traditionally concentrated in Punjab and Haryana for wheat and in the two, plus Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Tamil Nadu, for rice – has come on the back of the Green Revolution (the cultivation of high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties) spreading to more states and their governments also establishing infrastructure for purchase of grain at minimum support prices (MSP) from farmers.
PM Modi at Egypt war memorial: honouring Indian soldiers killed in WW1 (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will pay his respects at the Heliopolis (Port Tewfik) Memorial in the Heliopolis War Cemetery in Cairo, Egypt, where the names of nearly 4,000 Indian soldiers who fought in Word War 1 in Egypt and Palestine are commemorated. The Heliopolis Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery also commemorates 1,700 Commonwealth soldiers who died in World War 2.
The Heliopolis (Port Tewfik) Memorial is part of the larger Heliopolis Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. This memorial commemorates the memory of 3,727 Indian soldiers who died fighting in various campaigns in Egypt and Palestine in the First World War.
The original Port Tewfik memorial had been unveiled in 1926 and was situated at the entrance to the Suez Canal. Port Tewfik is now known as Port Suez.
The memorial was destroyed in the Israeli-Egyptian War of 1967 by retreating Egyptian soldiers and a new memorial bearing the names of the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War campaign in Egypt and Palestine was erected in Heliopolis Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery in 1980.
World
Charges dropped, Wagner leader to move to Belarus, his mercenaries leave Rostov (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Heavily armed Russian mercenaries who advanced most of the way to Moscow halted their approach, de-escalating a major challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power, in a move that their leader said would avoid bloodshed.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former Putin ally and founder of the Wagner army, said his men reached within 125 miles (200 km) of the capital on Saturday.
Earlier, Moscow deployed soldiers in preparation for their arrival and told residents to stay indoors. Soon after, they began withdrawing from the Rostov military headquarters they had seized. Prigozhin will move to neighbouring Belarus and not face prosecution, the Kremlin said.
The conflict between Moscow’s military leadership and Prigozhin, the chief of private mercenary group Wagner, escalated into an open insurrection.
The Wagner chief accused Russia’s military leadership of killing a “huge amount” of his mercenary forces in a strike on a camp and vowed to retaliate.
Security forces have been scrambled across western Russia as regional governors urged residents to stay off the roads, and a “counterterrorist operation regime” was declared in Moscow.
Economy
Banks readying systems to track spends on outward remittances (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
With the 20 per cent tax on Liberalised Remittances Scheme (LRS) of the Reserve Bank of India set to kick off from July 1, banks are gearing up to get ready with the systems to track the spends on international cards and mobilise the tax collected at source (TCS) on outward remittances.
Banks were finding the going tough in assessing and collecting TCS on exemptions while using credit and debit cards outside India, banking sources said.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on the other hand, has left it to the banks to fend for themselves to collect the tax imposed by the government in the FY23-24 budget.