The second victory of BJP with larger number of parliament seats has reinforced the notion in the mind of Modi Sarkar that India is some sort of regional superpower that nobody can challenge. The Indian government has now adopted the contours of the Mandalay philosophy and seeks to dominate the region, one way or the other. India has extended financial assistance to smaller regional countries to maintain its hegemony and geopolitical clout.According to a report in Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies: “Contrary to popular perception, the foundational logic of India’s foreign assistance, particularly under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, is not altruism. Rather, it is a complex set of realist geopolitical and geostrategic factors which has compelled New Delhi to sustain or expand its donor profile. The primary reason for this is China’s rapidly growing clout in India’s neighbourhood and in the Indian Ocean. The NDA’s tenure saw an increasingly assertive Beijing slowly but surely expand its sphere of influence in India’s backyard under the ambit of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Through big ticket connectivity and development projects, China has been quietly chipping away at India’s entrenched clout in South Asia and in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Seen in this context of hegemonic competition, New Delhi’s foreign aid allocations in the past five years saw both, continuity and expansion, and also bear some striking hallmarks of a highly reactive foreign policy aimed at safeguarding critical geopolitical influence.”As it is, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has obtained a 14.7 percent hike in the allocation for the budget 2019-20, which is 19 percent rise when evaluated against the ministry’s actual expenditure in 2017-18. Now the Modi government’s first budget of the second term has seen a sharp increase in money allotted for foreign aid for Mauritius, Maldives, Bhutan and Nepal. India plans to spend Rs 9,069.34 crores on various projects in these countries. Bhutan will get the largest share for a single country, Mauritius is to get Rs 1,100 crores from Rs 350.39 crores in 2017-18, Maldives will also get a fresh infusion of funds Rs 576 crores in 2019-20 over last year’s Rs240 crore, Nepal is to get Rs 1,050 crores in 2019-20, a boost of massive 178 percent. Meanwhile, allocation for African countries has gone up to Rs 450 crores in 2019-20. Interestingly, 18 new Indian diplomatic missions in Africa were approved in March 18. New Delhi has opened five new embassies in Rwanda, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Guinea and Burkina Faso, with another four are scheduled to be launched in 2019-20.Interestingly, for the last two years, allocations for development of Iran’s Chabahar port are noticeably missing. India spent Rs 100 crores on Chabahar in 2016-17, but the allocation of Rs150 crore in 2017-18 was never used by the country. Similarly, 2018-19’s budget estimate of Rs150 crores for Chabahar Port were scaled down to zero in the revised allocation.It is interesting to note that as part of the UK's aid budget, the Department for International Development (DfID) was to give £52m to India last year and a £46m in 2019/20. According to reports, Tory MP David Davies said India did not "want or need" UK aid and that "in effect we are sponsoring an Indian moon launch" as India is spending £95.4m on the lunar probe, Chandrayaan-2.Another Tory MP, Phillip Davies, told the Daily Express: "Here we are spending money in a country that has not only got its own space programme but is developing its own overseas aid programme. To be honest, the government needs looking at if it thinks that is an appropriate way of spending taxpayers' money."It needs to get out of Whitehall and appreciate the public is not just sick and tired of this but angry too. It is completely unjustifiable and truly idiotic." It has been reported by the international media that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had suppressed a damning report that had revealed India’s poverty rate reaching its highest level in decades during 2017. Another report stated that “30.3 percent of extremely poor children live in India, making India only second to sub-Sahara Africa regarding extreme child poverty.” Other poverty statistics reveal that 50 percent of Indians have no proper shelter, 70 percent have no access to decent toilets, 35 percent of households have no nearby water source, 35 percent of villages have no secondary school, over 40 percent of these villages have no roads connectivity. Contrastingly, the Indian leadership claims to grow by 9 percent annually and brazenly follows interventionist policies.
from The News International - National https://ift.tt/2YvUsUW
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