On the surface, the recent individual terror attacks in Indonesia seem to be a form of lone wolf terrorism, although they are not. Yet, the relevant government agencies in counterterrorism in Indonesia are prone to cognitive bias in generalising individual attacks as lone wolf terrorism.

By Chaula R. Anindya*

The pattern of terror attacks in the Indonesian cities of Solo and Tangerang in Java and Medan in Sumatra has led to wrong initial judgements of the Indonesian police (POLRI) that those attacks reflect lone wolf terrorism. The three attacks show a similar pattern in which they were conducted by individuals.

Yet, POLRI later discovered that the attackers might be affiliated with terrorist networks. The relevant government agencies in counterterrorism must fully understand what is lone wolf terrorism to further identify the threat and take appropriate counterterrorism measures.

Increasing Trend of Individual Attacks

Besides the Sarinah Attack in Jakarta in January 2016, there was a rising trend of individual terror attacks in Indonesia. In July, a lone suicide bomber, Nur Rohman, attempted to attack a police headquarters in Solo but ended up killing himself and injured one police officer.

Later in August, an 18-year-old boy, Ivan Armadi Hasugian, who is believed to be obsessed with ISIS, failed to detonate a bomb and attacked the priest in a church in Medan instead. Recently in Tangerang, a machete-wielding man attacked police officers at a busy intersection and tried to set off a bomb. He was fatally shot by the police.

These three attacks show a shifting pattern of terror attacks in Indonesia, from large-scale group attacks to individual attacks. Although less lethal than the group attacks, no one should underestimate the lone wolves. The individual attacker could also create fear among civilians, which is one of the aims of a terror attack.

Immediately after the Solo attack, the police tended to classify the individual attacks as a form of lone wolf terrorism. The then chief of POLRI, Badrodin Haiti, at first explained that Nur Rohman might be the only suspect as he produced the explosive device himself. In the following attack in Medan, Badrodin Haiti’s successor, Tito Karnavian, stated that it was a new phenomenon known as lone wolf terrorism. Tito also claimed that the Tangerang attack was part of this pattern.

Solo Attacks May Not Be Lone Wolves

Nevertheless, an individual attack does not necessarily mean lone wolf terrorism. According to sociologist Ramón Spaaij, the key features of lone wolf terrorists are: they (a) operate individually; (b) do not belong to an organised terrorist group or network; and (c) their modi operandi are conceived and directed by the individual without any direct outside command or hierarchy.

None of the three attacks fits into the key features as explained by Spaaij. In fact those three attacks were not by lone wolves despite the initial judgement of the national police. There are strong indications that the attackers are affiliated with terrorist networks. Nur Rohman was soon discovered to be a member of Tim Hisbah Solo and he is also believed to have a direct contact with Bahrun Naim, the Indonesian jihadi who has relocated to Syria.

Moreover, Ivan Armadi Hasugian revealed during investigation that he was ordered by someone to specifically blow up a church in Medan and received Rp 10 million for his action. However, he remained tight-lipped about the specific person who ordered him to carry out the attack. Lastly, the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) discovered that the attacker in Tangerang, Sultan Azianzah, was a member of militant group Jamaah Ansharut Daulah which is led by jailed cleric Aman Abdurrahman. Sultan Azianzah once visited Abdurrahman in Nusakambangan prison in June last year.

Avoiding Detection

To avoid detection, terrorist networks adopt a decentralisation strategy, which makes it harder for the security apparatus to trace them. This leads the relevant government agencies towards a typical cognitive bias in identifying the terror attacks. Firstly, they tend to generalise individual attacks as lone wolf terrorism by following the trend of the current threat posed by ISIS sympathisers.

ISIS highly encourage the sympathisers to launch lone wolf attacks and teach them through social media on how to conduct such an attack. Bahrun Naim, as a part of ISIS, also called for his sympathisers to be a lone wolf with whatever means they can.

Secondly, the authorities simply used similar occurrences in other parts of the world to classify the individual attacks in Indonesia as lone wolf terrorism. The chief of BNPT, Suhardi Alius, referred to the lone wolf attacks in France and Germany to identify the problem in Indonesia.

Notwithstanding the changing strategy of ISIS, the three attacks show that lone wolf terrorism is not likely to be the cases in Indonesia because the existing terrorist networks still play a major role in directing the attacks; most of them are still part of the networks.

Avoiding Generalisation

It is important to fully understand the definition of lone wolf terrorism and not to classify all individual attacks as a form of lone wolf terrorism. The failure to fully grasp the idea of lone wolf terrorism will undermine the counterterrorism efforts in Indonesia. Furthermore, the relevant government agencies may downplay the future challenges from the existing terrorist networks to launch more individual attacks.

To avoid these cognitive biases in identifying the terror attacks, the officials should assess the attacks thoroughly. First, they need to check whether the terror attacks fit into the three key features of lone wolf terrorism. They should checklist what kind of relevant information they need to identify an attacker as a lone wolf. For instance they need to collect more information about his background and do a thorough investigation to unveil whether the attacker received an order from another person or not. If it does not fit into one of the key features, it is not a lone wolf terrorism.

Secondly, officials should review the inclination to use the attacks in other countries as a reference to assess lone wolf attacks in Indonesia. The so-called individual attacks in France and Germany were also later discovered to not be lone wolf attacks after all. Using irrelevant cases overseas as references for the Indonesian situation could lead the officials to neglect the attackers’ ties with the existing networks.

*Chaula R. Anindya is a Research Analyst with the Indonesia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Luke Coffey and Daniel Kochis*

The White House has announced a short-notice trip to Europe for November 15 to 18. President Barack Obama will start the trip in Greece, where he will meet with President Prokopios Pavlopoulo and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras before traveling on to Germany.

Greece, a NATO member since 1952, hosts an important U.S. naval base at Souda Bay on the island of Crete. In the context of transatlantic security, however, Greece has been a troublesome ally in recent years. On his final trip to Europe, the President should use the opportunity to thank Greece for the continued use of Souda Bay; he should also express concern over Russian use of Greek ports, and Greece’s continued blocking of Macedonia’s accession to NATO. Most important, the President should carry the message that the U.S. remains committed to transatlantic security.

Maintaining Sanctions

Since coming to power, the leftist Syriza government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has courted closer ties with Russia, in part to gain leverage in negotiations with the EU over the European economic crisis. During this time, Greece has maintained a cozy relationship with Moscow, placing it out of synch with most of the rest of Europe. In May 2016, Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov traveled to Greece with an entourage of Russian business executives, some of whom are currently under sanction by the U.S.[1] During the press conference, Tsipras condemned the current EU economic sanctions against Russia.[2]

Despite Greece’s close economic ties to both the EU and Russia, neither the EU sanctions nor the Russian counter sanctions have had a significant impact on the Greek economy. The 2015 drop in Greek exports to Russia was small compared with other EU economies’ drop in exports to Russia.[3] Greek commercial vessels have reportedly docked at ports in occupied Crimea, in violation of sanctions. According to reports, “There are several Greek vessels, owned by the Greeks but not operating under the Greek flag that are involved in illegal grain export from Sevastopol and Kerch.”[4]

Moscow, for its part, sees Greece as a candidate to undermine Europe’s collective response to Russia’s military aggression. During his visit to Greece, Putin referred to his host country as “Russia’s important partner in Europe.”[5] Putin knows that the EU decision to renew sanctions requires unanimity and he hopes that Greece will someday block, and then end, the EU’s sanctions.

Hosting the Russian Navy

Even with Russia’s continued illegal occupation of Crimea, its support for the war in eastern Ukraine, and its unconditional support for Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad, Greece continues to provide Moscow with military support by welcoming Russia’s navy into its ports. On October 31, the Russian navy’s destroyer Smetlivy left Sevestopol in occupied Crimea for Piraeus, Greece, where according to Russian media the ship took part in a “festival” dedicated to the Russian–Greek year of culture.[6] The Smetlivy then joined the Russian naval task force in the ongoing military operations in Syria.[7] This is not the first time that Greece has hosted the Russian navy. In June 2015, the Russian landing ship Korolev 130 also visited the port of Piraeus.[8]

This visit was particularly worrying because Greece is not only a member of NATO and the EU, but also home to a NATO and U.S. naval base on Crete. It is unacceptable that a member a NATO and the EU that hosts an important U.S. base would welcome the Russian navy into its ports at this time. The recent visit of the destroyer Smetlivy is even more shocking as it departed from a port in occupied Crimea and will participate in Russia’s military operation in Syria.

Macedonia’s NATO Membership

With the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, Macedonia became an independent state under its new constitutional name: Republic of Macedonia. Greece quickly protested on the baseless grounds that the name Macedonia, which is the same as that of Greece’s northern province, implied regional territorial claims by the new nation.

In 1993, Macedonia joined the United Nations under the provisional term “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” In 1995, Macedonia and Greece agreed to a U.N.-brokered interim accord in which Athens agreed not to block Macedonia’s integration into international organizations, such as NATO, so long as it called itself “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” until both sides agreed on a mutually acceptable name.

Macedonia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1995 and received NATO’s Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 1999. Upon completing its MAP in 2008—meaning it had met all requirements to join the alliance—Macedonia anticipated an invitation to join that year at the NATO summit in Bucharest. At the last minute, Greece unilaterally vetoed Macedonia’s accession over the name issue.

In December 2011, the International Court of Justice ruled that Greece’s veto was in blatant violation of the 1995 interim accord. Even so, Greece continues to block Macedonia’s membership to the detriment of the alliance.

Time to Apply Pressure

In his only trip to Greece, President Obama should raise several critical issues, including Greek support of the Russian navy and its blocking of NATO enlargement for Macedonia. The U.S. should:

• Pressure Greece to vote for renewed sanctions. In December, the EU will vote on extending its economic sanctions against Russia. This matter is decided by unanimity, meaning that a single EU country can force the conclusion, or at least the watering down, of sanctions. The President should encourage Greece to do the right thing and support sanctions renewal in December.
• Object to Russian war ships in Greek ports. While Crimea remains illegally occupied and Russia continues its support for Syrian dictator Assad, President Obama must be crystal clear that Greek support for the Russian navy is unbecoming of a NATO ally. He should encourage Athens to follow Spain’s recent example and cancel future visits by the Russian navy.
• Make the case for Macedonia. Greece’s pertinacious opposition over the name issue, coupled with the illegality of its position under international law, has jeopardized NATO’s open-door policy. The U.S. should encourage Greece to allow Macedonia to join NATO under the terms of the 1995 interim accord.

Conclusion

President Obama’s trip to Greece presents a valuable opportunity. The President should reiterate America’s commitment to transatlantic security and the U.S’s continuing friendship with Greece. As friends, the President should also be frank in criticizing Greek support for Russia and its continued obstruction of Macedonia’s entry into NATO. He should advocate policies that enhance NATO, while countering Russian attempts to garner influence in Athens.

*About the authors:
—Luke Coffey is Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation. Daniel Kochis is a Policy Analyst in European Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, of the Davis Institute.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation

Notes:
[1] United States Department of the Treasury, “Office of Foreign Asset Control: Specifically Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List,” November 1, 2016, https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.pdf (accessed November 3, 2016).

[2] “Greece’s Tsipras Condemns Sanctions Against Russia,” BBC, May 28, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36403129 (accessed November 3, 2016).

[3] RadioFreeEurope–RadioLiberty, “Side Effect of EU Sanctions,” http://www.rferl.org/a/28071947.html (accessed November 3, 2016).

[4] “Which EU Commercial Ships Still Go to Russian-Occupied Crimea?” Ukraine Today, October 7, 2016, http://uatoday.tv/politics/which-eu-commercial-ships-still-go-to-russian-occupied-crimea-781809.html (accessed November 3, 2016).

[5] Holly Ellyatt and Julia Chatterley, “Russia Can Get a Strategic Geopolitical Boost from Greece: Minister,” CNBC, June 16, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/16/russia-can-get-a-strategic-geopolitical-boost-from-greece-minister.html (accessed November 3, 2016).

[6] “Russian Destroyer Smetlivy Sets Out from Crimea for Festival in Greece,” RT, October 29, 2016, https://www.rt.com/in-motion/364686-russian-destroyer-greek-festival/ (accessed November 3, 2016).

[7] News release, “Russia Sends Naval Destroyer Smetlivy to Syria: State Newspaper,” Reuters, October 28, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-destroyer-idUSKCN12S1XG (accessed November 3, 2016).

[8] Shipspotting.com, “RFS KOROLEV 130,” June 5, 2015, http://www.shipspotting.com/gallery/photo.php?lid=2260368 (accessed September 9, 2015).

By Marija Ristic

The annual EU progress reports for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo, published on Wednesday, said that the three Balkan countries still need to do more to deal with the crimes committed during the wars of the 1990s and their enduring impact.

Serbia is criticised for not cooperating properly with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and extraditing three wanted members of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party to The Hague.

In Kosovo, it warns that local war crimes prosecutors and police could be under-resourced and under-skilled.

It also expresses continued concerns about the huge backlog of unprocessed war crimes cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Overall, the unresolved fate of close to 11,000 people who disappeared during the conflicts of the 1990s remains a humanitarian concern, the reports say.

Of these, some 6,900 cases are related to the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2,100 to the conflict in Croatia and over 1,600 to the conflict in Kosovo, according to figures from International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The lack of information on gravesites and difficulties in identifying the human remains exhumed up to now continue to be the key obstacles to solving the remaining cases of missing persons in the region,” the EU says.

Serbia chided for not extraditing Radicals

The report said that it was a serious concern that Serbia had turned away from full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

The criticism stems from Serbia’s refusal to hand over of three members of the Serbian Radical Party who are wanted for contempt of court for allegedly interfering with witnesses in their leader Vojislav Seselj’s trial.

The report says that Serbia needs to implement the ICTY’s rulings and decisions fully.

“Serbia’s commitment to working towards regional cooperation and reconciliation should include preparedness to face its recent past and to do all it can to establish an atmosphere conducive to deal with all war crimes,” it adds.

It describes the adoption in February 2016 of a national strategy for the investigation and prosecution of war crimes as an “important step forward”, but urges Serbia to step up the implementation of the strategy and adopt an operational prosecutorial strategy.

The report welcomes the fact that the Serbian War Crime Prosecutor’s Office has continued its cooperation with other countries in the region to exchange evidence and information.

“The most significant developments concern the number of cases referred to prosecution services in Bosnia and Herzegovina (16 cases) and Croatia (44 cases),” it notes.

But it expresses serious concern that the mandate of the former War Crimes Prosecutor expired in December 2015 and his successor has yet to be appointed.

It also notes that only two new war crimes indictments were filed in 2015 and there was no progress on investigating high-profile cases.

Kosovo war crimes unit under pressure

The EU report warns that although Kosovo has set up a war crimes department within its Special Prosecution Office, it only has two local prosecutors for a workload which will further increase when more cases are handed over from the EU rule-of-law mission, EULEX.

The Kosovo police war crimes investigation unit has been given additional staff, vehicles and computers, but lacks qualified personnel, it says.

“The limited experience, and the lack of investigators with an ethnic Serb background, criminal intelligence analysis staff and language and translation capacity, has an impact on the work of the unit,” it cautions.

In cases where the suspects are ethnic Serbs, mainly living in Serbia, mutual legal cooperation between Pristina and Belgrade is effectively non-existent, it says.

It also expresses concern about Pristina’s capacity and willingness to handle war crimes cases involving former Kosovo Liberation Army members.

The 1,665 people who have been missing since the conflict is another major issue for Kosovo, the report says.

“The unresolved fate of missing persons from the 1990s conflict remains a humanitarian concern, the resolution of which is vital for reconciliation and stability in the region,” it explains.

“Politicisation of the process, including unhelpful statements in the media and a further weakening of the process due to interinstitutional disputes, needs to be avoided,” it adds.

The Kosovo government must “show greater political commitment and renewed efforts” to find missing persons, it argues, saying that a central register of missing persons should be established.

It also expresses concern about the lack of progress in dealing with unidentified human remains stored at the Pristina morgue.

However the report notes that Kosovo met its obligations in relation to the establishment of the new Hague-based Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecution Office which will probe and try allegations of crimes committed by KLA fighters during and after the 1999 conflict.

Bosnia: large backlog of cases remains

The report says that Bosnia and Herzegovina “further tackled” its huge backlog of war crimes prosecutions, with an increase in indictments between September 2015 and August 2016.

“There was a continued positive trend in the successful prosecution of war crimes cases involving sexual violence. Final convictions amounted to 25 cases,” the report says.

However it cautions that a large number of potential cases remain and more efforts are required, “particularly to ensure institutional understanding to improve victims’ confidence in the judicial system and avoid retraumatisation of victims and witnesses”.

It expresses further concern that female war victims of the war do not have the same legal status in Bosnia’s two entities, Republika Srpska and the Federation.

It says that the implementation of the country’s national war crimes strategy objectives continued, with less complex cases being transferred from the state-level judiciary to lower judicial levels, but warns that Bosnia and Herzegovina is still behind schedule in processing the more complex cases.

“The initial deadline of seven years to have the most complex cases solved by December 2015 was not met and a new revised deadline has yet to be agreed,” it says.

By Amity Saha*

Islamic hooligans vandalised and looted at least 15 Hindu temples along with hundreds of houses of the minority Hindu community as the latter celebrated Kali Puja and Diwali in Brahmanbaria’s Nasirnagar on the afternoon of October 30, 2016. The violence began around 1:30 p.m. in protest of a Facebook post that rumour has it was posted a few days ago by a Hindu fisherman named Rasraj.

Around 150 to 200 people indulged in the attacks and vandalised at least seven to eight idols of five temples in that locality. In a little while, the attacks spread to Kashipara, Ghoshpara and Dashpara areas and several other places of the same district.

While the Bangladesh government claims the existence of secular and peaceful conditions for the Hindus and other minorities, the Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Tribal minorities in Bangladesh are in reality being treated viciously by the majority Muslim population.

The Hindu minority, particularly, is facing a grim situation where it is facing persecution at the hands of radical Islamic groups having links with the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, Hefajat-e-Islam, Awami Ulema League, Hizbut Tahrir, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat etc. Without any doubt, Brahmanbaria is an illustrative example of this situation.

In 1947, Hindus constituted nearly 30 per cent of the population of then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh. But an estimated 20 million Hindus were “missing” from Bangladesh by the year of 1991. Today, Hindus comprise less than 9 per cent of the 157 million population of the country — and this number will certainly diminish now after the Brahmanbaria rampage of 2016.

Prominent Bangladesh economist Prof. Abul Barkat, in a recent paper titled “Seventh Five Year Planning (2016-20) in Bangladesh: The Dream and Reality”, has estimated that over 1.1 crore (over 11 million) Hindus had left Bangladesh due to religious maltreatment and discrimination between 1964 and 2013. Prof. Barkat observed that the regular outflow of the minorities, tribals and marginal people living in the plain or hilly areas of the country is the result of their being denied their traditional rights to lands, water bodies and forests.

Prof. Barkat said over 25 lakh acres of land belonging to minority and tribal people have been forcibly occupied by those belonging to both ruling and opposition parties as if in a fundamental attitude of Islamic perpetuity.

Criticising ‘The Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Act of 1965’ and its subsequent versions ‘The East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Buildings Administration and Disposal Order of 1966)’, ‘The Enemy Property (Continuance of Emergency Provision) Ordinance No.1 of 1969′, or the latest avatar of it, ‘The Vested and Non-Resident Property (Administration) Act (XLVI of 1974)’, Prof. Barkat said all these Acts and Ordinances were orchestrated to repudiate the rights of the Hindu minority as well as other non-Muslims from the territory of Bangladesh.

Prof. Barkat estimates that, on an average, 632 Hindus left Bangladesh every day in the 49 years between 1964 and 2013 — which means that a total of 1,13,03,320 (49 x 365 x 632) Hindus have fled Bangladesh during 1964-2013.

The reasons are obvious — and related to brutality, persecution and discrimination on the ground of their belonging to the religious minority.

Fisherman Rasraj was arrested under section 57 of the ICT Act (Information and Communication Technology Act, 2006). It is a strict legal provision and the punishment is evenly unforgiving.

But those people who attacked the minority members and ransacked their houses and vandalised temples are not penalised under similar strict regulations. For such brutal offences, the law must be strict.

Besides, the Facebook post in question is also highly questionable as the Photoshop thing could not have been done by a primary-level-pass fisherman. These Facebook posts are obviously being created by people who have an interest in fomenting unrest and thereby conditions amenable for looting property and land of the minorities.

Such false Facebook posts and their brutal aftermath have been witnessed earlier at Ramu, in Chittagong division, four years ago. Mobs destroyed 12 Buddhist temples and monasteries and 50 houses in reaction to a tagging of an image depicting the desecration of a Quran on the timeline of a fake Facebook account under a Buddhist male name.

Under section 259, 295 Ka, 298 of the Bangladesh penal code, such serious crimes can be properly tried. In the case of Rasraj, however, it has been seen that the magistrate did not give him the scope of defending his position.

In a recent case reported from Daudkandi, in Comilla District, a person from the majority community posted an offensive post against the Hindu religion. The person was arrested by the police. Later, the accused apologised in another post and claimed that his account was hacked following which the police set him free.

But the point is that law should be applied equally for all.

Bangladesh still has the world’s third largest Hindu population with about 12 million Hindus. They are living without protection from radical groups and others who can assault and abuse them with impunity because almost everyone turns a blind eye to their victimisation. This is unfortunate!

And yet, which major media outlet is reporting about this ongoing ethnic cleansing? Whether internationally-hailed human rights organisations are planning any agitation against it — or even mentioning it in some noteworthy manner? The answer is not at all.

*Amity Saha is a Research Assistant (International Affairs) at Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA). She can be reached through email <amitysaha@yahoo.com> and <amitysaha@biliabd.org> and twitter handle @omnia39.

The Israeli military says it has struck a Syrian army artillery position after a rocket from Syria hit the Israeli-controlled part of the Golan Heights, the Associated Press reports.

The military believes the rocket attack, which caused no casualties, was errant fire that spilled over the frontier Wednesday, November 9 from the civil war.

Israel has largely remained on the sidelines of the fighting, but has carried out reprisals on Syrian positions when errant fire has crossed the frontier.

Israel is also widely believed to have carried out airstrikes on arms shipments said to be destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a close ally of the Syrian government.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and the two countries remain enemies.

By C Uday Bhaskar*

Ahead of the Nuclear Security Group (NSG) meeting in Vienna on November 11, China has stated that there will be no change in its position about admitting new members who are non-signatories to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT). A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman noted in Beijing: “This Friday in Vienna a plenary session of the NSG will be held. Our position is subject to no change as of date.”

The earlier Chinese position had been outlined in mid September when the officials of the two countries had met and at the time, the Beijing formulation was: “China supports the notion of a two-step approach within the (NSG) Group to address the above question, i.e., at the first stage, to explore and reach agreement on a non-discriminatory formula applicable to all the non-NPT states, and to proceed to take up country-specific membership issues at the second stage. China, for its part, expressed its readiness to actively participate in the above process within the group.”

Earlier this week the topmost Indian and Chinese officials at the level of the National Security Adviser met to review long-standing and unresolved issues – and the list is growing longer. The Hyderabad meeting was inconclusive – and predictably so.

It was evident at the Goa BRICS summit hosted by India in October, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping met, that Beijing was unlikely to accommodate Delhi’s expectation on the NSG membership and the terrorism issue related to Pakistan-based Masood Azhar and his proscription by the UN. Both issues are intertwined with the inflexible Sino-Pakistan strategic relationship.

In the intervening period India has raised the bilateral ante in the public domain and Delhi’s actions include allowing the visit by the US Ambassador to India to Arunachal Pradesh. This is to be followed by the visit of the Dalai Lama to the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh in March next year and Beijing has conveyed its concern in the matter – as it has consistently, since March 1959 when the Tibetan spiritual leader sought political exile in India.

Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by China and is perceived to be part of the unresolved territorial dispute with India that includes the brief October 1962 war. Thus the recent pattern of visits are likely to strain the bi-lateral relationship and concurrently test its resilience.

The visit of the Dalai Lama to Tawang has considerable spiritual symbolism for the Tibetan diaspora and it is unlikely that Delhi will allow this visit to be packaged in any political manner by the Tibetan government-in-exile. But Delhi would also be signalling its own resolve about treating Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India and thereby allowing visitors to ‘visit’ as it were – however high the visibility index.

In the past decade plus, the uneasy India-China bilateral relationship was seen as being tactically provocative on occasion – but strategically restrained and robust. This formulation will be on test in the near future even as both capitals await the identity of the next incumbent in the White House – for that in turn will have a significant bearing on the complex India-China-US relationship.

*C Uday Bhaskar is Director, Society for Policy Studies. He can be contacted at cudaybhaskar@spsindia.in

By Simi Mehta*

On the margins of the G8 Outreach Summit in 2006, held at St. Petersburg, Russia, BRIC started as a formal grouping after a meeting of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The grouping was thereafter formalised during the first meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. In September 2010, it was agreed to include South Africa into the grouping, and thus BRIC became BRICS at the BRIC Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New York.

BRICS is based on two major pillars of cooperation, namely, consultation on issues of mutual interest through meetings of leaders and Ministers of Finance, Trade and Health, Science and Technology, Education, Agriculture, Communication, Labour and others; and practical cooperation in a number of areas through the meetings of Working Groups/Senior Officials.

Regular annual summits as well as meetings of leaders on the margins of G-20 Summits, UNGA sessions, and the like are also held.

The engagement of BRICS countries with the rest of the world in terms of trade flows has increased over time.

Merchandise imports from the world into the BRICS countries have increased from $2.95 trillion in 2012 to $3.03 trillion in 2014. Similarly, the global merchandise exports of the BRICS countries have increased from $3.2 trillion in 2012 to $3.47 trillion in 2014.

Intra-BRICS trade has also been on the rise. In 2012, intra-BRICS trade stood at $281.4 billion and this increased to $297 billion in 2014.

BRICS member states have noted the lack of uniformity in the global economic recovery, marked with significant downside risks for the developing countries. As a solution, they have called for strengthening of macroeconomic cooperation, promoting innovation, robust and sustainable trade and investment growth.

The Presidency of BRICS is for a year and is transferable from one country to the other in the grouping. The 2016 chairmanship is held by India when it assumed the Presidency in February 2016. As a result, the Eighth Annual Summit was hosted by India in its beach state of Goa on October 15-16, 2016. In the run up to the Summit, under its chairmanship, a staggering 101 multi-sectoral activities, events and official meetings involving all the five members were completed.

The Eighth BRICS Summit was attended by the leaders of the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa. The theme of the Summit was “Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions”.

This Summit was held in the midst of major geopolitical events like Brexit, the US elections, the South China Sea dispute, and terror attacks in Uri in Jammu & Kashmir resulting in the boycott and cancellation of the SAARC summit in Islamabad.

As regards the mission to take BRICS to the people, it is noteworthy that a total of 101 events/meetings/activities involving all five members were completed during India’s chairmanship. These included commercial arbitration, agriculture, exchanges among parliamentarians, young scientists and diplomats, football tournaments and film festivals, among others, organised at various places around the country.

The major issues addressed during the Summit can be categorised into three, namely, fight against terrorism, economic development, and protecting the environment.

1. Terrorism: The member-states unanimously recognised the threats posed by terrorism, extremism and radicalisation, as having detrimental consequences upon regional and global peace, stability and economic prosperity, society and humanity as a whole.

India highlighted this issue stringently because of being a victim of the cross-border terrorism very recently in Uri sector of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was firm in underscoring the role of Pakistan as being the mothership of terrorist activities and fuelling them.

The leaders agreed to the urgent need to cooperate to combat this threat, by closely coordinating on tracking the sources of terrorist financing; and targeting the hardware of terrorism, including weapons’ supplies, ammunition, equipment, and training.

2. Economy: Putting the global economy back on track was a key focus of the deliberations in the Summit. The leaders highlighted the necessity to make public investments in long-term infrastructure projects, coordinate macro-economic policy, drive growth, and promote world trade and manufacturing with renewed vigour.

They reiterated the centrality of the WTO in the multilateral trade architecture, while promoting reform of the global financial and economic architecture by expanding the role of emerging and developing economies in the International Monetary Fund, enhancing BRICS’ coordination within the G20, and discussed the way forward on the new areas of co-operation proposed by India, like creation of a BRICS Institute of Economic Research and Analysis.

In the run-up to the BRICS Leaders’ Summit, the first BRICS Economic Forum was held that attempted to bring together finance ministries, central banks, think tanks, bankers, business houses and other key stakeholders of BRICS economies on a common platform for seminal discussions and exchange of views on new and on-going issues of mutual interest among BRICS countries.

3. Environment: The leaders acknowledged the need to strike a balance between economic development and environmental protection and welcomed the early entry into force of the Paris Climate Agreement to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change. They affirmed their commitment to attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a time-bound fashion.

The regional grouping BIMSTEC or the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation — comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand — was invited by India as part of the BRICS outreach summit.

It provided a unique opportunity for BRICS and BIMSTEC leaders to hold a conversation on prospects for closer partnership and coordination and unlock the immense synergies with huge benefits for the people. The choice of BIMSTEC by India still underscores its commitment to the Act East Policy and the high priority accorded to Southeast Asia.

The hitherto not-so-active BIMSTEC received international attention and leveraging which would be to its own benefit to scale new heights.

Beginning essentially with economic issues of mutual interest, the agenda of BRICS meetings has considerably widened over the years to incorporate topical global issues. The enormous potential of BRICS is imminent from the marathon meetings, events and outreach activities (101 in total) under the present Indian chairmanship reflected the need to nurture the cooperation as a continuing effort.

The very reason for the formation of BRICS was based upon the recognition of the variety of economic challenges that impede economic growth and based its belief on the deepening of strategic partnership amongst them as a way forward. The encouraging trend of trade needs to be strengthened as trade amongst BRICS nations is less than 5 per cent of their total global trade.

The Eighth Summit discussions were detailed and substantive. The leaders exchanged views on important global issues, including terrorism, global economic scenario, and the need to reform the global governance architecture. They reviewed the on-going BRICS cooperation and focused on ideas and possibilities for the expansion of BRICS in the years to come.

The common interest of all the five members led them to focus and highlight intra-BRICS cooperation. For instance, the establishment of the New Development Bank (NDB) would continue to focus on infrastructure, technology and renewable energy sectors, the Railways Research Network was established for better connectivity to ease transportation for the people.

New Delhi played an important role in including BIMSTEC into the BRICS’ fold and is seen as being crucial to India’s efforts to create a peaceful Bay of Bengal community through economic and cultural linkages. An impetus to BIMSTEC through the BRICS outreach programme signals India’s willingness to foster deep and equitable economic and security cooperation among the nations on the Bay of Bengal littoral, very much in tune with PM Modi’s larger SAGAR (Security And Growth for All in the Region) initiative and the Act East Policy.

The Goa Declaration adopted at the end of the Summit laid a comprehensive vision for cooperation and coordination within BRICS and on international issues. BRICS in 2016 thus established itself as a “hyperactive transcontinental grouping” that has successfully established its ever-increasing international influence.

The Goa Summit in essence demonstrated the maturity of BRICS in managing its internal differences and showcasing areas of convergence of interests and common concerns, thus setting the stage for working together on areas of divergence in the years to come.

It reflected the fact that BRICS has become a concrete, increasingly comprehensive, cooperative success, both alone and within the G20, on behalf of all emerging countries.

It was successful as India looks forward to building bridges to new partnerships and finding common resolve and solutions to its own entrenched problems.

It emphasised the importance of further strengthening BRICS solidarity and cooperation based on common interests and key priorities to further strengthen our strategic partnership in the spirit of openness, solidarity, equality, mutual understanding, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation.

It reiterated the common vision of on-going profound shifts in the world as it transitions to a more just, democratic, and multi-polar international order based on the central role of the United Nations, and respect for international law and that development and security are closely interlinked, mutually reinforcing and key to attaining sustainable peace.

*Simi Mehta is a Ph.D. candidate at the US Studies Division of the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. She can be reached at simimehta.08@gmail.com

This columnist did not see a Donald Trump victory coming. The degree of disgust directed at an awful candidate was more than I had predicted. Neither the corporate media, nor Wall Street nor the pundits nor the pollsters saw this coming either. Their defeat and proof of their uselessness is total. Those of us who rejected the elite consensus and didn’t support Hillary Clinton should be proud.

Black people are now in fear and in shock when we ought to be spoiling for a fight. All is not lost. Even the victory of the openly bigoted Trump poses an opportunity to right our political ship. Not the electoral ship, the political one. For decades black Americans have been voting for people who have done them wrong. Bill Clinton got rid of public assistance as a right, and undid regulations that kept Wall Street in check. He put black people in jail and yet black people didn’t turn on him until he and his wife tried to defeat Obama. But Obama gave us more of the same. Bailouts of Wall Street, interventions and death for people all over the world, and a beat down of black people who still loved him. Despite the fear of Republican victory we end up losing whenever a Democratic presidential candidate wins.

Victory is ours if we dump the Democrat Party and their black misleaders. The Democrats were so entrenched in their corruption and self-dealing that they didn’t see the Bernie Sanders campaign for modest reform as the savior it might have been. Instead they marched in lock step with a woman who was heartily disliked. Sanders went along as the sheep dog who led his flock straight over the cliff. The Democrats inadvertently galvanized people who had stopped participating in the system and who want change from top to bottom.

One of our biggest problems lies not in facts but in perceptions. What did Democrats do for black people? The Democrats ship living wage jobs off shore in corrupt trade deals like NAFTA and TTP. They don’t prosecute killer cops or raise the minimum wage. Trump will be hard pressed to deport more people than Obama did. The list of treachery is very long.

When Donald Trump asked black people, “What have you got to lose?” his words were met with derision. But in reality he posed a good question. What do we have to show for years of Democratic votes? Obama bailed out banks, insurance companies, Big Pharma and even Ukraine. But he didn’t rebuild Detroit or New Orleans. The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisoned and the prisons are still full.

The outpouring of love for Barack Obama was purely symbolic. In state after state, black people who gave him victory in 2008 and 2012 stayed home. They loved seeing him and his wife dressed up at state dinners but they were never fully engaged in politics because that is not what Democrats want. The love was phony and void of any political intent. Donald Trump will be president because of that veneer of political activism.

As for white people who voted for Trump, of course many of them are racists. However they are not without valid complaints. They don’t want neoliberalism but black people don’t either. They don’t want wars around the world and neither do black people. We corrupt our own heritage of radicalism in favor of shallow symbolism. While we slept walk in foolish nostalgia for Obama and cried at the thought of him leaving office, white people kept their hatred of Hillary to themselves or lied to pollsters. They want America to be great again, great for them. White nostalgic yearnings are dangerous for black people, and we must be vigilant. But there may be opportunity in this crisis if we dare to seize it.

Republicans have been the white people’s party for nearly 50 years. Trump just made it more obvious. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. We don’t have to be the losers in this election. Let us remember what we have achieved in our history. Half of black Americans didn’t even have the right to vote in the 1960s yet made earth shattering progress in a short time. But we must understand the source of that progress. It came from struggle and daring to create the crises that always bring about change.

Yes white people will strut for president Trump but that doesn’t mean we must submit as if we are in the Jim Crow days of old. We have ourselves to rely on and we can reclaim our history of fighting for self-determination. The dread of redneck celebration should not be our primary motivation right now. Before we quake in fear at white America we must send the scoundrels packing.

The black politicians and the Democratic National Committee and the civil rights organizations that don’t help the masses must all be kicked to the proverbial curb. The rejection must be complete and blame must be laid squarely at their feet.

Those of us who voted for the green party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka must stand firmly and proudly for our choice. We must strategize on building a progressive party to replace the Democrats who never help us. We must applaud Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing their corruption. There should be no back tracking on the fight to build left wing political power.

The black people who didn’t return to the polls shouldn’t be blamed either. Those individuals must have personal introspection that is meaningful and political. Their lack of enthusiasm speaks to Democratic Party and black misleadership incompetence. We should refrain from personal blame and help one another in this process as we fight for justice and peace.

The end of the duopoly is the first step in liberation. Staying with a party that literally did nothing was a slow and agonizing death. Sometimes shock therapy is needed to improve one’s condition. If we don’t take the necessary steps to free ourselves this election outcome will be a disaster. Instead, why not bring the disaster to the people who made it happen? The destruction of the Democratic Party and creation of a truly progressive political movement is the only hope for black America.

I tweeted the following on November 4. “Bill Kristol, who has been wrong all along, now says Hillary will win bigger than Obama did in 2012. My takeaway—it’s good news for Trump.”

The eggheads blew it. This election proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Ivy League pundits and scholars are anything but the independent thinkers they claim to be. Indeed, they function more like a herd.

Most of the chattering class never served a day in the armed forces, or even took a swing at a baseball, so pampered has their lifestyle been. From the National Review and the Weekly Standard, to the New Republic and the Nation, the softball kings and queens need to do penance: they need to sit down and talk to the proletariat. George Will—are you listening?

The day before the election, I emailed some friends about the outcome.  In two of my missives, I said, “Look for a Trump upset tomorrow”; the other two said, “I think the pollsters are all wrong. Predicting a Trump victory.”

What did I see that others didn’t? Over a year ago, I said neither Jeb Bush nor Hillary Clinton would get elected. Why? Voter fatigue—we’ve had it with the two families. Jeb got .2 percent of the primary vote and Hillary is still in disbelief.

In early 2016, I commented on Trump’s strengths. My first article appeared on February 10, “Elites Don’t Get Trump’s Appeal”; it drew a favorable response from Trump. My next piece, published on April 22, read, “Trump Taps Into Mass Distrust.” On June 2, I wrote, “Trump is a Man of the People.” The titles convey my central point: Trump resonates with angry voters, most of whom have been treated like dirt by the establishment.

The eggheads got it wrong from the get-go, beginning with the primaries. To wit: If Hillary Clinton couldn’t win in Michigan and Wisconsin, she was in deep trouble come November. Moreover, I reasoned, many of those same Democrats who voted against Clinton in the primaries were poised to do so a second time. They did.

If the eggheads weren’t so drunk on polls, they would have asked themselves over the summer why all the polls on the Brexit vote were wrong. Similarly, they would have questioned why the polls on the peace deal championed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos were all wrong; his side was slated to win by a margin of better than 2-1.

Another factor that should have meant something to the eggheads was the survey this fall that showed that 75 percent of the public said the media are biased against Trump. If they can’t understand what that means, they should retire.

Among those who blew it was University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato: “Sabato’s Final Call: Hillary Wins Big, 50-50 Senate.” Here’s another keeper: “Emerson College Polling Predicts Massive Electoral Win for Clinton.” Reuters told us, “Clinton Has a 90 Percent Chance of Winning.” Huffington Post was even dumber, claiming, “98% Chance of a Clinton Win.” The same website also ran a piece by an Ivy professor titled, “Yes, Folks, It’s President Hillary.”

If these sages were lawyers, they would be disbarred for incompetence.

On election day, a poll produced for ABC told us that early voting heavily favored Clinton, 51-43 percent. Slate, the left-wing website, boasted that it teamed with a novel pollster to offer brand new insights on voter behavior, rendering accurate projections in real time. It was another monumental failure.

One might have thought that the folks at Politico would have connected the dots on election day when it reported that those who had already voted said that more than anything else, they wanted “strong leadership.” Yet it posted a picture of Trump saying it would take a “miracle” for him to win. Has anyone ever credited Hillary with “strong leadership”?

One egghead who at least admitted he lives in an intellectual ghetto is David Brooks of the New York Times. He confessed in April that he had spent “large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata—in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own.”

I wrote to him commending him for his honesty, offering a tonic. “Now you need to visit a working-class pub and meet real people—their anger explains their draw to Trump.” Alas, there is no evidence that he ever left his carrel in the library.

Politico has two stories today saying how the Anthony Weiner Wikileaks story really hurt Hillary. Her camp is blaming Comey. They should instead blame her for using her private server. Had she not done so, the FBI wouldn’t have seized the computer owned by Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin.

It was the NYPD that alerted the FBI—it was looking for child porn on Weiner’s laptop—and it was me who filed a formal complaint against Weiner for suspected child sexual abuse. I suspect the eggheads would call that karma. Cheers!

Prior to Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and aggression in the Donbass, there were only a few thousand Muslims in the central part of Ukraine, but now, some 100,000 of the faithful have fled there from Russian occupied areas, dramatically increasing the size of that community in areas with little experience with Islam.

Sheikh Said Ismagilov, the mufti of the Kyiv-based Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Ukraine, told the QHA news agency that “100,000 Muslims from Crimea and the Donbass have moved to the territory under the control of the Ukrainian authorities” (qha.com.ua/ru/obschestvo/v-ukraine-sto-tisyach-pereselentsevmusulman-iz-krima-i-donbassa/167532/).

These people need assistance because they lack resources on their own, because “in Ukraine there are not very many wealthy Muslims,” and because foreigners and foreign Muslim organizations have not done anything to help. His mosques, the sheikh said, collect food and clothing, support orphanages, and do what little they can on their own.

He said that his MSD had not been in contact with the MSD in Crimea since the Russian Anschluss. “We know that they are harshly controlled by the authorities and that definite rules have been imposed on their functioning. Therefore we do not have any ties” with the Crimean muftiate lest such contacts things worse for the Muslims of Crimea.

Asked whether he would support the establishment of other Muslim organizations in Ukraine, including by Muslims from Russian-occupied Crimea, the mufti said that “they have the right to do so and we will not influence this process because we respect the choice and rights of our fellow believers and are happy to cooperate with any religious organizations of the Muslims of Crimea,” as long as they “support the national interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”

Sheikh Ismagilov said that Ukrainians should not fall victim to those who demonize Muslims by claiming they are terrorists. There are terrorists in Ukraine, but they are supporting Russian forces in Crimea and the Donbass – and those people are not followers of Islam.

The stunning election victory for Donald Trump, despite coming second in terms of popular votes, represents a double-edged sword that is rooted in the paradoxes and built-in incoherence of the Trump political ‘phenomenon’. As the dust of the highly toxic pre-election campaigns settles and the American nation embarks on a new path of patching the wounds, the aftershocks of the Trump victory will be felt like a mega political earthquake for sometime.ƒ

The Democrats, for sure, will be reeling in pain and puzzlement as to how they lost on all fronts — the White House and the Congress — when a precious four weeks ago Hillary Clinton was ahead by double digit numbers? Was it the FBI’s untimely intervention, or the reservoir of hidden (mainly rural) Trump voters, or the accumulated pile of Wikileaks ‘dirt’ on the Clinton dynasty, etc., that nailed the coffin on Hillary’s second bid for presidency? Or was it the Democratic Party’s abandoning the white working class Americans and failing to present a viable alternative economic vision that proved to be the ultimate undoing? Or was it the combination of all these factors and, above all, Trump’s own charisma that confounded all the US establishment, including the mainstream media that lined up behind Clinton — to no avail?

In the on-going autopsy of the Democratic Party, no single factor may emerge as the leading cause of the party’s demise at the ballot boxes. What is certain, however, is that Trump the Republican billionaire somehow managed to appear as the representative of the have-nots, stealing the torch traditionally held by the Democratic Party. In many respects, however, Trump is a false prophet whose economic and social agenda, such as cancelling the Obamacare which will throw off some 20 million poor Americans off the assisted insurance, can hardly be said to be pro-working class. There is undoubtedly a great deal of chasm between the perception and reality, which will likely cause a good deal of voter disillusionment with Trump in the future.

But, for an anti-establishment candidate who relies heavily on known establishment figures for policy advise — Newt Gingrich, Rudi Giuliani, etc. — Trump has his job cut out for him, particularly in the first year of his presidency when the voter expectations of his delivery of promises will be at its highest. Promising work on America’s infrastructure is a good beginning, but hardly sufficient, and Trump needs to address the needs of millions of working Americans who aspire for higher wages and benefits and, yet, most have voted for a pro-business figure who advocates tax cuts for the rich, which will in turn limit the government’s revenues allocated to social (welfare) policies. A return to laisses faire capitalism, on the other hand, is virtually impossible as it would sound the death knell for the welfare capitalism of the past century that has kept social peace.

Still, Trump ‘the outsider’ who will enjoy a Republican-dominated Congress is apt to take some measures, such as with respect to his newly-unveiled urban pact for the African-Americans, that could compensate for his perceived racist agenda. Promising to be the president for all Americans including “all races and all religions,” Trump in his victory speech showed a glimmer of hope that he will act responsibly and as a national unifier rather than a voice of white supremacy.

As expected, Trump’s victory has been warmly welcomed by Russia, which hopes to restore US-Russia relations on a healthy footing again, and it remains to be seen how Trump will act on the Syrian crisis, where the US has often been a spoiler of peace opportunities? Another issue is Iran’s nuclear agreement, which Trump has opposed and yet cannot rescind unilaterally short of damaging US’s global image and interests. Surrounded by anti-Iran hawks who provide foreign policy advise to him, such as John Bolton and Rudi Giuliani, Trump may adopt a more hawkish position vis-à-vis Iran, that could escalate tensions in Persian Gulf. Hopefully, Trump, who has prioritized the domestic agenda, will not prove reckless on foreign policy and thread a cautious line, particularly in the volatile Middle East, where the menace of terrorism has wreaked havoc. Trump’s pledge to fight ISIS with full force is welcome news for the region, provided that it does not prove to be a clever disguise for US interventionism.

By Kingsley Ighobor*

For environmentalists and development experts, green is not just a colour; it also refers to activities that benefit the environment – the careful use of the earth’s finite resources.

Africa’s policy wonks are already on the green bandwagon, having identified “green industrialization” as the Holy Grail of the continent’s socioeconomic transformation. They believe infusing green initiatives into value-chain activities – during the sourcing and processing of raw materials, and the marketing and selling of finished products to customers – can cure economic stagnation.

At recent economic forums in N’Djamena in Chad, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Abuja in Nigeria, Rabat in Morocco, even New York in the United States, and elsewhere, Africa’s experts have been expressing their support for green industrialization.

“Green industrialization is the only way for Africa…it is a precondition for sustainable and inclusive growth,” highlights the Economic Report on Africa 2016: Greening Africa’s Industrialization, published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

Green initiatives will move Africa from the periphery to the centre of the global economy, said Fatima Denton, director of the ECA’s Special Initiatives Division, during the African Development Week in Addis Ababa, in April.

Africa’s green industrialization advocates have borrowed from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by world leaders in September 2015, and the Paris Climate Change Agreement of December 2015 – both promote green initiatives.

Given that energy production and use contribute up to 87% of overall carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans, curtailing the exploitation of fossil fuel is at the centre of green advocacy. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas generates carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour, which in turn contribute to global warming.

However, it may be tough to sell Africa’s oil and natural gas exporters, like Angola and Nigeria, on limiting fossil fuel drilling. For both countries, oil accounts for more than 90% of exports and at least two-thirds of the national budget. The price of oil dropped from a peak of $100 a barrel in 2015 to about $50 by mid-June 2016. Before the oil price crash, even countries just discovering oil – like Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone – had anticipated a financial windfall from the sector.

These countries fear that limiting fossil fuel investments may severely damage their economies, although green advocates continue to insist that renewable energy, including energy generated by sun, wind, rain, waves and geothermal heat, all of which Africa has in abundance, is the way to go.

African countries must take advantage of “new innovations, technologies and business models that use natural resources optimally and efficiently”, notes the 2016 ECA economic report.

Kandeh Yumkella, who formerly held the title of special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (a global initiative), offered a middle-of-the-road approach, recommending that Africa adopt an all-of-the-above energy strategy. “Why should we burn gas? Why shouldn’t we use gas for energy production?” Yumkella asked rhetorically, in an interview with Africa Renewal.

Grudging acceptance

Globally, countries have been slow to embrace green technology “because of the lingering belief that environmental regulations erode competitiveness”, wrote Harvard University business professor Michael E. Porter and his co-author, Claas van der Linde, in an article for the magazine Harvard Business Review.

And in October 2011, Salifou Issoufou and Nama Ouattara, economists with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank respectively, presented a paper based on their research, titled “Does Green Investment Raise Productivity?” to a packed house at the African Economic Conference in Addis Ababa. Green investments lowered productivity growth, they told a shocked audience that included some of Africa’s top policy makers. Africa must adopt “a cautious approach in attempting large-scale investments in green technologies,” the researchers recommended.

The main problem with green investments, the 2011 paper showed, was that costs, made worse by regulations, further stifled interest. Investing in environmentally friendly agricultural equipment, for example, “requires heavy upfront costs and the transition from the existing mode of production to the new one requires complementary technical innovation,” wrote Issoufou and Ouattara at the time.

There is also the argument that since Africa contributes the least of all continents to global warming, it should not be compelled – or expected – to adopt policies that mitigate global warming.

Cost effective

Since 2011, when Issoufou and Ouattara’s research findings lowered expectations for green industrialization, the green economy train has been running at full speed due to several factors, including innovative technologies, which are bringing down the cost of renewables considerably. In addition, a crash in commodity prices, particularly in extractives, is sending some of Africa’s economies – such as Angola, Nigeria and South Africa – spiralling into chaos, forcing many countries to explore opportunities in green industrialization.

Government leadership has been playing a key role in driving the growth of renewables, particularly wind and solar, in the power sector including many in Africa. As of early 2016, 173 countries had renewable energy targets in place and 146 countries had support policies. Cities, communities and companies are leading the rapidly expanding “100% renewable” movement, playing a vital role in advancing the global energy transition.

Additional growth factors include better access to financing, concerns about energy security and the environment and the growing demand for modern energy services in developing and emerging economies.

Carlos Lopes, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, expressed optimism: “We have the potential to access renewable energy at a time when the price of producing this energy is comparable to fossil fuel production.”

Triple bottomline

According to Professor Mark Swilling of the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, the added value of renewables is their positive impact on the “triple bottomline”, a term that refers to a company’s profit, its social responsibility activities and its environmental responsibility.

Africa’s capabilities for “leapfrogging” – another buzzword at economic forums – constitute a significant economic advantage for the region. Simply put, African countries implementing green initiatives won’t have to go through every intermediary stage of technology, but instead can directly access the latest available on the market.

Africa can therefore be expected to take a giant developmental step: the leapfrog. Industrialised countries, on the other hand, will have to retrofit older infrastructure, said Lopes, a burdensome expense.

The ECA 2016 economic report states that Africa’s population is expected to hit 2 billion by 2050. The rapid growth of the working-age population (aged 25–64), increasing urbanization and the dominance of informal employment have weighty implications for the continent’s structural transformation.

While young people provide a valuable resource to be harnessed in national development, they can also drive green industrialization if they have green jobs in various sectors.

Many African countries are planning or already implementing green projects. In March 2014, an intergovernmental committee of experts from Central African countries (Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and São Tomé and Príncipe) met in N’djamena to hash out a plan for transitioning to a green economies

Mariam Mahamat Nour, Chad’s minister of planning and international cooperation, said companies operating in the region must master production techniques based on low energy use.

Ethiopia in 2011 adopted a Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy as part of its ambitious plan to propel the country into middle-income status by 2025. The government is partnering with the private sector to help communities engage in sustainable farming.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a tree-cloning project is enhancing afforestation (establishing forests on lands that have not been forested for a long time) and reforestation (establishing forests where they have been destroyed). Climate change experts consider afforestation and reforestation effective methods of combating global warming. Despite the DRC’s efforts, it is considering lifting the moratorium on logging that has been in place since 2002; this could threaten the forests, experts believe.

Last February the World Bank assisted Ghana in launching a Climate Innovation Centre in the capital, Accra, to support a green growth strategy. The centre is working with about a hundred local technology companies.

Nigeria’s Renewable Energy Programme is, among other things, executing a low-carbon development project to provide electricity for its capital city, Abuja, through improved insulation, energy-efficient devices for apartments and local power generation.

The project, currently underway, is the first of its kind in Africa and the second in the world, after that of Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, according to Nigeria’s environment ministry. Also, the Tata Group of India is planning to establish in Nigeria a mass transit system of compressed natural gas vehicles to reduce emissions.

The ECA economic report recommends a step-by-step “systemic approach,” with a focus on value chains in agriculture, energy extractives, manufacturing, transport and water. Countries must identify green industrialization entry points, set policies that support green industrialization and mobilize resources from the public and private sectors, recommends the report.

The report further stresses that investments in infrastructure and innovation are critical and that countries should share best practices, strengthen national institutions and constantly review their green industrialization policies and activities.

Overall, a general belief among Africa’s development experts is that going green — and clean—is no longer a moral question; it is now a socioeconomic imperative. They view it as the new pathway to Africa’s industrialization.

*Dr. Kingsley Ighobor is Information Officer, UNHQ Africa Section, New York, Information Services. This article is being published by arrangement with Africa Renewal. It first appeared in Africa Renewal’s August-November 2016 edition with the headline ‘A green path to industrialization’.

The Chinese Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index dropped by a third in mid-2015, wiping out billions in share value. One of the responses of the Chinese government was to directly participate in the stock market. This column assesses the costs and benefits of this intervention, finding that the resulting gains amounted to about 5% of Chinese GDP. The value was created not just from increased equity and investor confidence, but also from increased liquidity and reduced probability of default for listed firms.

By Yi Huang, Jianjun Miao and Pengfei Wang*

From mid-June to early July of 2015, the Chinese Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SSECI) plunged by 32%, wiping out more than RMB 18 trillion in share value from its 12th June peak. The value lost was equivalent to about 30% of China’s GDP in 2014 and about 20% of US GDP in 2014. Figure 1  presents the SSECI index and some major events that happened during the period from 1st July 1 2014 to 30th September 2015.

Figure 1. A chronology of China’s stock market

The large stock market crash produced widespread panic and pushed the Chinese government to implement a range of rescue policies. Did the government intervention create value, or was it simply a redistribution of value from taxpayers to the rescued firms? If it created value, where did the value added come from?

These questions are important for policymakers and investors, but have not been studied in the literature. Veronesi and Zingales (2012) provide an estimate of the costs and benefits of the Paulson plan implemented during the US financial crisis in 2008. In a recent paper, we provide a similar analysis for China (Huang et al. 2016).

Unlike the Paulson plan, the Chinese government directly participated in stock market trading by purchasing about half of the stocks listed in the Chinese stock market. The trading was done through two state-owned corporations, China Securities Finance Corporation Limited (CSF) and China Central Huijin Investment Limited (CCH), which are known as the ‘national team’. Other institutions such as brokerages and mutual funds also participated in the intervention. Our analysis focuses on the national team due to data availability.

Methodology

The national team continually purchased stocks starting in July 2015, but we do not observe its daily trading behaviour. We can only observe its share holdings of the rescued firms from their quarterly balance sheets. From the balance sheets in the second and third quarters of 2015, we can infer the net purchases by the government in that period. We thus provide a short-run estimate of the costs and benefits of the government’s purchases during the period 30th June to 30th September 2015.

Given the global turbulence in financial markets during the period, it is impossible to estimate the systemic effects of the government intervention. However, it is possible to estimate its effects on the rescued firms. To compute these effects on the value of the rescued firms, we do not limit ourselves to the changes in the value of common stocks, but we study the changes in the entire enterprise value by also studying changes in the value of existing debt.

We first compute the actual cost of the stock purchases as the difference between the purchase cost and the holding value on 30th September 2015. The purchase cost is estimated to be the purchase prices multiplied by the number of shares purchased between 1st July and 30th September. Since we do not observe the national team’s daily trading information, we consider three estimates of the purchase prices: the lowest, the highest, and the average market prices between the two dates.

Second, we compute the change in equity value using the capital asset pricing model of Sharpe (1964). We compute the abnormal returns between 1st July and 30th September of common stocks after correcting for market events. Then the change of a stock value is equal to the stock’s market capitalisation on 30th June, multiplied by the stock’s abnormal returns.

Third, we compute the change in debt value using the model of Merton (1974). We use the observable equity value, the estimated equity volatility, the risk-free interest rate, and debt maturity to compute firm value and default probabilities on 30th June and 30th September 2015. We compute debt value as the difference between firm value and equity value. Since debt value also changed for non-rescued firms, we then correct the market events to compute the (adjusted) change in debt value of recued firms using non-rescued firms in the same industry as a control.

Finally, we compute the costs/benefits of the government intervention as the sum of the changes in the equity value and debt value minus the actual cost of the stock purchase.

Benefits and costs of the government purchases

We find that the total costs of stock purchases by the national team range from RMB 770.5 billion to 1,708.8 billion. Subtracting the market value on 30th September, we find that the total actual costs of stock purchases are RMB 321.9 (average price), 818.6 (highest price), and -119.8 (lowest price). The change in equity value of all rescued firms is RMB 113 billion. The change in debt value of all rescued firms is RMB 3,169 billion. Using these values, we find that the total net gains of all purchased stocks are between RMB 2,464 and 3,402 billion. These gains are about 5% of Chinese GDP in 2014.

Sources of value creation

Where does the value creation come from? Since the national team purchased more than 1,000 stocks, we have a relatively large sample to conduct a cross-sectional regression analysis. We find the following results.

• First, the government purchase increased the demand for shares and raised equity value (or reduced the loss of equity value), thereby raising investors’ confidence.
• Second, the government purchase reduced default probabilities of the rescued firms and hence their debt value.
• Third, the government purchase raised liquidity of the rescued firms.

Final thoughts

We should emphasise that our estimates are based on a short-run analysis. Many researchers are concerned about the long-run costs of the Chinese government intervention. First, the massive stock purchases by the government prevented the efficient discovery of stock prices. The national team is a large player in the stock market, whose transactions can have a large impact on price movements. As a result, the stock prices may not reflect fundamentals. This may plant the seeds of a future bubble. Second, the Chinese government intervention can create a moral hazard problem. If firms believe that the government will rescue them if they default on the margin loans, then they may keep borrowing more without improving the loans’ profitability. Third, in addition to directly purchasing stocks, the government took some other measures such as halting IPOs, restricting short selling, and imposing a lock-up rule. These measures prevented the normal function of the stock market. Besides these possible long-run costs, there are many other questions worth further studying. For example, what are the problems of the Chinese trading system? How should one reform this system? Is there a better alternative intervention approach? We leave these questions for future research.

*About the authors:
Yi Huang, Assistant Professor of International Economics and Pictet Chair in Finance and Development, The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Jianjun Miao, Professor of Economics, Boston University

Pengfei Wang, Professor of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

References:
Huang, Y, J Miao, and P Wang (2016), “Saving China’s Stock Market”, Boston University, working paper.

Merton, R (1974), “On the Pricing of Corporate Debt: The Risk Structure of Interest Rates”, Journal of Finance, 29, 449-470.

Sharpe, F W (1964), “Capital Asset Prices: A Theory of Market Equilibrium under Conditions of Risk”, Journal of Finance, 19, 425-442.

Veronesi, P and L Zingales (2010), “Paulson’s Gift”, Journal of Financial Economics, 3, 339-368.

A populist wave that began with Brexit in June became a tsunami as Trump’s cyclone hit Washington Tuesday night, leaving the capital in a shambles. His is a story straight out of Grimm’s fairytales. the peasants rose up. The phoney civility of the neoconservative nightmare that Americans (and the world) have endured for years is cracking.

Trump’s victory is pure protest by the masses. Exciting, but disturbing, as Trump is just another billionaire. He will be sure to look after his own, but then again, maybe he can stare them down. Fortunately, there is the Republican Congress and Senate to provide stability as the upstart get his feet on the ground. The weakened Democrats will have to fight extra hard after years of complacency under the nice, liberal Obama.

For critics of media control by the Israel lobby in the US, and the sham elections where money rules, the victory shattered this paradigm. “Though the ‘Masters of Discourse’ control the entirety of world media, and they decide what people may think and say from Canada to Hong Kong, only you, American citizens, can defeat them. Trump has a great quality making him fit for the task: he is impervious to labels and libels. He had been called everything in the book: anti-Semite, racist, women hater, you name it. And he still survived that flak. Such people are very rare,” writes Israel Shamir.

Almost all presidents since Jimmy Carter have campaigned as outsiders. Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush jr, Obama. But they were all seasoned politiciansm and all disappointed.

There is a precedent of a boorish outsider, made famous and pilloried in the media, who catapulted into the political world. His name is Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler who served as the 38th Governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003. He was the first member of the Reform Party to win a major government position, now in the Independence Party of Minnesota.

He surprised everyone with a sober, uncorrupt term in office, reforming taxation and constructing the METRO Blue Line light rail in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul. He shattered the Republican-Democratic stranglehold and no one suffered. Trump has shattered it again. He makes a path open to a third party or independent candidate in the future.

Trump’s trump card

Trump’s final ad, a 2-minute masterpiece of populist rhetoric infuriated the ADL for hinting the obvious: the forces of international finance that have their own agenda for the US, behind our backs, and whose agent is/was Hillary Clinton. He depicted a “global power structure” that is “bleeding America dry” with horrible trade deals that enrich elites and open the gates to mass immigration.

The people behind this globalist takeover include George Soros, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein, with the implication that Clinton is their minion. “The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” charged Trump.

That jab alone was worth more than all of Hillary’s millions spent on ads attacking him for peccadilloes. Now the intelligent Republicans are waking up. Trumps’ words are branded in their minds. That alone makes the election historic.

The ADL’s slander of Trump–This ad touches on images and rhetoric that anti-Semites have used for age–merely alerted Americans to the emptiness of the ‘antisemitic’ slur. If something is true, pointing it out is not bigotry.

Senior House deputy whip Dennis Ross of Florida lauds Trump for his know ability as negotiator. “Sure, he might toss out statements like ‘build a wall,’ or ‘no Muslims,’ and say something sensational. But then he knows how to give in a bit and come up with a solution.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan publicly disowned Trump during the campaign, and now has to eating crow. The closest modern comparison of an outsider president and a speaker of the same political party may be the fractious relationship during the late 1970s between Democrats President Jimmy Carter and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Carter’s team didn’t have an appreciation for how the system worked in Washington and struggled to advance his agenda.

New American ball game

The Republican win in the Congress and Senate, with a Republican president, offers a chance to produce meaningful change. Will Trump develop more concern for the environment and work to help the millions of poor Americans who put their trust in him? He has a huge responsibility to repay his voters and give hope for reconciliation with his opponents. There is much soul searching to be done now, on both sides of the divide in American political life.

The election represents a call to action for people to fight hard to save the environment, rebuild a county falling apart, and demand a responsible US foreign policy.

Democracy only works when we all take part. People are awakening from their Wall St induced sleep. Look for a new ‘Occupy Wall St’ and peace campaigning.

That’s the bright side. Trump’s policies on the Middle East and Iran are confused and incoherent. Let’s hope that his friendship with Vladimir Putin portends realism, and the ability and intent to change the US imperial mindset that plagues the world. The French are just as furious with the same scenario there. Trump’s victory makes a victory for the Front National’s Marine Le Pen more likely. “The American people – free!” Le Pen tweeted as Trump’s count reached the threshold of victory.

It also gives energy to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Protest candidates throughout Europe have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government coalitions in 11 Western democracies, including in Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

This wave of protest is gathering momentum. The American people have the chance now, and the responsibility, to help shape where Trump will take his ‘revolution’. Whether he can work with his foreign counterparts to create a people’s ‘new world order’, not the one Bush sr promised in 1991 and that Bush jr failed to achieve. Foreign policy has too long been off limits, done by elites behind closed doors.

Government has to listen to the people now, after years of passivity and policies shaped by the elite. Trump made serious promises to revitalize American. People will now hold him to them.

By Giorgi Lomsadze

On the cusp of what appears a new era of unpredictability in international affairs, countries in the Caucasus, that sensitive borderland between East and West, are wondering what to expect from Donald Trump, the United States’ choice for president.

In what many see as schadenfreude, Moscow is the only place in the larger region where politicians unabashedly hail Trump. The State Duma, in fact, met the news of Trump’s victory with a standing ovation.

“Man to man, I don’t envy Bill Clinton because his old lady, for whom he trailed around all the states like a threadbare backpack, will be going through the roof over losing,” predicted Sergei Mironov, leader of the social-democratic Fair Russia.

“Our dear Trump, congratulations on your victory,” chimed in the Liberal Democratic Party’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist known for his ebullient pre-election endorsement of Trump. “Babushka Hillary should go have a rest,” he advised.

For his part, President Vladimir Putin refrained from gloating and said he looks forward to working with Trump to end the crisis in US-Russian relations.  One Facebook spoofer, however, could not resist depicting him signing a decree naming Trump head of the “North-American federal district [округ].”

While Russian officials could well be rubbing their hands at the sight of a divided and weakened US, many Russians think they get Trump because they know the type. He has been compared to the “new Russians” of the 1990s; a breed of new-money philistines often sporting tracksuits and gold chains.

Andrei Kolesnikov, an analyst with the Moscow chapter of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that for the average Russian, Trump cuts a familiar political figure. “A politician of that type has been a constant in Russia for the past 25 years,” he wrote.

South of Russia, across the Caucasus mountain range, where Washington is often seen as a much-needed counterbalance to Moscow, reactions have been less enthusiastic.

The leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia made sure to send in the requisite pleasantries to the US president-elect, too.

In what appeared to be a fill-in-the-name statement, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan hailed Trump’s “experience” and “vision,” and expressed confidence that “the Armenia-US close partnership… [will be] expanding and reaching new heights in diverse areas.”

With similarly general words, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev kept the focus on resolving the conflict with Armenia over breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh, expressing hope that “the U.S. . . .will contribute to a fair settlement of this conflict.”
.
Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili used more direct speech, saying that the world expects responsible leadership from a US president. “Humanity faces new challenges, growing and interconnected threats, which puts a great responsibility on us to protect universal values, such as freedom, democracy and peace,” Margvelashvili said.

But local analysts seem fairly confident that all three countries had been rooting for Hillary Clinton.

Washington plays a mediating role in the Karabakh conflict, and both counties would have benefited from a US president who is aware of it, the thinking goes.

“The election of Clinton, who is knowledgeable about Caucasus affairs from her time as secretary of state, would have meant Washington’s more active role on a few questions of vital importance for Azerbaijan, with the number one being the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” said Azerbaijani political analyst Zaur Shiriyev.

Arguably, some might say, particularly so given that Azerbaijan’s US embassy uses a lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, run by the brother, Tony Podesta, of Clinton’s campaign chairperson, John Podesta.

But Clinton ranks as more of a known quantity for Armenia, too. “Obviously, Hillary is more predictable, [including] when it comes to Armenia and [the] South Caucasus,” said Mikayel Zolyan, a policy analyst with the Regional Studies Center, a Yerevan-based think-tank.

There was some hope in Armenia that Clinton would have given the failed 2009 attempt to reconcile Armenia with its old foe, Turkey, another try. Zolyan, though, is skeptical.

“I tend to agree with those who say that she would not want to touch something [that] she got burn[ed] with,” he told Tamada Tales. Still, Zolyan believes Clinton would have played an active role in the region, a geographical area she has visited and knows. By contrast, he said, Trump has little knowledge of or interest in this part of the world.

“I tend to think that he will probably not be interested in the South Caucasus” and all region-related decisions will simply be left to State Department officials to make, Zolyan said.

In 2012, Trump visited the Georgian port-city of Batumi, then the prospective site of another hotel bearing his name, and his daughter, Ivanka, has made it to Baku to check in on another Trump hotel project. But neither hotel has been built.

Nonetheless, a commentator for Azerbaijan’s pro-government Trend news service expressed hope that Baku’s own construction project would bring the entrepreneurial Trump to their energy-rich country.

One Georgian observer expressed a similar hope. “Perhaps Trump comes here and completes the [Trump] tower,” Vasil Kacharava, director of Tbilisi State University’s American Studies Center, speculated to Rustavi2.

Trump has scared off many Georgians by wafting kisses at Putin, Georgia’s biggest bête noire. A sense exists that a Trump administration would care less about protecting Georgia from Russia’s imperial ambitions.

But Georgia may reap one unexpected benefit from a Trump presidency: the country features among The Telegraph’s 15 best places in the world for emigration by Americans who can’t stand having Trump for president.

October 30, 2016, was the 107th birth anniversary of Dr Homi Bhabha, a great visionary and the architect of nuclear India.

I saw him closely for the first time in July 1964 when he was the chief guest at the graduation ceremony of the 7th Batch of trainees of the Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay (AEET) Training School.

That day was rather warm and sultry. One of the senior scientists tried hard to arrest a swiveling pedestal fan so that Dr. Bhabha who was on the stage would feel comfortable. The fan did not cooperate. It made a rattling sound. We were amused. Dr Bhabha showed visible consternation and waved his admirer off.

I saw him briefly on a few other occasions. Once I saw him getting out of his car and admonishing a person who was nonchalantly walking over the well-groomed lawn. I could not hear what he said. It was clear that the unseemly behavior irritated him.

The last time I saw him was at a meeting held in Trombay to condole the unexpected and untimely death of Shri Lal Bahadur Shastry, the then Prime Minister of India. There was something very poignant about the meeting, which the Department held on the afternoon of January 21, 1966.

When the meeting was over, Dr Bhabha came to know of the sad news of the suicide of Shri Devgun, a young scientist in the Technical Physics Division. He was a year senior to me in the training school.

Dr Bhabha went to the hospital and spent lot of time there. He postponed his journey to Geneva. His schedule was to leave on that day. He flew on January 26, 1966 in Kanchenjunga. an Air India plane, which crashed on Mount Blanc while on its way to Geneva.

Personally, I had reasons to feel very uneasy about that air-crash. A few days earlier to that fateful day, I visited Kanchenjunga accompanied my friend Mr Seetharaman who was a flight engineer with AIR India. He explained to me the safety features of the aircraft including the mandatory technical and administrative procedures in place to ensure safety.

I had no occasion to interact with Dr. Bhabha. Some of my friends had. During the early years, if any officer resigned, Dr Bhabha used to call him for an interview. My senior colleague Dr A Gopalakrishnan met him before he left for higher studies. Dr Bhabha wanted to know why an officer resigned.

Some of us were amused whenever some senior scientists quoted Bhabha at the drop of a hat. Then we did not know the humongous contributions he made to start a nascent programme and to consolidate its progress on firm ground.
India owes its achievements in the field of atomic energy to the close, cordial and intellectually stimulating relation between Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the former Prime Minister of India and Dr Homi J. Bhabha.

They exchanged information periodically. On 4 January 1947, while laying the foundation stone of the National Physical Laboratory at New Delhi, Nehru spoke convincingly on the necessity of atomic research in India.

He asserted that we should not lag behind in this very important matter. He knew that atomic energy would play a vast and dominant part in the future shape of things. It would make power mobile and this mobility of power could make industry develop anywhere. We would not be tied up by accidents of geography.

Visionaries such as Nehru and Bhabha had every reason to dream of large-scale production of nuclear power in India. It was certainly overambitious as this was many years before anyone set up any nuclear power plant anywhere in the world. Then the per capita consumption of electricity in India was paltry at about 14 kWh in 1947!

On April 26, 1948, Bhabha submitted a note to Nehru on the organization of atomic research in India

“The report submitted to you, Mr Prime Minister, on my return from Europe and America collected evidence which made it reasonable to believe that within the next couple of decades, atomic energy would play an important part in the economy and the industry of countries and that, if India did not wish to fall even further behind industrially advanced countries of the world, it would be necessary to take more energetic measures to develop this branch of science and appropriate larger sums for the purpose.”, he pleaded

Bhabha asked for a grant of Rs. one million for the first year! He got it.

Bhabha knew the priorities and the challenges facing the programme

“. . . Our immediate programme should include an extensive and intense search for sources of uranium. These geological surveys would take at least two years if carried out in any careful and exhaustive way and it is possible that their result may be negative. In that case, India would either have to depend on an agreement with a foreign power for the purchase of her uranium . . .,” The quest uranium continues!

Bhabha articulated his vision on atomic power generation in an amazingly simple and direct way. The half page summary note he wrote to Nehru on 8 August 1954 listed 13 items. Each one of these developed into massive programmes covering all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. The list included setting up of the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay, uranium prospecting and processing, plants to produce heavy water and beryllium, a uranium enrichment plant, atomic power plants, breeder reactors and a plutonium extraction plant.

He included training and development of labor, supporting and financing research in the universities (one of his favourite themes) and research institutes and developing and promoting the use of tracers in biology, medicine and industry as subsidiary activities. Government must make the notes from Bhabha to Nehru compulsory reading material for any science administrator.

At the second meeting of the Board of Research on Atomic Energy, the predecessor to the Atomic Energy Commission, held in Bombay on nine and 10 April 1948, Bhabha secured approval for three resolutions; one of which recommended that the government should investigate the feasibility of producing heavy water in India. He knew the difficulties in executing that programme

“Government should explore the possibilities of utilizing cheap hydroelectric power in India for manufacturing heavy water, on the one hand for our own requirements in a pile, and on the other for sale to other countries.,” he wrote to Nehru.

Bhabha proposed that the government should come to an agreement with the governments or atomic energy agencies of one or more countries such as Great Britain, France and Norway – ‘that was the quickest and the most desirable way to develop atomic energy in India’, he argued.

He knew that Norway had the knowhow to produce heavy water, an essential raw material to produce atomic energy. In 1942, Norway was producing 1.5 tons of heavy water annually at its Rjukan plant.

The ‘factory should be set up for the purpose under the Defence Ministry and put under the same security measures as the armaments factories of that Ministry’. He wrote driving home the strategic importance of heavy water.

He wanted that ‘the heavy water produced should be at the disposal of the Atomic Energy Commission for use or sale’. Clearly, he wanted to thwart a possible future turf war with the army!

Bhabha proposed to Nehru the setting up of a three Member Atomic Energy Commission directly under the prime minister as, ‘the present Board . . . cannot be entrusted with this work since it is an advisory body. . . composed of 28 members including officials, scientists and industrialists’.

‘Secret matters cannot be dealt with under this organization’, Bhabha emphatically asserted.

Soon after the Indian Parliament passed the Atomic Energy Act 1948, the Central government set up the Atomic Energy Commission in the erstwhile Department of Scientific Research on 10 August 1948.

The Commission was exactly as proposed by Bhabha in his letter to Jawaharlal Nehru on 26 April 1948. This was probably the most important development in the field. The Commission has the powers of the Government of India and continues to play a significant role.

The notification issued on 10 August 1948 stated that the Commission has a Chairman, a Member and a Member-Secretary It stipulated that the Commission would carry the work directly under the guidance of the prime minister.
Bhabha showed his visionary bend of mind quite early in his life. He went to Cambridge in the late twenties. Then he was 18 years of age. His father wanted him to secure engineering degree so that he could join Tata Industries later.

Bhabha loved physics. “But you are not Socrates or Einstein”. His father taunted him. He did engineering and physics!

After an illustrious career, he returned to India. Soon the World War broke out. He could not return to England. He accepted a readership in the Institute of Science, Bangalore. With the support of Mr. J.R.D. Tata, he established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore in less than two months of receiving a grant Rs 45000 from Sir Dorab Tata Trust. Six months later, Bhabha shifted the institute to Bombay. T.I.F.R. was the cradle of India’s atomic energy programme.

Dr Bhabha knew that because of paucity of scientifically and technically trained personnel some of the top people would have to do more than one job at the same time.

Dr Bhabha ensured that specialists in all disciplines worked together. The greatest strength of any unit of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) lies in its multi- disciplinary background.

Dr Bhabha argued effectively against outdated government rules and procedures. He provided cars for the scientists on a 24-hour basis; he arranged lunch and dinner for them in the reactor building at Trombay from an appropriate restaurant. Government regulations were against these provisions. Bhabha wrote to Nehru that such rules and regulations are not suited for executive work, which is to be done at speed, and under pressure. Nehru agreed.

“There are already oral contraceptives known, but they are relatively expensive and required to be used systematically and precisely…. The problem of getting every villager in over 600 thousand villages in India to use them systematically would be quite enormous. If on the other hand, some substance could be developed which when mixed with an ingredient of one’s daily diet such as rice, grain, or salt would have the effect of reducing the chance of conception by 30%, the problem would be immediately solved. I have no doubt there are many who will hold up their hand in horror at this suggestion.”

You may attribute these statements to Mr Khushwant Singh or to some eminent demographer. Certainly not to Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, who made these suggestions at the sixth International Conference on Planned Parenthood. Homi Bhabha was a multifaceted personality.

After the overwhelming victory for the second term in West Bengal assembly election in 2016, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee made a volta face towards car makers. She vied for the German auto-giant BMW to invest in West Bengal, despite her goodbye to Tata.

But, setting up of a car factory in West Bengal is not propitious, given the lackluster auto-infrastructure in the State. Manufacturing cars is a value–chain based industry. In Japanese terminology, it is known as a supporting base industry. It is a marriage between assembly operations and component manufacturers. It needs development of both assembly operations and component makers side by side. A car assembly plant does not produce components. They are supplied by component makers. Given the severe price completion, manufacturers of critical components are required to set up factories within the close proximity of the assembly plant. Therefore, setting up of a stand alone car assembly plant is not viable, unless component manufactures are developed in the State.

Chakree Chaei ( jobs wanted) has been the growing clamour in West Bengal after Mamata’s second victory. People of Bengal brought Ms Mamata Banerjee back to office, despite her failure to bring a single big investment in the State in her first term. Shutting down the 34 years of Communist government raised big hopes, but, soon those hopes were belied.

Failing to bring back domestic investors, she turned to foreign investors. She vied for the German heart, BMW, to set up a car factory. She visited BMW and tried to allure the company with a big land bank and surplus power, against the lackluster image of land availability in other parts of the country after the Land Bill was stuck in political row.

Will the German auto giant be enticed by her magical offers? The paradox lies with the potential for setting up an auto factory in the State. If BMW sets up a car factory in West Bengal, it needs to develop component and parts makers in West Bengal. But, West Bengal is a blip on the map of auto component making industry. In the near term, it is difficult to develop the auto component industry.

Alternatively, the company has to source component and parts from Tamilnadu and Haryana – the hubs of Indian auto components. Procurement from Tamilnadu and Haryana are less cost effective because of long distant transit costs.

Further, the import of component and parts are not economically viable because of high custom duties and currency fluctuations Against these backdrops, West Bengal can not be the appropriate destination for an automobile giant at the current industrial structure.

Experiences of Suzuki of Japan and Hyundai of South Korea should be important lessons for the State government. Maruti-Suzuki of Japan developed manufacturers of critical component and parts in Haryana near to its plants in Gurgaon and Hyundai Motor of Korea brought 17 subcontractors from Korea in Tamilnadu, near to its plant in Sriperumbudur.

Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee chanted for a large land bank in West Bengal, compared to other states. But, the big investors are dubious over the potential benefit of the land bank. This is because there are few big land tracts available in the land bank. Mostly they are small plots and not contiguous. .According to State government data, there is one lakh acres of land in the land bank. It is difficult to find big areas of contiguous land.

Against the backdrop of the present industrial structure of West Bengal, the industries with low and middle level investment and of labor intensive are appropriate for industrialization. To this end, experiences of Vietnam and Bangladesh would be pertinent for the growth industries in West Bengal. Success stories of ‘Supporting industry” model in Vietnam and upsurge in garment industry in Bangladesh can provide some tips to West Bengal.

Supporting industries are group of manufacturing industries within a country that supply parts and components or process them for the assemblers, such as automobile, electronics and precision equipments. Supporting industry is low cost capital intensive and high labour intensive with high –skilled labour.

In Vietnam, Supporting industry proved boon to the growth of domestic automobile industry. The country has reached 90 percent of localization in manufacturing motorbikes. Vietnam is the second biggest manufacturer of motorbikes in ASEAN. Foreign investors played an important role in the development of supporting industry. This led to flow of foreign investment in Vietnam.

The electronic industry is a Supporting base industry. Manufacturing of mobile phones and electronic components are low capital and high labor intensive industries. There are several factors which favour West Bengal as better destination for mobile phone and electronic component manufacturing. Cheap wage, low land cost, surplus electricity and availability of highly skilled labour forces ( owing to three big technical education institutes) can prove propitious for development of mobile and electronic component manufacturing in West Bengal.

In Bangladesh, the garment industry is a major driving force for industrialization. It is the second biggest exporter of garment in the world after China. It contributes 75 percent of Bangladesh exports.

Garment is labour –intensive and low-capital base industry. It provides start-up platform for re-building of industrialization. Low wage is the catalyzing factor for the growth of garment industry. Automation has limited scope in garment industry. Given the factors which are favourable for the growth of garment industry, West Bengal can be an ideal place for setting up garment industry.

Therefore, to start with, labour intensive and low capital base industries are warranted in West Bengal. To this end, the investors in supporting industry base and garment industry should be incentivized. In the run up, foreign investors can be allured in the development of supporting industries and garment in West Bengal, on the lines of Vietnam and Bangladesh.

*S. Majumder, Adviser, Japan External Trade Organization ( JETRO) , New Delhi, Views are personal

I have now demonstrated to my complete satisfaction that as a political prognosticator I am a total bust. Not that I put much effort into trying, to be sure, but I certainly developed firm ideas as the politicking proceeded over the past year or more. When Donald Trump first appeared on the horizon as a presidential hopeful, his actions struck me, as so much about the man and his ideas has struck me, as a bad joke. I gave him no chance of gaining the Republican nomination. After he had surprised me by doing so, I gave him a negligible chance at best of winning the election against Hillary Clinton, who was the overwhelming favorite of the political establishment and the beneficiary of a powerful political machine. Thus, my record in regard to Trump so far has been: wrong and wrong again. Of course, many others no doubt saw the matter much as I did, but companionship in error is no basis for excusing my incorrect judgments.

Now that Trump has been elected, many people—including some of my close acquaintance—are practically wailing and gnashing their teeth at the prospect of a Trump presidency. I understand why they feel as they do. I myself look forward to his actions in office with the greatest trepidation. I have always regarded him as a loose cannon, a man so ill-anchored in any visible principles and so lacking in genuine understanding and wisdom about economic and governmental affairs that I have marveled at observers who expected him to do this or that. To me, he has been and remains a complete crap shoot. At this point it is difficult to think of anything he might do that would come as a complete surprise to me, inasmuch as a vast set of possibilities seems always to be “on the table” for him.

Nevertheless, I think that those who are wringing their hands would do well to recall, if indeed they knew at some previous time, that even the president of the United States faces constraints. He is not in a position to do just anything he might decide to do. The government itself is a huge apparatus with many power centers. Moreover, the government officials who occupy the state’s commanding heights also work hand in hand with powerful people outside the government who also have great influence in the determination of how the government acts. Comprised of members of both groups, this so-called Deep State might well be said to command the government’s major decisions as much as it is made subject to them. There is continual give and take, but the Deep State movers and shakers can never be safely disregarded. Nor can they, in most cases, be voted out of office or forced to resign, because they occupy no formal office in the legislature or the bureaucracy. Elected officials and political appointees come and go, but the Deep State grinds on, seemingly inexorably, almost oblivious to who occupies formal offices, able to get huge, regular infusions of funds from the Treasury for its kingpins’ projects whether the partisan political weather be fair or foul.

None of this means that President Trump will be a powerless puppet; far from it. But it does mean that those who fear that his presidency portends a revolution of some sort, even the sort ushered in by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, are probably worrying unnecessarily. The United States of America, as countries go, is especially immune to sweeping revolution, in great part because it has come to have such a powerful, coherent Deep State. My advice (gratuitous, to be sure) would be: keep calm; keep developing events under observation; and do not project every unnerving development to its “logical conclusion.” Don’t panic and don’t despair. The country has taken nasty turns several times in its history, and it’s still here, still relatively prosperous, still not the worst place on earth for many people to live and work, however intrusive the state has grown over the years. President Trump and his subordinates will certainly try to accomplish some major changes once they are in power, but the United States has long been marked by great political and governmental stability relative to almost all other countries, and there is little solid reason to expect extraordinary instability now.

So, I do not expect anything one might call a Trump Revolution. Gridlock seems a better bet. But in deciding how much weight to give my judgment, one might do well to recall what a terrible political prognosticator I have been recently.

This article was published at The Beacon.

Scientists have developed a type of HIV test on a USB stick.

The device, created by scientists at Imperial College London and DNA Electronics, uses a drop of blood to detect HIV, and then creates an electrical signal that can be read by a computer, laptop or handheld device.

The disposable test could be used for HIV patients to monitor their own treatment.

Furthermore, the technology could enable patients with HIV to be managed more effectively in remote locations.

New research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, shows the device is not only very accurate, but can produce a result in under 30 minutes.

The new technology monitors the amount of virus in the bloodstream. This is crucial to monitoring a patient’s treatment.

Current tests to detect the amount of virus take at least three days, often longer, and involves sending a blood sample to a laboratory. In many parts of the world, particularly those with the highest number of HIV infections, such testing does not exist at all.

The current treatment for HIV, called anti-retroviral treatment, reduces virus levels to near zero.

However, in some cases the medication may stop working – perhaps because the HIV virus has developed resistance to the drugs. The first indication of this would be a rise in virus levels in the bloodstream.

Furthermore, regularly monitoring of viral levels enables healthcare teams to check a patient is taking their medication. Stopping medication fuels HIV drug-resistance, which is an emerging global problem.

Viral levels cannot be detected by routine HIV tests, which use antibodies, as these can only tell whether a person has been infected.

Dr Graham Cooke, senior author of the research from the Department of Medicine at Imperial explained: “HIV treatment has dramatically improved over the last 20 years – to the point that many diagnosed with the infection now have a normal life expectancy.

“However, monitoring viral load is crucial to the success of HIV treatment. At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment that can take a couple of days to produce a result. We have taken the job done by this equipment, which is the size of a large photocopier, and shrunk it down to a USB chip.”

Dr Cooke added that this technology, although in the early stages, could allow patients to regularly monitor their virus levels in much the same way that people with diabetes check their blood sugar levels.

The technology could be particularly powerful in remote regions in sub-Saharan Africa, which may not have easy access to testing facilities. Finding out quickly if a patient, particularly a baby, is infected with the virus is crucial to their long term health and survival.

The device, which uses a mobile phone chip, just needs small sample of blood. This is placed onto a spot on the USB stick. If any HIV virus is present in the sample, this triggers a change in acidity which the chip transforms into an electrical signal. This is sent to the USB stick, which produces the result in a programme on a computer or electronic device.

In the latest research, the technology tested 991 blood samples with 95 per cent accuracy. The average time to produce a result was 20.8 minutes.

The team are also investigating whether the device can be used to test for other viruses such as hepatitis. The technology was developed in conjunction with the Imperial spinout company DNA Electronics which is using the same technology to develop a device for detecting bacterial and fungal sepsis and antibiotic resistance.

Professor Chris Toumazou, DNAe’s Founder, Executive Chairman and Regius Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial added: “This is a great example of how this new analysis technology has the potential to transform how patients with HIV are treated by providing a fast, accurate and portable solution. At DNAe we are already applying this highly adaptable technology to address significant global threats to health, where treatment is time-critical and needs to be right first time.”

The dramatic decline of Iran’s Lake Urmia–once the second-largest hypersaline lake in the world–has both direct human and climatic causes, according to a new study published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. The study was the first to compare the relative impact of climate and water management on the water flowing into the lake.

“Saving Lake Urmia will require both national action to improve water management, and international cooperation to address the issue of climate change,” said IIASA and Wageningen University researcher Somayeh Shadkam, who led the study.

Lake Urmia was once the world’s second-largest hypersaline lake, but has declined over 80% in recent decades. Previous work by Shadkam and colleagues had shown that climate change threatens the lake’s existence, using future scenarios of climate change to project water inflow into the lake. The new study aims to better understand the causes of the lake’s decline, teasing out the relative contribution of different factors such as human water usage as well as climate-related variables, using 50 years of data from 1960 to 2010.

The annual flow of water into Lake Urmia dropped by 48% over the study period. Using a model of water flow into the lake, the researchers found that 60% of this decline was caused by climate changes, such as change in precipitation and temperature, and that the remaining 40% of the decline could be attributed to water resources development, such as diverting water for irrigation that would otherwise flow into the lake.

Most previous studies have indicated the dominate role of water usage in changes in the lake surface area. The new study clear indicates that climate change and variability has contributed to the lake desiccation. That means that reduces water use without taking change in the climate into account might be insufficient in saving the lake.

“Water resources and climate change are inextricably interlinked,” said IIASA Director General and CEO Professor Dr. Pavel Kabat, a coauthor on the study. “This is just one area where an integrated systems viewpoint is vital for providing sound advice to policymakers trying to solve such pressing issues.”