What Ireland's president said on migration, social media hate after racist attacks on Indians
'Ireland has long been shaped by migration, both outward and inward. Those who left our shores carried our culture and values into faraway lands, often depending on the generosity of strangers,' his statement read.
He said 'shared human experience' should inform how we must treat 'those who have come to make their lives here (in Ireland)'.
'To forget that is to lose a part of ourselves,' he stressed.
He mentioned social media platforms among the shared space that 'should never be poisoned from messages of hate'.
He further expressed worry for what he called 'the most fundamental and enduring instincts of Irishness… hospitality, friendship, and care for others'.
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Hindustan Times
5 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
India-US ties: Up, close and personal
Six months ago, at the White House, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi were describing each other as 'great' and 'dear' friends, recalling the reverberating echoes of Howdy Modi in Houston (2019) and Namaste Trump in Ahmedabad (2020), and outlined an ambitious vision of India-US relations in an over 3,000-word-long joint statement. Even as Canada rubbished Trump's call for it to become the 51st state, Nato, Japan, and South Korea wondered about the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella, and Europeans did their best to reassure a beleaguered Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, the February visit reassured India that the Modi-Trump relationship was intact and India-US ties were on a positive trajectory. Opinion polls across the world noted that Indians were the most optimistic about Trump's second term. Bilateral trade talks began soon after. Five rounds have taken place but trade deals take long, years at times. But Trump's qualities do not include patience and subtlety. To push the Indians, he added a 25% tariff with a deadline of July 31. Also, his second term was promising to be very different from his first. In his inaugural speech, he had talked of ending wars, of leaving behind a legacy as a 'unifier and peacemaker'. It soon became clear that in addition to deploying his favourite policy tool, tariffs, to get his trade deals, his goal was the Nobel Peace Prize, preferably in the first year itself. His tactics seemed to be working. The US has announced new trade deals with the EU, UK, Japan, and South Korea, covering more than 25% of US foreign trade, though details haven't been worked out. In addition, negotiations are underway with over a dozen countries. China is playing hardball, and using its leverage to restrict exports of rare earth magnets. Canada and Mexico have their own leverage. China's tactics may be working as the US has already relaxed its export controls on H20 chips to China. On Trump's peace-President agenda, progress has been slow. The two big conflicts that Trump had promised to sort out quickly, Ukraine and Gaza, have proved difficult. Both Russian president Vladimir Putin and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu have their own ideas about their objectives and have been stringing Trump along. However, Trump has been nominated for the peace Nobel jointly by the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia and by PM Hun Manet of Cambodia for brokering the ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia. The White House has also highlighted his role in ending the conflicts between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. And somewhat cheekily, for the ceasefire between Israel and Iran especially after Trump came to Israel's help by firing Tomahawk missiles and deploying B2 bombers to deliver the GBU 57 bombs on Iranian targets. Netanyahu has mollified Trump by nominating him for his role in the 2020 Abraham Accords that enabled Israel to normalise relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Putin is now scheduled to have a bilateral meeting with Trump in Alaska on August 15 but Ukraine and the Europeans are not invited. Meanwhile, secondary sanctions on Russia's oil exports have been introduced and India (collateral damage) will attract a 25% penalty, an incremental tariff on exports to the US, effective August 27. However, the India-Pakistan crisis is perhaps where Trump feels let down by his 'great friend Modi'. India was upset at Trump pre-empting the ceasefire announcement on May 10 and claiming credit that it was a 'US-brokered ceasefire'. Since then, he has repeated the claim more than 25 times adding how he prevented a nuclear war, and he employed the threat of cutting trade if they continued. Each time, it was denied by Indian foreign office and military officials, and most recently by the external affairs minister S Jaishankar and defence minister Rajnath Singh, in Parliament. Meanwhile, Pakistan was quick to thank Trump for his positive role and expressed the hope that he could remain engaged and mediate on Kashmir, while nominating him for the Nobel Peace prize. Encouraged by Pakistan, Trump invited Modi to the White House on June 18 on his way back from the G-7 meeting in Canada but was turned down. Trump was presumably trying to set up a meeting with Pakistan army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, who was invited to lunch the same day. With so much happening, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture. Relations between States are governed by national interests and patient negotiations. Good ties between leaders can help but cannot be the principal driver. That's why neither Modi nor Trump is going to pick up the phone to resolve their misunderstanding. The end of the Cold War provided the impetus for the shift in India-US relations when President George H W Bush (41) and PM PV Narasimha Rao took the initiative in 1992 to initiate a dialogue on nuclear issues and the first baby steps for defence cooperation were taken. Gradually, despite ups and downs, and changes in governments in both countries, the positive trajectory continued and a bipartisan consensus based on mutual trust and converging interests evolved. If the nuclear tests in 1998 marked a low point, the Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh dialogue, and the positive US intervention in 1999 during the Kargil conflict restored trust. The story was repeated after the attack on Indian Parliament in 2001 and during Balakot, when the US facilitated the quick release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman from Pakistani custody. There is a difference between backchannel diplomacy and public diplomacy. While Trump has a fondness for TruthSocial, India's geography dictates prudence. The US is larger than Trump just as India is larger than Modi, and there is life after Trump and there is life after Modi. This becomes clearer if interests are given primacy as foreign policy drivers. It also helps avoid the trap of believing one's own propaganda. The simple question is: Is it in India's national interest to sustain relations with the US. The answer should be obvious. Rakesh Sood was ambassador to Afghanistan, Nepal, and France, and served as PM's Special Envoy on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. The views expressed are personal.
Hindustan Times
5 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Citizen-State relations and the burden of document raj
For over a month now, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ensnared the bulk of Bihar's voting population in a maze of paperwork, thanks to its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the voter rolls. In the process, widely accepted documents — Aadhaar, ration card and the voter card itself — have been declared suspect, despite the Supreme Court's intervention. Through executive fiat, ECI has created a new, arbitrary document hierarchy, declaring 11 specific documents — some of which even the most privileged Indians struggle to procure — as appropriate for determining citizenship. Now, as the process moves to the question of deletions from the voter rolls and the very real threat of disenfranchisement, ECI is obdurately hiding behind its paperwork, refusing public access to the list of deleted names. This tyranny of paper is also at the centre of another controversy. The enduring image of Rahul Gandhi's recent press conference is the seven-foot-high stack of paper — the physical electoral rolls — that the Congress team trawled through to identify discrepancies. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. (HT Photo) In different ways, both episodes reveal one of the most pernicious aspects of the exercise of State power in India — the use of documents to mediate citizen-State relations and their role in feeding the State's obsession with ordering citizens into administrative categories of 'eligible' and 'ineligible'. Bureaucratic norms cohere around the idea that 'good governance' is about weeding out the 'ineligible'. At one level, this is a legitimate governance impulse. After all, who will disagree with the need to ensure that all citizens access their rights, particularly voting rights, and that no 'ineligible' person misuses the system? However, the practices this unleashes often lead to the kind of documentation chaos as we are witnessing in Bihar. Worse, it opens the window for co-opting bureaucratic practices into legitimising exclusionary political projects. In hiding behind its mounds of paper, obdurately refusing to make its processes and documents transparent to the public, ECI has demonstrated how effectively the State can weaponise paper even in pursuit of ostensibly legitimate goals. Proving eligibility via documents is a unique burden that the Indian State places on its citizens. After Partition, governments in India and Pakistan adopted the practice of adjudicating citizenship claims by evaluating documents such as passports and, later, ration/voter cards that claimants possessed to determine their authenticity as citizens. This, as political scientist Niraja Jayal has argued, inverted the standard relationship between citizenship and documents. In most contexts, the possession of citizenship is the means to acquire identity documents such as passports. In the Indian case, documents became the means for determining citizenship. This penchant for relying on documents to mediate citizenship soon extended to routine administrative tasks. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. Only through a connection with paper, Hull argues, could an action be construed as an action. Contemporary Indian bureaucracy adopted this practice and extended this culture of distrust to how it deals both with itself and with the public at large. In dealing with the public, documents — ration cards, BPL cards, job cards, Aadhaar cards, voter cards — came to play the role of gatekeepers. For citizens, they are the primary means to make themselves visible to the State and place claims. For the State, they are the means through which it seeks to 'see' society, categorising the population into administratively legible segments that become the basis for administrative action. The culture of distrust that underpins this allowed for an intriguing twist. The State took it upon itself to categorise the population as 'eligible' and 'ineligible'; after all, corruption enables the 'ineligible' beneficiary to access the State. But to achieve this goal, the bureaucracy appropriated the power to verify its own documents, casting suspicion both on its documents and, rather conveniently, on those in possession of these documents. This administrative suspicion can easily be weaponised and placed in service of political projects, as we are now witnessing in Bihar. Words like 'verification', 'authentication', 'deletion' and 'doubtful' are routinely deployed in administrative parlance. The citizen is a suspicious actor, in constant need of verification. It is this bureaucratic impulse that has allowed the ECI, with absolutely no irony, to claim the voter card, distributed by its own machinery, to be inaccurate, leaving it to the Supreme Court judges to remind the ECI of the principle of 'presumption of correctness'. Crucially, it is precisely this suspicion that can become a convenient weapon in the politics of exclusion. Political narratives of 'infiltrators' and outsiders find legitimacy precisely because the State regularly reminds us of how suspiciously it views its documents, allowing itself the luxury of authenticating documents at will. It should be no surprise that the spectre of NRC is writ large over the SIR as well. As the SIR and electoral roll controversy unfolds, the risk of mass disenfranchisement (6.5 million deletions in the draft list), procedural arbitrariness, the constitutional overreach of ECI, and its sheer incompetence are at the centre of the ongoing political and legal challenge. The debate, however, is missing a deeper interrogation into the tyranny of paper and the culture of distrust it has entrenched that makes even our institutions capable of undermining democracy and citizens' rights. The struggle to protect democratic freedoms must extend to interrogating and indeed challenging the culture of kaghaz raj within the State that makes critical independent public institutions vulnerable. Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal.
Economic Times
35 minutes ago
- Economic Times
India's hold on Pakistan begins to hurt where it matters
India put the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) with Pakistan, signed in 1960, in abeyance following the Pahalgam terrorist attack in April, arguing Pakistan violated the treaty through unrelenting cross-border terrorism. Months after the action, India's hold on Pakistan has begun to hurt which is evident from incendiary statements by several Pakistani leaders. Speaking at a private dinner in Tampa, Florida, where he had gone to attend an American military function, a few days ago, Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir threatened India that his country would target dams with missiles, as per media reports. Munir told members of the Pakistani diaspora, 'We will wait for India to build a dam, and when it does so, phir 10 missile sey faarigh kar dengey [we will destroy it with 10 missiles].' 'The Indus river is not the Indians' family property. Humein missilon ki kami nahin hai, al-Hamdulillah [we have no shortage of missiles, Praise be to God],' he said. Munir also threatened India with nuclear strike. After Munir's comments, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday warned that any attempt to block water flow into Pakistan would be a violation of the IWT and met with a 'decisive response.' Speaking at an event in Islamabad, Sharif declared, 'The enemy cannot snatch even a single drop of water from Pakistan. You threatened to stop our water—if you try, Pakistan will teach you a lesson you will never forget.' Last month, former Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is the chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party, warned India over its unilateral suspension of the IWT. Speaking during the budget session of the National Assembly, said, 'India has two options: share water fairly, or we will take it from all six rivers.' Also Read | 'Enemy can't snatch even single drop of water': After Munir, Pak PM Shehbaz Sharif threatens India on Indus treaty India rejects international court jurisdictionPakistan has welcomed an international court's ruling interpreting design criteria for new run-of-river hydropower projects on the Western Rivers (Chenab, Jhelum and Indus), to be built by India, saying it vindicates its position on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), which India put in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack. India, however, has never recognised the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which reportedly ruled that India must "let flow" the waters of the Western Rivers for Pakistan's unrestricted use. India has instead focused on the neutral expert mechanism."The specified exceptions for generation of hydro-electric plants must conform strictly to the requirements laid down in the treaty, rather than to what India might consider an 'ideal' or 'best practices' approach," Pakistan's foreign office said Monday's ruling, Pakistan reiterated its commitment to implementing IWT and urged India to resume functioning of the same. India maintains IWT will remain in abeyance until Pakistan takes action against cross-border terrorism. Also Read | After Asim Munir's nuclear rant, Bilawal Bhutto threatens Pakistan could 'take back six rivers' from India Why are Pak leaders threatening India?Possibly, Pakistan has realised India's suspension of the IWT is not going to be reverted, which poses dire medium- and long-term challenges to the country. Under normal IWT operations, India shared vital water-flow data and alerted Pakistan to seasonal variations and flood risks. Now, India has halted such data sharing, severely impairing Pakistan's ability to anticipate floods or droughts. India no longer needs to follow design and operational restrictions for projects on the western rivers—Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab—meaning it can proceed unilaterally with dam construction and modifications. This includes reservoir flushing to clear sediment at projects like Kishanganga, potentially affecting downstream short-term capability is limited due to India's existing infrastructure, long-term construction of dams and reservoirs could significantly alter water availability for Pakistan in dry relies on Indus waters for 80–90% of its irrigated agriculture, which supports roughly 25% of its GDP and up to 37–45% of employment depending on the report. Also Read | 'We'll show them what's next': After Indus dam, Pak Army Chief Asim Munir now fixes target on RIL Jamnagar refinery In the long term, India could ramp up dams, storage, and diversion projects along the western rivers, consolidating significant upstream control. Pakistan, with limited storage capacity, may suffer perennial water shortages, especially in non-monsoon seasons. Domestic instability in Pakistan could intensify—impacting food security, rural livelihoods, trade competitiveness, and energy possible Pakistan has sensed India's long-term plans to restrict water flow and is alarmed at the Indian environment ministry panel has given 'in-principle' approval for diversion of over 847 hectares of reserved forest and 'jungle-jhari' land for construction of the ambitious 1,856-MW Sawalkot hydroelectric project in Ramban district of Jammu & Kashmir, TOI reported last month. Certain key green provisions were set aside for the purpose, keeping in view national interests. Though the final approval will be subject to grant of environment clearance for the project by the UT govt, the move shows the intent to swiftly take up the dam's construction for leveraging Chenab river's potential following suspension of the IWT. The Sawalkot hydroelectric project (HEP) is a major hydropower initiative, intended to harness the potential of the Chenab — one of the western rivers along with Indus and Jhelum whose waters currently flow unchecked to Pakistan despite India's right to use it for non-consumptive purposes, including hydro-power is also set to revive the long-stalled Tulbul Navigation Project in Jammu & Kashmir, PTI has reported recently, based on information from sources. A detailed project report for Tulbul is being prepared and is expected to take about a year to complete. This move, which comes right after the IWT suspension, underscores a significant policy shift: leveraging water resources as a means of strategic assertion. The work was restarted in 2010, with the then irrigation minister of J&K, Taj Mohideen, stating that Article 9 of IWT permitted such projects meant for non-consumptive use. In 2012, unidentified terrorists lobbed a grenade towards a bund raised by the workers for the project. Under the IWT, India was allocated the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej), while the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) were allocated to Pakistan, with limited rights for India. India is allowed to use water from the western rivers for non-consumptive purposes like navigation, power generation and limited storage. The Tulbul Project aligns with these permissible uses. With the IWT in abeyance, there can't be any challenge to this project. After the Uri Terror Attack in 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said "blood and water cannot flow together" during a high-level review meeting of the IWT. This was a clear signal that India might review or alter its commitment to the IWT in response to Pakistan's failure to curb cross-border terrorism. Nearly a decade later, Modi's indication has become a reality. India's revival of plans to build long-term projects on several rivers suggests it is not going to revert its decision. It also drives home the message in Pakistan that the suspension of the IWT was not a merely tactical move but a long-term strategic shift. Also, India's rejection of international court jurisdiction over IWT underlines this shift. That's what is bothering Pakistan's top leaders.
