India Coffee House

[Nilgiri]

I am a little stunned that the EU should continue to define India as an open society.

Power wielders give out labels as required for the purposes of furthering the objectives of power.

 

[Nilgiri]

Modi’s European Tour Kicks Off in Germany

Although the West has bristled at his approach to Ukraine, India’s leader is far from isolated.

foreignpolicy.com

Although the West has bristled at his approach to Ukraine, India’s leader is far from isolated.​

By Colm Quinn, the newsletter writer at Foreign Policy.


Modi Meets Scholz in Berlin
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi embarks Monday on a three-country tour of Europe, beginning with Germany, as the West continues its charm offensive amid India’s neutral position on Ukraine.

For German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, it will be his second meeting with a leader of an Asian democracy in the space of a few days, following his trip to Japan last week to meet Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Modi’s travels take him to Denmark on Tuesday, where he is due to participate in the India-Nordic Summit, also including the leaders of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.


He heads to France on Wednesday, where he’ll meet with newly reelected French President Emmanuel Macron and mark 75 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Although it’s his first foreign trip this year, Modi hasn’t lacked for international attention lately. There has been a steady flow of foreign dignitaries in India over the past few months, with both EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson meeting Modi over the past two weeks.

In quieter times, those visits would still make strategic sense: Western leaders have long courted India for its potential economic benefits. Nowadays, those trips amount to a loosely coordinated persuasion campaign, as India’s neutral position on Russia’s war in Ukraine has awakened the West to the reality that not all powers see the world the same way Washington and Brussels do.

As FP columnist C. Raja Mohan wrote in March, the war has also put India in an enviable position: making the West desperate to supply the country with weapons, getting discounted oil and other commodities from Russia, and even receiving diplomatic overtures from China.

Scholz is expected to do his part by making India an invitee to the next G-7 summit, which will take place in the Bavarian Alps in June. He will also have an eye on unwinding India’s tight defense relationship with Russia by pushing European defense firms to fill the gap, Bloomberg reports.

The meeting could mean good news for Indian workers, too, with discussions expected to include relaxing immigration rules to address labor shortages in the tech sector, something Modi and Johnson also spoke about last week.

And while India has been criticized for increasing its oil imports from Russia, it won’t be lost on Modi that the leader of the second-largest importer of Russian oil in the world will be sitting across from him in Berlin. That may change soon, after one of Scholz’s key advisors suggested a Russian oil embargo could be put in place in a “few months,” putting the country on the side of Poland and the Baltic states in the European Union-wide debate.

Modi’s European tour kicks off a busy month of travel for the Indian leader. On May 24, Modi is expected at the next meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, in Tokyo. The meeting will be the second time in two months that U.S. President Joe Biden and Modi will interact following a virtual summit between the two leaders in April.

 

[Nilgiri]

We talked about it before, how a fundamental restructuring of the human both biologically and psychologically would be required to overcome the tribalism and predisposition to violence

During a long drive recently, I listened to this podcast and found it quite contextual to our discussion....well worth a listen/watch when you (and any others interested in the subject) have some time for it:

 

[HTurk]

India is still considered a very important partner in Europe, though, many politicians, experts and newspapers don't see New Delhi as equally democratic. The mutually shared foundation of democratic values and legitimacy is gone - at least with the current administration in New Delhi. The Europeans have adopted a very pragmatic view of India.

 

[Joe Shearer]

During a long drive recently, I listened to this podcast and found it quite contextual to our discussion....well worth a listen/watch when you (and any others interested in the subject) have some time for it:

Haven't watched the video yet. Who won?

 

[Nilgiri]

India is still considered a very important partner in Europe, though, many politicians, experts and newspapers don't see New Delhi as equally democratic. The mutually shared foundation of democratic values and legitimacy is gone - at least with the current administration in New Delhi. The Europeans have adopted a very pragmatic view of India.

It is better that way. As pragmatic as possible.

When Europe and the US (by way of its "many politicians, experts and newspapers") fully introspect and come clean about such things as:

- the holocaust (something that will not happen in India though it is far poorer + less developed even today)
-operation paperclip (and its consequences from its root hypocrisy allowed to stand unchallenged/unrectified to this day)
- cold war geopolitical extreme hypocrisy and consequences impacted on the victims of this
- their role in colonialism predating a lot of this.....

relative to their relative developed asserted enlightenment and economic standing at these times....and how that came about...

....all of it impacting on how countries like India had and have the basic wherewithal to develop and strengthen sociopolitically and economically earlier and today...

When they do that (because they have only gone into all of that in a fraction of a percentage needed)...they can then be taken somewhat commensurately seriously on their credibility to go past "pragmatic".

Given there is massive economic exchange and reliance built on by Europe with a country that has developed a large network of concentration camps (that can be seen from space) to hold what is estimated to be 1 million people of an ethnic minority.

Something unparalleled in the current affairs of the world.

Till then India's problems are commented and addressed on far more credibly by Indians.

 

[Nilgiri]

Otherwise its a matter of a fat ungainly goose resting pretty on how it got fat and ungainly.....

.........trumpeting its goosey goosey gander where shall i wander.... to feel good.

 

[Nilgiri]

Haven't watched the video yet. Who won?

Heh the title kind of implies it as a contest doesn't it?

It was more of just a contextual comparison (how the missing link era during the australopithecene branch took on several different changes compared to our closest ongoing primate branches......especially in our branch eventually producing homo erectus et al. ).

i.e no winner...just a side by side analysis.

Very interesting stuff, you will enjoy it I think.

I found the interaction somewhere in the 2nd half about pro-active vs reactive anger (and the increase of the former compared to the latter by greater human proclivity for early male collectivisation etc) especially interesting to consider.

I will have to get these 3 books the guest has written to have a thorough read later.

 

[RogerRanger]

For Britain India is the most important country in Asia.

 

[Nilgiri]

For Britain India is the most important country in Asia.

UK is also arguably also the most important country in Europe for India.

 

[Gessler]

This Europe tour has 2 main points:

> There is evidence of diplomatic rapprochement with Germany now that Merkel is gone. Relations with Schmidt & Kohl were warm, strategic even. Things went cold since Merkel came to power (~2005) for reasons that aren't completely clear to me (Chinese pressure?). From what I've gathered from this visit, at the very least, relations seem to have been "normalized". So there's good stuff to look forward to - like the $10bn investments in green energy projects.

> Building on existing strategic partnership with France. Modi has just landed in Paris so remains to be seen if any major announcements are made - but without doubt this is the most important leg of the trip.

The rest of the trip is filler and diplomatic "nice to have" stuff like onboarding Denmark as a source of investment for green/hydrogen manufacturing, the summit with Nordic PMs etc.

It is better that way. As pragmatic as possible.

When Europe and the US (by way of its "many politicians, experts and newspapers") fully introspect and come clean about such things as:

- the holocaust (something that will not happen in India though it is far poorer + less developed even today)
-operation paperclip (and its consequences from its root hypocrisy allowed to stand unchallenged/unrectified to this day)
- cold war geopolitical extreme hypocrisy and consequences impacted on the victims of this
- their role in colonialism predating a lot of this.....

relative to their relative developed asserted enlightenment and economic standing at these times....and how that came about...

....all of it impacting on how countries like India had and have the basic wherewithal to develop and strengthen sociopolitically and economically earlier and today...

When they do that (because they have only gone into all of that in a fraction of a percentage needed)...they can then be taken somewhat commensurately seriously on their credibility to go past "pragmatic".

Given there is massive economic exchange and reliance built on by Europe with a country that has developed a large network of concentration camps (that can be seen from space) to hold what is estimated to be 1 million people of an ethnic minority.

Something unparalleled in the current affairs of the world.

Till then India's problems are commented and addressed on far more credibly by Indians.

Well put.

It's naivete to imagine that anybody in the West would wantonly put a country that isn't completely subservient to Western interests (like Japan, SK) at the same 'democratic' level as them. Because if you do, you forfeit the possible usage of those tools against said country if and when that country were to act against your interests.

UK is also arguably also the most important country in Europe for India.

From a civilian, economic & cultural perspective, undoubtedly.

Europe map according to the largest foreign nationality residing within:

However, from a military or strategic point of view, the most important country simply has to be France. Because from a security perspective (keeping the Indo-Pacific region in mind) the UK can always lean on the US/other Anglophone states, whereas France lacks large countries/former colonies in the region which implicitly share its world-view - this makes them more susceptible to work with a country like India in several areas where cooperation would otherwise be strictly limited to the most trusted of allies i.e. nuclear submarines.

 

[RogerRanger]

UK is also arguably also the most important country in Europe for India.

Yeah I would say Russia in number I and then Britain.

 

[RogerRanger]

This Europe tour has 2 main points:

> There is evidence of diplomatic rapprochement with Germany now that Merkel is gone. Relations with Schmidt & Kohl were warm, strategic even. Things went cold since Merkel came to power (~2005) for reasons that aren't completely clear to me (Chinese pressure?). From what I've gathered from this visit, at the very least, relations seem to have been "normalized". So there's good stuff to look forward to - like the $10bn investments in green energy projects.

> Building on existing strategic partnership with France. Modi has just landed in Paris so remains to be seen if any major announcements are made - but without doubt this is the most important leg of the trip.

The rest of the trip is filler and diplomatic "nice to have" stuff like onboarding Denmark as a source of investment for green/hydrogen manufacturing, the summit with Nordic PMs etc.



Well put.

It's naivete to imagine that anybody in the West would wantonly put a country that isn't completely subservient to Western interests (like Japan, SK) at the same 'democratic' level as them. Because if you do, you forfeit the possible usage of those tools against said country if and when that country were to act against your interests.



From a civilian, economic & cultural perspective, undoubtedly.

Europe map according to the largest foreign nationality residing within:

However, from a military or strategic point of view, the most important country simply has to be France. Because from a security perspective (keeping the Indo-Pacific region in mind) the UK can always lean on the US/other Anglophone states, whereas France lacks large countries/former colonies in the region which implicitly share its world-view - this makes them more susceptible to work with a country like India in several areas where cooperation would otherwise be strictly limited to the most trusted of allies i.e. nuclear submarines.

Some good points raised here. I have a different perspective on UK. I think the UK would love all those arms exports to India and Technology transfers, but we can't do any of that because unlike the French we control none of our naval or air assets, the Americans do, or we are in partnerships with other European countries. I would like to see Britain export the Astute class and QE class, but we can't do it because the Americans don't want us to.

France has more room for exporting to India for this reason. France also has interests in the Gulf, it has nuclear powered carrier and submarines, independent of any other's which India is looking for it. Its the right strategic partnership for them, along with Russia. Britain once again letting all the advantages it had compared to other European countries slip away, in South America, Africa and South Asia. We should be the world's third biggest arms and technology exporter, which would supplement our own defence spending. We make better ships, submarines, army vehicles than the French, but they are much better are exporting because they aren't tied to the Americans. This is a massive weakness for Britain and has been since WW1.

 

[Nilgiri]

Yeah I would say Russia in number I and then Britain.

Russia is lower IMO....and lower than France and potentially other big/impactful EU countries like Germany, Holland and Italy increasingly.

Total (goods) trade with UK in 2021 for India was 17 billion USD worth.

In Russian case it was 12 billion USD (on a population more than twice that of the UK).

Once you include services trade, total financial flow, investment etc etc.... it puts UK even further ahead.

Not to mention the other strong bonds that are entrenched and growing/evolving.....cultural, linguistic etc.

Lot of Indians for example learn English and some portion of them (with means and social mobility) learn it quite fluently eventually.

Hardly any learn Russian or think of Russia as some place with lot of (notable) Indians and bonds etc.

It counts for a lot in the end past the hard numbers.

Russia relationship is taking on a far more transactional only aspect in comparison....i.e little to talk of past goods trade.

There is no real broad strategic intersection anymore like there may have once been (in latter half of cold war and first couple decades of era after it).... as they have thrown in their lot with the PRC (in ways that will be long term detrimental to us) for a good chunk of years now.

 

[Nilgiri]

However, from a military or strategic point of view, the most important country simply has to be France. Because from a security perspective (keeping the Indo-Pacific region in mind) the UK can always lean on the US/other Anglophone states, whereas France lacks large countries/former colonies in the region which implicitly share its world-view - this makes them more susceptible to work with a country like India in several areas where cooperation would otherwise be strictly limited to the most trusted of allies i.e. nuclear submarines.

Yes I put France as no. 2 (given far larger impact of English language compared to French etc within India and all that carries forward) ....but there is a good case for it to be no. 1 as well.

Depends how you prioritise the military and strategic technology domain in the overall domain.

France is increasingly important + reliable strategic partner....and no surprise that Modi is including it in this trio of countries (Germany, Denmark, France) to visit this time.

Big credit to (former president) Jaques Chirac in really expanding this substantially (against a lot of larger western resistance to France doing so). He was a good friend of India and was pretty solid Indophile overall.

 

[Nilgiri]

Modi, Macron put Ukraine rift aside to take Indo-French ties to next level

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi becomes the first world leader to have a face-to-face meeting with his frequently cited “friend” Emmanuel Macron following the French president’s re-election victory.…

www.france24.com

 

[Blackbeardsgoldfish]

It is progress definitely, as we overall unlock more truth and gain more experience as a (so called intelligent) species. There will be fits and starts....and maybe some reversals inevitably I feel....but I am quite optimistic overall.

Ian Morris book was a very good read.

The challenges are immense and daunting as always this century, but if anything we are an extremely adaptable species....even to the problems we self-inflict and often realise only later.

Our dawn and our spring is over....we have woken up in sufficient capacity (to truth, enlightenment and what the nature of infinity means).

I personally think our Summer will be quite a long one....we have a long way to go.....there will be storms during summer too.

It will be interesting to know (if possible) how humanity looks back at thse 500 odd years or so..... a millennia or more from now.

In the last century, the deadliest problems were usually based on an ideological basis and a political decision to go to war. There was little in the way of an acute need to survive as a nation or as a people and fighting over the most fundamental requirements that a human needs to live, outside the various genocides perpetrated, even though those were also usually politically motivated.

But this century, with the way things are going, our wars will quite likely be based around exactly these fundamental needs. I'm going to coin a term here to refer to those wars, namely "WATER", or "Wars About The Essential Resource", and you can guess what resource that is.

Indian members on the forum can probably write a book about this particular issue, but it's just the most pressing problem that needs to be addressed. What about energy needs and carbon emissions? Because fossil fuels aren't going to go away for decades, and this constant yapping from the west about clean and green energy won't change anything, increases the use of oil and coal if anything.

Urban population across Africa is expected to double until 2050, and how do you supply 1.2 billion people living in cities with energy and water? You're going to need coal, oil and gas to get it done, there's no way around that. Add to that the effects of climate change and the degradation of available farmland, this probably will make it rise even faster, and the political instability and extremism resulting from that on top of it all.

It happens. People are often nostalgic or have some sense of stockholm syndrome persisting....without even realising it.

There is a heavy anti US sentiment in (some) parts/sections of Europe overall that I have perceived spread all around in some propensity....and concentrated some times too.

The cold war was not always sunshine and roses for (long term inbuilt) perception of the US....much like the USSR as well.

There was a foreboding psyche that set an overhang for lot of people long term....Armageddon being somewhat artificially prevented yet never too far away....borrowed time etc....and out of even their collective national hands. Do you trust so few people in the end, with so much destructive power....given the world wars just before.

Even here on this side of the pond, it has never really totally been grappled with. Rather the passage of time slowly erodes at it effect. Then we see the renewed and resurfacing of the root psyche for war again. It paints a very uncomfortable spectre for so many....why do we keep circling to the same thing after we know it solves nothing?

Anti-Americanism is strong throughout europe, west and east, don't have any illusions about that, it's a strong and potent force and has been for the entire cold war and even before that.

With East Germany one has to keep in mind that the reintegration of the society, one raised to be obedient and quiet, into the far more extroverted and open west hasn't gone well. Large swaths of East Germany are disappointed with the way of life that liberalisation brought and large swaths of West Germany say that the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain should never have come down. Political differences and the general attitude to life, values and beliefs is fundamentally different, and oftentimes irreconcilable, but that's what 45 years of SED and Stasi will do to a society, I guess...

Makes me think about the two Koreas joining back together... a sociologist's field day.

During a long drive recently, I listened to this podcast and found it quite contextual to our discussion....well worth a listen/watch when you (and any others interested in the subject) have some time for it:

Indeed a good podcast well worth a listen, though I do feel like the interview was dumbed down too much oftentimes, though that's just my view.
Ended up looking through some reviews for his books, and this amazon review caught my eye(I cut a few things to meet character limit):

An interesting read, but a rather simplistic theory of human violence and morality
Reviewed in Germany on 9 March 2019
Verified Purchase
This is a very interesting book, and even if you do not agree with the author on some aspects of his argument, reading the book is quite thought-provoking.

As the title states: The Goodness Paradox is that Homo sapiens is both more and less violent.
The key fact about humans is that within our social communities we have a rather low propensity to fight: compared to most wild (social) mammals we are very tolerant.

Wrangham's main line of argument goes like this:
Homo sapiens' body and behavior show many traits of domestication (the author describes in great detail the process of domestication on the basis of the well-known text-book example of Belyaev's silver foxes); but given that no one else was there to domesticate us, humans must be a case of self-domestication.
How did this happen?
...

That is one of the weak points of Wrangham's analysis: that he does not show that murder of aggressive males has been common enough to be a strong selective force that has been able to cause domestication of the whole species. He just makes the claim, but does not offer any empirical evidence or mathematical model to support his theory (unlike for example Bowles and Gintis in their excellent book "A cooperative species", a book full of evidence and modelling).

Another weak point of his theory is the place of cooperation in his picture. Wrangham acknowledges the importance of cooperation as an important ability, but claims that
cooperation depends on a very low propensity for reactive aggression.
I do not think that this is true. Wolves or hyenas show a high level of (reactive) aggression, but they are also highly cooperative (when they hunt). But wolves or hyenas are not domesticated.

Another inconsistency is that Wrangham treats cooperation as a prerequisite for execution of male bullies because the weaker members of the group have to plot and coordinate their forces to kill such an aggressive man. He writes: "Shunning would be insufficient to affect an individual who is able to intimidate or defeat all others in a fight. Subordinates’ resentment could be translated to effective resistance only by coalitionary force. Cooperation among the weaker individuals is needed."
...

To sum up: Homo sapiens is a strange species with unique features, and one of them is the stark contrast of peaceful behavior within group and often violent behavior against out-groups or traitors or deviants or bullies within the own in-group. But Wrangham's execution theory gives only one aspect of the big picture, it describes just one mechanism of social control, but the author does not convince me that execution of aggressive males has been the most important driving force in the evolution of Homo sapiens' social life.

 

[Nilgiri]

In the last century, the deadliest problems were usually based on an ideological basis and a political decision to go to war. There was little in the way of an acute need to survive as a nation or as a people and fighting over the most fundamental requirements that a human needs to live, outside the various genocides perpetrated, even though those were also usually politically motivated.

But this century, with the way things are going, our wars will quite likely be based around exactly these fundamental needs. I'm going to coin a term here to refer to those wars, namely "WATER", or "Wars About The Essential Resource", and you can guess what resource that is.

Indian members on the forum can probably write a book about this particular issue, but it's just the most pressing problem that needs to be addressed. What about energy needs and carbon emissions? Because fossil fuels aren't going to go away for decades, and this constant yapping from the west about clean and green energy won't change anything, increases the use of oil and coal if anything.

Urban population across Africa is expected to double until 2050, and how do you supply 1.2 billion people living in cities with energy and water? You're going to need coal, oil and gas to get it done, there's no way around that. Add to that the effects of climate change and the degradation of available farmland, this probably will make it rise even faster, and the political instability and extremism resulting from that on top of it all.

Yes the situation can look quite dire if you look at this from this angle.

But I believe the ongoing energy revolution will help mitigate and even solve it potentially.

Making energy easily and cheaply available at both the dense and spread tiers......will solve a lot of the other resource issues. Just look at what the price of a solar cell has dropped like during the last decade for example. There is much more that needs to follow up past it of course, but its a welcome start.

Malthusian overloads had been predicted before, especially with food (in developing world) in first half of cold war but they were overcome by the green revolution in that case as well.

Clean Energy ---> clean water will be a big one going forward, but I think it can be done.

I'll get to rest of your post a bit later.

 

[Nilgiri]

What is the origin of this forum , i mean why was started amd when was this started ?
Iam just curious

@Nilgiri can best answer that question.

It was started in august 2020.

There was unfair abuse on lot of members in earlier forum lot of us were at (and a major fell swoop of expelling/suppression etc while no action taken on masses of trolls and actual rule violators)......

......so we decided to set up a much more professional oriented space with consistent basis of core rules and principles. No favouritism, no exceptions, no looking the other way.

Quality > Quantity etc.

 

[Indian gir lion]

Thats why this forum is slow