INVESTMENT AND TRADE AT CENTRE OF MODIPUTIN TALKS AT BRICS
XIAMEN: Trade and investment figured prominently in PM Narendra Modi’s bilateral meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Brazil’s President Michael Temer on the sidelines of BRICS summit here on Monday.
Modi and Putin touched on various aspects of bilateral ties, Indian diplomats said, adding trade and investment was among the issues the leaders discussed. They also discussed cooperation in oil and natural gas. “Furthering a special & privileged strategic partnership,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, tagging photos of Modi and Putin shaking hands and sitting for talks.
The meeting between Modi and Putin came three months after they met in St Petersburg in June for the annual India-Russia summit, and at the SCO meeting in Astana the same month where India was made a permanent member of the organisation.
At the St Petersburg summit, the two sides signed an agreement for building Units 5 and 6 of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu, and decided to give new direction to their defence cooperation.
While the focus is on Modi’s meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping on Tuesday, his meeting with Putin assumes significance not only in the context of BRICS but also to keep bilateral ties on track. Russia’s support would have been crucial for India to have prevailed on China to include the names of specific terror groups in the Xiamen statement released earlier on Monday.
MODI HAILS GST
Modi on Monday made a pitch for attracting foreign investment into India at the BRICS Summit, emphasising the Goods and Services Tax will help businesses .
Addressing the BRICS Business Council, Modi pitched the introduction of the GST as “India’s biggest economic reform”, indicating that its launch will smoothen business processes. NEWDELHI: North Korea’s claim of testing a hydrogen bomb have raised concerns among Indian security experts of a possible reverse flow of the advanced technology to a country that Pyongyang has for long secretly cooperated with on nuclear and missile know-how – Pakistan.
The US Geological Survey registered a 6.3-magnitude quake at North Korea’s Punggye-ri test site on Sunday, and Western experts believe this indicated Kim Jong-un’s regime had detonated a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 100 kilotons. By contrast, the bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of about 15 kilotons.
Hydrogen or thermonuclear bombs use fusion, or the merging of atoms, to unleash huge amounts of destructive energy, unlike atomic bombs that use fission. More significantly, this is a technology Pakistan is not believed to have mastered as yet.
Collaboration between Pakistan and North Korea on nuclear technology dates back to the 1980s. In his 2008 book Goodbye Shahzadi, journalist Shyam Bhatia quoted late Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto as saying that she had smuggled in uranium enrichment know-how during a state visit to North Korea in 1993.
This data was reportedly used to facilitate a missile deal, whereby North Korea supplied Pakistan with long-range missile technology in violation of nonproliferation regimes. It is widely believed Pakistan’s Ghauri missiles are based on North Korea’s Nodong missiles.
“Based on the earlier patterns of cooperation, there is an immediate need to study whether there could be a reverse flow of the technology from North Korea to Pakistan,” said Commodore (retired) C Uday Bhaskar, director of the Society for Policy Studies, a Delhi-based think tank.
Air vice marshal (retired) Kapil Kak, a former deputy director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, said there was a long history of clandestine cooperation between Islamabad and Pyongyang. “If North Korea’s nuclear technology has advanced to this extent and if it is shared with Pakistan, it will be a major crisis,” he said.
Kak said the policy of escalation adopted by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un also represented a major concern for India. “He is escalating to the hilt and no one will take chances with him,” he added.
Experts believe these developments will have a say on how India fashions its security policies vis-à-vis China, which continues to be the biggest backer of the North Korean regime.
Experts said India will also have to focus on China’s larger strategic objectives behind enabling the WMD programmes of countries such as North Korea and Pakistan. “We have to keep a close eye on what the Chinese hope to achieve,” Bhaskar said.