India bids to buy ‘drones’ from US

Lanka ‘food’ threatened

NEW DELHI/WASHINGTON, June 22, (Agencies): India is pushing for US approval of its request to buy a naval variant of the Predator drone, officials said, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi tries to revitalise relations with Washington when he meets President Donald Trump for the first time.

Securing agreement on the purchase of 22 unarmed drones is seen in New Delhi as a key test of defence ties that flourished under former President Barack Obama but have drifted under Trump, who has courted Asian rival China as he seeks Beijing’s help to contain North Korea’s nuclear programme.

Modi’s two-day visit to Washington begins on Sunday. Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in April and has also had face-time with the leaders of nations including Japan, Britain and Vietnam since taking office in January, prompting anxiety in New Delhi that India is no longer a priority in Washington.

If the Indian navy gets the unarmed surveillance drones it wants to keep watch over the Indian Ocean it would be the first such purchase by a country that is not a member of the NATO alliance.

“We are trying to move it to the top of the agenda as a deliverable, this is something that can happen before all the other items,” said one official tracking the progress of the drone discussions in the run-up to the visit.

India, a big buyer of US arms recently named by Washington as a major defence ally, wants to protect its 7,500 kms (4,700 mile) coastline as Beijing expands its maritime trade routes and Chinese submarines increasingly lurk in regional waters.

But sources tracking the discussions say the US State Department has been concerned about the potential destabilising impact of introducing high-tech drones into South Asia, where tensions are simmering between India and Pakistan, particularly over Kashmir, which is divided between them.

Modi

Tibetan refugees get passports:

Event organiser Lobsang Wangyal has to travel overseas often, but as a Tibetan refugee born in India, he did not have a passport and sometimes had to wait days to get the mandatory permits every time he went abroad.

So Wangyal, whose parents fled Tibet as teenagers, went to court to demand his right to an Indian passport.

In response to his petition, the Delhi High Court said authorities must abide by an earlier ruling that all Tibetans born in India between January 1950 and July 1987 are Indian citizens by birth, and can be issued passports.

The order came into effect in March, and Wangyal got his Indian passport shortly thereafter, using it to go to Thailand.

For the first time, he was spared the additional scrutiny that his documents always got from immigration officials.

“I feel like a real person now, having obtained a passport,” said Wangyal, 47, who was born in a Tibetan settlement in eastern Odisha state and now lives in the hill town Dharamsala.

“Tibetans are seen as refugees and as stateless in India. Being seen that way after having been born and lived our whole lives in India is unfair and impractical,” he said.

Tibetans have been seeking asylum in India since the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese occupation.

The Tibetan spiritual leader has since lived mostly in Dharamsala in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, where his supporters run a small government in exile and advocate for autonomy for Tibet by peaceful means.

More than 100,000 Tibetans live in 39 formal settlements and dozens of informal communities across India. They generally arrive via Nepal, after a perilous trek across the Himalayas.

The Indian government has funded schools to provide free education for Tibetans, and reserved seats in medical and engineering colleges. Those eligible can get voter identification cards.

Former Indian judge arrested:

A former judge who led police on a 40-day manhunt across India has been arrested and jailed on contempt charges after a lengthy battle with the courts, an official said Wednesday.

C.S Karnan had been on the lam since the Supreme Court in May found him guilty of contempt, the first case of its kind against a sitting judge in India’s history.

The court had ordered police in West Bengal state — where the 62-year-old had been a high court judge — to detain Karnan on grounds of disrespecting the judiciary but he fled and sparked a nationwide manhunt.

Authorities finally caught up with him on Tuesday evening, arresting Karnan at a resort in Tamil Nadu state more than 2,000 kilometres away, said Anuj Sharma from West Bengal police.

“He was taken by an Air India flight to Kolkata on Wednesday afternoon. He was sent to the city’s presidency jail after his health was examined,” Sharma, a police director-general, told AFP.

Lanka food security threatened:

A severe drought followed by floods has slashed agricultural production in Sri Lanka, leaving some 900,000 people facing food insecurity, the United Nations said, warning that without help the situation might further deteriorate.

Production of rice, the country’s staple food, is forecast to drop almost 40 percent to 2.7 million tonnes in 2017, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) said in a report on Thursday.

Other crops including pulses, chillies and onion are also expected to take a blow, it said.

Sri Lanka was hit by the worst drought in four decades last year, with poor rains continuing into 2017, causing many farmers to lose their crops and income, the agencies said.

In May, the situation was exacerbated by the worst torrential rains in 14 years, which triggered floods and landslides in the country’s southwest, killing some 200 people and forcing many from their homes.

But in drought-affected areas in the north, rains were not sufficient to replenish reservoirs, and the second 2017 rice paddy harvest is expected to be at least 24 percent lower than last year’s, said FAO official Cristina Coslet.

“The level of water in irrigation reservoirs is still well below the average,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.