Progressing India

Alongside participating in the ongoing T20 Cricket World Cup in UAE, India has done a lot of remarkable things in the last few days. And these achievements all comes from different sectors like defence, diplomatic relations and much more. Let’s look into these achievements one by one as most of them would have gone unnoticed by common people.

First of all the biggest news from India’s point of view is that WHO has finally approved the long awaited Covaxin made by Bharat Biotech for emergency use listing. This will lead foreign governments to accept Covaxin. Now, Indian citizens inoculated with this vaccine will not face any uncertainty around the world.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met U.S. President Biden and many other world leaders like U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the recently occurred G20 summit in Rome. The talks included various range of issues of global and mutual interests. PM Modi was accompanied by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval during his meet with his French President and Italian counterpart respectively.

PM Modi also met Pope Francis in Vatican City and invited him to India next year, and according to Ministry of External Affairs, Pope Francis is looking forward to it. With all these things, it was perfectly timed by India to pitch for its membership in NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group) as nuclear energy is green energy and it would help to cut down carbon emission. Prime Minister Narendra Modi while attending COP26 summit in Glasgow, pledged that India will achieve net zero carbon emissions by the year 2070, considering it as practical long term target and said India is well on track to achieve this target. These statements by PM Modi was well received and appreciated by world leaders.

There were developments in defence sector also. Like to further enhance bilateral relations, India and Israel have agreed to form a task force that will build 10 year cooperation plan and identify new areas in defence aid between both the countries. This was agreed on October 27 in Tel Aviv, at the 15th India Israel Joint Working Group (JWG) meeting. Other than that, Indian Navy has got a new indigenous Project 15B Class Destroyer Ship named INS Visakhapatnam on October 28. With overall length of 164m it is armed with Barak-8 surface to air missiles as well as supersonic surface to surface Brahmos missiles. It is also equipped with anti-submarine weapons and sensors for underwater warfare capability. Saying that, it is worth mentioning that Indian Navy also conducted second sea trials for its first indigenous aircraft carrier (IAC) Vikrant. Built at the cost of ₹23,000 crores the warship can operate MH-60R multi-role helicopters, Kamov-31 helicopters, and MiG-29K fighter jets.

Recently in USA, three Republican Senators introduced an amendment in the National Defence Authorization Act to make it harder for U.S. government to impose sanctions on the members of QUAD for buying Russian arms. This step comes at time when India is expected to get its S-400 missile defence system delivery from Russia possibly this or next month and there is threat to attract sanctions under U.S. domestic law named Countering Americas Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) of 2017. It presents a powerful image of India as USA too would not like to cause harm to bilateral relations between the countries.

With all these things happening in such a short period of time, we are witnessing how quickly geopolitics changes on day to day basis. With no country to completely trust on, India is building its bilateral ties with more and more countries like Italy, Spain etc. in Europe. It’s the need of the hour and we can say that India is doing pretty good at it right now and is on road to become a superpower in the upcoming decades.