Author: Staff Reporter

The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed on the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the United Nations Headquarters. 

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will inaugurate a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations on December 14, marking the arrival of the Mahatma at UN’s headquarters during India’s presidency of the powerful 15-nation Security Council for the month of December.

India, on December 1, assumed the monthly rotating presidency of the Security Council, the second after August 2021 that India is presiding over the Council during its two-year tenure as an elected UNSC member.

The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed in the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the UNHQ.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will inaugurate a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations on December 14, marking the arrival of the Mahatma at UN’s headquarters during India’s presidency of the powerful 15-nation Security Council for the month of December.

India, on December 1, assumed the monthly rotating presidency of the Security Council, the second after August 2021 that India is presiding over the Council during its two-year tenure as an elected UNSC member.

The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed in the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the UNHQ.

The simple ceremony will take place in the presence of UNSC members, including the five incoming new Council members — Ecuador, Japan, Malta, Mozambique and Switzerland.

The bust, made by renowned Indian sculptor Padma Shree awardee Ram Sutar, who has also designed the ‘Statue of Unity’, will be a gift from India and will be installed in the UN headquarters, which proudly displays gifts and artefacts from around the world.

Addressing reporters on the Indian presidency and the monthly program of work, Ms. Kamboj said that apart from two signature events chaired by Mr. Jaishankar in the Council on December 14 and 15 on reformed multilateralism and counter-terrorism, there will also be two side events coinciding with India’s presidency. “The first will mark the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations,” Ms. Kamboj said.

The five new members, whose two-year tenure at the Council will begin on January 1, 2023, will replace India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway and join the five permanent members China, France, Russia, the U. K., and the U.S. as well as non-permanent members Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates at the Security Council’s signature horseshoe table.

Notable works of art at the UNHQ include a section of the Berlin wall donated by Germany, the Soviet sculpture ‘Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares’, a life-size bronze statue of Nelson Mandela gifted by South Africa, and the ‘Guernica’ tapestry after the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

The only other gift from India on display at the UN Headquarters is an 11th-century black-stone statue of ‘Surya’, the Sun God, donated on July 26, 1982. The statue, dating from the late Pala period and which is currently displayed in the Conference Building, was presented as a gift by then Prime Minister late Indira Gandhi to the United Nations.

Then Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar accepted the sculpture on behalf of the United Nations. Ambassador Kamboj had told PTI in an exclusive interview that Gandhi’s legacy of non-violence and peace is enduring and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement that “this is not an era of war” speaks to that very legacy and has been widely accepted by the world.

The second side event will see the launch of a ‘Group of Friends for accountability of crimes against UN peacekeepers’, Ms. Kamboj said adding that a “more robust peacekeeping has been one of our priorities in the Security Council.”

She said that following up on Resolution 2589, which had focused on the safety and security of peacekeepers, the Group of Friends will bring the spotlight on an issue that is “fundamental, if I may say existential, to the task of peacekeepers.” As 2023 ushers in the ‘year of Millets’, India will also promote and highlight millets during the month.

Addressing reporters on the Indian presidency and the monthly program of work, Ms. Kamboj said that apart from two signature events chaired by Mr. Jaishankar in the Council on December 14 and 15 on reformed multilateralism and counter-terrorism, there will also be two side events coinciding with India’s presidency. “The first will mark the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations,” Ms. Kamboj said. “We will also be promoting millets”, which are “very healthy and environment-friendly”, Ms. Kamboj said. 

Data shows Leicester and Birmingham have become UK’s first ‘minority majority’ cities in new age of ‘super-diversity’

England and Wales are now minority Christian countries, according to the 2021 census, which also shows that Leicester and Birmingham have become the first UK cities to have “minority majorities”.

The census revealed a 5.5 million (17%) fall in the number of people who describe themselves as Christian and a 1.2 million (43%) rise in the number of people who say they follow Islam, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million. In percentage-point terms, the number of Christians has dropped by 13.1, and the number of Muslims has risen by 1.7.

It is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian.

Meanwhile, 37.2% of people – 22.2 million – declared they had “no religion”, the second most common response after Christian. It means that over the past 20 years the proportion of people reporting no religion has soared from 14.8% – a rise of more than 22 percentage points.

The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said the census result “throws down a challenge to us not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known”.

He added: “We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by.”

The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said: “One of the most striking things about these census results is how at odds the population is from the state itself. No state in Europe has such a religious setup as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”

Analysis by the Guardian shows areas with a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities are also more religious. And places with a higher proportion of white people also have a bigger proportion with no religion. The places with the highest numbers of people saying they had no religion were Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Rhondda Cynon Taf, all in south Wales, and Brighton and Hove and Norwich in England. They were among 11 areas where more than half the population are not religious, including Bristol, Hastings in East Sussex and Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, most of which had relatively low ethnic minority populations.

The places with the lowest number of non-believers were Harrow, Redbridge and Slough, where close to two-thirds of the populations are from minority ethnic backgrounds.

The slump in religion and emergence of minority ethnic populations as a combined majority in whole conurbations in England and Wales is revealed in data about the ethnicity, religion and language of close to 60 million people gathered in a snapshot census on 21 March 2021. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) cited differing patterns of ageing, fertility, mortality and migration as possible reasons for the change in religious profile of the countries.

Across the two countries, 81.7% of the population is now white, including non-British, down from 86% in 2011, 9.3% is Asian British, up from 7.5%, 2.5% is Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean-African and African, up from 1.8%, and 1.6% are other ethnicities.

Ushering in a new age of city-wide “super diversity”, the ONS data showed 59.1% of the people of Leicester are now from ethnic minority groups, a big change since 1991, when black and minority ethnic people made up just over a quarter of the city’s residents. Leicester’s Asian population first became well established after 20,000 people settled in the east Midlands manufacturing city after expulsion from Uganda in 1972.

Minority ethnic people also make up more than half the population in Luton (54.8%) and Birmingham (51.4%), the UK’s second largest city where 20 years ago seven out of 10 people were white. Since the second world war, Birmingham’s population has grown with immigration from the Caribbean and south Asia, as well as Gujaratis who had been in east Africa.

The mixed-race population grew by half a million people to 1.7 million over the last decade, but the rate of increase was slower than for the previous decade.

The census deputy director, Jon Wroth-Smith, said the figures showed “the increasingly multicultural society we live in” but added that despite the rising ethnic diversity “nine in 10 people across England and Wales still identify with a UK national identity, with nearly eight in 10 doing so in London”.

The figures will present a fresh impetus to policymakers to tackle embedded racial inequalities, which mean black and minority ethnic people are 2.5 times more likely to be in relative poverty and are falling faster and further below the poverty line in the cost of living crisis, according to the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank.

China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to “resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces,” following the largest street demonstrations in decades staged by citizens fed up with strict anti-virus restrictions, media reports here suggest.

The statement from the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission released late Tuesday comes amid a massive show of force by security services to deter a recurrence of the protests that broke out over the weekend in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and several other cities.

While it did not directly address the protests, the statement serves as a reminder of the party’s determination to enforce its rule.  Hundreds of SUVs, vans and armored vehicles with flashing lights were parked along city streets Wednesday while police and paramilitary forces conducted random ID checks and searched people’s mobile phones for photos, banned apps or other potential evidence that they had taken part in the demonstrations.

The number of people who have been detained at the demonstrations and in follow-up police actions is not known.  While reports and footage of the protests have flourished online before being scrubbed by government censors, they have been ignored entirely by the strictly controlled state media.

Further diverting attention was Wednesday evening’s national news dominated by the death of former president and Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin at the age of 96.

Jiang was installed as leader just ahead of the bloody suppression of the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and later presided over an era of breakneck economic growth during the 1990s and early 2000s while still maintaining rigid party control.

The commission’s statement, issued after an expanded session Monday presided over by its head Chen Wenqing, a member of the party’s 24-member Politburo, said the meeting aimed to review the outcomes of October’s 20th party congress.

At that event, Xi granted himself a third five-year term as secretary general, potentially making him China’s leader for life, while stacking key bodies with loyalists and eliminating opposing voices.

“The meeting emphasized that political and legal organs must take effective measures to … resolutely safeguard national security and social stability,” the statement said.

“We must resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces in accordance with the law, resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order and effectively maintain overall social stability,” it said.

Yet, less than a month after seemingly ensuring his political future and unrivaled dominance, Xi, who has signaled he favors regime stability above all, is facing his biggest public challenge yet.

He and the party have yet to directly address the unrest, which spread to college campuses and the semi-autonomous southern city of Hong Kong, as well as sparking sympathy protests abroad.

Most protesters focused their ire on the “zero-COVID” policy that has placed millions under lockdown and quarantine, limiting their access to food and medicine while ravaging the economy and severely restricting travel. Many mocked the government’s ever-changing line of reasoning, as well as claims that “hostile outside foreign forces” were stirring the wave of anger.

Yet bolder voices called for greater freedom and democracy and for Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, as well as the party he leads, to step down — speech considered subversive and punishable with lengthy prison terms. Some held up blank pieces of white paper to demonstrate their lack of free speech rights.

The weekend protests were sparked by anger over the deaths of at least 10 people in a fire on Nov. 24 in China’s far west that prompted angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by anti-virus controls.

Authorities eased some controls and announced a new push to vaccinate vulnerable groups after the demonstrations, but maintained they would stick to the “zero-COVID” strategy.

The party had already promised last month to reduce disruptions, but a spike in infections swiftly prompted party cadres under intense pressure to tighten controls in an effort to prevent outbreaks. The National Health Commission on Wednesday reported 37,612 cases detected over the previous 24 hours, while the death toll remained unchanged at 5,233.

Beijing’s Tsinghua University, where students protested over the weekend, and other schools in the capital and the southern province of Guangdong sent students home in an apparent attempt to defuse tensions. Chinese leaders are wary of universities, which have been hotbeds of activism including the Tiananmen protests.

Police appeared to be trying to keep their crackdown out of sight, possibly to avoid encouraging others by drawing attention to the scale of the protests. Videos and posts on Chinese social media about protests were deleted by the party’s vast online censorship apparatus.

A literal spark lit the blaze of protests that have spread across China over the past several days, as thousands have turned out to demonstrate against the government’s longstanding “Zero COVID” policy and its related lockdowns. Last Thursday, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the western city of Urumqi, killing 10 people and injuring nine. Locals complained that gates, barricades, and other obstacles that had been set up to quarantine the building slowed the response of firefighters.

As CNN reports, Urumqi had been under lockdown for more than 100 days, and by Friday morning, residents were marching on a local government building demanding that the quarantine be lifted. Over the weekend and into today, the protests quickly spread to at least 16 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, and Wuhan, where COVID-19 first emerged. Protesters held up blank sheets of white paper—a symbolic protest against censorship—and in both Shanghai and Beijing called for Chinese President Xi Jinping to step down. “We don’t want a leader, we want votes,” chanted the Beijing demonstrators, as my colleague Chad de Guzman reports.

The demonstrations come at a time when China is experiencing a COVID-19 surge, hitting a one-day record of more than 40,000 cases today. But that has not cooled the fury of protesters who have watched as much of the rest of the world has opened up even as Beijing continues its draconian Zero COVID rules, under which the government aims to identify and isolate every person with the disease.

At times, the protests turned violent. Police clashed with demonstrators in Shanghai, and Ed Lawrence, a reporter for the BBC, was arrested and later released, but not before being beaten and kicked by reporters, Lawrence alleges. A spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN that Lawrence did not identify himself or “voluntarily present his press credentials.” The spokesman also said that police were trying to protect Lawrence from contracting COVID-19 from the crowd. (“We do not consider this a credible explanation,” said the BBC in a statement.)

The mere fact that the protests are taking place is surprising in China, where demonstrations are strictly forbidden and quickly crushed. That Xi’s name was raised makes the uprising even more shocking.

“Until recently, most Chinese people were very scared about the efficiency and the magnitude of the repressive organs of China, and they wouldn’t move a finger,” Jean Pierre Cabestan, emeritus professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, told Chad. But the recent protests show just how much people are “fed up with the current situation and think things have to change.”

That change is coming—albeit slowly. Today, the Chinese government announced a slight loosening of some restrictions. In Beijing, for example, officials will no longer set up blockades to prevent entry to apartment compounds where infections have been found. In Guangzhou, a recent hotspot of infections, mass testing requirements will be eased. And in Urumqi, some markets and other businesses will be allowed to reopen, CNN reports, and bus service will resume.

Still, the government does not currently plan to abandon its Zero COVID policy entirely. “Facts have fully proved that each version of the prevention and control plan has withstood the test of practice,” a government commentator wrote in the People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, according to the Associated Press.

The People’s Republic of China is under pressure from its people over President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid and lockdown policies. Thousands of people have taken to streets across China.

Some observers say that it is the most serious threat to the communist regime since the pro-democracy protests at the Tiananmen Square, where over 10,000 people were reportedly killed in a government crackdown.

This time too, China has responded with a severe crackdown on the protesters. Hundreds, including journalists covering the protests, have been detained and beaten up by the police.

China has warned American officials not to interfere in its relationship with India, the Pentagon has said in a report to the Congress. Beginning in May 2020, Chinese and Indian forces faced off in clashes with rocks, batons, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire at multiple locations along the LAC. The resulting standoff triggered the buildup of forces on both sides of the border.

As per reports, throughout its standoff with India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Chinese officials sought to downplay the severity of the crisis, emphasising Beijing’s intent to preserve border stability and prevent the standoff from harming other areas of its bilateral relationship with India, the Pentagon said in a report on Tuesday.

“The PRC (People’s Republic of China) seeks to prevent border tensions from causing India to partner more closely with the United States. PRC officials have warned U.S. officials to not interfere with the PRC’s relationship with India,” the Pentagon said in its latest report to the Congress on Chinese military buildup.

In a section on the China-India border, the Pentagon said throughout 2021, the PLA sustained the deployment of forces and continued infrastructure build up along the LAC. Negotiation made minimal progress as both sides resist losing perceived advantages on the border, it said.

Beginning in May 2020, Chinese and Indian forces faced off in clashes with rocks, batons, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire at multiple locations along the LAC. The resulting standoff triggered the buildup of forces on both sides of the border. “Each country demanded the withdrawal of the other’s forces and a return to pre-standoff conditions, but neither China nor India agreed on those conditions,” it said.

“The PRC blamed the standoff on Indian infrastructure construction, which it perceived as encroaching on PRC territory, while India accused China of launching aggressive incursions into India’s territory,” it added.

Since the 2020 clash, the PLA has maintained continuous force presence and continued infrastructure build up along the LAC.

The 2020 Galwan Valley incident was the deadliest clash between the two nations in the past 46 years, the report said. On the June 15th, 2020, patrols violently clashed in Galwan Valley resulting in the death approximately twenty Indian soldiers and four PLA soldiers, according to PRC officials, it said.

According to media reports, China may station aircraft carriers, large warships and submarines in its first overseas military base in Djibouti, a move that would have profound security ramifications for the Indian Navy.

Details of the base feature in the US Department of Defense’s annual report on China, which is submitted to the US Congress. The report, released on Sunday, comes less than four months after NDTV published high-resolution satellite images of the base, including a large Chinese Navy landing ship at the dock. This is the backbone of China’s amphibious assault forces.

“In late March 2022, a FUCHI II class (Type 903A) supply ship Luomahu docked at the 450-metre pier for resupply; the first such reported PLA Navy port call to the Djibouti support base, indicating that the pier is now operational,” says the US Department of Defence’s 2022 China Military Power Report. “The pier likely is able to accommodate the PLA Navy’s aircraft carriers, other large combatants, and submarines,” it adds.

This is not the first time that the United States has raised the possibility of China getting ready to deploy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean region. In 2017, Admiral Harry Harris Jr., who was commanding the US Pacific Command, told NDTV, “There is nothing to prevent them from sailing in the Indian Ocean today.”

Since then, China has been busy developing its aircraft carriers and now has three operational ships, each with incrementally greater capability. The Indian Navy presently operates two aircraft carriers, the made-in-Russia INS Vikramaditya and the INS Vikrant which is still several months away from being fully operational.