New Delhi,
India has achieved a lot of progress and turned from being a developing country to an emerging power; it moved from a poor country to a country that achieved self-sufficiency in the field of food production for its 1.2 billion population. India is now exporting grains to many world countries. It turned from a backward country, to a country that launches satellites and achieved a tremendous progress in the field of telecommunications and IT. This quantum leap achieved by India has been coincided with great changes on the international and regional levels. This leap revealed India’s ambitions and its vision of development.
India forced the US and Europe to deal with it as a nuclear power. During the visit of the French President Jack Chirac to India last February, India signed an agreement for cooperation with France in the field of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The Indian Prime Minister signed a landmark agreement with the US for cooperation in the same field during the visit of the US President to New Delhi in March after Bush asked the US Congress to lift sanctions imposed on India since 1998, due to possessing nuclear weapons.
India also signed an agreement with Russia, according to which Moscow would provide India with 60 tons of Uranium. India also was recognized by the EU as a strategic partner and an effective player on the international arena. The leaders of 25 EU countries moved to New Delhi to attend the Indo-European summit. Through boosting its ties with China, the US and Europe, India seeks to get a permanent seat in the Security Council.
2- The independence of political decision and having ties with two opposing countries: Iran and Israel
India is a model of a country that has independent political decisions and seeks to achieve the national ambitions of an emerging state. It is a country that wants to boost its regional and international role according to its interests not sentiments. The strategic ties between India and the US did not prevent India from establishing cooperation ties with Iran in different fields. India concluded an agreement with Iran to get natural gas. The agreement amounted to $ 21 billion. According to the agreement, Iran will provide India with 5 billion tons of natural gas till 2009.
The two countries are studying a project for extending a gas pipeline from Iran to India across Pakistan for this purpose. In the meantime, India has been concluding defense deals with Israel since 2002 that amounted to $ 2.7 billon. This made Israel the second largest supplier of weapons to India, preceded only by Russia.
Since India established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992, Israel provided India with advanced military equipment in addition to participating in several programs for upgrading missiles. India concluded a deal with Israel for providing it with three Falcon air-borne early warning systems amounting to $ 1.1 billion, a Green Bayen Radar system, and hand-held radars as well as Derby and Gogo missiles. Israel also provided India with 400 thermal systems to be used by T72m tank, Parak Anti-vessels missiles, electronic warfare systems, Meg 21 systems, and advanced remote sensing devices.
Israel upgraded the Indian Graff chopper and equipped it with electronic devices as well as day and night surveillance equipment. In the end, the two countries agreed to develop a defense system in space that will use satellites to intercept missiles.
India is boosting its regional and international role through dealing effectively with international and regional issues. It uses different tools to achieve this goal. One of these tools is the aids provided to other countries. India is participating in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and is financing development and training projects there. India’s aids to Afghanistan reached $ 650 million. It has recently promised to provide $ 18 million for the Palestinian people.
The Indian government, headed by Manmohan Singh, adopted an initiative for creating “a new Kashmir” in the region that has been witnessing turbulence and acts of violence since 1947, the time Pakistan separated from India. The initiative included calling on the resistance movements and representatives of separatist groups to hold negotiations to discuss the means of solving the problem.
The initiative is considered an important message to the US, Israel and other concerned Arab parties: the effect of this message is that the key to solving the Israeli Palestinian conflict and establishing peace and stability in Iraq is through recognizing resistance and entering into serious negotiations for achieving peace. This initiative coincides with another initiative taken by Singh who called on Pakistan to sign a “Security and Friendship” agreement to end the historical animosity between the two countries.
India came on top of the list of countries attracting foreign investments in 2005 due to the services it is providing for investors and anti-bureaucracy decisions it is taking. India preceded countries like the US, Britain and China, as it got about 34% of US capital flow to the Asian markets.
India is following a liberal policy that is based on its national interests. The government has a big share of the capital of any huge strategic project in the field of industry or technology. The vision of the state related to constructing new cities is based on this idea. Every Indian city, has a new city nearby. This new city could absorb the population increase and would provide job opportunities and new projects.
There is new Mumbai where the Indian government gives great facilities to businessmen. Reliance Infosys is one of the companies that moved to operate there. The company managed to expand and to provide 40,000 job opportunities.
For advocates of women empowerment, a woman’s holding of a senior post is news. But this is something usual in India. The protocol officer at the Indian Ministry of External Affairs was surprised when some of the members of the Egyptian delegation visiting India were astonished on hearing that a woman was holding the post of president of the state of Rajasthan, another was the Speaker of the Indian Parliament and a third was holding the post of Prime Minister.
In the sixties, Indira Gandhi, one of the greatest Prime Ministers in the world, took the helm of power in India. India, does not establish special councils or issue certain rules for women - except in special cases- but it is a country that respects the principle of citizenship and equal opportunities for both sexes.
As the Egyptian audience loved the Indian movie star Amitabh Bachchan, he loved them. Bachchan visited the Embassy of Egypt in India upon an invitation from the Egyptian Ambassador, Kheir Al din Abdel Latif. The focus given by the Indian media to the visit of the Indian movie star to the Egyptian Embassy reflects the high status of the man. According Hinduism, a man who is highly respected by the people should be highly regarded.
The number of newspapers issued in India, whether daily, weakly or quarterly, reached 60000. The average number of daily copies distributed is 330 million. There are about 400 foreign correspondents in India. The Indian government owns only one TV channel “Dwtdarshan”, which is considered the oldest TB channel in India.
Naftig Sarana, the official spokesman of the Indian government and Director of the Press Department of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (the equivalent of Egyptian State Information Service) , said that India is one of the countries that are most open to the media. Foreign journalists feel free to do their work in India. The government provides everyone with information and does not practice any pressures on them. There is a website for the government on which it publishes all information related to issues under discussion and the official stance regarding those issues.
In case any correspondent publishes groundless report, the Indian mission in the country where the correspondent publishes his story translates the report and sends it to us to discuss it with the correspondent. We are in continuous debates and discussions with local and international journalists, he added. As for the current focus of attention of the Indian citizens, he said that Indians nowadays are interested to know more about regional and international dimensions of the current conditions in Nepal.
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