Ø Even as
Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned from his six-day, three-nation tour to
criticism from the Opposition for his frequent travels abroad, sources tell The
Hindu the Prime Minister will be travelling soon again, to Bangladesh in June,
and to Russia and five central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyztan,
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — in July. Officials said details were
being worked out for both trips. Bangladesh is part of the PM’s neighbourhood
initiative, and comes after his visits to Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the
Indian Ocean islands in the past year. He is expected to travel to Dhaka from
June 8 to 10, and will sign the recently ratified Indo-Bangladesh Land Boundary
Agreement. In July his visit to six nations will take place around the BRICS
and SCO summits to be held in the Russian city of Ufa from July 9 to 10. This
would complete 25 countries visited in a little over a year for the PM. In a
visit reminiscent of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1955
ground-breaking trip, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Russia
and five Central Asian states in July this year. The visit, to
Turkmenistan,Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyztan, and Kazakhstan is likely to
take place in the first two weeks of July, timed around the BRICS and SCO
summits in the Russian city of Ufa from July 9 to 10, sources confirmed. The
Prime Minister is expected to break up the tour of the “Stans”, as the former
Soviet republics in central Asia are known, visiting two countries before his
visit to Ufa, and the three remaining ones after. Diplomatic sources said the
Prime Minister’s visit to the 5 states, which was last done by PM Nehru in June
1955, will have a three-fold focus: energy, exports, and as a counterpoint to
China’s inroads in the region. Between them, the five states control the most
energy-diverse and oil-rich parts of the world, with Kazakhstan a major oil
producer, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with the biggest natural gas reserves,
and Tajikistan and Kyrgyztan understood to have considerable untapped reserves.
While Nehru covered the states during a visit to Russia by train in about 10
days, Mr. Modi is expected to spend about three days traversing through these
areas. His visit will come after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2013 visit to
all five “Stans” when he announced billions of dollars in loans to the countries
to build energy and transport infrastructure, as well as a year after Russia
and China announced a $400 billion gas pipeline that would cover all the
central Asian countries in between. The visit to Ufa for the SCO (Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation) and BRICS summits will be no less important. India
and Pakistan are expected to be elevated from ‘observers’ to ‘members’ during
the current SCO summit, and hence it is the first time the Indian PM will
attend the grouping of Russia, China, and four of the ‘Stans’ (Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyztan).
Ø The U.S.
government this week provided an unprecedented insight into the mind of Osama
bin Laden when it released 103 documents of his that were retrieved by Navy
SEALs during their May 2011 assassination raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Among
the letters released was one that described the Mumbai terror attacks as a
“blessed operation,” adding that it was a “heroic Fidai operations in Bombay —
India’s economical capital — in which several western targets were struck in
which many Americans and other Westerners were killed.”
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