Barackface: 15: India

'Dr. Doom' Nouriel Roubini: AI will unleash productivity in a way we haven't seen a new McKinsey study identified 63 generative AI use cases spanning 16 business functions that could unleash $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in economic benefits annually.............. Current generative AI and other technologies have the potential to automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today ......... ..Salesforce says its AI Cloud product will allow marketers to auto-generate personalized content for customers and developers to auto-generate code, among other use cases......... .

Ukraine Reports Slow Progress at Start of Counteroffensive “This is a very difficult fight,” he said. “It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time at a high cost.”........ “Behind these were complex minefields of anti-tank and antipersonnel mines,” he wrote. Ukrainian forces trying to push forward into these areas will most likely be closely tracked by Russian drones and targeted by Russian artillery. And near the main Russian defensive lines are “properly dug trenches and concrete-reinforced firing posts, tank obstacles, ground-laid cable to coordinate artillery strikes and even more mines,” he wrote.

America’s new best friend: Why India is indispensable . .

Joe Biden and Narendra Modi are drawing their countries closer India does not love the West, but it is indispensable to America ........ No country except China has propped up Russia’s war economy as much as oil-thirsty India. And few big democracies have slid further in the rankings of democratic freedom. But you would not guess it from the rapturous welcome Narendra Modi will receive in Washington next week. India’s prime minister has been afforded the honour of a state visit by President Joe Biden. The Americans hope to strike defence deals. Mr Modi will be one of the few foreign leaders, along with Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelensky, to address a joint session of Congress more than once. The praise gushed on Capitol Hill about the partnership makes no mention of Ukraine, democracy or grit in the gears of America’s new best friendship............... the global clout of the South Asian giant is rising fast. Its economy is the world’s fifth biggest. Its 18m-strong diaspora is thriving, from America to the Gulf. And India has become indispensable to America’s effort to assert itself in Asia and deter Chinese aggression .......... huge, capitalist, democratic and wary of China, India is also poor, populist and, ....... dismissive of the vestiges of the post-1945 Western order. ............. One of the fastest-growing economies, its gdp is expected to overtake Japan’s and Germany’s by 2028, even as it treads a novel path towards getting rich. ........... Think not just of call centres but data scientists for Goldman Sachs. Infrastructure has also improved under Mr Modi and his immediate predecessors, and manufacturing may pick up as supply chains diversify from China: Apple assembles 7% of iPhones in India. India’s chief failing is its vast numbers of unskilled, jobless young people. It is trying to help them by pioneering a digital welfare state. .......... Thanks in part to its diaspora, India’s soft power is world-beating. The bosses of Alphabet, ibm and Microsoft are of Indian descent, as are the heads of three of America’s five top business schools. Reflecting the accomplishment of Indian-Americans, 70% of the wider American public views India favourably, compared with 15% for China. ............... is essentially pragmatic. Ideologically, it is suspicious of Western countries and flatly rejects their claim to global leadership. .......... India is an American strategic partner that mistrusts the West, is unlikely ever to enter a formal alliance with America and is attached to Russia, which supplies it with arms. .......... It wants to bolster its land defences against China, not fight over Taiwan. ............. only 60m of its 1.4bn people have formal jobs ......... The Biden administration’s efforts to accelerate technology transfer to India seem a promising example. By boosting India’s defence industry, America hopes to wean it off dud Russian weapons and provide an affordable new source of arms for other Asian democracies. Other areas of co-operation could include clean energy and tech, where both seek to avoid relying on China. .......... To work, the relationship will have to function like a long-term business partnership: India and America may not like everything about it, but think of the huge upside. It may be the most important transaction of the 21st century. .

The real injustice would have been not to indict Donald Trump The former president must be subject to due process .

In conversation with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar A transcript of The Economist’s interview with India’s foreign minister ......... you will see next week is a public and visible expression of the state of the relationship between India and the United States, which is very good, which is getting better by the day, which is getting more consequential by the day. ......... this relationship is on the right track and moving forward very, very rapidly. .......... Two decades ago India had virtually no defence dealings with the United States, there was an arms embargo after 1965. There were a few exceptions here and there. But by and large, for 40 years, there were actually no significant military sales from the United States to India at all. ............. Trade’s been good, investment flows are growing. The technology connect has been strong. The number of students going up and down is good. You have a lot of Americans residing in India, because many of them are of Indian origin. So by any metric civil-society support is very strong. This is a relationship which has support in the street. And that’s not always the case with the United States, nowadays. It’s a popular relationship. And I think there’s an enormous tailwind that is propelling us forward. .......... For the last decade you have had a government which does not have those ideological hesitations. So you will see the relationship move forward much more smoothly. ............ an India which is able to play on the big stage, which is able to handle the contradictions of multiple powers who often do not get along with each other. An India that’s making this huge effort to transform the immediate neighbourhood, so that we create the kind of regionalism which has sadly been absent for four decades ............. if you ask me what changed since you first started in this business, I would say it’s actually the India-us relationship. ................
the post-1945 order has been severely challenged, and that they need a new template, new partners, that they need to look beyond alliance constructs.
............. the media lags behind in its understanding of policy ............ If you were to ask me, is your relationship with the uk or us primarily about security? I would say, look, relationships are about relationships. Do security issues come up? Of course they do. .............. the Quad does humanitarian assistance, disaster resilience, the Quad had a stab at vaccination. It does fellowships, it does critical and emerging technologies. It does telecom. .................... the Quad’s four countries, who happen to be in the four corners of the Indo-Pacific, have come together because they believe that their interests are better served by working together ............ you have the two claimed lands, the Indian-claimed land, and the Chinese-claimed land, they do not coincide. And both sides send out patrols to assert their claim line. And the problem can often be that these patrols collide with each other and then contest their jurisdictions. This has been the running problem. ......... There have been 18 rounds of commander-level talks. You have been making progress working through the different flash points, and the pattern has been to create some buffer zones on both sides. So if you can do the same in Demchok and the Depsang plains, which are the points they’re talking about now, .................. This is a really complex problem, which is why we need so many rounds and such great effort. It’s not a question of looking at the map and deciding what you’re going to do. There’s a topography out there. The topography has its own value and its own disadvantages. So each one has been a very detailed, very complex negotiation. ............... My relations with the United States, as I pointed out, have been steadily developing for two decades, and in the last decade, have accelerated. There’s empirical data out there to show that quite independently of anything that happened on the China border, India-us relations were ticking along, more than ticking along, just fine. .............. I don’t take the us Congress as an undifferentiated mass. I think there are more knowledgeable people and less knowledgeable people. I’m not in any way diminishing the second category, it’s just that they’re not as familiar with the relationship and with us as those who are more knowledgeable................ they completely understood that the Russia relationship is an outcome of 60 years of history. And after 60 years of history it’s not as though you say, I’ve changed my mind. That’s not the way real life works. ........... America chose not to sell arms to India after 1965 we really had no choice but to go to the Soviet Union. .............. For us, there are three big Eurasian powers, Russia, China, and India. That has its own dynamics. This is not transactional. This is geopolitical. ............... It’s been a cardinal principle of our foreign policy, which still remains valid, that maintaining a strong relationship and a good relationship with Russia is essential. The geopolitical logic indicates that. So I don’t want to dumb this down to military dependence. .................. I expect Russia to turn more towards Asia. Historically, Russia has seen itself as European. Throughout history the self-perception of Russians has been very European, not Asian. The current events may well make them turn around, reposition their priorities and look much more at what Asian or non-Western partners have to offer ............ you have India today, fifth-largest economy moving towards becoming third, probably by the end of the decade, clearly an increasingly major consumer of resources, growing exporter of goods and services. So if you have a Russia which focuses more on Asia, and an India which is a bigger and bigger factor in the global economy, to me it’s common sense that the two trends intersect. .............. we’ve been seriously negotiating an fta [free-trade agreement] with the uk. With the eu, we have the Eurasian Economic Union fta, which was sort of stuttering along. ........... To move, during the lockdown, the biggest number of forces since 1962, in violation of two agreements, which had explicit clauses which prevented them from doing so–I think that has raised a whole lot of question marks. .......... The fact is, this is an extraordinarily self-absorbed society. It needs regular reminders that there is a world out there, and that there are things happening in that world, which impacts our society and our interest very, very deeply. .................. the world has come to your doorstep. Look at the example of covid. Something which happened somewhere else took over every Indian household for two and a half years. And even a conflict like Ukraine has a direct impact on inflation, on energy costs. Given these deep links, this was a plea for greater activity. .............. the younger-generation Indian must start preparing to go out in the world more, to have opinions, to wade into debates, to try to shape and influence. .............. in the last decade you have seen an India, which just in development work is present in 78 countries in the world. And we have done or are in the midst of doing almost 600 major projects. Now, these are not just neighbouring countries, this could be as far away as Latin America and Central America, Caribbean, Pacific. ..................... Take our stepping forward where Sri Lanka was concerned. It took them ages to negotiate that deal with the IMF. They would have sunk if I hadn’t had the willingness to put four and a half billion dollars on the table for them. ........... Preparations for a global footprint take two generations, we should have started earlier, but at least we are starting now. ............ our industrial policy, our embrace of technology, our desire to see technology-driven goods produced in this country–this is a 25-year vision. ................ The old 1990s-model of globalisation asked, where can I get it on scale? Where can I get it at cost? And where can I get it on time? This globalisation we’re heading to asks, who’s handling my data? What are the legal rules and constraints out there? Where is the supply chain passing through? Which part of it can be leveraged at the wrong moment? And how do I build redundancy and in some cases separation? This takes the form of many debates, including the de-risking debate. I think that’s a more sensible way of capturing it than decoupling, which is too strong a word and too impractical an option..................... We have one major card, which is human resources, that I can churn out people at a scale and rate which no other democratic society can. ......... imagine an India with much stronger human resources, with a much better infrastructure, with a much easier, friendlier business club, which has arrangements with a lot of major economies which make possible easier flows and greater confluence. It would be a very different India ........... When you speak of a world of trusted collaboration, because that’s the world we are heading towards, which countries will be able to work with which other countries? I think India has a lot to offer in that world............. A large part of the developing world is under stress. They had a triple whammy, because first they got hit by a set of economic forces, including higher interest rates, then they had this very scarring experience of covid. And then you have the knock-on effects from the Ukraine war. ............... when we got the G20 presidency, one of the first things he did was to say, I want to consult 125 others and ask: if we speak for you, please tell us what we should be saying? ......... we did that exercise, meaning we are not a self-assigned spokesperson of the South ............. You know the us food stamp system. Here we’re not giving you the stamp, we’re giving you the food, and we’re giving it to 800 million people. You have payments, you can say unemployment benefits, you’re actually able to put payments into the bank account of more than 400 million people because there is a digital backbone, and a sense of purpose, and an inclusive approach. ................... We’re doing a housing programme where you build houses for those most vulnerable. We’ve done 31 million houses. And if you take an Indian family at 4.8 people per family, that’s 150 million people who are house owners because of this scheme. ................... when people look for analogies for Modi, he might actually be more analogous to fdr [Franklin D. Roosevelt] in terms of a new deal. A large part of the population in India may actually perceive him as someone who has taken social benefits to them on an unprecedented scale. .

Narendra Modi is the world’s most popular leader The prime minister’s odious Muslim-bashing is not the main reason ......... one of the most remarkable developments in global politics. Over the past nine years the bjp has emerged, in two general elections and dozens of state ones, as India’s biggest party. Yet it is far short of having a popular majority. It controls only half of India’s 28 states. In general elections, it seems nonetheless to have a lock on power, for the next five years and probably more, thanks to the popularity of Narendra Modi. With an approval rating of 77%, the prime minister is more than twice as popular as his party. He is by far the world’s most popular elected leader............ Mr Modi is benefiting from a combination of good luck, political brilliance and ruthlessness. ........... Contrary to the story he tells, India’s economy has not done better under his government than under its Congress-led predecessors. Yet under its weak, uncharismatic fourth-generation dynastic leader, Rahul Gandhi, Congress has failed to lay claim to this success, let alone promise a repeat performance. ..................... Mr Gandhi is half Italian and, like his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, all Indian prime ministers, Oxbridge-educated. Mr Modi was born poor, is largely self-taught and, partly because that describes millions of Indians, hugely admired for it. Another Cambridge-educated Congress luminary once dismissed him as a chaiwala (tea-seller)—which he was. No political barb has backfired more disastrously. ................ Mr Modi’s genius is his ability to capture the political narrative in such ways. He is adept at reading mass sentiment and, as a relentless campaigner, courts it as no other Indian leader has since Indira Gandhi, or ever. Also like Mrs Gandhi, he claims credit for everything his government has achieved—and much that it has not. His smiling image, ubiquitous on billboards, is the face of welfare schemes, infrastructure projects and diplomatic shindigs. In a time of tumultuous change, many Indians crave a kingly figure whom they can thank for the progress they hope for, and trust to manage the uncertainties they fear. “Only Modi knows how to implement things,” says Rajdip Ghosh, a 34-year-old it professional in Kolkata (who was named after Mr Gandhi’s father, Rajiv). “Modi-ji is providing so many houses for the poor,” says Narendra Yadav, a 55-year-old driver in Delhi. “During the pandemic Modi-ji saved so many lives.” .

Russia Issues Dire Warning About Nuclear War . .