Missed opportunity or ill-timing?

The acrimony over the proposed Foreign Ministers’ meeting has set back India-Pakistan ties

That was quick. A quick cool breeze turning into a scorching slap of hot wind of the desert. We had a rocky start when the routine congratulatory letter by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan calling for constructive engagement was translated as the signal for resumption of dialogue. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) wasted no time to embarrass Pakistan’s Foreign Office for its lack of capacity to understand the diplomatic language. Despite another facepalm over the contents of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s phone call with Mr. Khan, the Pakistan Foreign Office put up a brave face to ease the tension between the U.S. and Pakistan on the eve of Mr. Pompeo’s five-hour visit on September 5.

The pundits in Islamabad saw a prize for the patience. Besides the same ol’, same ol’ statements issued unilaterally from both sides, there was something special discussed on the sideline related to India and Pakistan. While the U.S. insisted on pulling the plug on India and Afghan-centric militants, Pakistan prodded the U.S. to push Delhi for positive engagement and a commitment to act positively should India accede to normalisation and finding mutually acceptable solutions to long-standing problems.

On the heels of the U.S. visit to the region, Mr. Khan sent Mr. Modi a letter, presumably to respond to his congratulatory letter but actually to bring a thaw into the frozen relationship. The letter might not be rich on style but did offer something to both countries. It offered Pakistan a face saver by mentioning Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek, while it offered India the possibility of resumption of trade and the T word. Pakistan was willing to talk about terrorism, Indians have always wanted to talk about it as they have maintained it as the main hindrance in the resumption of the comprehensive dialogue.

Back and forth

On Thursday, September 20, the MEA spokesperson acknowledged the letter from Mr. Khan, requesting a meeting of the two Foreign Ministers, Sushma Swaraj with Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and said a meeting would take place but should not be construed as the resumption of the dialogue process.

The U.S. Department of State wasted no time by welcoming the scheduled meeting in an almost condescending tone. Within 24 hours, the very next day the MEA Spokesman made a U-turn, cancelling the meeting. Had it been just the cancellation, it would have been taken lightly, but the direct accusation against Mr. Khan by naming him created a new crisis.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party now ruling Pakistan, had in the past used very harsh language against former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had contested the 2013 elections on the promise of improving relations with India. “Modi ka yaar gaddar (Modi’s friend is a traitor)” was a theme that ran for almost the entire campaign period against Mr. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in the elections this summer. The PTI had accused the PML-N of establishing personal relations with Mr. Modi and doing personal business with him instead of promoting the national interests of Pakistan. The party had hit Mr. Sharif hard for Mr. Modi’s visit to Lahore in December 2015 and had blasted his government on an Indian businessman’s visit to Pakistan in April 2017.

With the controversial elections of July 25 behind him, Mr. Khan turned the corner. His first informal acceptance speech offered the olive branch to India. “If India moves one step, we will move two,” he said.

Islamabad was rife with rumours that he wanted to invite Mr. Modi besides his friends in Bollywood and cricket friends for his oath-taking ceremony on August 18.

Somehow Mr. Khan was prevented from inviting Mr. Modi, but one of his cricket buddies, Navjot Singh Sidhu, did turn up. While his seating arrangement and the japha (bear hug) with the Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, created quite a stir in India, Pakistan government circles were bullish on the offer to open the Kartarpur border crossing for Sikh pilgrims. While The New York Times even suggested that the Pakistani military had tried to reach out to the Indian side to discuss outstanding issues, a story never denied by the military, the very ambiguity created a positive atmosphere before the scheduled meeting between the top diplomats of both countries on September 27.

More fireworks

All that changed on Friday, September 21, with the cancellation of the meeting that almost insulted the Pakistan PM. While the Pakistan Foreign Office and Mr. Qureshi expressed their disappointment, they stayed within the diplomatic ambit and did not attack the Indian side. That changed when Mr. Khan on Saturday, September 22, attacked Mr. Modi without naming him and chiding him as the small man holding a big office. As if that was not enough, the statement by the Indian Army Chief threatening Pakistan and the retaliatory statement by the Pakistan Army spokesperson has made the situation more toxic than the pre-election situation. We expect more fireworks in New York City during the UN General Assembly.

Will the two men in Delhi and Islamabad find a way untangle the relations should Mr. Modi continue to rule after the upcoming elections in India is a question that hangs in the air in both countries now. Politics is the art of the possible, and thankfully both Mr. Modi and Mr. Khan are politicians.

Murtaza Solangi is a broadcast journalist based in Islamabad, and is a former Director General of Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation

Language matters: on Amit Shah's 'termite' remark

The BJP should give up its shrill rhetoric on immigration and the NRC

he process of filing claims and objections by persons left out of the draft National Register of Citizens in Assam began on Tuesday, in an atmosphere fraught with uncertainty about the documentation needed and possible recourse for those who may ultimately not clear the final list. In the draft published on July 30, as many as 40 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants found their names missing. It is vital that the state do all it can to create an enabling environment to assist people grappling with paperwork and bureaucracy to assert their claim to being legitimate citizens of India. It is equally important that the government, in Assam and at the Centre, think the future through humanely and practically in regard to those who may remain off the final list. These persons will have many levels of appeal as next resort — but India needs to officially give the assurance that it will not condemn undocumented immigrants, who lack wherewithal and are the most unfortunate victims of poverty and South Asia’s complicated history, to their own devices. This empathy is in keeping with India’s tradition of giving refuge to those who have nowhere to go. It is disturbing that instead, even as the finalisation of the NRC is on, the register is becoming a pretext for political outreach based on xenophobia and demographic messaging. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is also in power in Assam, are freely recommending NRCs across India, and using the process in Assam to create new fault lines.

This weekend, at a public meeting in Delhi, the BJP president, Amit Shah, rallied the crowd by referring to infiltrators allegedly in the country, claiming they were eating away at India’s future. The comparison he made for this eating away from within was with “deemak” (Hindi for termites). Mr. Shah has, of late, dwelt many times on the need to identify illegal immigrants in the country, whose numbers he says are in crores. This has already drawn a response from Bangladesh, with Minister of Information Hasanul Haq Inu calling Mr. Shah’s comments “unwanted”, and also reiterating Bangladesh’s position that the NRC exercise is India’s internal matter. Mr. Inu has also referred to Delhi’s own communication, including from Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, that the NRC process is India’s internal issue. Beyond the data and diplomacy angles, there must be concern about the language being employed. Analogies to pests that attack a society from within are the staple of dangerous polarising rhetoric. The use of the NRC in electoral rhetoric is even more dangerous. Regrettably, the BJP seems determined to proceed with such mobilisation, knowing full well the damage it will cause to Indian society.

Voters’ choice: on Maldives presidential polls

The Maldives turns the page on pre-election cynicism with a dramatic result

he interim results of Sunday’s presidential election in the Maldives have given the joint opposition candidate, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih a resounding victory in the direct contest with the incumbent, Abdulla Yameen. The final results will be published by the election commission by September 30 and the current government will, according to procedure, hand over charge on November 17. But it is immediately clear that Maldivian voters have ushered in change, with 58% of the voters choosing Mr. Solih. Regardless of political affiliation, Maldivians have much to celebrate with the successful completion of the election. To begin with, the turnout of 89.2% has disproved pre-election cynicism about the integrity of the electoral process. Early on, the opposition had suffered a setback when former President Mohammed Nasheed, who was seen as the frontrunner, was disqualified from contesting because of a “terrorism conviction”. Former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was behind bars on the charge of attempting a coup in February this year. Just ahead of the elections too, there had also been many misgivings over the conduct of the election commission, the courts and security forces, with these worries heightened when the headquarters of the main opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party, to which Mr. Solih belongs, were raided. Counting procedures were changed at the last minute, which led to some confusion during Sunday’s polling, and many foreign journalists, including from India, were denied visas. Fortunately, the outcome has belied the worst fears about the election, and after meeting with Mr. Solih, President Yameen conceded defeat and vowed to ensure a smooth transition.

For New Delhi, the results are especially heartening as they present a chance to reset ties with Male, which have been on a downward spiral for several years. This was perceived to be a result of Mr. Yameen’s close understanding with China, to which the Maldives is now heavily indebted. Mr. Yameen responded to India’s criticism of the emergency he declared this year by clamping down on visas to Indian job holders, hundreds of whom await some movement in the matter after the new government takes over. India can also now renew talks over the fate of Indian Coast Guard and Air Force personnel stationed in the Maldives, whose visas have been pending since June. India was quick to welcome the provisional results and to congratulate, among others, the Maldivian Democratic Party, and the Jumhooree Party — to which the Vice-President-elect Faisal Naseem belongs. Going forward, New Delhi must stay clear of partisan positioning on the internal politics of the Maldives. The larger agenda must be to partner the Maldives in its stability and development rather than engaging in a tug of war with China.

After Salzburg: on rejection of post-Brexit blueprint

he rejection of Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-Brexit blueprint at the Salzburg summit rules out nothing as yet in Britain’s rocky negotiations on withdrawing from the European Union. All the same, the development is a blow to Ms. May, who faces a possible backlash at the Conservative party conference this month. Her proposal, adopted by the Cabinet in July, has deepened divisions among the Tories. Two senior Eurosceptic ministers have quit. A controversial idea in the July white paper is for a hybrid arrangement, with Britain staying in the common market only for trade in goods and agriculture, and without the obligations of free movement of people. This is at odds with the EU stance of not allowing cherry-picking when it comes to its four basic freedoms — of movement of capital, goods, services, and labour. The other dispute is over the post-Brexit status of the soft border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Maintaining the status quo is critical to keeping the peace under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Brussels seems flexible on its original proposal for full regulatory convergence and jurisdiction of EU courts over Belfast. This is meant to assuage London’s concerns about two separate jurisdictions operating within the U.K. Britain’s alternative proposal to avoid the return of checkpoints on the Irish border and to get around the difficulties of erecting invisible borders is to bring all of the U.K. under a common customs arrangement. Eurosceptics see this as aligning the country too close to the EU and curbing its freedom to negotiate trade deals outside the bloc. For Brussels, it would still amount to an unacceptable division of the EU’s four freedoms.

European Council President Donald Tusk’s remarks in Salzburg that the July proposals were not workable amplified these concerns. They drew angry reactions from Ms. May, who harked back to the mantra that a no-deal was better than a bad deal. But then, discrepancies in the opposing positions go back to the 2016 referendum outcome. Brussels had said then that while it regretted the verdict, it respected London’s decision to leave. It stuck firm on established procedure and stressed that withdrawal negotiations could not commence until Article 50 of the EU treaty was triggered. It emphasised that exit from the bloc would involve costs for Britain, just as the benefits of membership entailed obligations. This accent on process could harden in the wake of the populist threat across the region to the European project. With elections to the European Parliament due next May, the leaders are keen that the anti-EU parties see the economic and political perils of quitting the bloc. Brexit uncertainty will linger, meanwhile.

Celestial misfit

We should accept Pluto as a dwarf planet, though an exceptional one

fter years of arguing over whether Pluto is a planet, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to remove Pluto’s planetary status. Now some researchers are challenging this decision, citing the manner in which scientific tradition has dealt with the taxonomy of planets. The IAU, in 2006, designated Pluto a ‘dwarf planet’ along with Ceres in the asteroid belt and Xena, an object in the Kuiper belt, which is an icy ring of frozen objects that circle the solar system beyond Neptune’s orbit. It was a bid to overcome sentiment and go by scientific rationale. The meeting defined three conditions for a celestial object to be called a planet: one, it must orbit the Sun; two, it should be massive enough to acquire an approximately spherical shape; three, it has to ‘clear its orbit’, that is, be the object that exerts the maximum gravitational pull within its orbit. Owing to this third property, if an object ventures close to a planet’s orbit, it will either collide with it and be accreted, or be ejected out. However, Pluto is affected by Neptune’s gravity. It also shares its orbit with the frozen objects in the Kuiper belt. Based on this, the IAU deemed that Pluto did not ‘clear its orbit’. Dwarf planets, on the other hand, need only satisfy the first two conditions.

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For the love of Pluto

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This rationale has been questioned by Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist who has worked with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and others who have studied the history of classifying planets and come up with several exceptions to the third rule. In a paper published in the journal Icarus, they point out that the only work in history that used this rule to classify planets was an article by William Herschel in 1802. They also argue that this work was based on reasoning and observations that have since been disproved. However, the last argument does not build up a strong enough case to give up what is, in fact, a sensible rule. Physics has many examples where an idea was once discarded for being incorrect, and much later emerged in a different form and gained acceptance — the concept of photons, for instance. And then again, if Pluto were to be re-designated a planet, many more complications would arise. For one thing, Charon, Pluto’s moon, is much too large to be called a satellite. Judging by this, the Charon-Pluto system should then rightly be called a binary planet system. This would then lead to classifying several other sets of bodies as binary planets. Recent research shows that both the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud, a shell of objects that surrounds the entire solar system far beyond the Kuiper belt, contain objects that can then be called planets, thereby complicating the issue. Denying planetary status to Pluto is then nothing less than a sweep of Occam’s razor, and Pluto remains a dwarf planet, albeit an exceptional one.

Banking on mergers

sking healthy banks to take over weak banks appears to be the strategy to handle the bad loans crisis. On Monday the Union government proposed the merger of three public sector banks — Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank — to create an amalgamated entity that will become the country’s third largest lender. The merger is part of the government’s efforts to consolidate the banking industry with an eye on overcoming the bad loan crisis. After the announcement of the merger, shares of Bank of Baroda and Vijaya Bank shed a significant part of their value, while Dena Bank gained sharply to hit upper circuit on Tuesday. This is not surprising at all. Dena Bank is the bank in the worst financial situation among the three entities and is currently under the Reserve Bank of India’s prompt corrective action framework. Unlike the other two banks, its shareholders are set to gain from being part of a new bank with greater financial strength. The current merger, it is worth noting, comes after the government let State Bank of India’s associate banks merge with their parent last year and the Life Insurance Corporation of India take over the troubled IDBI Bank this year.


Forced mergers such as the current one make little business sense for the stronger banks as the weaker banks tend to be a drag on their operations. They are also unlikely to solve the bad loan crisis that has gripped the banking system as a whole. It is important to ensure that such mergers do not end up creating an entity that is weaker than the original pre-merger strong bank. That said, the fact is that mergers are one way of managing the problem and therefore cannot be discounted totally. However, the trick lies in ensuring that the merger fallout is managed prudently; identifying synergies and exploiting scale efficiencies will be crucial here. There is no denying the fact that there are too many public sector banks in India; given this, consolidation is a good idea in principle. But ideally, mergers ought to be between strong banks. Then again, these are not normal times and with many banks in a precarious situation, the immediate compulsions for merging the weak Dena Bank with the stronger Bank of Baroda and Vijaya Bank are clear. From a corporate governance perspective, however, the merger sends out rather poor signals. Here is a dominant shareholder in the form of the government that is dictating critical moves that impact the minority shareholders, who are left with no say in the matter. A merger as significant as this one ought to have been first discussed and approved in the board rooms of the banks concerned. If the shareholders of Bank of Baroda, whose share fell by 16% on Tuesday, feel unhappy, that is perfectly understandable.

uDiamond Filament Improves Print Speed With Nanodiamonds

Helsinki-based Carbodeon are no strangers to nanodiamond filaments. The company has previously shown how the presence of nanodiamonds within thermoplastic filament can improve thermal conductivity and tensile strength, among other properties. Now, they’re back with a new uDiamond filament with the help of VTT, who helped test and develop the nanodiamond properties.

Nanodiamonds are spherical inserts that act as lubricant in the extrusion process. They don’t increase in nozzle wear and further improve various material characteristics. The diamond particles also reinforce the polymer structure, improving the stiffness, strength and adhesion between printed layers. Carbodeon has extensive patent coverage for the nanodiamond materials that it manufactures along with refined products enhanced with nanodiamonds.

Carbodeon’s uDiamond PLA is a high-performance diamond-enhanced 3D printing filament that even works with consumer-grade printers. It contains functionalised nanodiamond particles. The thermal conductivity in uDiamond enables printing speeds of up to 500mm/s. The filament is for both consumer-grade and professional FDM/FFF 3D printers. The recommended printing temperature is 220°C – 250°C (depending on the printing speed) which can be 50-500 mm/sec. Similarly, bed temperatures should range between 0°C – 50°C.

This is the first product of a family that will be sold as a finished 3D filament and in a granular format, as well. VTT has been a long-term, reliable partner in this development, and has reacted to our needs quickly,” said Carbodeon CEO Vesa Myllymäki.

VTT helped in developing methods for evenly dispersing the nanodiamonds in PLA to best optimise the filament specifically for printing. The diamond nanoparticles within uDiamond have a diameter of 4–6 mm. They aid in improving the thermal conductivity which, in turn, improves the smoothness of printing and processing. VTT´s Polymer Pilot produced the original 600 kg material batch, which Carbodeon had refined into a commercial product.

“Using our chemical pilot devices, we at VTT produced the nanodispersed material required for the melt processing, and thus supported the creation of a new product,” says Jarmo Ropponen, Research Team Leader at VTT’s chemical pilots.

Nanodiamonds significantly improve material performance at a low cost despite such small quantities being present. VTT state that the preliminary tests showed the modulus of the 3D-printed test pieces improved by over 200% in comparison with the standard, market PLA filament.