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While President Donald Trump doesn't enjoy the same support as predecessors former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush -- presumably because of his trade threats and his restrictions on visas for highly-skilled workers, most of which go to Indians -- that broad approval remains largely intact, with 56% of Indians polled saying they had confidence in Trump to do the right thing on world affairs.

At one level, India and the US have continued to move their nascent strategic relationship forward with mutual concerns about China's territorial and political assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific serving as the backdrop.

The US president and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have gone out of their respective ways to rub shoulders and share podiums with each other over the past four years.

ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”

In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power

The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed

But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.

As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.

When he ran for prime minister in 2014, Mr. Modi extolled the success of what he called “the Gujarat model” — a set of business-friendly policies he claimed had led to widely shared prosperity for the people of Gujarat. Those claims have now been called into question by 500,000 of his most faithful supporters, many of whom, in dozens of interviews last week, described a Gujarat where a young, educated work force is finding it increasingly difficult to find good private-sector jobs.

The point of the protest, he explained in an interview, was to confront Mr. Modi and his allies with a brutally difficult choice — either side with the Patels who had brought them to power, or else earn the Patels’ political wrath by siding with the castes and tribes that currently benefit from the quota system.

The impact of the week’s events is still being absorbed across India. Taking their cue from the Patels, other prosperous castes have now begun talking about holding similar protests. On editorial pages and TV news programs, debate is raging over the nation’s quota system, first codified in India’s Constitution 65 years ago. The Indian Express called the Patel protest “an eruption against growth that has not been inclusive.” The Hindu called it a “rude awakening” for Mr. Modi.

if the B.J.P. keeps falling back on its core agenda (Hindu nationalism cloaked in runaway pro-business dogma), it will be left only with its core support base (Hindu right-wingers and India Inc.). The A.A.P., in contrast, has come to stand for straight talk and transparency put in the service of the common people’s interests.

the A.A.P. made an impressive electoral debut in the Delhi election of December 2013. Then it suffered three major setbacks. Soon after taking office, it failed to secure other parties’ backing for a signature anticorruption bill. As a result, the A.A.P.’s leader, the ex-bureaucrat-turned-social activist Arvind Kejriwal, resigned as Delhi’s chief minister. Partly as a result of that, the party had a poor showing in the general election in May.

But Mr. Kejriwal apologized to voters — a rarity in Indian politics — and the party embarked on a period of soul-searching. It went back to basics, reaching out to constituents through a grassroots campaign that concentrated on their daily concerns, like corruption and access to electricity and water, education and healthcare. In order to better focus on the Delhi election, the A.A.P. eschewed national politics in the second half of 2014, refusing to run in most state elections, and it limited its criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. Its large cast of volunteers made aggressive use of social media —

discontent is palpable: the Pew Research Center found Indians’ confidence in the economy had fallen by 27 percentage points in the past year, the largest drop of any country it measured.

Separate but linked is deep despair among India’s farmers, who are struggling with steep falls in the prices of staples such as chickpeas, onions and oilseeds, and whose mood can sink a government in a country where 70% of people still directly or indirectly earn their living from agriculture. Farmers have marched on Delhi five times in the past 12 months.

rural India is still reeling from Modi’s surprise decision in 2016 to invalidate a majority of the currency in the economy, which led to months of cash shortages and knocked an estimated 2% off the country’s GDP.

India is the world's second-most populous country and has the fifth-biggest economy, with trade connections all over the world. Yet despite its size, the country of 1.34 billion appears to have avoided the full hit of the pandemic. To date, India has only 492 confirmed cases of coronavirus and nine deaths.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained there is no sign of community spread, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has praised India's swift response, which has included grounding domestic and international commercial flights and suspending all tourist visas.On Tuesday night, Modi ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown starting at midnight Wednesday. The order, the largest of its type yet to be issued globally, means all Indians must stay at home and all nonessential services such as public transport, malls and market will be shut down.

But fears are growing that the country remains susceptible to a wider, potentially more damaging outbreak. Experts have cautioned that India is not testing enough people to know the true extent of the issue -- and have questioned the viability and sustainability of a nationwide lockdown.

The Tokyo Olympics have been postponed. New York, now the center of the outbreak in America, braces for a flood of patients. The playwright Terrence McNally dies of complications from the coronavirus.

tocks rallied on the hope that Washington was close to producing a stimulus bill. Shares soared for airlines and other companies expected to benefit.

Trump expressed outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.

Jaswinder Singh Gill had plowed 20 years of savings from an earlier career as a mechanical engineer into his family’s nearly 40-acre plot in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab, just a dozen miles from the border with Pakistan.

Then India suddenly transformed the way it farms. Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year pushed through new laws that would reduce the government’s role in agriculture, aimed at fixing a system that has led to huge rice surpluses in a country that still grapples with malnutrition.

At 56 years old, Mr. Gill doesn’t know what to do next. “How can a man restart at that age?” he said.

Narendra Modi is to become the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, India's foreign minister has said.

The two countries have shared 23 years of diplomatic relations and are working together on counter-terrorism, defence, agriculture and the water and energy sectors.But no Indian prime minister or president has ever visited Israel.

The two countries have shared 23 years of diplomatic relations and are working tog

ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.

The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.

Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.

are deliberately stripped down to minimize data usage and the cost to the phone company

Mr. Zuckerberg declined several requests to discuss Internet.org. But he remains passionate about his crusade. “Internet access needs to be treated as an important enabler of human rights and human potential,” he told the United Nations last month.

Last month, he hosted a live-streamed chat with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And this week, Mr. Zuckerberg will be in New Delhi, where he will take questions from some of Facebook’s 130 milli

Are we entering a new age of global revolution? Or is it foolish to try to link anger in India over the price of onions to pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia?

recent upheavals do appear to share one key factor: youth. In most cases, younger people are at the forefront of calls for change. The uprising that unexpectedly swept away Sudan’s ancien regime this year was essentially generational

while younger people, in any era, are predisposed to shake up the established order, extreme demographic, social and political imbalances are intensifying present-day pressures

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

India’s top military commander has created shock waves by suggesting that Kashmiris could be shipped off to “deradicalization camps,” which rights activists consider an alarming echo of what China has done to many of its Muslim citizens.

But rights activists and Kashmiri intellectuals were deeply unsettled, saying that the general’s words revealed how the highest levels of the Indian military viewed Kashmiri people and that his comments could presage another disturbing turn of events.

Over the past three years, the Chinese government has corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into what it calls vocational training centers but what rights activists say are internment camps and prisons. The Uighurs, like Kashmiris, are Muslims who are part of a minority that is often viewed with suspicion by the central government.

Indian students were hitting the books hard in preparation for a big test on cows, reading that India’s cows have more emotions than foreign ones, and that their humps have special powers.

But facing widespread ridicule, this weekend the government abruptly postponed the first exam based on a new curriculum, pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

Critics said the curriculum, devised by the National Cow Commission set up by Mr. Modi’s government, was an especially bold move by his ruling party to push its ideology and undercut the secularism that is enshrined in India’s Constitution but seems to be increasingly imperiled with each passing day.

S. Jaishankar, Mr. Modi’s external affairs minister, admitted recently that there were “no easy answers” to the dilemma posed by India’s aggressive neighbor. “They are changing, we are changing,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “How do we find an equilibrium?”

In a book published in 2020, just as he had taken over as Mr. Modi’s trusted foreign policy architect, Mr. Jaishankar wrote that the tensions between the United States and China set “the global backdrop” for India’s choices in a “world of all against all.” India’s ambitions as a major power, he wrote, would require a juggling act: “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.”

India’s rise as a large, growing economy has allowed it to hold its ground — working with any partner it can benefit from — in a polarized and uncertain world.

It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists.[11] Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste.[12] Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present)