GOA, India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi branded Pakistan a “mother-ship of terrorism” at a summit of the BRICS nations on Sunday, testing the cohesion of a group whose heavyweight member China is a close ally of its South Asian arch-rival.
Modi’s remarks to a meeting of leaders from the BRICS — which include Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa — escalated his diplomatic drive to isolate Pakistan, which India accuses of sponsoring cross-border terrorism.
Tension between the nuclear-armed neighbors has escalated since a Sept. 18 attack on an army base in Kashmir, near the disputed frontier with Pakistan, killed 19 Indian soldiers in the worst such assault in 14 years.
India later said it had carried out retaliatory “surgical strikes” across the de facto border that inflicted significant casualties. Pakistan denied any role in the attack on the Uri army base, and said the Indian operation had not even happened, dismissing it as typical cross-border firing.
“In our own region, terrorism poses a grave threat to peace, security and development,” Modi said in his remarks to BRICS leaders who met at a resort hotel in the western state of Goa.
“Tragically, the mother-ship of terrorism is a country in India’s neighborhood,” the 66-year-old prime minister said, without directly naming Pakistan, in a series of tweets issued by the foreign ministry.
No immediate reaction was available from Pakistan’s foreign ministry.
Modi’s posturing overshadowed the gathering of leaders of a group originally set up to boost economic cooperation. It followed a productive bilateral summit with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Saturday that yielded billions of dollars in defense and energy deals.
The BRICS leaders had donned brightly colored sleeveless jackets, of a style made popular by India’s first post-independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, for an informal dinner on Saturday evening.
They were due later on Sunday to hold an outreach session with leaders from a little-known group of countries from the Bay of Bengal region whose key attribute, from India’s point of view, is that Pakistan is not a member.
Lack of strategic restraint
Modi’s hard line against Pakistan marks a departure from India’s tradition of strategic restraint, and New Delhi has won expressions of support from both the West and Russia over the army base attack.
Yet China, a longstanding ally of Pakistan that plans to build a $46 billion export corridor, has shown public restraint.
Modi and President Xi Jinping also held a bilateral meeting on Saturday and the accounts of their conversation emerging from both sides pointed to key differences of opinion.
In one remark reported by the state Xinhua news agency, Xi said that China and India should “support each other in participating in regional affairs and enhance cooperation within multilateral frameworks.”
The dispatch went on to refer to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). This grouping includes Pakistan, which was to have hosted a summit in November that collapsed after India and other members pulled out.
The final BRICS summit declaration was expected to repeat earlier condemnations of “terrorism in all its forms,” say diplomats and analysts, but avoid leveling blame over tensions between India and Pakistan.
“Modi is aware that such language wouldn’t get the consensus necessary to make it into the final communique. Including it in his speech ensures it gets wide circulation anyway,” said South Asia expert Shashank Joshi.
“So far, we haven’t seen any indication at all that China is softening its public support for Pakistan. India did not expect differently,” added Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
(Additional reporting by Drazen Jorgic in Islamabad)
Pakistan a 'mother-ship of terrorism', Modi says at BRICS summit
Pakistan a 'mother-ship of terrorism', Modi says at BRICS summit
Poland slow to counter Russia’s ‘existential threat’: general
- The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size
- Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039
WARSAW: Russia poses an “existential threat” to Poland and its military is lagging, the country’s armed forces chief warned senior officials on Wednesday.
Poland, the largest country on NATO’s eastern flank and a neighbor of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is the western alliance’s largest spender in relative terms.
This year, the country is allocating 4.8 percent of its GDP to defense, just shy of the alliance’s five percent target to be met by 2035.
However, that record defense spending was not enough to “make up for nearly three decades of chronic underfunding of the armed forces,” General Wieslaw Kukula, chief of the general staff, argued at the meeting, which included top officers, the defense minister and Poland’s president.
The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size.
Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039, compared with around 210,000 at present.
As a result of a lack of updates, some new Polish units “are not achieving combat readiness,” due to insufficient equipment, rather than a personnel shortage, the general argued.
Meanwhile, he added, “the Russian Federation remains an existential threat to Poland.”
Russia “is constantly reorganizing its forces, drawing on the lessons from its aggression in Ukraine, and building up the capacity for a conventional conflict with NATO countries,” he stressed.
Poland is to receive 43.7 billion euros ($51,5 billion) in loans under the European Union’s Security Action For Europe (SAFE) scheme, designed to strengthen Europe’s defensive capabilities.
Warsaw plans to use these funds to boost domestic arms production.
The Polish government claims that Poland will be able to access SAFE finance even if President Karol Nawrocki — backed by Poland’s conservative-nationalist opposition — vetos a law setting out domestic arrangements for its implementation.
Law and Justice (PiS) — the main opposition party — argues that SAFE could become a new tool for Brussels to place undue pressure on Poland, thanks to a planned mechanism for monitoring the funds, which they claim risks undermining Polish sovereignty.
