GS Paper: GS2-19.Effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests, Indian diaspora.

Why vaccination gap is cause of worry

• By the end of May 2021, only 2.1% of Africans had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
• A widely vaccinated world population is the only way to end the pandemic; otherwise, the multiplication of variants is likely to undermine the effectiveness of existing vaccines.
• Vaccination is also a prerequisite for lifting the restrictions that are holding back our economies and freedoms.
• If the vaccination gap persists, it risks reversing the trend in recent decades of declining poverty and global inequalities.
• Such a negative dynamic would hold back economic activity and increase geopolitical tensions.
• The cost of inaction would for sure be much higher for advanced economies than what we collectively would have to spend to help vaccinate the whole world.
• The International Monetary Fund has proposed $50 billion plan in order to be able to vaccinate 40% of the world population in 2021 and 60% by mid-2022.

Need to resist the vaccine nationalism

• To achieve the goal set by IMF, we need closely coordinated multilateral action.
• We must resist the threat posed by linking the provision of vaccines to political goals and vaccine nationalism.
• The EU has been vaccinating its own population, while exporting large volumes of vaccines and contributing substantially to the vaccines roll-out in low-income countries.
• The EU has also exported 240 million doses to 90 countries, which is about as much as used within the EU.
• One-third of all COVAX doses delivered so far have been financed by the EU.
• India’s Vaccine Maitri is another example of global solidarity.
• However, this effort is still far from sufficient to prevent the vaccination gap from widening.

Way forward

• To fill widening vaccination gap, countries with the required knowledge and means should increase their production capacities, so that they can both vaccinate their own populations and export more vaccines.
• All countries must avoid restrictive measures that affect vaccine supply chains.
• We also need to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and technology, so that more countries can produce vaccines.
• Voluntary licensing is the privileged way to ensure such transfer of technology and know-how.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that health is a global public good. Our common global COVID-19 vaccine action to close the vaccination gap must be the first step toward genuine global health cooperation, as foreseen by the Rome Declaration recently adopted at the Global Health Summit.

The article suggest the Indian model for peaceful coexistence as a possible solution to Israel-Palestine conflict.

Brief history of the conflict

• Britain renounced its Mandate over Palestine in 1948.
• This paved the way for the United Nations to divide Palestine between the Jews and Arabs, giving them about 55% and 45% of the land, respectively.
• The Jews, meanwhile, had declared the establishment of the state of Israel for which they had been working for long.
• The Palestinians, who lacked the resources to conceive of a state, failed to form a state of their own in the land allotted to them.
• Instead, a coalition of Arab countries invaded the nascent state of Israel to nip it in the bud.
• Israel defeated the Arab armies.
• Israel also destroyed about 600 Palestinian villages and expelled about 80% of Arabs from its territory.
• In 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel captured not just more Palestinian land but also Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights.
• During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Arabs came to realise that Israel is here to stay.

Need for realisation on both the sides

• The Arab states failed to impress the realisation of permanency of Israel upon their Palestinian brethren, a sizeable number of whom remain committed to seeking a solution through counter-violence. 
• Vicious cycle of violence is not going to end unless there is realism on both sides.
• The Hamas should know that Israel will not give up on holding on to land it has held for years.
• Israel should understand that total subjugation, expulsion or even decimation of Palestinians will not make it any safer.
• A solution based on the common humanity of all stakeholders, one that is not riven by racial and religious schisms, needs to be explored.

Viability of Indian model

• The Indian model of democracy and secularism, which accommodates religious, ethnic, linguistic and other diversities, could be a viable model for the peaceful coexistence of formerly antagonistic groups.
•  India evolved a unique model of accommodating the victors and the vanquished, without ever resorting to the latter’s decimation.
• A modus vivendi has to evolve on the basis of hard realities, the first of which is that neither the Jews nor the Palestinians are going to vanish.
• If the two-state solution is nowhere in the offing, a single state after the Indian model, i.e., a secular, democratic and pluralistic state, may be the only feasible option.
• The Palestinian refugees have a right to return.
• That the altered demographics would impinge on the religio-racial character of Israel is not an argument which behoves a modern democratic state.
• It is true that a nation state belongs to the group which constituted itself into a nation.
• A nation is an imagined community.
• As imagination expands, the foundations of the nation become deeper.

Consider the question “In the absence of two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, what lessons India could offer to the two parties for peaceful coexistence?”

Conclusion

Israel might not offer the right model of conflict resolution for India, but India presents a model of peaceful coexistence for Israel.

The article discusses the types of response the recent violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict would invoke across the world and also explains the perils of ignoring the conflict.

Three types of responses

• The deadly riots in Israel and the war in Gaza, is likely to evoke three kinds of responses: The indifferent, the imperial, the humanitarian.

1) Moral indifference

•  Instead of becoming the symbol of the unfinished tasks of decolonisation, and a human rights catastrophe, the Palestinian question is now mostly an occasion to vent cynicism.
• The moral questions the oppression of Palestinians poses is avoided by claiming that in this conflict we can assigning rights and wrongs equally to both sides.
• There is the spectacle of civilians on both sides living in terror.
• There is the fanaticism of the right-wing in Israel and there is the fanaticism of Hamas and Fatah.
• Blaming both sides also whitewashes the fact that there is a monumental injustice to the Palestinians at the heart of the problem.

2) The imperial response

• The events leading up to the recent clashes at the Al-Aqsa Mosque can be seen as part of a long pattern of pushing out Palestinians from territory Israel wants to claim.
• American administration has not been able to significantly roll back this project of pushing the Palestinians out.
• Palestine will once again be the site where the Biden administration’s liberal internationalism will face challenge.

3) Humanitarian response

• This third response is to dig beneath the politics and find bridges in shared humanity and suffering.
• This is also the tack of the peace movements that use culture and a history of shared suffering to build bridges.
•  They emphasise that dispossession and exile is something both communities share; they, of all the people, should be able to understand each other.
•  Humanity and culture, even when deeply internalised, collapse quickly when subject to fear.
• And they always fall short of acknowledging the core issue at stake: Political equality between two peoples.

Geopolitical implications of conflict

• The violence of Israel will beget more terrorist violence of Hamas and Fatah, with every world power from Russia to Iran influencing the chaos.
• Israel needs to be reminded of the blowback of imperial politics: The ultimate consequence of trying to dominate a people is that you end up destroying the moral legitimacy of your own claims.
• No amount of military capacity can compensate for the images of lynching, rioting, and provocations that we have seen this week.

Conclusion

We continually risk conflict if the Palestinian question is simply treated as an object of geo-political opportunism, not as a question of basic dignity and justice.

The article highlights the important role played by the US in the geopolitics of the region and the impact of the US retreat on the region foreign policy landscape.

How the US shaped the regional politics of South Asia

• Since it replaced Britain as the major external power in Greater Middle East half a century ago, America has been the pivot around which the regional politics has played out.
• Many regional actors sought alliances with America to secure themselves against ambitious or troublesome neighbours.
• Others sought to balance against America.
• Israel’s security, ensuring oil supplies, competing with other powers, making regional peace, promoting democracy, and stamping out terrorism are no longer compelling factors demanding massive American military, political and diplomatic investments in the region.

Region now has to learn to live with neighbours

• As America steps back from the Middle East, most regional actors either need alternate patrons or reduced tensions with their neighbours.
• Although China and Russia have regional ambitions, neither of them bring the kind of strategic heft America brought to bear on the Middle East all these decades.
• Turkey has figured that its troubled economy can’t sustain the ambitious regional policies.
•  After years of challenging Saudi leadership of the Islamic world, Erdogan is offering an olive branch to Riyadh.
• After years of intense mutual hostility, Saudi Arabia and Iran are now exploring means to reduce bilateral tensions and moderate their proxy wars in the region.
• Saudi Arabia is also trying to heal the rift within the Gulf by ending the earlier effort to isolate Qatar. 
•  These changes come in the wake of the big moves last year by some Arab states — the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — to normalise ties with Israel.

How India’s approach helped maintain ties in the region

• India’s emphasis on good relations with all the regional actors without a reference to their conflicts has been vindicated by the turn of events.
• Barring Turkey, which turned hostile to India under Erdogan, India has managed to expand its ties with most regional actors.
• Hopefully, the new regional churn will encourage Turkey to take a fresh look at its relations with India.

Effect on India-Pak relations

• The regional reset in the Middle East has coincided with efforts by Delhi and Rawalpindi to cool their tensions.
• The ceasefire on the Line of Control in Kashmir announced at the end of February appears to be holding.
• The US withdrawal from Afghanistan poses major challenges to the Subcontinent.
• India and Pakistan, for very different reasons, would have liked to see the US forces stay forever in Afghanistan.
• For India, American military presence would have kept a check on extremist forces and created conducive conditions for an Indian role in Afghanistan.
• For Pakistan, American military presence in Afghanistan keeps the US utterly dependent on Pakistan for geographic access and operational support.

Challenge of terrorism

• The prospect of trans-border links between the Taliban and other extremist forces in the region is a challenge that South Asian states will have to confront sooner than later.
• Soaring levels of violence in Afghanistan and attack on the former president of Maldives, underlines South Asia’s enduring challenges with terrorism.
• Unless the South Asian states collaborate on countering extremism and terrorism, every one of them will be weakened.

Consider the question “How US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan will influence the regional geopolitics of the region?”

Conclusion

The region needs to focus on the peace and harmony in the region while resolving the bilateral issues through dialogue.