India’s Modi Visits Bhutan on First Step of Bid to Reassert Regional Sway

Jakarta Globe, Sanjeev Miglani, Jun 15, 2014

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi
comes out of a meeting room to receive
his Bhutanese counterpart Tshering
Tobgay before the start of their bilateral
meeting in New Delhi on May 27, 2014.
Modi made his first trip as premier by
visiting the Himalayan kingdom
 Bhutan on June 15. (Reuters Photo)

Thimphu, Bhutan. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday kicked off his first visit abroad since taking office, arriving in Bhutan to launch a drive to reassert Indian influence in the region, offering financial and technical help and the lure of a huge market.

The tiny Buddhist nation wedged in the Himalayas between India and China is the closest India has to an ally in South Asia, a region of bristling rivalry where China is making inroads.

While India has been struggling recently with policy paralysis and a slowing economy, China has been building ports in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and its “all-weather ally”, Pakistan. China overtook India as the biggest foreign investor in Nepal in the first six months of this year.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist party has vowed to end the neglect of neighbors and in an unprecedented gesture, he invited all regional leaders to his inauguration last month.

The choice of a visit to Bhutan to build on the inaugural outreach shows an astute sense of the region’s critical importance to India’s economic dynamism and strategic strength, said Alyssa Ayres, a South Asia expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

“Of course, India is also closely watching China’s border talks with Bhutan and China’s recent efforts to establish stronger ties with Thimphu,” she said on the think tank’s Asia Unbound blog.

On Sunday, hundreds of school children dressed in traditional red and green tunics lined the route from the airport to wave the Indian flag as Modi’s motorcade arrived in Bhutan’s capital of Thimphu, nestled among mountains and for centuries closed to outsiders.

At the airport, Modi was welcomed with a ceremonial white scarf by Bhutan’s Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay and cabinet members, wearing the national costume of ankle-length red robe.

During the trip, Modi will lay the foundation of a 600-megawatt hydroelectric power station and inaugurate a parliament building also constructed by India.

“Bhutan and India share a very special relationship that has stood the test of time,” Modi said before he left New Delhi. “Thus, Bhutan was a natural choice for my first visit abroad.”

In the longer term, Modi’s government aims to make India the dominant foreign investor across South Asia as well as the main provider of infrastructure loans, in the same way China has done in much of the rest of Asia and in Africa.

Consolidating ties with difficult neighbors like Pakistan and Bangladesh could reduce poverty and transform regional security relationships, Indian officials say.

“Although India would like to have a greater say in South Asian matters beyond trade, so far we have not been able to exercise substantial political clout,” said P.D. Rai, a lawmaker from the state of Sikkim, which shares a border with Bhutan. “Modi’s first visit to Bhutan will have to be looked at in this light.”

He is accompanied by Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj as well as National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, credited with helping craft the neighbors-first policy.

Enthusiastic response

India’s neighbors have responded enthusiastically to Modi’s overtures. His Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, overcame resistance at home to attend the inauguration even though political ties remain fragile and marked by deep distrust.

On Sunday, giant portraits of Modi and his Bhutanese counterpart, Tobgay, were strung up along the highway Modi took from the airport. Prayer flags tied high on poles fluttered in the wind in the deeply religious country.

Bhutan, the size of Switzerland and with a population of 750,000, has only recently emerged from centuries of isolation.

Its first road was built in 1962 and television and the Internet arrived in 1999.

It is the first country to monitor gross national happiness, an alternative to gross domestic product, to balance a tentative embrace of modernity with an effort to preserve traditions.

But Bhutan, which made the transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy in 2008, is struggling with high unemployment and a growing national debt.

The government that took power in 2012 says it wants to focus on obstacles to happiness.

“It is good that we are being connected to the world, we are all on Facebook,” said schoolgirl Tenzin Lamsang, as she and a group of friends prepared to greet the Indian leader.

Reuters

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"The Time Capsule of Gaia" – Feb 9, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“…  Tesla the Man

There was a point in time when humanity almost stumbled, by the way. You were having a hard time with electricity. So a man came along who was way ahead of his time and was available and his name was Nikola Tesla. He gave you a principle that today you call alternating current. Dear ones, I challenge you to understand this principle. Most of you can't, because it is not in 3D. The attributes are still considered "genius-level thinking" to this day. The whole idea of the kind of electricity you use today comes from this man's quantum mind.

That was all he was allowed to do. Tesla himself was a kind of time capsule, delivered at the right time. He had more, but alternating current was all that was allowed to be given to the planet at that time. Oh, he tried to give you more. He knew there were other things, but nothing was able to be developed. If I told you what else he had discovered, you might not be aware of it at all, since it was never allowed to get out of the box. Earth was not ready for it.

Tesla discovered massless objects. He could alter the mass of atomic structure using designer magnetics, but he never could control it. He had objects fly off his workbench and hit the ceiling, but he couldn't duplicate or control it. It just wasn't time yet. Do you know what else he was known for? It was seemingly the failure of the transmission of electricity. However, he didn't fail at all.

There are pictures of his tower, but every time a Human Being sees a tower, there is a biased assumption that something is going to be broadcast through the air. But in the case of Tesla, he had figured out how to broadcast electricity through the ground. You need towers for that because they have to pick up the magnetics within the ground in a certain way to broadcast them and then collect them again from the nodes of the planet's magnetic grid system. We talked about this before. He was utilizing the grid of the planet that is in the earth itself! He was on the edge of showing that you could use the whole grid of the planet magnetically to broadcast electricity and pick it up where you need it, safely, with no wires. But the earth was not ready for it.

Tesla died a broken man, filled with ideas that would have brought peace to planet Earth, but he was simply not allowed to give any of them to you.

Now I'll tell you why he was stopped, dear ones, and it's the first time we have ever told you – because these inventions were too easy to weaponize. Humanity just isn't ready for it. You're not ready for massless objects, either, for the principles are too easy to weaponize.

"So," you might say, "when will we be ready for it?" I think you already know the answer, don't you? At the time when Human consciousness reaches a point where that which is most important is unification and not separation, it will happen. A point where conquering and power are not desirable ideas or assets. A point where humanity will measure the strength of its population by how healthy they are and not by economic growth. A point where coming together with your neighbor is the main objective to social consciousness, and not conquering them or eliminating them. That's coming, dear ones. It's a ways away, but it's coming. Look around the planet at the moment. The old energy leaders are obvious, are they not? It's like they are relics in a world of thinking that is passing them by.  ….”

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