Indian prime minister-elect Narendra Modi summoned senior figures from his Hindu nationalist party yesterday for talks on building a new government that is set to steer India sharply to the right.
Modi was holding meetings in New Delhi with his closest aides, as well as national and state leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after storming to power at general elections with a strong mandate for economic reform.
A day after parties, street parades and religious ceremonies were staged around the country to celebrate the BJP’s landslide election victory, Modi was behind closed doors working on forming his new Cabinet.
B.S Yeddyurappa, a BJP leader from Karnataka State, was among the first to meet Modi at Gujarat House in Delhi as rounds of negotiations for plum posts got under way, television footage showed.
“All kinds of people are meeting Modi,” senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar said, declining to give details of the talks.
Modi, a popular, but divisive, figure, later met the party’s elder statesman L.K. Advani at his Delhi residence after the pair fell out last year over Modi’s nomination as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate.
Modi, a former tea boy who has governed his home state of Gujarat for the past 13 years, is expected to take office later this week after securing the strongest mandate of any Indian leader in 30 years.
Modi and his right-wing BJP trounced the left-leaning Indian National Congress, which has ruled India for most of the 60 years since India’s independence, piling humiliation on the famous Gandhi family that dominates the party.
Modi faces enormous expectations from tens of millions of voters after pledging to create jobs and increase development to revive the country’s stagnant economy growing at the lowest level in a decade.
After his presidential-style campaign dominated the election, Modi reiterated yesterday his pledge to work with his BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition to make India a world leader “once again.”
“NDA is committed to creating new opportunities to empower the people of India & to make India a Jagat [world] Guru once again,” he said on his official Twitter account.
Two US House of Representatives committees yesterday condemned China’s attempt to orchestrate a crash involving Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) car when she visited the Czech Republic last year as vice president-elect. Czech local media in March last year reported that a Chinese diplomat had run a red light while following Hsiao’s car from the airport, and Czech intelligence last week told local media that Chinese diplomats and agents had also planned to stage a demonstrative car collision. Hsiao on Saturday shared a Reuters news report on the incident through her account on social media platform X and wrote: “I
STILL ON THE TABLE: The government is not precluding advanced nuclear power generation if it is proven safer and the nuclear waste issue is solved, the premier said Taiwan is willing to be in step with the world by considering new methods of nuclear energy generation and to discuss alternative approaches to provide more stable power generation and help support industries, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. The government would continue to develop diverse and green energy solutions, which include considering advances in nuclear energy generation, he added. Cho’s remarks echoed President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments in an interview last month, saying the government is not precluding “advanced and newer nuclear power generation” if it is proven to be safer and the issue of nuclear waste is resolved. Lai’s comment had
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