A former envoy to India has suggested deepening ties with New Delhi to capitalize on the nation’s existing friendship with India’s incoming ruling party, which swept to a landslide victory in general elections over the weekend.
Taiwan and India should work to beef up the intensity and depth of their relations now that the groundwork for exchanges has been laid, Ong Wen-chyi (翁文琪) told the Central News Agency in a recent interview.
Ong, who was the nation’s representative to India from 2008 to 2012 and now serves as chairman of Chunghwa Post, made his appeal after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to victory in India’s parliamentary election on Sunday.
The victory will usher in a new government led by prime minister-elect Narendra Modi.
In urging the government to take action, Ong criticized it for not showing sufficient commitment to closer bilateral ties, in contrast to India, which has shown considerable interest in cooperation.
“Compared with India, how much effort has Taiwan made [on cooperation]?” Ong asked, citing frequent visits to Taiwan by officials from India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
Given the recent anti-China riots in Vietnam, “perhaps we should consider whether India should play a greater role [in the nation’s economy],” said Ong, who helped the state of Gujarat, governed by Modi since 2001, solicit investment from Taiwan-based China Steel Corp.
The nation’s ties with the BJP date back almost seven years ago when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then a presidential candidate, visited BJP President Rajnath Singh in June 2007. Singh called the meeting with Ma historic.
Deputy Minister of National Defense Andrew Hsia (夏立言), Ong’s predecessor as representative to India, met with Modi at an international meeting on the shipping industry in Gujarat in September 2007.
During their meeting, Modi lauded the nation’s expertise in hardware and said that with India’s strength in software, the two sides should cooperate closely like “body and soul.”
Modi visited Taiwan in November 1999 when he was a general-secretary of his party.
Economic cooperation with India has warmed up in recent years, with the two signing an agreement to avoid double taxation in 2001 and another for mutual assistance in customs matters in July 2011.
In March last year, the two nations signed an agreement allowing temporary duty-free admission of products and equipment, usually for exhibition purposes, to boost trade and business exchanges.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching