Promotion of Yogi Adityanath is seen representing the rise of Hindu power
.. Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a hard-line Hindu nationalist politician to lead India’s most-populous state over the weekend, a surprise move that marks a swing toward contentious religious politics by a leader who had stuck largely to a development-focused agenda.Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest and parliamentarian for nearly 20 years, is known for his divisive and incendiary speeches targeting Muslims... Mr. Adityanath will serve a five-year term as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state where nearly 20% of the residents, or 40 million people, are Muslims and where religious tensions easily and frequently flare.
.. Mr. Adityanath’s promotion.. represents the rise of a muscular, Hindu India and a chance to correct what they see as years of official policy going too far to accommodate India’s Muslim minority.
.. “It signifies a new reading on the BJP’s part that public opinion will now accept what was considered politically imprudent not so long ago.”
.. Mr. Adityanath is among the strongest voices in the BJP pushing for the construction of a temple in a place in Uttar Pradesh where, in the 1990s, a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th century mosque
.. He campaigns against so-called love jihad, which he describes as an “international conspiracy” by Muslims to kidnap or lure Hindu women to marry and convert them.
He has exhorted Hindus to respond to attacks on members of their community with tenfold violence.
.. his choice for chief minister harks back to the Hindu nationalist roots of his party, which arose out of a nine-decades-old movement to establish India as a Hindu nation.
.. Mr. Adityanath built a support base in Uttar Pradesh by projecting India’s 80% Hindu majority as victimized and shortchanged by his political rivals, who he accuses of a pro-Muslim bias
Inside India’s Unprecedented Assault on Cash
India is hardly alone in seeking to drive underground money into the banking system. But the scale, pace and finality of Mr. Modi’s action make it a stunning and painful test of what had to this point been a largely theoretical debate.
.. “The great task that the country wants to accomplish today is the realization of our dream of a cashless society,” the prime minister said in a recent radio address.
.. The lives of the poor, in particular—many of whom depend on irregular, off-the-books employment paid in cash—have been upended.
.. That was when Mr. Dastur noticed a problem: The new bills were slightly smaller than the old ones.
.. engineers would have to open up each of the nation’s ATMs and manually reconfigure the cash drawers before they could dispense the new notes—a process that NCR estimated could take two months.
.. The Modi administration insists there will eventually be big benefits, including better tax collection, improved surveillance of crime networks, and more accurate monitoring of commercial activity itself.
.. Defenders of cash see risks in those same capabilities—including a loss of privacy and a vast expansion of government power.
.. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, writing in The Washington Post, argued, “It’s time to kill the $100 bill.”
.. Fewer than a third of Indians have a smartphone
.. Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, author of “The Curse of Cash.” “That’s a big ally of governments.”
As Trump vows to stop flow of jobs overseas, U.S. plans to make fighter jets in India
In both cases, the aviation companies would be building production facilities in India; Lockheed Martin proposes to move its entire F-16 assembly line from Texas to India, making India the sole producer of the single-engine combat aircraft.
The U.S. military is phasing out the F-16 for its own use, but other countries remain as likely customers.
.. Analysts say Lockheed’s main rival in the single-engine sphere is Sweden’s Saab Group and its Gripen fighter. Chicago-based Boeing has also proposed to make its twin engine F/A-18 in India.
.. Lockheed has promised that India would not only manufacture and export its jets but would play a “critical role” in supporting a fleet of about 3,200 F-16s in operation around the world
.. Another strike against it, for some, is that it is the fighter aircraft used by archrival Pakistan.
.. A greater concern, said Pushan Das, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, is whether “India wants to be seen as close to the United States and building U.S. fighter aircraft, or does it want to be more politically neutral and choose a partner like Sweden, given the fact that New Delhi needs to manage its relationship with Russia and China.
Indians Rush Frantically to Launder Their ‘Black Money’
For decades, Indians have stuffed their mattresses with 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, the most widely circulated bills, worth the equivalent of a few dollars.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted to tax that money. His strategy was to force Indians to reveal what they had been hoarding. How? He banned the bills and told everyone that they had to exchange them for new ones.
.. Because more affluent Indians are allowed to exchange only 250,000 rupees, or about $3,700, without proof that they paid taxes, some are handing wads of cash to poor people, paying them a fee to hold the money in their accounts and return it later.
.. About a third of all business in India is carried out using black money. Whole industries, like real estate, trading, luxury retailing and wedding services, have been fueled by black money for decades.
.. In a country where government oversight is weak, it has been easy to transact business in cash and to avoid taxes
.. Cash had become so ingrained in the real estate industry that it was difficult to make a deal without paying some portion under the table. When Ramanan Laxminarayan, a Princeton University senior research scholar, tried to buy an apartment in the New Delhi area, he was told that he would have to provide 60 percent of the purchase price, about $420,000, in cash to close the deal.
.. India’s notoriously lavish weddings have taken a big hit. Families that had stashed large amounts of black money to spend in the coming wedding season
.. Several marriages planned for five-star hotels have been downscaled