Rahul Gandhi backs ‘Cockroach’ demonstrations, Trump’s world court attack seen as illegal, AI producing have and have-not countries, and China’s unique ancient art replica.
The massive demonstrations across India began last week as a youthful protest against a politically suspect clean out of the electoral rolls. As this week ends, Narendra Modi’s government is facing opposition from a previously unknown union of political parties, youth activists and student groups who are also campaigning for fundamental rights – freedom of speech and of assembly.
Prominent in the protests is the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical movement turned political force. But Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha (lower house), has emerged as a key figure.
A story in The Indian Express said Gandhi had ensured that the protests against Modi’s government and Chief Electoral Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar have drawn a full turnout from his INDIA bloc multi-party coalition, student activists and civil society groups.
The Statesman newspaper quoted Gandhi as saying: “We are standing together as one. There are no parallel protests, only one single protest with one mission – to restore democracy in India.” He later openly supported the ‘Cockroach’ party, the paper said.
A commentary in The Hindu newspaper, by historian Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, said the degree of unity was unprecedented. “India’s opposition parties and thousands of ordinary citizens are finally galvanised against the Modi government,” Bhargav said. “They are speaking in one voice against voter suppression and for India’s democratic future.”
The demonstrations, seeking the resignation of electoral commissioner Kumar, erupted across India last Saturday. In Delhi, The Hindu said, 14,000 police were deployed and they arrested more than 5,000 protesters.
Police turned a site called Jantar Mantar, a designated protest area, into a fortress, The Indian Express said. Barricades, mass detentions, travel restrictions and the massive deployment of police personnel made it impossible for protesters to reach the area. They then broke up into scattered ‘flash protests’ at different locations.
A trigger for the protests was a story in The Indian Express last week saying two of the three electoral commissioners had questioned aspects of what was called a Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. It should have been a routine clean-up but some 130 million voters were struck off draft rolls.
The story said questions of the commission’s role in deciding who could vote – and who couldn’t – were raised time and again by two commissioners.
Suspicions about the clean-up process were heightened this week when The Hindu reported that in Delhi a disproportionately high number of Muslims was flagged for so-called logical discrepancies in their records. Muslims accounted for 13.6 per cent of voters on Delhi’s draft roll but they made up 20.3 per cent of those flagged for discrepancies.
“Muslims were 60 per cent more likely to be marked for ‘logical discrepancies’ than non-Muslims,” the story said.
Another confrontation was looming for Friday evening (16 October) as ‘Cockroach’ founder Abhijeet Dipke announced a ‘Lehra Do Tiranga’ protest in central Delhi. ‘Tiranga’ refers to India’s tricolour flag and two protest leaders were arrested for waving the flags. He called on all demonstrators to bring tricolours, The Statesman said.
The Delhi High Court on Thursday refused to restrain Dipke in holding the tricolour protest.
Tokyo stands firm on international rule of law
Shortly after Marco Rubio announced US sanctions against the International Criminal Court, the secretary of state rang his Japanese counterpart, Toshimitsu Motegi.
He wanted to stress his view that sanctions were necessary “as a result of the Court’s rogue actions that threaten American sovereignty,” said a State Department readout of the conversation.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry’s readout was polite but clear. Motegi, it said, had “conveyed the Japanese government’s position on the recent US institutional sanctions”. That position had been spelled out by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi: the US move was incompatible with Japan’s view.
The ministry also noted, The Japan Times reported, that before speaking to Rubio, Motegi had called ICC president Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, to exchange views on the situation surrounding the ICC.
The US sanctions were announced last week, just after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to South African jurist Navanethem (Navi) Pillay, a former ICC judge. They came on top of sanctions against Akane, announced in August.
Japan, America’s most important Asian ally, is taking a leading role in defending the ICC from US attacks.
Takaichi was quick to post on social media, saying she was deeply concerned over the move to sanction the entire ICC.
“Japan has consistently attached great importance to upholding the rule of law in the international community,” she said. “We will continue to reach out to the United States and extend necessary support to the ICC so that the Court can fulfil its role and functions as originally envisaged.”
Japan is the largest financial contributor to the ICC.
The sanctions would stop the ICC conducting business with US companies. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper said the court relied on US-made systems for personnel management, finance, information management and communications.
The paper carried an interview with Nobel laureate Pillay, who called Washington’s attacks on the court completely unlawful, negative and cruel. “Heads of countries have a particular responsibility spell out the principles, which is you respect the law, you respect international law,” she said.
And the paper said in an editorial the US could not be given guarantees that its citizens would not face ICC charges. “The road to justice for victims will become narrower if major powers can suppress the ICC through force,” it said.
The international community should support the court by securing alternative financial and IT services.
The Japan Times published a Bloomberg commentary that said the world was watching a split screen. On one panel humanity saw jurists like Navi Pillay; on the other Donald Trump continued his full-bore assault on international law.
The column, by national security writer Andreas Kluth, quoted Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten as asking the question: How could anyone be opposed to prosecuting the very worst crimes?
“How indeed?” Kluth asked. “Eight decades after the Nuremberg Trials the world is again at a historic juncture. One path leads to the ideals of Pillay; the other to the world as Trump would have it.”
AI boosts world growth but developing nations miss out
On a bright note, the International Monetary Fund has forecast that global economic growth this year will reach 3.1 per cent. The boost is coming from massive artificial intelligence (AI) investment, offsetting the energy shock from the war against Iran.
The negative news concerns the gap between countries gaining from AI and those being bypassed. There is even worse news for the Gulf countries affected by the war: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are expected to slump into serious recessions.
The fund released its World Economic Forecast at the annual IMF and World Bank meetings, held in Bangkok this week.
It said global growth would reach 3.1 per cent this year and 3.4 per cent in 2027, Bangkok Post reported. The growth came from AI platform investments in advanced economies and in countries supplying AI hardware, including South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand.
Risks to growth were tilted to the downside, said IMF chief economist Silvana Tenreyro.
“A prolonged conflict in the Middle East could put additional pressures on inflation and slow down growth,” she said. “A worsening of fiscal prospects, a reassessment of AI profitability, and extreme weather events could further weaken the outlook.”
The IMF noted the gap between countries getting a GDP boost from AI and those missing out. A mere 32 countries accounted for 95 per cent of global growth, a big drop from 54 countries six months ago.
Downward growth revisions were more widespread, with 47 countries having been downgraded since April.
The World Bank is holding talks with more than 30 countries about potential crisis aid, said bank president Ajay Banga – to help them manage energy shocks and price increases triggered by the war.
Few countries had asked for help from the US$25 billion (about A$36 billion) crisis fund set up at the start of the war, he said. But other factors, including sharp increases in diesel and fertiliser prices, and the super El Niño, were adding to pressures on developing economies.
“We’re ready. We’re engaged,” Banga said. “We’re having conversations with a number of them… 30 to 40 countries are in dialogue with us.”
But a searing commentary in The Jakarta Post said that as platitudes about fiscal discipline and macroeconomic resilience echoed through the IMF-World Bank conference halls, the Global South faced a stark reality.
“These orthodox prescriptions are no longer merely detached from reality,” said the opinion piece, written by NGO leaders from Asia, Africa and Europe. “They are actively lethal.
“The international financial architecture continues to treat debt-servicing as sacrosanct and human survival as expendable…Frontline communities do not need more debt. They need liberation from an architecture built upon their systematic exploitation.”
Why Kim should want a summit (and Trump should not)
In his first term, Donald Trump had a fondness for summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. They met three times: in Singapore, Hanoi and the Koreas’ demilitarised zone. Asked two months ago whether he would meet Kim, Trump replied: “Yeah, I will.”
Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, poured iced water over the idea and rejected suggestions there had been secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
But two American security experts who have spent decades analysing North Korea and who have met countless (their word) North Koreans, official and otherwise, think that some people in Pyongyang believe their country would benefit greatly from a fourth Trump summit.
They believe the North Korean Foreign Ministry could lay out a strong case for a meeting.
The Americans are Joel Wit, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Centre and author of a book on US-North Korea relations, and a person known as James Church, a pseudonym used by a former Western intelligence officer who writes the Inspector O series of novels.
Their essay has been published by The Diplomat, the Asian online current affairs magazine. Read from Pyongyang, it is a list of reasons for holding a summit; read from Washington, it is a case for scrapping the idea.
Their first point is that given Pyongyang’s close relationship with Russia and China, North Korea would go to a summit from a position of strength. “The United States and Trump,” they say, “are in a much weaker position than before. “The president’s overconfidence and erratic personality will almost certainly result in missteps.
“And he doesn’t grasp that another summit will greatly benefit North Korea, which is now working in opposition to Washington.”
Another summit would improve North Korea’s global position, Wit and Church say, by supporting its friends – Russia and China – in their efforts to undermine Trump’s influence abroad. Pyongyang might nudge Trump to accept North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. The situation was also ripe for creating further tensions in the US-South Korea relationship.
The Foreign Ministry would predict that if the Republicans lost the mid-term congressional elections, Trump would be further weakened. “[H]e may be anxious to make even more concessions to paint any outcome – even simply holding a meeting with Kim – as a personal victory,” they say.
And the ministry would stress that Trump’s personal traits would affect his performance. He is older than at the previous summits; he responds to flattery; he has a higher opinion of himself and his negotiating ability; he is more likely to rely on feelings than expert advice; he is losing his grip on reality; and he has rolled out red carpets to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, even though they are opposed to Washington’s global interests.
And Kim’s advisers would point out that Trump does not understand strategic thinking.
“Past summits with North Korea have demonstrated he has no grasp of the wider picture,” Wit and Church say. “[T]he US war in Iran again underlined his short-sightedness.”
‘Godzilla’ El Niño dry season intensifies forest fires
A heavy, toxic haze has settled over lower Southeast Asia, as Indonesia battles its most intense wildfires since 2015.
The fires, in Sumatra and Kalimantan, have been made worse by a weather pattern labelled in a Singapore Straits Times podcast as a Godzilla El Niño, which has produced an unusually intense dry season.
The haze is blanketing Singapore and Timor Leste and parts of Indonesia and Malaysia. The west of Singapore on Wednesday recorded a sustained reading for PM2.5 particle pollution in the ‘very high’ band, Channel News Asia said – a level not seen since 2015.
Timor Leste suspended face-to-face learning in school for three days, said a story in The Diplomat. Malaysia also announced school closures. Singapore has begun distributing N95 masks to vulnerable people.
In Indonesia, more than 280,000 respiratory problems had been recorded since August and in Central Kalimantan the air pollution reading was four times higher than the starting point for ‘hazardous’.
Some fires occurred naturally, the report said, but many were caused by agricultural burn-off on plantations owned by powerful Indonesian conglomerates. Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni had said most of the fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan had been set by companies or individuals.
Thick smoke had grounded fire-fighting aircraft in Central Kalimantan for about a week, The Straits Times said. Fire crews were struggling to control blazes threatening Tanjung Puting National Park, one of the world’s best-known orang utan habitats.
Major-General Zainul Arifin, the regional military commander, had reported to a meeting chaired by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto that visibility around the park had dropped to 500 metres, making it impossible for civilian aircraft to conduct water-bombing operations.
Firefighters on the ground faced challenges. “The locations are very scattered and the terrain is swampy,” Zainul said. “It is not just orang utans there. There are any dangerous animals, including crocodiles and snakes.”
The story said Prabowo’s meeting did not discuss offers of help from Singapore and Malaysia.
Indonesia had refused to declare the fire a national disaster, The Jakarta Post said – drawing criticism from Greenpeace and the Indonesian Forum for the Environment. Greenpeace forest campaigner Belgis Habiba said the scale of the crisis and its impact on communities warranted a national disaster declaration.
She criticised the government for failing to prevent the fire despite longstanding scientific warnings about the risk of prolonged drought linked to this year’s El Niño.
China, the Met together in Buddhist mural’s homecoming
Almost 100 years ago, an ancient Buddhist mural in central China was cut into sections and sold for 1,600 silver coins so that impoverished monks could repair a damaged temple roof.
The mural, known as the Medicine Buddha, is a religious artwork on a huge wall, more than 15 metres wide and 7.5 metres high, and dating back to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368).
It changed hands through international dealers and in 1965 was donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
South China Morning Post writer Xinlu Liang says the wall is covered in a vast and majestic Buddhist assembly. One who visited the Met and was struck by the mural was Zhang Jian, director of the Meticulous Painting Institute at the Chinese National Academy of Arts.
“The moment you step into the hall, you are overwhelmed by its awe-inspiring energy and ancient brilliance,” he said.
Zhang went to see the mural three times before also visiting its original home – Guangsheng Temple in Shanxi province. The two spaces ‘clicked’ in his mind and he developed a groundbreaking plan.
China has made a priority of preservation of the country’s cultural heritage. More than 10 million cultural artefacts have been lost overseas since the opium wars of the 19th century, mainly through looting and illegal trafficking, the SCMP story says.
Physical repatriation of lost relics is an arduous task. Zhang’s alternative plan was a visual homecoming through forensic, research-based copying – an exacting process that replicates not just the painting but also hundreds of years of decay and restoration.
Zhang and the Met forged a partnership, formalised in 2024.
Most mural reproductions are painted on silk or paper, Liang says, but Zhang’s team used the ancient technique of painting on a mud-and-straw plaster base, using soil taken from near the temple in China.
Modern technology played a key role: the team used high-precision cameras, MacBooks for data capture, and iPads for colour-matching.
The team was to find that the Met’s restorers had made errors. Restorers decades ago, for instance, had misread the Buddha’s necklines, leaving the head misaligned by 5cm.
Last month, on the first day of Xi Jinping’s state visit to the US, the China National Arts and Crafts Museum in Beijing launched an exhibition of traditional Chinese and Buddhist paintings.
It features the full-size replica of the Medicine Buddha mural.
David Armstrong is the Editor-in-Chief of Pearls and Irritations. David is one of Australia’s best respected reporters, editors and media executives, with more than five decades of experience in Australia and Asia. A contributor for more than 10 years, David writes a regular column on Asian media.