Sonia Gandhi, rejecting fresh appeals to become prime minister of India, named Manmohan Singh, a 71-year-old Oxford-educated economist, for the post this week, giving the country its first non-Hindu prime minister since it gained independence. Gandhi decided not to take the post after she came under fire from Hindu nationalist rivals because she is Italian by birth.
Donning a garland of port-coloured carnations, a young woman climbs on to a platform and begins a speech to several hundred villagers in the swirling dust of north India. Her peroration begins with a family history and ends with the words Jai Hind (Victory to India). Priyanka Gandhi follows in the footsteps of a family of political luminaries.
STMicroelectronics, Europe’s largest chipmaker, announced last week that it will spend $100-million on two design centres in India to cash in on the country’s large, cheap but highly educated workforce.
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/ 9 February 2004
Monsanto, the world’s largest genetically modified seed company, has been awarded patents on the wheat used for making chapatis — the flat-bread staple of northern India. The patents give the United States multinational exclusive ownership over Nap Hal, a strain of wheat whose gene sequence makes it particularly suited to producing crisp breads.
India and Pakistan agreed to talks this week to resolve their differences and expressed confidence about settling their dispute over the Himalayan territory of Kashmir, which brought them to the brink of war two years ago.
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/ 12 September 2003
Ariel Sharon arrived this week in New Delhi bearing arms. In doing so, the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to the subcontinent threatens not only to accelerate the arms race between nuclear rivals, India and Pakistan, but also marks the emergence of a new United States-backed coalition of the willing.