welcome to hardtalk. thank you. the recent indian election, it was a result which nobody really expected. your party, the congress party, did better than the polls had suggested it would. many in your party expressed contentment, evenjoy. and yet you still lost. isn t that the key point? that is true. but i think the expectation from the ruling dispensation, a lot of the popular mainstream media was that the propaganda will suffice and people will give a bigger majority to the ruling party. what really happened was, this was a vote by the people to check what we thought were excesses by the government, and the congress party and our allies together have done remarkably well, compared to last time. if you look at the numbers, the ruling party has 290 odd mps and we have 240 odd. so it s not that much of a gap. but more than that, it shows the robustness of our democracy, and the way people have voted is that issues that are important to the people is what finally matters. sure
just from the details we have, of what we ve seen and that these attacks in russia? obviously, there is a lot we do not know but it fits a pattern of attacks we have seen, including last year byjihadists linked to the islamic state probably from the islamic state khorasan, which is their branch in central asia, and has carried out attacks in moscow and this attack is close to their home territory. can we infer anything? we know the sites that were targeted, two churches, one a synagogue these are religious venues. can we make anything from that in terms of what was actually targeted? so, the islamic state and individuals that follow it see themselves as part of a religious struggle. they see a western war on islam and they see awar a war done by christians and dues on religious targets. jews. by striking religious targets, they believe they re defending their faith. as you said earlier, we re still working to confirm a lot of the facts here and figure out exactly who w
and so we re absolutely sure of our facts and the chinese ought to own up to this. we have sanctioned a great number of chinese companies, and we re prepared to do more by the way. we remind china that chinese officials, they have considerable authority in this authoritarian government over what happens, and they can certainly crack down on these companies, and they ought to do it because it is a major problem. and it s a major obviously a major assistance to russia in this war effort. how much communication is there between the two sides, and how difficult is it for you? we know there have been times. i ve been here for two plus years. there have been times when communication has been very sparse. after speaker nancy pelosi s visit to taiwan august 2022, the chinese shut down communications mostly with our cabinet level in washington. after that strange balloon floated across the territory of the united states for five days in february of 2023, the chinese shut down comm
welcome to hardtalk. thank you. the recent indian election, it was a result which nobody really expected. your party, the congress party, did better than the polls had suggested it would. many in your party expressed contentment, evenjoy. and yet you still lost. isn t that the key point? that is true. but i think the expectation from the ruling dispensation, a lot of the popular mainstream media was that the propaganda will suffice and people will give a bigger majority to the ruling party. what really happened was, this was a vote by the people to check what we thought were excesses by the government, and the congress party and our allies together have done remarkably well, compared to last time. if you look at the numbers, the ruling party has 290 odd mps and we have 240 odd. so it s not that much of a gap. but more than that, it shows the robustness of our democracy, and the way people have voted is that issues that are important to the people is what finally matters. sure