THE national conference of the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain), one of the oldest NRI organisations, took place in Derby on September 11. Delegates from across the UK assembled to discuss and deliberate upon the report presented by Joginder Kaur on behalf of the Central Executive Committee of IWA (GB). The conference was organised in a hall dedicated to all the founders of the Association.

IT has been more than 16 months since the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia launched a war on Yemen, the poorest nation in the Arabian peninsula. The other members of the military coalition are the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco and Kuwait. Most of the bombing raids are being conducted by Saudi planes these days. The UAE air force which was very active in the earlier phase of the campaign is now only playing a limited role. The UAE forces on the ground are concentrating their firepower on the al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Daesh (Islamic State).

THE two day NATO summit held in Warsaw in the second week of July was billed as the most important one since the end of the Cold War. It was held in the wake of the “Brexit” vote and the looming threat it poses to the very concept of European unity. Britain has been America's foremost ally within the European Union (EU) and NATO. With the exit of the United Kingdom, the EU is theoretically better positioned to follow a more independent foreign policy. An important goal of the Warsaw summit was to project unity.

Beijing was expecting an adverse ruling on the South China Sea from the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an International Tribunal at the Hague and has taken the judgment on the dispute on July 11 in its stride. Senior officials have said that the situation in the South China Sea should not be allowed to escalate. The Chinese government had announced some months before that it would ignore the decision of the tribunal, saying that it had no jurisdiction over the case as the main dispute was over land in the form of islands and islets in the South China Seas.

Two years after Prime Minster Narendra Modi took over, India's foreign policy has significantly changed its contours. Without taking parliament and Indian public opinion into confidence, the Modi government has gone ahead and virtually changed the country's traditional non-aligned status. The pro-western tilt that had started during the earlier NDA and UPA regimes has become even more pronounced in the last two years, despite India being a member of groupings like BRICS and IBSA. So much so that the Obama administration now wants India to be given the exalted status of a non-NATO ally.