NEW DELHI: On ,’Talking Point‘, Ambassador Asoke Mukerji, India’s Ex-Envoy to Kazakhstan and Former Permanent Representative to the UN, who also opened India’s first Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan Embassies in 1992 and Aigerim Toleukhanova, a Journalist from Kazakhstan, in discussion with StratNews Global Associate Editor Amitabh P. Revi.
The panel discusses Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev ordering security forces to “fire without warning”, days after fuel price hike protests escalated to anti-government demonstrations, the Russia-led six-country Collective Security Treaty Organisation(CSTO) alliance, for the first time sending troops to a member nation after being invited to, the genesis of the crisis and what its snowballed to, the protests that now have a larger focus against the government, inequality, poverty and corruption, the anger against the ‘Father of the Nation’, who ruled for three decades, former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, how Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is handling another crisis, even as tens of thousands of troops are deployed on the Ukraine border in a standoff with the U.S., NATO and the West, China’s worries on the situation in Kazakhstan and the Central Asian Republics(CARs), where it has much invested financially and strategically, how the unrest impacts India’s renewed push for increased connectivity, energy, security and trade ties in the area, the reported invitation to all five CAR heads of state for Republic Day, last month’s CAR foreign ministerial level dialogue in Delhi and all five ‘stans’ sending their National Security Advisors to New Delhi for a meeting on Afghanistan and the region in December 2021.
