India's Foreign Relations

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched and is the eliminating statement. The Kurds are an Iranian-language people of the mountainous region spanning south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, north-eastern Syria and north-western Iran, the largest stateless nation in West Asia, and they have no presence in or connection with Bangladesh.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. The Madhesis are the plains-dwelling communities of Nepal's Terai, ethnically and linguistically close to the neighbouring Indian states, whose agitation over provincial demarcation, citizenship and representation under the constitution promulgated in September 2015 led to prolonged unrest and disruption of the India-Nepal border trade.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority concentrated in Rakhine State in western Myanmar, denied citizenship under the 1982 law and subject to displacement on a large scale.

Hence 2 and 3, giving (c). The elimination route is complete and immediate: the Kurd-Bangladesh pairing is wrong on geography alone, which removes (a); (b) and (d) then fail because both the remaining pairs are sound. Each of the three communities was in the news in the period before the paper, which is what made the item easy.

The Belt and Road Initiative is China's connectivity and infrastructure programme, announced by Xi Jinping in 2013 in two parts: the Silk Road Economic Belt, an overland network of corridors across Central Asia to Europe, and the twenty first century Maritime Silk Road running through the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. It is financed substantially through Chinese policy banks and the Silk Road Fund.

Hence (d). Options (a), (b) and (c) each name a party with an interest in the initiative but not its author: African states host major BRI projects, European states have received investment under it, and Brazil is outside its principal geography altogether. India's position gives the question its salience: India has declined to endorse the initiative, objecting that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and so disregards Indian sovereignty, and objecting more generally to the absence of transparency and of consultation. The item is easy, the initiative having been the single most reported element of Chinese foreign policy in the period.

• Option (a) is correct. The Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement is the name given to the free trade agreement negotiated between India and the European Union, launched in 2007 and suspended in 2013 after the two sides failed to converge. The sticking points are instructive and are worth carrying: the European Union sought deep tariff cuts on automobiles, wines and spirits, a strong intellectual property chapter going beyond TRIPS, and access to government procurement and the legal, accountancy and insurance markets, while India sought recognition as a data secure country, liberalisation of the movement of professionals under Mode 4 of services trade, and protection for its generic pharmaceutical industry and its dairy and agricultural sectors.
• Option (b) is wrong: India's engagement with the Gulf Cooperation Council has proceeded through a framework agreement and bilateral arrangements, not under this name.
• Option (c) is wrong on the nature of the body: the OECD is a policy analysis and standard setting organisation of largely developed economies and does not negotiate trade agreements, which is the cleanest ground of elimination.
• Option (d) is wrong: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which India joined as a full member in June 2017, is a political and security grouping without a common trade regime to negotiate. Governing principle: only a customs union or a single market with a common commercial policy can negotiate a trade agreement as a bloc, which among these four is true of the European Union alone.

• Option (c) is correct. Pakistan has consistently denied India overland transit to Afghanistan, so Indian goods have had no direct land route to Afghanistan or to Central Asia. Chabahar, on Iran's Makran coast on the Gulf of Oman, lies outside the Persian Gulf and therefore beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and it connects through the Zaranj Delaram highway, itself built by India, to the Afghan ring road, and northward towards the International North South Transport Corridor. Developing the port therefore creates a sea and land route to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan entirely, which is the strategic point of the project.
• Option (a) is wrong on geography: trade with Africa runs from India's western ports across the Arabian Sea and requires no Iranian transit, and routing African trade through Chabahar would be a detour.
• Option (b) is wrong because Iran is not an Arab country and its relations with the Gulf Arab States are adversarial, so a major Indian investment in an Iranian port does not strengthen ties with them and is more likely to complicate them.
• Option (d) is wrong twice over, since a pipeline from Iraq through Pakistan is not the project in question and no Pakistani facilitation is contemplated; the option is also internally inconsistent with the premise of the port, which exists precisely to avoid dependence on Pakistan. Governing principle: locate the port on the map first, and the answer follows from what the location makes possible.

The action plan was signed with Russia at the annual bilateral summit in New Delhi in October 2018, so (b) is correct. Its content was the sequencing of cooperation in the areas the two sides had already agreed, namely the remaining units at Kudankulam, the identification of a second site for Russian designed reactors, localisation of manufacture of components in India in line with the Make in India programme, cooperation in third countries beginning with the Rooppur project in Bangladesh, and collaboration in nuclear science, fuel cycle and small modular reactors. The wider context is that Russia is the only foreign partner with reactors actually operating and under construction in India, which is why an implementation road map with Russia and not with the others was both possible and necessary.

• Option (a) is wrong; the India Japan civil nuclear agreement was signed in 2016 and no project has followed from it.
• Option (c) is wrong; the United Kingdom has no reactor supply relationship with India.
• Option (d) is wrong; the India United States agreement of 2008 remains without a single constructed reactor, the Westinghouse proposal for Kovvada having stalled on the supplier's bankruptcy and on liability concerns. The item is difficult because the name of the instrument is not recognisable, and the only route to it is the reasoning that an implementation road map presupposes an existing construction programme.

• Statement 1 is correct; Vietnam has been among the fastest growing economies in the world over the past two decades, sustaining high growth even through the pandemic years when most comparators contracted.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the decisive statement. Vietnam is a one party socialist republic in which the Communist Party of Vietnam is the sole legal party and its constitutionally recognised leading force; no multi party competition exists.
• Statement 3 is correct. Growth has been built on export led manufacturing and deep insertion into global supply chains, supported by an unusually wide network of free trade agreements.
• Statement 4 is correct. Low labour costs together with a managed and relatively stable exchange rate have long been central to the country's attraction for global manufacturers relocating assembly.
• Statement 5 is incorrect, being an unsupported superlative; the most productive e-service sectors of the Indo-Pacific lie elsewhere, in Singapore and the developed east Asian economies.
• Statements 1, 3 and 4 holding, (c) is correct, and options (a), (b) and (d) each rest on the one party error or the unsupported superlative, either of which a candidate can identify to eliminate three options at once.

The discriminator is simply which partner countries belong to ASEAN. Project 1, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, links Kolkata by sea to Sittwe in Myanmar, then by the Kaladan river to Paletwa and by road to Mizoram, and Myanmar is an ASEAN member, so it qualifies. Project 2, the India Myanmar Thailand Trilateral Highway from Moreh through Myanmar to Mae Sot, involves two ASEAN members and qualifies. Project 3, the Agartala to Akhaura rail link, connects Tripura with Bangladesh, and Bangladesh is not a member of ASEAN, belonging instead to SAARC and BIMSTEC, so it does not qualify.

Hence 1 and 2 and (a) is correct. (b) and (c) admit the Bangladesh link, and (d) drops the Kaladan project even though Myanmar is the very country that gives India its land bridge to Southeast Asia.