Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has accepted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to be the Chief Guest at India’s 71st Republic Day celebrations in 2020.
Modi, who is in Brazil for the 11th BRICS Summit met Bolsonaro on the sidelines of the summit spoke about how Delhi and Brasilia association will help to ameliorate their ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership with larger cooperation in defence and space sectors.
Brazil is increasingly viewing Asian majors as trade and investment partners. Under Bolsonaro, it has not only announced visa-free entry for Indians but also strengthened the counterterrorism agenda of BRICS and helped revive the India, Brazil, South Africa grouping, much to India’s satisfaction.
Bolsonaro is a retired army captain who offered his service during the years of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He is a far-right politician who is known for his unabashedly misogynistic, homophobic and militaristic views.
He has served as a Congressman for Rio de Janeiro in Brazil's lower house since 1991 and has been switching parties many times. He was hardly known outside Rio until 2014.
Matias Spektor, a Professor of International Relations at the Brazil-based Getulio Vargas Foundation had a talk to the Al Jazeera after Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018, said, "He was always an unimpressive backbencher, he was never a party boss or had a programmatic agenda that was of any significance."
The right-wing leader Bolsonaro was sworn in as Brazil's President on January 2, has been under blitz after his environmental policies led to a rapid acceleration in deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, which covers vast swathes of Brazil and is considered vital to combating global warming.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, caused a stir in May when he issued a decree enabling a wide range of professions, including truckers, politicians and even some journalists, to carry weapons without having to prove why they needed them, reported AFP. Weeks later, he revised the original order to restrict "common citizens" to carrying handguns, but not rifles in public.
Following legal and political challenges to the decree, Bolsonaro revoked his order and sent a bill to Congress to change legislation on the registration, possession and commercialisation of weapons. Experts have warned the loosening of restrictions would fuel gun violence in a country which already has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
Bolsonaro's public enticement is known to be induced not by his policy ideas, but rather his ability to render one-liners as simple solutions, regardless of their efficacy. “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” was his campaign slogan.
First Published: IST