Fewer spectators, no chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade

dpa New Delhi India staged its annual military parade to mark Republic Day on Wednesday under the cloud of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a limited number of...

dpa New DelhiIndia staged its annual military parade to mark Republic Day on Wednesday under the cloud of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a limited number of spectators and no foreign dignitary invited to be the chief guest for the first time in more than 50 years.The parade with marching troops and military bands on New Delhi’s Rajpath boulevard is the main event to mark the day the Indian Constitution came into force, on January 26, 1950.India has a tradition of having a head of state or government as chief guest to the parade. The last time no chief guest was invited was in 1966, after then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died on January 11 during a visit to Tashkent.The ceremony in 2021 did not have a chief guest attending physically, but the invitee, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, greeted India on Republic Day after he was forced to cancel his visit because of rising cases of Covid-19 in his country.Though it was never formally announced, India had been planning to have the presidents of the five Central Asian republics - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan - as chief guests.This did not happen due to increasing cases of the Omicron variant in India and internal developments in some of these nations. Arrangements are usually made for nearly 100,000 spectators to view the annual parade, which includes performances by schoolchildren and tableaux presented by regional governments.