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Modi is first PM who always stays outside India: Raj Thackeray

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raj thackeray

Mumbai: Taking potshots at Narendra Modi on his frequent foreign tours, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) President Raj Thackeray today alleged that he is the first Prime Minister in Indian history to have remained out of the country for long.

“What kind of a government do we have? Instead of doing work, they are behind banning every possible thing. Here we have a PM, who is the first in the country to have remained out of India for so many days,” Thackeray said.

Raj was speaking here at an India Today conclave here. “I just heard that Salman Khan is now making Bajrangi Bhaijan part 2. In the sequel, he will be seen bringing back Modi to India from a foreign country,” he said taking a dig on the PM.

As of October 2015, Modi has reportedly made 28 foreign trips. Most of them were state visits to Asian countries, following his neighborhood first and Act East policies.

Criticising the proposed Bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, Thackeray questioned the purpose that would be served by introducing this super fast train.

“Why do we need a Bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad? Why not to some other state? What purpose will it serve? Just go to Gujarat, eat a Dhokla (Gujarati delicacy) and come back. Thats all,” he said.

He further said that the recent standoffs between the BJP and Sena are ruining the smooth running of the government.
“The way these both parties fight publicly, even husbands and wives dont fight this way. CM says all is well between them, but if that is so, one needs to go and ask the Sena ministers,” he said.

“It is only the BJP whose Acche Din have come. Their ally and its ministers are only sulking,” he added.
Backing Senas Opposition to Ghazal maestro Ghulam Alis concert here, Thackeray said, “Opposition is not to him as a singer. But, do our artists get the kind of respect they deserve in Pakistan? There is so much of talent here in India that we do not need an outsider to perform here.”

(PTI)

Scientist Bhargava raises voice against Hindutva, returns Padma Bhushan

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P M Bhargava

Kolkata: Eminent Indian scientist P.M. Bhargava on Thursday said he will return his Padma Bhushan award in protest against the “growing intolerance in the country”.

Bhargava, who was the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), said religious beliefs are personal choices and should not interfere in politics.

“The fear as we see in democracy today… the spread of Hindutva… I believe that (religion) really is a personal matter. It should stay as a personal matter. It should not make incursions into politics as it is doing now,” he told IANS.

The 87-year-old said he also finds statements by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat that women should restrict themselves to doing household chores, as “detestable”.

Bhargava said he will meet the home secretary and give back the award. He also encouraged the youth brigade in the scientific community to come forward and protest.

Incidentally, the veteran researcher is one of the scientists who started the online petition on Tuesday, signed by atleast 100 senior scientists, addressed to President Pranab Mukhrejee against growing intolerance.

(Agencies)

KJ George may lose Home Minister post to KPCC President G Parameshwara

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KJ George

Bengaluru: Karnataka’s Home Minister K J George is likely to lose his powerful ministry, as Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee President G. Parameshwara, who is being inducted into the Cabinet on Thursday, will take over the same.

 

Parameshwara was keen on Deputy CM’s post, but the Congress high command was not in favour of it, as it would lead to creation of a parallel power centre to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

As a compensation, the party offered him either of the powerful ministries of Home Affairs & Revenue and it is said that Parameshwara opted for the former. However, an official announcement is expected later on Thursday after he takes the official oath.

As George is making way for Parameshwara, he could be appointed as the dedicated minister to oversee the development of Bengaluru, a long-pending demand of the industry, especially the IT sector.

4 new ministers

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will induct 4 new ministers into his Council of Ministers in an effort to end the rebellion in the party. He has forwarded the list to the Governor’s office for approval and the swearing-in ceremony will take place later today.

Those joining Siddaramaiah’s Council are Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee President G. Parameshwara, A Manju, Vinay Kulkarni and Manohar Tahsildar. While Parameshwara and Tahsildar will get Cabinet grade, Manju and Kulkarni will be ministers of state (Independent charge).

However, ministerial aspirants, such as H Y Meti and Maalikkayya V Guttedar, who could not make it to the Cabinet, have expressed their resentment. Of the 4 selected for induction today, 3 are supposed to be Siddaramaiah’s followers and this has angered Congress loyalists.

“There is no reshuffle of the Cabinet. We are filling up 4 vacant posts. This is just an expansion of the Cabinet,” said Siddaramaiah.

(Agencies)

Akhilesh Yadav sacks eight ministers, strips nine of portfolios

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Akhilesh-Yadav

Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday sacked eight cabinet ministers and withdrew portfolios of nine ministers in a major shake-up of his ministry.

The move is being seen as a precursor to the cabinet reshuffle scheduled for October 31 when some new faces are likely to be included in the 43-month-old Samajwadi Party government.

 

The ministers who have been removed from the state cabinet are Shiv Kumar Beria, Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar, Ambika Chowdhary, Aridaman Singh, Alok Kumar Shakya, Yogesh Pratap Singh, Shivakant Ojha and Narad Rai.

Sources say the ministers have been removed on action initiated by the SP high command for their non-performance and, in some cases, on specific complaints.

The nine ministers who have been stripped of their portfolios include Raguhraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya, Avdhesh Prasad, and Ahmad Hasan, who held the health and family welfare portfolio.

Other ministers to be divested of their ministries are Paras Nath Yadav, Ram Govind Chowdhary, Durga Prasad Yadav, Brahma Shankar Tripathi, Iqbal Masood and Mehboob Ali. Their departments, for now, will be with the chief minister.

Close aides of the chief minister told IANS that the cabinet expansion scheduled for Saturday will see a “stamp of Akhilesh Yadav and will be a mix of young energy and experience”.

Earlier, Akhilesh Yadav called on Governor Ram Naik late on Wednesday to discuss expansion of his cabinet and to take Naik’s consent.

The oath-taking ceremony of the new ministers in slated for October 31 at 10.30 a.m. at Raj Bhawan in Lucknow.

(IANS)

BJP trying to dethrone me: CM Siddaramaiah

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siddaramaiah

Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who is facing rebellion in the party, accused the rival BJP of trying to dethrone him.

“My detractors are unable to digest the fact that I have emerged as the leader of the oppressed sections of society. Now, they are floating the idea of a Dalit CM in Karnataka. Why didn’t the BJP appoint a Dalit CM if they were so concerned about the oppressed sections? It is clear that the BJP wants me out of the CM’s chair,” he said.

Siddaramaiah received a nod to reshuffle his Cabinet by bringing in four new ministers in order to end the rebellion in the party. However, it is to be seen whether this reshuffle will make the rebels in Congress happy.

(Agencies)

Bihar’s third phase ends, 53 percent vote

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bihar-polls

Patna: The third phase of Bihar’s staggered assembly polls ended on Wednesday evening, with 53.20 percent of the 14.5 million electorate voting in 50 constituencies across six districts.

Additional Chief Electoral Officer R. Lakshmanan said the exercise passed off peacefully, including in areas where Maoists are active. There were only minor clashes between rival political activists.

According to officials, more than 7.5 million people voted during the day in a battle that has pitted the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi against the Grand Alliance of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

The voters on Wednesday included Nitish Kumar, his ally and RJD leader Lalu Prasad, BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Modi and BJP’s dissident MP Shatrughan Sinha.

After voting in Patna with his family, Lalu Prasad, a former chief minister, hit out at Modi.

“Modi is playing the communal card on reservation. People in the country never expected such words from the prime minister,” he said.

He was referring to Modi’s statement that the Grand Alliance was trying to put in quotas in jobs and educational institutions for Muslims.

Sushil Modi also voted in Patna. And so did Nitish Kumar and Shatrughan Sinha, a Bollywood veteran who has embarrassed the Bharatiya Janata Party by publicly praising Nitish Kumar.

When journalists asked him who he thought will win the Bihar battle, Sinha retorted: “Khamosh” (silence). The MP has been sidelined by the BJP in the election campaign.

Polling began at 7 a.m. in the districts of Patna, Saran, Vaishali, Nalanda, Bhojpur and Buxar. It got over at 4 p.m. in 10 constituencies located in Maoist strongholds. Elsewhere it ended at 5 p.m.

Nalanda is Nitish Kumar’s home turf, and is widely known as ‘Kurmistan’ due to the dominance of his Kurmi caste.

As in the first and second rounds of polling on October 12 and 16, serpentine queues formed at polling stations since early in the morning.

Officials said voters in over a dozen villages boycotted the polls to protest what they said was lack of development in their areas.

Lalu Prasad’s prestige was at stake on Wednesday as his sons Tej Pratap Yadav and Tejaswi Yadav were in the fray. They contested from Mahua and Raghopur respectively in Vaishali district.

The BJP is banking heavily on Dalits and other backward castes, including Yadav voters, besides most upper castes to get the winning votes. Its allies include the Lok Janshakti Party, Hindustani Awam Morcha and Rashtriya Lok Samata Party.

The JD-U has tied up with the RJD and Congress.

According to the Association for Democratic Reforms and the National Election Watch, 215 of the candidates in the third round faced serious criminal charges, including those of murder.

The staggered elections to pick a 243-member Bihar assembly will end on November 5. The results will be known on November 8. The fourth round of polling will take place on November 1.

(IANS)

Nepal gets first woman president

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Bidhya Devi Bhandari

Kathmandu: Bidhya Devi Bhandari, vice chairman of the ruling CPN-UML, was on Wednesday elected president of Nepal, making her the first woman to occupy the vaunted post.

Bhandari defeated Nepali Congress nominee Kul Bahadur Gurung in the presidential poll to elect the second president of the Himalayan nation, The election result was announced in parliament by Speaker Onsari Gharti Magar.

A former defence minister, Bhandari is a cancer survivor and widow of late communist leader Madan Bhandari, who died in 1991 in a yet unexplained road accident.

The incumbent, Ram Baran Yadav, who belonged to Nepali Congress, was elected president in 2008 after the first elections to the Constituent Assembly.

Under the country’s new republican federal Constitution, promulgated on September 20, it was mandatory to elect new president and vice-president, prime minister, and parliament speaker and deputy speaker.

(IANS)

MSF hospital in Yemen Bombed by US-backed coalition

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Active medical facility was struck while patients and staff were inside

Images from Doctors Without Borders hospital in Saada following Monday night's bombing. (Photo: MSF Yemen/Twitter)

Images from Doctors Without Borders hospital in Saada following Monday night’s bombing. (Photo: MSF Yemen/Twitter)

by Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières confirmed Tuesday afternoon that one of its small hospitals, located in the Haydan district in Saada Province, “was hit by several airstrikes beginning at 10:30 p.m. last night.”

“Hospital staff and two patients managed to escape before subsequent airstrikes occurred over a two-hour period,” the organization said in a statement. “One staff member was slightly injured while escaping. With the hospital destroyed, at least 200,000 people now have no access to lifesaving medical care.”

Hassan Boucenine, MSF head of mission in Yemen, denounced the attack as “another illustration of a complete disregard for civilians in Yemen, where bombings have become a daily routine.”

A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in northern Yemenwas bombed Monday night by the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition.

Tim Shenk, press officer for MSF, confirmed to Common Dreams that the active medical facility, based in the Saada governorate, has been hit. The strike was initially reported by the aid agency’s Yemen bureau, which noted that there were several patients and staff members in the facility at the time of the attack.

“Our hospital in the Heedan district of Saada governorate was hit several times. Fortunately, the first hit damaged the operations theater while it was empty and the staff were busy with people in the emergency room. They just had time to run off as another missile hit the maternity ward,” MSF country director Hassan Boucenine told Reuters.

“It could be a mistake, but the fact of the matter is it’s a war crime. There’s no reason to target a hospital,” Boucenine continued. “We provided (the coalition) with all of our GPS coordinates about two weeks ago.”

The bureau also released images of the facility following the bombing:

This is not the first such attack. Since the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed military campaign began over six months ago, the coalition has bombed medical facilities, markets, schools, power plants, refugee camps, factories, and warehouses storing humanitarian supplies. In addition, the Saudi-led naval blockade has left 80 percent of Yemen’s population in dire need of food, water, and medical assistance, according to aid agencies.

The World Health Organization estimates that the conflict has so far killed roughly 5,600 people, the majority of them civilian. According to a recent report by Action On Armed Violence and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in 2015, 93 percent of people killed or wounded in populated areas as a result of “air-launched explosive weapons” were civilians.

The Saudi-led coalition is responsible for the vast majority of these killings. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported last month that “almost two-thirds of reported civilian deaths had allegedly been caused by coalition airstrikes, which were also responsible for almost two-thirds of damaged or destroyed civilian public buildings.”

Monday’s bombing comes just over three weeks after the U.S. military bombed a functioning MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 30 people.

Scrap quota in higher education institutions: SC

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Supreme Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court Thursday ruled that national interest requires doing away with all forms of reservation in institutions of higher education and urged the Centre to take effective steps “objectively”.

Despite several reminders to the central and state governments to make merit the primary criteria for admissions into super-specialty courses, the ground reality remains that reservation often holds sway over merit, observed a bench of Justices Dipak Misra and P C Pant.

“The fond hope has remained in the sphere of hope… The said privilege remains unchanged, as if (it is) to compete with eternity,” the bench remarked.

(Agencies)

139-day FTII strike ends, protests to continue

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FTII

Pune: FTII students who went on strike on June 12 against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as its chairman returned to their classes on Wednesday but said protests against the BJP member will go on.

The Film and Television Institute of India students said they will continue to protest in a “peaceful and democratic manner” against Chauhan, who they say is not fit to head the country’s premier film institute.

Ranjit Nair, spokesperson for the Students Association, told IANS that the strike was over.

“We have come to realize, after our long-stretched negotiations with the government, that the government is a bully,” a miffed Nair said.

He said the students will now invite people from all over the country who face similar problems.

“The strike will escalate now… It’s time to register our protest all over again and take it to different heights,” Nair said.

He said filmmakers and academics should come forward and take the protests forward in Mumbai.

The students held multiple meetings with officials of the information and broadcasting ministry but there was no end to the stalemate.

The government refused to buckle over Chauhan, forcing the student community to blink.

Chauhan congratulated the students for ending the strike, and told IANS over telephone that it was time for them to return to their classes.

The decision to end the strike followed the government’s “incongruous approach” towards the students’ cause, said another student leader, Reema Kaur.

“The 139 days of strike have not only made us stronger but more aware of the state that we today live in,” said Kaur, a final year student of editing and a part of the core committee of the Students Association that spearheaded the strike.

“We voiced ourselves loud and clear but it is the government’s adamant stand and incongruous approach towards our valid demands that has made us completely lose faith,” Kaur told IANS.

“Looking at the ministry’s unrelenting approach and the amount of our valuable time spent, we have decided to end the strike and resume classes.

“However, our voices will not shut, but grow louder. The protests shall continue democratically and in the peaceful manner as they have,” Kaur added.

(IANS)

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