Archives for 2018

The Congress on Sunday alleged that prices of petroleum products were being used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi “as a tool” to benefit BJP during elections and demanded that the prices should stay at least at the level that prevailed during the Karnataka assembly elections.

Talking to reporters here, Congress spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill said the price of petrol and diesel were at a record five-year high, and if the government can control price of petroleum products during Karnataka polls, it should do so around the year in the interest of people.

“If he (Modi) can control the price (of petrol and diesel) for his own interest during the polls in Karnataka, why can’t he do it now and all year around in public interest? That means fuel prices is just a tool for him to get the benefit in elections.

“On behalf of the people of India, that at least control the price if you cannot reduce it. Modi should give priority to the interest of public over his political interests,” he said.

State-run Indian Oil Corp on Sunday raised transport fuel to record highs in Delhi on the seventh day of resuming the daily price change system, following a temporary suspension that lasted 20 days.

The price of petrol in Delhi touched a record high of Rs 76.24 per litre under the dynamic pricing regime beating the previous high of Rs 76.06 in the city on September 14, 2013.

Congress leader D.K. Shivakumar on Saturday said MLAs of his party would be present in the Karnataka Assembly where the BJP government led by Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa faces a crucial trust vote.

“Two Congress legislators Pratapgouda Patil and Anand Singh are yet to join us in the House. We are in touch with them and they will be joining us soon for the trust vote,” Shivakumar told reporters at the state secretariat building.

The remarks came amidst reports that the two Karnataka Congress legislators were missing ahead of the floor test at 4 p.m.

The number of party’s MLAs was intact, he said. He said Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) G. Somasekhara Reddy was also not present in the House yet.

“We are certain that the BJP will not win the trust vote,” the Congress leader said.

The 15th state Legislative Assembly’s first session is underway since 11 a.m. with the newly-elected legislators taking oath.

The oath-taking of all the legislators will be completed before 4 p.m. for pro tem Speaker K.G. Bopaiah to conduct the floor test to ascertain if the Chief Minister has a majority in the hung House, as directed by the Supreme Court on Friday.

Of the 222 seats where election was held on May 12, the BJP won 104, Congress 78, JD-S, 37 and one each by Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Karnataka Pragnyavantha Janatha Party (KPJP) and an Independent.

With one of BJP’s legislators, Bopaiah being nominated as the pro tem Speaker and JD-S state president H.D. Kumaraswamy winning two constituencies he contested from and allowed to cast only one vote, the effective strength of the House becomes 220.

The BJP is still seven short of the 111 mark required to prove the majority.

Though Governor Vajubhai R. Vala directed Yeddyurappa to seek a vote of confidence on the floor of the House within 15 days from the date of assumption of office as the Chief Minister on May 17, a three-judge bench of the top court ordered the floor test on Saturday, rejecting his plea for a week’s time to prove his majority.

Sixteen labourers and three children were killed and six others injured after a truck they were travelling in overturned at Bavaliyari village near Dholera in Ahmedabad early on Saturday, police said.

The accident took place on Ahmedabad-Bhavnagar highway when the cement-laden truck was coming from Pipavav Port in Bhavnagar district, police said.
“There were 25 labourers travelling in the truck. The vehicle turned turtle early morning and 19 labourers were crushed to death,” Ahmedabad Superintendent of Police R V Asari said.

The deceased included 12 women and three children, he said, adding that while 18 of them died on the spot, another one died in a hospital. Six injured were admitted to a nearby hospital, the officer said.

“The accident seems to have taken place as the driver of the truck lost control over the vehicle. After the mishap, the driver escaped from the spot and a search has been launched to trace him,” Asari said.

Further investigation is underway.

Governor Vajubhai Vala on Saturday convened the 15th Karnataka Assembly in the Vidhana Soudha here. It began with the newly-elected legislators taking oath.

The pro tem Speaker, K.G. Bopaiah conducted the proceedings.

Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa was the first to take oath followed by Congress legislature party leader and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Janata Dal-Secular’s (JD-S) legislature party leader H.D. Kumaraswamy.

After these three, legislators of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress and JD-S would be administered the oath.

Later in the day at 4 p.m., there will be a floor test conducted in the House to ascertain Yeddyurappa’s majority, as ordered by the Supreme Court on Friday.

In the May 12 assembly election held in 222 constituencies across the state, the BJP won 104, Congress 78, JD-S 37 and three others, including one Independent, one from Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and other a regional party, Karnataka Pragnyavantha Janatha Party (KPJP).

I have never seen the electronic media so totally defiant of the BJP government. Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s avowed intention to calm Kashmir by announcing a Ramadan ceasefire appears to have been dismissed as “appeasement of Pakistan and terrorists”.

A guest peering out of one of the six windows on the TV screen was frothing in the mouth. “Murderers of our brave jawans are being shamelessly appeased.” The other went one better: “A brave nation does what the Sri Lankan army did to the LTTE – just finished them off.” The anchor on this Aaj Tak show Thursday evening looked angrier than both. This apparently is common fare.

The Communist Party of India is receiving signals from its Kashmir unit that it may have to rename itself. The ‘I’ in the CPI has been hurting the state unit for quite some time. But after the recent surge in shootings, stone pelting, “encounters”, sustained images of wailing women, trailing the spate of funerals, and relentless media jingoism, the “I” now invites physical danger. True, a defunct party by any name will remain defunct, but even so, Communist Party of Kashmir (CPK) will at least not incur the wrath of the street.

The relative Ramadan peace is a good occasion to take stock. Even in days of drift in Kashmir during the time of P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, there was a semblance of political control by the National Conference and the PDP. Elements of the Hurriyat had fingers on the street pulse. The scene recently has been anarchic: there was no control.

Recent increase in violence was described by reliable sources as “indigenous” which is not what officials say. A narrative which discounts outside “meddling” is not honeyed music to the establishment. Nor to that shrill panel – on Aaj Tak. Ironical, isn’t it, that the absence of outside support to the insurgency disturbs us?

Just when Kashmir was at fever pitch, the mayhem in Aligarh Muslim University erupted around the photograph of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Friends are in error if they consider the undiluted hooliganism on view in Aligarh an occasion to engage in a serious debate on Jinnah’s culpability in partitioning the country. The hoodlums of Aligarh were not busting their guts to have Jinnah’s portrait removed from the AMU union office. Quite the contrary. Hindu Yuva Vahini would love to provoke Aligarh hotheads to dig their heels in to preserve Jinnah in the university precincts. This will be the ammunition which can come in handy at all times. The campus will be the ordnance depot for frequent explosions in the service of the projected Hindu Rashtra.

This is not the first time in recent decades that AMU has been exploited for saffron politics. Ever since Prime Minister V.P. Singh aggravated identity politics by implementing the Mandal Committee report providing reservation in government jobs to lower castes, the BJP has rushed to prevent the caste structure from crumbling. Hindu consolidation, by building up the Muslim ogre, has been the obvious strategy.

Aligarh was frequently the target as part of this strategy. There was no Arnab Goswami in the 90s but Hindi newspapers played a lead role in widening the Hindu-Muslim divide.

A story appears in newspapers that, after horrendous riots in Aligarh city, some of the injured Hindus being taken to the University Medical College for treatment are being killed by Muslim doctors and interns. Even though the university is only three hours drive from New Delhi, newspapers choose to rely on unverified agency copy which, in turn, quotes upper caste Hindi newspapers.

An incredible scene is being enacted on the outskirts of the university. Local scribes seated on chairs arranged in a circle under a mango tree, sip tea even as one Krishna Kumar Navman, BJP MLA from Aligarh, holds them in his thrall with graphic accounts of murders in the hospital.

“Has anyone visited the Medical College?” I ask. They had not, they say, because it is “risky”.

At the medical college the picture is surreal: petrified doctors encircle me. “No one has come to us for clarification,” they complain.

Why have they not reached out to the journalists with their story? After a long, pregnant silence, they speak up. They thought it would be dangerous stepping out of the campus “in the midst of communal violence”. This is what I call uninstitutionalized apartheid.

That was 30 years ago when there were no TV channels to inculcate saffron nationalism on the scale I saw the other day and which I have mentioned above.

Folks overtly agitated or elated at the turn of events in Aligarh may find it sobering that Pakistan’s Jinnah is not the only leader around whom communal polarization can be contrived. Ram Navami processionists in Kankinara, 24 Parganas in West Bengal, were so overpowered by the spirit of Rama that they pulled down the statue of Congress President and India’s first Education Minister, Maulana Azad – a person, who in his outlook was exactly the opposite of Jinnah. This was in preparation for the Panchayat elections currently in the news.

Protection to anti-namaz lumpens in Gurugram, or those who pasted a Maharana Pratap Road placard on Akbar Road (the placard was removed the next morning), Modi clenching his fist at Tipu Sultan during the recent campaign, are minor episodes in an epic of hatred being manufactured for 2019 of course, and beyond if need be. In this gameplan there is no real, long-term respite for Kashmiris, Muslims or Indo-Pakistan peaceniks. Alongside, the rage of the Dalits and tribals is spiraling out of control. There is an element of simulation in anti-Muslimism for political reasons but the retribution faced by Dalits and tribals in the countryside is visceral.

The Supreme Court will hear on Saturday an application by the Congress and the JD-S challenging Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala’s decision to appoint K.G. Bopaiah, a relatively junior MLA, as the pro-tem Speaker.

Advocate Dev Dutt Kamat, who has filed the application, told reporters at the Supreme Court that the application was filed at 7.45 p.m. (on Friday) and has been listed to be heard by a bench of Justice A.K. Sikri, Justice S.A. Bobde and Justice Ashok Bhushan at 10.30 a.m. on Saturday.

He said the Supreme Court has passed scriptures against Bopaiah for acting in a partisan manner and disqualifying MLAs who had earlier revolted against then Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa.

Bopaiah is to preside over the floor test on Saturday to ascertain whether newly-appointed Chief Minister Yeddyurappa enjoys a majority support in the assembly.

Seeking the setting aside of the appointment of Bopaiah as pro-term speaker and appointment of the senior most member in his place, the application has sought the videography of the floor test.

The plea by both Congress and JD(S) has said that except for administering oath and conducting floor test, the pro-term Speaker should be restrained from exercising any other power.

On Friday evening, a team of Congress lawyers arrived at the Supreme Court to file the plea.

The Congress has contended that Bopaiah is not the senior-most member in the newly-elected House and as per the parliamentary convention, it is only the senior-most member in terms of number of times he has been elected to the Assembly who can be a pro-tem Speaker.

Earlier in the day, the party alleged Bopaiah’s appointment was made “with the sole intent of manufacturing a majority out of minority for Yeddyurappa”.

Pointing to the “brazen unconstitutional action” in appointing Bopaiah after the passing of the order earlier on Friday morning, the application by both the Congress and JD(S), said that despite the settled parliamentary convention and practice that the senior most member of the assembly in term of number of times he has been elected to the assembly, a junior MLA K.G. Bopaiah (BJP) has been appointed as pro-tem speaker.

The application said that Bopaiah has a “dubious and controversial record of passing biased disqualification orders”.

Bopaiah, the application says has been “severely criticised and strictures” were passed against him by the top court and the disqualification orders passed by him earlier as Speaker of Karnataka assembly were also set aside as being “vitiated with mala fides and undue haste”.

The application has said that Governor Vala has appointed Bopaiah in a shocking disregard to binding parliamentary convention and long standing parliamentary practice of appointing the senior most member of the House.

“The sole purpose of appointing a relatively junior member of the House is nothing but an attempt to seize and manipulate the floor test” the application says expressing “reasonable apprehension” of both the Congress and the JD(S).

The application has contended that the Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa in “tandem with the Government at the Centre is exercising influence through the Governor of the State to ensure that he sails through the floor test by hook or crook, in absolute disregard to Parliamentary practice and the well-established convention of appointing the senior most member as the pro-tem Speaker”.

The “manner in which preparations for the floor test is being carried out seems to suggest that it is being designed to replicate defections orchestrated” by Yeddyurappa in the year 2008 when he was again short of majority.

The same is commonly known as “Operation Lotus”, says the application.

After camping here for the entire day, Karnataka MLAs belonging to the Congress and the Janata Dal-United (JD-S) left for Bengaluru late on Friday.

With the Supreme Court on Friday directing the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Karnataka to prove its majority on the floor of the Assembly on Saturday, the legislators of the two parties left for Bengaluru by road.

Over 115 MLAs of the two parties, along with their leaders, left in five luxury buses, accompanied by a large number of vehicles of Congress leaders of Telangana. Amid tight security, the long convoy left the two hotels after 10.30 p.m.

The MLAs arrived here early in the day after the night-long journey and checked in into the two star-hotels. They were shifted to Hyderabad to protect them from poaching by the BJP.

Hours after their arrival here, the Supreme Court directed Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa to take the floor test at 4 p.m on Saturday.

On a day of fast-paced developments, former Karnataka Chief Ministers H.D. Kumaraswamy and Siddaramaiah flew to Hyderabad to hold crucial meetings to discuss the strategy to be adopted in the state Assembly on Saturday when the BJP government seeks a trust vote.

JD-S leader Kumaraswamy, Congress’ Siddaramaiah and top leaders of the two parties attended the meeting at the Taj Krishna hotel, where Congress MLAs were camping. They also discussed the appointment of BJP legislator K.G. Bopaiah as pro-tem Speaker by the Governor.

Kumaraswamy joined the meeting a couple of hours after Siddaramaiah held a meeting with all 76 MLAs of the Congress party. The meeting of Congress legislature party unanimously elected Siddaramaiah as its leader.

Kumaraswamy, who has already staked claim to form the government with the support of the Congress, later drove to Novotel, where 36 MLAs of his party were camping.

The Delhi Police on Friday questioned Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two AAP MLAs and sought to know from him about the sequence of events that took place on February 19, said a senior police officer.

The police also sought to know from him whether the assault on Prakash was pre-planned, he said.

Chief Minister may again be questioned and if needed it will also question Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia as Kejriwal did not give “satisfactory answers”, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Harendra Singh told the media after about three-hour-long questioning.

Reacting to his questioning, Kejriwal hit out at the Union government and said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is behind the move.

On February 20, the Chief Secretary alleged that he was assaulted by two Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs in the presence of Kejriwal at the Chief Minister’s residence. The two, Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, were arrested and later released on bail.

The Chief Minister alleged that the cases against the AAP were “fake and politically motivated”.

Singh said that Kejriwal did not give satisfactory answers to some of the questions, adding that Kejriwal was questioned in the room in which the Chief Secretary was allegedly assaulted. “He was evasive of some questions.”

The Additional DCP said that the whole process has been videograhped, but added that as per law, a copy of the recording could not be given to the Chief Minister.

He also said that there were two advocates with Kejriwal during his questioning.

Meanwhile, Kejriwal said in a written statement after the questioning that the BJP was letting loose Lt. Governor Anil Baijal and Delhi Police after the AAP, to stop the good work being done by the AAP government in Delhi.

“For the first time in the history of India, a Chief Minister was questioned for fake cases and a raid was conducted by police. There is only one reason behind it — to disturb us and to defame us,” the statement said.

The Chief Minister’s interrogation began around 5 p.m at his residence on Flagstaff Road of north Delhi and went on till 8.15 p.m.

A police officer who was present at the time of the questioning told IANS said that over 100 questions were asked by the Delhi Police.

Singh entered Kejriwal’s residence with Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Civil Lines Police Station, and four Inspector-rank officers, a police official said.

Over a dozen policemen were deployed outside the Chief Minister’s residence.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday hailed the Supreme Court order directing a floor test for Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa to ascertain majority support to him.

“We have great respect for the verdict of the Supreme Court. We will watch tomorrow’s floor test. We, the ‘regional’ parties, will decide our next course of action after that,” Banerjee tweeted.

The Supreme Court directed a floor test on Saturday to ascertain whether Yeddyurappa enjoys majority support in the 224-member assembly and barred him from taking any policy decisions till then.

Directing the floor test at 4 p.m, a bench of Justice A.K. Sikri, Justice S.A. Bobde and Justice Ashok Bhushan on Friday said the pro-tem Speaker, the senior-most member of the House, would administer the newly-elected members their oath and then conduct the floor test.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislature party leader B.S. Yeddyurappa was on Thursday sworn-in as the Chief Minister after the May 12 elections threw up a hung assembly.

Former Minister and Kerala MLA Thomas Chandy on Thursday dismissed as “hoax” media reports that newly elected Congress and Janata Dal-Secular legislators in Karnataka were travelling to stay at his resort here.

“These are all hoax news. I also got calls from Kerala intelligence officials on the issue. I also heard from certain TV channels that Karnataka legislators are travelling to Alappuzha. I tell you, no such thing is going to happen,” Chandy said.

Chandy quit as Transport Minister this year after allegations that his plush resort in Alappuzha had usurped government land. His resort overlooks the beautiful Vembanad lake.