PATNA: An massive surge in COVID-19 cases taking the count to over 2.95 lakh on Thursday has evidently alarmed the state of Bihar.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday said that the Covid positives is also being reported from rural areas apart from urban pockets and the state is badly falling in the second wave in India.

Speaking to the media after taking the second jab at IGIMS on Thursday, Kumar said that the state government is keeping strict vigil on the emerging trends of the pandemic and would go to any extent to check it after the all party meet on April 17 chaired by the governor.

“Our officers and the minister also are speaking to everyone within and outside the state and ensuring immediate returning of all those who want to return to Bihar from other states,” he said, replying to a specific query regarding imposition of either curfew or lockdown in the state ahead.

He stated that the COVID-19 has started spreading in some rural pockets apart from urban, which has made the state government to enforce the safety guidelines across the state.

“We have now ramped up the testing count to nearly 1 lakh daily and hoping to exceed it soon. We will act strongly if the situation continues persisting worsening,” he hinted about the state’s move to be taken ahead.

Meanwhile, reliable sources said that the state government may place five to six cities including Patna under curfew or a week long lockdown after April 17.

The cities apart from Patna ikely to be placed under curfew or lockdown are Muzaffarpur, Gaya, Bhagalpur, West Champaran, Saran, Begusarai and Munger.

On Thursday, Bihar reported the highest single day spike in positive cases – 6,133 – the highest of second wave.

In Bihar, everyday 7 to 10 patients die in Patna besides deaths reported from other parts.

As many as 24 COVID patients died in the last 24 hours in the state till Thursday evening, drastically reducing the recovery rate to 89.79% from over 97%.

The shortage of oxygen cylinders in the hospitals is also impending to such an extent that the DM Patna had to depute magistrates to monitor the supply.

The Patna DM ordered the agencies to supply 90 per cent of total production of oxygen cylinders to Patna through the state industry department.

New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday attacked the government over the handling of the COVID-19 situation and alleged that it is only indulging in a “sham” of a ‘vaccine festival’.

He also alleged that there is no testing, no beds in hospitals, neither ventilators or oxygen and vaccine is also not available. Gandhi also took a jibe asking what PM-CARES is doing, as huge donations were given to the fund for handling COVID-19 situation.

“There are no tests or beds in hospitals. There are no ventilators or oxygen. The vaccine is also not there. But there is a sham of a festival. PM-CARES?” he asked.

His attack came after the government celebrated the ‘Tika Utsav’ (vaccine festival) from April 11 to 14.

India saw its highest single-day rise of 2,00,739 COVID-19 infections and 1,038 fatalities pushing the country’ tally of cases to 1,40,74,564 and the total death toll to 1,73,123, according to official data.

The total number of active COVID-19 cases in the country were recorded at 14,71,877 cases.

Mangaluru: AICC secretary and former MLC Ivan D’Souza on Wednesday demanded that the Adani brand name be removed from the welcome arch of the Mangaluru International Airport (MIA).

Addressing reporters here, he said the Airports Authority of India (AAI) should take immediate steps to remove the ‘Adani’ tag from the airports name as it violated the agreement with the company which has only been given permission to operate and maintain the airport.

He said details obtained through an RTI query have revealed that the operating company cannot tag its name with the airport, which is fully under the Civil Aviation Ministry.

D’Souza alleged that due to the neglect shown by the AAI, the MIA has witnessed a slump in its growth over the years.

The facilities at the airport have not been improved and the number of flights have come down.

He said the Congress would launch a ‘Save Airport’ movement if the authorities continued to show neglect towards the MIA.

The number of flights to Mumbai have been reduced and the only flight to Mysuru has also been cancelled.

D’Souza said though 16 years have passed since MIA received international airport status, no flights have so far been operated to tourism destinations like Sri Lanka, Singapore and Thailand.

Courtesy: The newslaundry.com report adds that the allegations of the villagers have gone mostly unreported so far.

“Newslaundry spoke to five eyewitnesses to the firing, family members and neighbors of the slain men and several other villagers. Their recollections of what happened at Booth 126 during polling in the fourth phase of the Bengal election are consistent. “The media is showing lies” is the common refrain. Booth 126 has just about 900 voters and the majority of them are Muslim” the report claims.

Graves of the four men killed in the firing at Jorpatki.

The official version largely covered by the media after the incident, on the polling day, rumors of a child being beaten up by central forces led to a mob surrounding the booth, leading to the CISF firing and the killings.

“The action on part of the force personnel was in self-defence after the crowd attacked the polling booth and officers. There is no doubt about that,” CISF’s chief spokesperson DIG Anil Pandey was quoted as saying by Newslaundry.

The villagers, however, say Jorpatki saw two separate incidents of violence that morning. At around 9 am, they claim, a boy who was playing at Kazi Mod, a crossroad near the polling booth, was roughed up by the central forces. Seeing this, men and women, two dozen or so, surrounded the forces. This led to the forces firing in the air, but the tempers cooled down and the forces drove the child to nearby Mathabhanga hospital.

The situation had normalized and they were peacefully voting, the villagers say, when, close to 10 am, two vehicles arrived at Booth 126. “Men in uniform got out of the car and approached the booth. They hit one of the boys standing in the line as soon as they entered the polling area. He was a young boy who had come to vote,” recalls Makshidul Miyan, 40, a migrant laborer whose work takes him to Delhi, Bihar, and Nepal.

Maskshidul Miyan at Booth 126 where the firing took place.

In a moment, there was firing. “One man standing in my line got shot, there were four people between me and him. I escaped through this narrow alley,” Makshidul claims, pointing to a gap between two classrooms of the school that doubled up as the voting booth. He never got to vote, the newslaundry report further added.

Newslaundry report:

Makshidul, like most villagers we spoke with, could not say which of the central forces arrived in the vehicles, and allegedly shot at the voters. They can only distinguish between men in police uniform and those in an “army-like uniform” they commonly refer to as Kendra Vahini.

The Election Commission’s special police observer, though, has maintained that it was the CISF who had to open fire to defend against a violent mob.

There was no mob, violent or otherwise, the villagers insist. “I have been saying this to the media for two days, but no one is showing what really happened,” complains Zamiul Hoque, 31, who was injured in the firing and is now being treated in the Mathabhanga hospital.

Zamiul has metal pins in one of his legs, put in about a decade ago to fix a fracture that he had suffered in a truck accident. “I walk very slowly because of my injury. I cannot walk even properly, do you think I would go to the booth to create a ruckus? I have been sitting home 10 years. When I cast my vote and came out of the booth, I saw two cars come and stop outside the polling area. They approached and shot at the line of voters.”

Zamiul’s cousin was one of the four men killed.

The ‘bad boys’

The BJP’s chief in Bengal, Dilip Ghosh, has denounced the men killed by the CISF as “bad boys”, and declared that such people will not remain if his party takes power. Fellow BJP leader Rahul Sinha has complained that the CISF didn’t shoot dead eight men. Speaking with the families and neighbors of the “bad boys” didn’t exactly serve to bolster their image as local strongmen. One of them, in fact, was a migrant worker who had come home to see his baby girl for the first time and vote. The second was a farmer, the third a mason, the fourth an aspiring undergraduate student.

Chhaimul Hoque, 19, had applied for a bachelor’s degree but couldn’t afford the fees. He was at the polling booth with his sister Anjupa Khatun and brother Saidul Hoque, 18. According to the villagers, Chhaimul was shot dead when he tried to stop a CISF man who was thrashing his brother. Saidul is currently in the Cooch Behar hospital.

Anjupa Khatun outside her home.

It’s hard to understand Anjupa through her inconsolable sobbing but she clearly alleges that the CISF firing was unprovoked. “My brothers and I went to vote in the morning and were in the line when the central forces came in two to three cars. And within a few minutes there was chaos and firing,” she recounts. “Before we could understand what had happened, I saw my brother lying on the ground. My father couldn’t gather who to pick up, who to help. I request you to please find out who did this.”

Had a mob gathered at Booth 126 and threatened the CISF personnel? “That is completely false,” she replies. “It never happened.”

Her neighbour Fajlu Rehman was in the queue as well, waiting his turn to vote. “The four officers at the booth were nice, there was no problem with them. The men who came in the car were the ones who did this. Both her brothers were in the line. First they hit Saidul and he fell. When Chhaimul asked [a CISF man] why he had done this, he was shot at.”

Fajlu goes on a rant against the BJP government and talks of conspiracies to suppress voting in his village. But he’s asked by fellow villagers not to peddle rumours and stick to explaining what he saw.

Anjupa’s neighbours also say her brothers were recording the CISF men unleashing violence and so their phones were taken away.

At Monirul Jaman’s house, where he has left behind his wife and a baby daughter, his maternal uncle, Majidul Hoque, tells us he is in no mood to speak to the media. “I have repeated my story for two days straight and no one has aired it yet,” he says. “They have only shown that the chief minister spoke to me via video conferencing. They are only showing what Dilip Ghosh is saying, which hurts us even more. They don’t understand our pain.”

Monirul Jaman’s baby girl whom he was unable to see for six months.

Monirul, 28, worked as a construction labourer in Gangtok. “His wife gave birth to a girl child six months ago and he was unable to visit them because he didn’t have the money to travel. He had sent whatever he had earned back to them,” Majidul adds. “The media is saying people at the booth tried to snatch the security personnel’s weapon. Do you think any of us would have the guts to do so? We are daily wagers, scared of their uniform and guns. If they are saying there was a mob, do they have video proof to show?”

The CISF spokesperson told Newslaundry they would release a video after the enquiry was completed. However, he added, there was a limitation to what might have been captured on camera. “You may be aware that cameras are placed inside the polling booth,” he pointed out, “towards the EVM machine.”

At Hamidul Hoque’s house gloom hangs heavy. His frail father looks at us and starts crying. His sister-in-law Sobitan Bibi who was standing in the women’s queue when the firing started has the same story to tell as all eyewitnesses. She says she ran as soon as she realised what was happening. Hamidul worked as a mason in Mathabhanga and earned about Rs 300 a day. His wife is nine months’ pregnant.

Hamidul Hoque’s farther has lost two sons now, one to heart stroke and one to the CISF firing.

Similar scenes greet us as Noor Islam’s house. His parents just stare at us in silence. Noor, 19, had been working on a farm adjacent to Booth 126 and stopped to speak to a friend when the firing took place. There’s little clarity that his parents can provide on the chain of events apart from that they lost their sole breadwinner.

Noor Islam’s parents outside their home.

At the Mathabhanga hospital, Jahidul Hoque, 14, is resting on a bed, his mother beside him. According to the police, rumours of him being beaten up were what started the violence.

Jahidul tells us he was indeed beaten up by men in uniform. “I was not running, just going back to my house and walking fast when one man from the central force held me by my shoulders. Another said, ‘He’s a kid, let him go.’ But he still hit me. He hit me on my bum and back with a stick. They did not hit me very hard but pushed me to the ground, I fell and fainted. I woke up near the hospital and realised the police had brought me here. They were nice to me,” he recalls.

Speaking with us, the child breaks into tears saying he doesn’t want to get beaten up again.

The superintendent of Mathabhanga’s Sub Divisional Hospital says Jaidul didn’t have severe injuries when he was brought there but is traumatised. He also said the slain men had bullet injuries in the chest and shoulder region. “The post-mortem would be able to provide exact details,” he added.

The minority in Jorpatki

The people living around Booth 126 are mostly Muslim. Hindus, mostly Scheduled Caste Rajabongshis, are the minority. We ask four Hindu families what they know about the violence.

In one of the families, we are told that young Hindu men and women had fled the evening of the polling after the firing because of tension in the village. They feared retaliation. They also complain they aren’t allowed to vote by the “Muslims” so they don’t know what happened at the booth.

Probesh Barman, a frail old man, says he was threatened and told not to cast his ballot seven days before the election. He doesn’t want to name whoever threatened him but claims that there are no tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims except on polling days. “We are not allowed to cast our vote except during the 2019 Lok Sabha,” he adds. “That went off very beautifully with no problems.” Probesh says he did not vote on April 10.

Niresh Barman, left, and Probesh Barman say they weren’t allowed to vote.

Sanjay Chakraborty, a BJP district leader, alleges that Hindus weren’t allowed to vote at Booths 136, 145, 146. The same day as the killings, Anand Barman, a BJP supporter according to Sanjay, was shot dead. Two arrests have been made in that case. “There is complete polarisation,” Sanjay adds, “with Hindus on one side and the minorities on the other. All minorities felt that if Hindus were allowed to vote, then BJP would win. And they are so scared of BJP winning that they obstructed Hindu votes hoping the TMC would win.”

This isn’t surprising given the well-documented voter suppression tactics used in the 2018 panchayat election. Bengal has known political violence a long time, with the communists and the Trinamool engaging in a bloody battle for power.

With the entry of the BJP, the legacy of party violence acquired a communal colour as voter preferences split along religious lines. Though we didn’t ask them, it was no secret that the majority of the Muslims we spoke with supported the Trinamool. Indeed, the bodies of the slain men were wrapped in the governing party’s flags. The Hindus we spoke with had BJP flags planted outside their houses.

Thus, allegations of voter suppression that were earlier traded between two parties are now being traded between two religions.

Conclusion

Since the day polling began in Bengal, Newslaundry has looked into allegations of voter suppression in Paschim Mednipur, Nandigram, Diamond Harbour, and elsewhere involving the central forces. In many cases, rumours floating around on WhatsApp turned out to be gross exaggerations, and local residents often refuted claims made by the Trinamool workers.

The Mamata government has fuelled mistrust of central forces with statements such as, “BJP’s CRPF was harassing and killing people” much before the Cooch Behar violence. These broadstroke accusations have made a section of the Muslim voters visibly scared of Kendra Vahini, who they believe are out to snatch their votes. They have also created a ripe ground for rumour- and fear-mongering, with both the BJP and the Trinamool vying to gain from the resulting polarisation.

The main difference between the incidents we documented earlier and the one in Jorpatki, however, is that four men lie dead, and multiple villagers are making consistent claims of unprovoked firing by the central forces.

As things stand, both the CISF and the brother of one of the deceased have filed an FIR. Siddharth Dorzee, Additional Superintendent of Police of Mathabhanga, Cooch Behar told Newslaundry, “A complaint was lodged by CISF. Villagers also approached us with a complaint. Presently, the matter is under investigation so I cannot say more than this as of now.”

Meanwhile, the CISF spokesperson told us that the incident has now acquired a political tone. “We can’t comment on the villager’s statement. Lots of manipulations can be made afterwards, thoughts can be planted. It is not limited to the crowd or civilians, now it’s a political issue. You can understand yourself to what extent the statements can be tailored,” he says. He adds that thousands of companies are deployed in West Bengal and one should wonder why there was firing in just one particular booth. This is a question that even the residents of Jorpatki are asking.

A free and fair investigation is the least that the families of the slain men deserve. And the news media could start hearing their version of truth to begin with.

Goalpokhor/Siliguri: In his maiden campaign in poll-bound West Bengal, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday termed BJP’s claim to build “Sonar Bangla”(golden Bengal) as a “mirage” and said the saffron party has nothing to offer except for hatred, violence and dividing people on the basis of language, religion, caste and creed.

Gandhi also attacked ruling Trinamool Congress, saying his party would never align with the BJP and the RSS, unlike the TMC, which in the past had been an alliance partner of the saffron party-led NDA.

The former Congress president, who attended two rallies in North Bengal in Goalpokor in Uttar Dinajpur and Siliguri, blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for failing to control COVID-19 surge in Bengal.

“BJP wants to destroy Bengal’s culture, heritage and divide it. In Assam, they are doing the same thing; in Tamil Nadu, they are trying to do the same thing with their alliance partner AIADMK.

“The BJP has nothing to offer except for hatred, violence and divisive politics,” he said.

With Congress having tie-up with the Left Front and fledgling Indian Secular Front of Muslim cleric Abbas Siddiqui, Gandhi targetted both the BJP and the TMC but he was more furious at the saffron party while attack on Mamata Banerjee’s party was comparatively low-key.

Though four rounds of voting are over in Bengal, this was the first occasion that a member of the Gandhi family campaigned in the politically significant state.

Rahul Gandhi and Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had taken many trips to Assam, where voting in three phases is over, but they remained away from Bengal, which is witnessing a fierce battle of ballots between the TMC and the BJP.

Mocking BJP’s slogan of building “Sonar Bangla”, Gandhi termed it as a “mirage” and said they “sell the same dream in every state”.

“In every state, they say similar things like Sonar Bangla.

But, they only offer dividing people on the basis of religion, caste and language,” the Congress leader said.

Criticising the “cut money” culture in Bengal, Gandhi said, “You gave the opportunity to TMC. But, they failed. People of the state have to venture out in search of jobs. This is the only state where you have to pay cut money to get jobs”.

Ridiculing the TMC poll slogan “Khela Hobe” (Game will happen), he said serving people and playing games in this regard are not the same.

“We have never aligned with the BJP and the RSS. Our fight is not just political but ideological too. For Mamata Ji, it is just a political fight.

“The BJP knows very well Congress will never surrender before them, so they called for Congress Mukt Bharat. They never said TMC mukt Bharat, as they have been their former allies,” he said.

TMC was a constituent of the NDA during time of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in whose cabinet Mamata Banerjee had served.

The BJP is not afraid of Banerjee and TMC; he said, “but they are afraid of Rahul Gandhi and Congress. The BJP knows I will never compromise or surrender before them.”

Gandhi urged people to vote in favour of the Congress- ISF-Left alliance in Bengal to usher in a new development era.

Lashing out at PM Modi over COVID situation in the country, the Congress leader said, “Modiji and the BJP have failed to control coronavirus surge in the country”.

“This central government is not bothered about whether you have jobs or lost it. This government is just bothered about a few industrialists and their profit,” he said.

Slamming the TMC government for failing to provide jobs, Gandhi said the state government had done nothing for the development.

The TMC retorted Gandhi for making comments without being aware of the ground realities.

“We don’t need lessons from Rahul Gandhi on how to combat BJP and RSS. Its the TMC which is fighting against the BJP in Bengal,” TMC MP Sougata Roy said.

New Delhi: SpiceJet and GoAir have decided not to carry any shipments of Vivo after a consignment of Chinese company’s smartphones caught fire at the Hong Kong airport’s tarmac on Sunday.

Moreover, Indian aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) will soon take a decision on whether to issue any advisory regarding carrying of Vivo cargo by domestic carriers

“We will take a call tomorrow (Thursday),” a senior DGCA official said in the press briefing

In a statement on this matter, Vivo spokesperson said it noticed that a shipment of goods, some of which were the company’s products, got burned on the parking apron of Hong Kong International Airport on Sunday.

“We have paid high attention and immediately set up a special team to work closely with the local authorities to determine its cause,” the spokesperson added.

Post the incident on Sunday, Hong Kong Airlines’ cargo arm said it would not carry any shipments of Vivo and its two logistics partners.

In an internal circular dated April 13, 2021, Sanjiv Gupta, CEO-Cargo, SpiceJet, said, “With immediate affect, acceptance of mobile and accessories shipments from company manufacturing vivo has been restricted till further notice on all SG flights.”