Hitting back for the first time at critics who questioned his perceived friendly relations with corporates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said that unlike “some people” he was “not afraid of” publicly standing beside industrialists and business magnates because his intentions were “noble”.

In response, the Congress responded to his remarks saying he should not lend his legitimacy and respectability to “crony capitalists” while Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Adami Party leader Arvind Kejriwal called it “an unsuccessful try” as people were now raising questions.

In his address at a government-industry interface in Lucknow as he inaugurated several development projects for Uttar Pradesh, Modi said industrialists too contribute to nation building and it was not right to label them all as thieves but those who do wrong “will have to leave the country” or live in jail.

“We are not the people who will be afraid of standing beside industrialists. You would be knowing some people (who are such) that you would not find a single photo of them with an industrialist/businessman. But there is not a single businessman in this country who would not have gone to these people’s places and bowed to them in reverence,” he said.

“If your intentions are noble, you won’t be tainted no matter with whom you are standing,” Modi said, adding that Mahatma Gandhi never had any qualms about living in the Birla household.

The opposition has been targeting Modi over his picture at Davos economic forum in January this year with fugitive diamondaire Nirav Modi who is at the centre of multi-thousand crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam besides the Prime Minister’s perceived closeness with another fugitive, Mehul Choksi, whom he once publicly addressed as “Mehul bhai”.

The opposition has also been critical of Modi government’s inaction while persons like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Choksi, Jatin Mehta and Lalit Modi easily flew out of the country after being accused of committing huge financial frauds.

The Congress has of late also targeting Modi for allegedly giving the offset contract in the Rafale jet deal with France to “one of his corporate friends” at the expense of state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.

“Mahatma Gandhi never hesitated standing beside (Ghanshyam Das) Birlaji because his intentions were right. But those who do things behind the curtain and wish not to be seen publicly (with corporates), they are afraid,” Modi said.

“Just as much as the labour of a farmer, an artisan, a banker, a government employee or a labourer goes into the making of the nation, the efforts of industrialists too have a role in nation building. Should we insult them, call them thieves and robbers? Is this the way?

“But yes, whoever (among corporates) does the wrong, he will either have too leave the country or live in jail. This would not happen earlier because a lot happened behind the curtains then.”

Addressing a media conference in Delhi later, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said “If the Prime Minister feels alright to be photographed with such people, who allegedly ripped off the banking system, and run away to Antigua and London or probably disappear from the earth, then I leave it to the Prime Minister’s wisdom to lend his legitimacy and respectability to such people.”

“The question is not the capitalists or industrialists. The question is what kind of capitalists or industrialists,” he said, while stressing his party was not against industrialists and capitalists, but against “crony capitalists”.

Tewari also hit out at Modi for comparing himself with Mahatma Gandhi.

Kejriwal questioned Modi’s closeness with those who looted the country and all the investigating agencies failed to nab.

“Giving a contract of the Air Force to a 10-day old company and whose owner is a friend of PM. All these are raising questions among the people. Sir, your clarification is unsuccessful try,” he said in a tweet in Hindi.

The West Bengal Assembly on Thursday passed a resolution renaming the state as “Bangla”.

The resolution was moved by the Trinamool Congress and supported by the Left parties and the Congress.

The outspoken cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan, is seeking to lead Pakistan as prime minister.

Contesting its third elections, Khan’s opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) is poised to make inroads at the country’s general elections on Wednesday.

He has appealed to the masses, especially the younger generation, with his campaign slogan of creating a “new Pakistan” and rooting out corruption.

Michael Kugelman, a US-based analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC, said Khan’s rise to power would be in line with global trends, where “maverick, unconventional, and shoot-from-the-hip national leaders” are enjoying a renaissance.

“For Imran Khan’s legion of devoted followers, he represents the new, bold, incorruptible leader that the country has long sought,” Kugelman told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. “In reality, there would be some considerable concerns about a Prime Minister Khan, ranging from his complete lack of experience in holding the national power to his proud and stubborn personality, which could worry a Pakistani military that prefers that civilian leaders be pliable.”

Early life
Khan, 65, was born and raised in an affluent ethnic Pashtun family in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, Punjab.

He was schooled at Lahore’s elite all-boys Aitchison College before graduating from Oxford University in 1975 with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics.

As the captain of Pakistan’s national cricket team, Khan famously led the country to its first and only victory at the 1992 World Cup in Australia.

After retiring from the sport, Khan devoted most of his time to philanthropy and social work.

He launched Pakistan’s first specialized cancer center, Shaukat Khanum, named after his late mother who succumbed to the disease.

In 2008, Khan also established a private technical college in Punjab’s rural Mianwali district, called Namal College.

Political career

Increasingly disillusioned by the county’s bureaucracy and endemic corruption, Khan entered the political realm in 1996, founding his centrist PTI party with a promise of ensuring “insaf” (justice) for all.

As party chairman, Khan won his first seat in the National Assembly in the 2002 general elections, contesting from his paternal ancestral hometown of Mianwali, Punjab.

Following a boycott of the 2008 polls as a stance against corruption, Khan stunned the political classes in Islamabad by unexpectedly attracting hundreds of thousands of supporters to public rallies in Lahore and Karachi in late 2011.

After a provincial victory at the 2013 general elections, PTI governed the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province for five years.

“Since emerging as a major player in Pakistani politics in 2013, what Pakistan has seen of Imran Khan is a lot of disruptive and agitational politics, a lot of disregard for elected institutions including the parliament to which he was elected but he hardly went there,” said Aamer Ahmed Khan, a Karachi-based journalist.

Khan led Pakistan to its first and only cricket World Cup victory in 1992
Khan has long been a vocal critic of the now-jailed prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

He led protests in 2014, demanding that the government, led by Sharif’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), resign over alleged poll-rigging.

Khan pushed the Supreme Court case instigated by the Panama Papers leak scandal against Sharif, which ultimately led to his disqualification and imprisonment.

Khan’s rivals say his rise and the fall of Sharif was engineered by the establishment – a local metaphor used for Pakistan’s powerful military. Khan denies the allegations as a “foreign conspiracy” to malign the army, which also rejects the charge.

Policies
Ahead of the elections, under the slogan of “new Pakistan”, Khan spearheaded a campaign against corruption with a promise to reform systems of governance in the country.

Khan has pledged to create as many as 10 million jobs, in addition to building five million low-cost housing units over the next five years, according to his party manifesto.

“Pakistan is broken from inside, not from outside; and when Pakistan reforms itself from the inside, the outside will improve very significantly,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences in a phone interview. “And he [Khan] is the right man to take courageous decisions.”

What Pakistan has seen of Imran Khan is a lot of disruptive and agitational politics, a lot of disregard for elected institutions, including the parliament.

Internationally, Khan has called for the resolution of the Kashmir dispute with rival and neighbour India within the parameters of the UN Security Council resolutions.

The PTI head has criticised US policy in Afghanistan and called for peace talks to be held with the Taliban, forcing his critics to call him “Taliban Khan” for being too soft on the armed group. He vehemently denies the accusations.

If elected, analysts and critics say the inexperienced public office holder will face significant domestic and foreign policy challenges.

“Internationally, Khan would have to deal with two neighbours – India and Afghanistan – that mistrust Pakistan in a big way and will be watching closely to see how conciliatory a message Pakistan’s next leader delivers to them, and how much policy space the military gives that new leader to wage foreign policy,” said Kugelman.

“There is also the troubled relationship with the US, which Khan has vociferously criticised over the years and will be in no rush to try to improve.”

A man detonated a bomb on a street outside the US Embassy in Beijing on Thursday, rattling the diplomatically sensitive area in the capital.

The police identified the man as 26-year-old Jiang Moumou, who set off a device made from fireworks, injuring his hand. He hails from China’s Inner Mongolia region.

“There was an explosion at approximately 1 p.m. on the street outside the South East corner of the Embassy compound,” the US mission said in a statement.

“There was one individual who detonated a bomb. Other than the bomber, there were no injuries and there was no damage to Embassy property. The local police responded,” it added.

The street in front of the Embassy, Tianze Road, which is also near the embassies of India and Israel, was closed for about an hour after the blast. Soon after the street reopened, a new line began to form outside the Embassy compound.

State media outlet Global Times tweeted that local residents had heard a “thunder-like bang”. Video and images posted on social media showed smoke rising from the vicinity of the Embassy in the heart of the Chinese capital with crowds gathering.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called the explosion an “isolated security incident”.

“Chinese police have dealt with it in a timely and proper manner,” he said.

A visa agent, who said he was about 30 feet away when the blast occurred, said the source appeared to be an explosive device, set off by a man who had been trying to call attention to a human rights issue.

Earlier in the day, the police arrested a woman spraying petrol on herself in a suspected attempt at self-immolation. It was not clear whether the two incidents were related.

The incident came at a time when the US and China are locked in a trade war.

Attacks on sites in the Chinese capital are rare. The most serious incident in recent years saw a car ploughing into a crowd at Tiananmen Square in 2013, killing five people including the attackers.

The form waiver loan in Karnataka remains a burning political issue After Karnataka Cheif  Minister H D Kumaraswamy announced a total of RS 44.700 crore crop loan waiver for farmers. The Bharatiya Janata Party is carrying out a three-day padayatra from Ramanagaram area to Bengaluru from Thursday demanding complete waiver of all farmer loans.

This is viewed as the party’s preparation for the by-polls to Ramanagaram and the 2019 Lok Sabha election for Bengaluru Rural seat. Former Minister C.P. Yogeshwar, and Tejaswini Gowda and N. Ravikumar, MLCs, will take part in the inaugural function to mark the commencement of the padayatra.

The padayatra will start from Kengal Anjaneya temple, which is situated in Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy’s constituency of Channapatna.

As early results showed the victory of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in the general elections, PTI chairman Imran Khan summoned his party leaders on Thursday for consultations at his residence in Bani Gala.

According to the sources in the know of the development, the party leaders will discuss and decide on the strategies for forming a government.

Khan is expected to ask his party leaders to contact independent candidates from across Punjab and enlist their support. The meeting will formulate a strategy to counter the opponent’s allegation that the elections were rigged.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has rejected the results citing outright rigging.

Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) denied the allegations, asserting that the elections were “100 percent fair and transparent.”