Monthly Archives: August 2018

Indian-American Sikh leader Gurinder Singh Khalsa with US Vice-President Mike Pence. PTI file Photo

Washington, March 9

Indo-US ties will touch new heights under the Trump administration as the two countries are “natural partners” and have common interests amid China’s assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region, an Indian-American entrepreneur considered close to Vice-President Mike Pence has said.“Both India and the US have an interest in fighting terrorism originating in central Asian areas such as Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Indiana-based Gurinder Singh Khalsa, founder and chairman of Sikhs Political Action Committee (SikhsPAC).“It is to India’s long-term benefit to continue improving relations with the US. We also have many shared business priorities, particularly in IT and tech industries,” he said.Khalsa, a businessman, has been Pence’s friend from the days when the latter was not even elected Indiana Governor.Khalsa said he wanted to focus on strengthening India-US ties and be the voice of Indian-Americans and other such ethnic communities in the US.“Pence has been very outspoken about the need for more economic cooperation between India and Indiana. Prior to becoming Vice-President, he spoke to us about his intention to travel to India after the election. He wanted to be the first Indiana Governor to visit India,” he said.Born in 1973, Khalsa moved to the US in 1996 after writing four research papers.Prior to moving to Indiana in 2008, Khalsa spent five years in the real estate, insurance and finance sectors in California. Since 2003, he has developed a chain of businesses throughout California, Nevada and Indiana.In 2007, a TSA agent in Buffalo, New York, refused to allow Khalsa on an airplane unless he removed his turban. “This was a clear violation of the Sikh religious practice,” he argued, adding that he refused and took the issue before the Congress, where he successfully lobbied for changes to the TSA headwear policy. — PTI

Kulwinder Sandhu

Tribune News Service

Moga, March 5

A 27-year-old Moga youth was taken into custody by the Army while he was found roaming near an Army camp in Kathua district of J&K last night.After preliminary investigations, the youth has been identified as Bali, a resident of Badhni Kalan town falling under the Nihalsinghwala sub-division in Moga.A senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency IB said the antecedents of the said youth were being verified by the agency.Local officials of the Punjab state intelligence (CID) also sprung into action after coming to know about the youth’s arrest by the Army.According to information, he was arrested from Ratno Chak nullah in the Tarnah sector of Hiranagar in Kathua district while he was roaming near an Army camp under suspicious circumstances.The local police at Hiranagar have also been informed about the arrest and his medical examination was conducted at the civil hospital. The doctors who attended on him reported that the youth was suffering from mental depression and was not in fully ‘conscious’ state.The arrested youth is in the custody of military intelligence and further investigations are in progress. Army officials suspect that he might have links with either terrorists or drug smugglers across the border in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir or he could be a spy working for the ISI, but the facts were yet to be ascertained, said IB sources.

Punjab Congress chief Capt Amarinder Singh’s grandson Nirvan Singh tied the knot with Mriganka Singh, granddaughter of Rajya Sabha MP Karan Singh, in New Delhi on Saturday.Members of the erstwhile royal families of Patiala, Jammu and Kashmir, Gwalior, the Rampur Bushair nobility of Himachal Pradesh and those from Jaisalmer and Kapurthala attended the marriage.Nirvan is the son of Amarinder’s daughter Jai Inder and Gurpal Singh, while Mriganka is the daughter of Karan Singh’s son Vikramaditya Singh and Chitrangada (daughter of late Congress leader Madhavrao Scindia).

Punjab Congress chief Capt Amarinder Singh, along with HP CM Virbhadra Singh and other guests, at the wedding of his grandson Nirvan Singh in New Delhi on Saturday. Nirvan tied knot with Mriganka Singh, granddaughter of RS MP and J&K royal scion Karan Singh .

who’s who of erstwhile royal families from across the country converged at Kashmir House in Lutyen’s Delhi to attend the wedding of the grandson of Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh on Saturday.

Many of the erstwhile royals are related to each other.

Nirvan is the son of Amarinder’s daughter Jayainder and Gurpal Singh, while Mriganka is daughter of Karan Singh’s son Vikramaditya Singh and Chitrangada (daughter of late Congress leader Madhavrao Scindia of former Gwalior royal family).

Another grandson of Amarinder and his wife former Union minister Preneet Kaur, is married to Aparajita, daughter of Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, a scion of erstwhile Bushahr state.

The marriage was solemnised with Sikh and Hindu rituals in the presence of their grandparents and other close family members and relatives.

Country’s top political leaders are expected to attend the reception, including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, on Sunday.

HT PHOTOPatiala royal scions Captain Amarinder SIngh and Malwinder Singh escorting the groom; and (right) the newly wed couple Nirvan Singh and Mriganka Singh, in Delhi on Saturday.

Nirvan Singh, a scion of the erstwhile Patiala royal family, tied the nuptial knot with Mriganka Singh, granddaughter of senior Congress leader Karan Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP and scion of Jammu and Kashmir’s princely family.

Members of erstwhile royal families of Patiala, Jammu and Kashmir, Gwalior, the Bushahr nobility of Himachal Pradesh and those from Jaisalmer and Kapurthala attended the marriage functions and blessed the newlyweds.

BACK in 1954, the Justice Munir Commission report into the anti-Ahmadi violence in Punjab famously complained that no two Pakistani clerics, or “divines” in the language of the time, could agree on the definition of a Muslim. Today, President Donald Trump might be finding himself similarly frustrated. His White House staff cannot agree on how to describe violent jihadists. Are they Islamist terrorists or just terrorists? Are they bad Muslims, non-Muslims or perfectly valid Muslims with a fringe point of view?Last week, in his first speech to his staff, the President’s new national security adviser, Lt Gen H.R. McMaster, said the term “radical Islamic terrorism” wasn’t helpful for US goals. His remark suggests he agrees with the approach taken by Trump’s predecessor. When Obama was still in office, the grieving mother of a US soldier asked why the White House would not use the term ‘Islamic terrorist’. “…Al-Qaida and (Islamic State) … they have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death,” Obama said. “…If you had an organisation that was going around killing and blowing people up and said, ‘We’re on the vanguard of Christianity.’ As a Christian, I’m not going to let them claim my religion and say, ‘you’re killing for Christ.’ I would say, that’s ridiculous.”In the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, French President François Hollande took a similar line. “Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” he said. It’s a position that has sparked some debate amongst violent jihadists. Some have joked on social media platforms about being declared a non-Muslim — or being “takfir’ed” as one put it — by Western politicians. After all, they ask, how can men such as Gen McMaster, president Obama or President Hollande presume they have the scholarly credentials to declare who is and who isn’t a Muslim?But its not just jihadists who reject the McMaster/Obama/Hollande line. Dr Sebastian Gorka, the deputy assistant to President Trump, has for some years lectured the US military on the sources of violent jihadism. “This isn’t about poverty or lack of education,” he has said, “It’s about people who are fighting for the soul of Islam  not a war with Islam, but a war inside Islam; as King Abdullah, as General Sisi has said, for which version is going to win.”Gorka is not arguing that violent jihadism is the only valid interpretation of the religion. On the contrary, other Muslims, he says, are struggling for their own interpretations to prevail. “There are people every day risking their lives on their blog sites, in North Africa, in the Middle East pushing back on this, saying, ‘I’m a Muslim, but I don’t think an infidel needs to be killed’.”Violent jihadists, on Gorka’s account, are not non-Muslim or even bad Muslims. Rather they are valid Muslims who believe in the use of violence to further their goals. Others in the new White House team have similar views. President Trump’s most trusted adviser, chief strategist Steve Bannon, has been speaking about these issues for some years. In a speech given in Rome in 2014 he spoke of a coming clash between Christianity and Islam. “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said. “And this war is, I think, metastasising far quicker than governments can handle it.”The extent to which religion can be used to justify jihadist attacks has also been debated in the UK. In 2014, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair complained that some Western commentators “went to extraordinary lengths in their attempts to deny that these conflicts were about Islam, arguing instead that local or historic factors were more important.” It was odd, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles.Blair’s successor David Cameron made similar remarks. In the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks on London’s transport system, before he was Prime Minister, Cameron said that: “The Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening”. But later he modified that position arguing that some Muslims, even if they do not use force themselves, agree with many of the ideas of the violent jihadists. “Simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work,” he said.So what of the new American president? He may just have appointed McMaster as his National Security Adviser, but there is little doubt that Trump’s views are more in line with those of Gorka and Bannon. In his remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last week, Donald Trump said this: “So let me state this as clearly as I can. We are going to keep radical Islamic terrorists … out of our country.” The writer, a British journalist, is the author of “Pakistan: Eye of the Storm”. By arrangement with the Dawn

IN our country it has become a common practice to add the soporific ‘honourable’ in mentioning an important personage in public life. Why do we need to embellish the names of public leaders to call them Honourable Prime Minister, Honourable Chief Minister, or the like? Is it high office itself that commands such obsequiousness, or, in politer words, expression of extreme respect?In court, it is customary for lawyers to address the sitting judge as ‘Your Honour’. An advocate might well challenge a contrary judicial verdict before a higher court in such flowery terms as perverse, biased and unsustainable in law. The counsel will, however, sugar coat his submission, referring to the judge who gave the adverse decision as ‘Honourable’ court, even as he attacks the judgment as bad, and even questions the basic understanding of the judge who delivered the decision. Such deference to judicial authority is understandable, based as it is on civility, convention, and an undercurrent of fear before the person wielding decision-making power.Democracy is a form of government of, for and by the people. Ministers performing executive functions are accordingly answerable to their electors. Before every voting they assiduously woo their constituents. Once the leaders assume office, the veneer of being chief servants of the public disappears. It seems that, in judicial terms, inducement, threat or promise — these are the unsubtle weapons available to secure obedience and respect. Hence we have the unedifying image of public figures, cringing before their patrons, and lionising them in speech as ‘honourable’ heroes.  Ironically, the figures continue to remain ‘honourable’ even when convicted of moral turpitude. All too familiar is the sight of convicted criminals controlling governments from behind prison bars.Could there be unintended sarcasm behind the terminology describing leaders as ‘honourable’? In Shakespeare’s play the killers of Julius Caesar publicly justify the assassination as an act of honour. Mark Antony cleverly picks on the impropriety of such wilful depiction as an honourable act. He instigates the mob against the conspirators, sarcastically dubbing the assassins ‘honourable men’. Repeated mention of the killers as ‘honourable’ infuriates the crowd, and turns the tide against the murder. In today’s context, the label ‘honourable’ can at best be seen to provide a crutch for the public image of the leaders that have been have voted to power. At worst, it would serve to cover their failings. Approbation, sincere or otherwise, clearly inflates the ego, even though it might not enhance the personality. In any case flattery is something that must influence, and appeal to all in the game. Alexander Pope writes: ‘Tis an old maxim in the schools,/That flattery is the food of fools:/Yet now and then, your men of wit/Will condescend to take a bit.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar. File photo

Mumbai, February 28

The Shiv Sena on Tuesday hit out at Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar over the Army paper leak, and said that the BJP should take entire responsibility of the incident that has dented the government’s image.”Papers of universities and other exams used to get leaked. But now, the Army’s recruitment question papers are also not safe. This leak, which comes at a time when soldiers are sacrificing their lives, has shattered the government’s image,” the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece ‘Saamana.'”Manohar Parrikar wants to become the Chief Minister of Goa again and is holding the reins of the Defence Ministry from Panaji. But atleast till he holds the post (of Defence minister), he should perform his duty,” it added.The Sena said that since the issue is related to national security, the BJP should come forward and accept complete responsibility for the paper leak.”The PM talks about nationalism and sacrifice but his talks do not seem to be percolating to the ground. If there is nationalism in note ban, then it should be in Army recruitment as well,” it said.The recruitment racket came to light on Saturday night when 18 people from Maharashtra and Goa were arrested after raids. Three more persons were arrested yesterday. All of them were sent to police custody till March 4 by a Thane court.Army recruitment exams slated on February 26 at Kamptee, Nagpur, Ahmednagar, Ahmedabad, Goa and Kirkee (in Pune) were cancelled after the question paper leak. — PTI

India, China research team says drought, floods to hit nation’s food security

BEIJING: The Indo-Gangetic plain will face extreme climatic conditions such as severe droughts if the burning of fossil fuel continues unabated and government policies fail to intervene, a group of Indian and Chinese researchers has warned.

REUTERS FILEA boy catches fish in a dried­up pond near the banks of the Ganges river in Allahabad.

The droughts, a possible result of the reckless burning of fossil fuels combined with regional warming, will lead to a fall in agricultural produce, compromising India’s food security, the researchers projected.

That wasn’t the only conclusion because of dependency on the intensity of monsoon and the variability of government intervention, “extreme wet events” or floods will be a probability too.