Milkha Singh. File photo

Tribune Web Desk

Chandigarh, August 19

A glaring error in a West Bengal textbook in depiction of athlete Milkha Singh was highlighted by a user on Twitter.Instead of Milkha Singh’s photo, the publisher has used Farhan’s picture, who played the reel Milkha Singh in the 2013 biographical film ‘Bhaag Milkha Bhaag’.Actor Farhan Akhtar has also urged West Bengal’s minister of school education to replace the textbook.

When West Bengal education board have Shown Shri Milkha Singh Ji as actor Farhan Akhtar they might show Bengal as Australia

Farhan Akhtar✔@FarOutAkhtar

To the Minister of School Education, West Bengal.
There is a glaring error with the image used in one of the school text books to depict Milkha Singh-ji. Could you please request the publisher to recall and replace this book?
Sincerely. @derekobrienmp

Lyfe Ghosh@Lyfeghosh

image of @FarOutAkhtar is portrayed as milkha singh in west bengal text book. not at all shocked. its became regular incident here @ShefVaidya @ShankhNaad

“To the Minister of School Education, West Bengal. There is a glaring error with the image used in one of the school text books to depict Milkha Singh-ji. Could you please request the publisher to recall and replace this book? Sincerely, (sic)” he tweeted.The actor portrayed the legendary athlete in the 2013 film based on his life.Farhan also tagged Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien in the tweet who responded saying that he was “on it”.Meanwhile, twitterati are not amused by this glaring error and slammed the textbook.Take a look at some of the reactions:

West Bengal using the Image of Farhan Akhtar to teach students about Milkha Singh….This is Bengal education

Tushar Sharma@ReticentReveler

Farhan Akhtar’s photo used in place of Milkha Singh in West Bengal textbooks. What next? Arbaaz Khan’s portrayed as Roger Federer in GK textbooks? Anyway, Bengal politicians seem to be taking Twitter a too seriously with their MPs too referring to Twitter handles in Parliament

madan mohit bhardwaj@mohitbhardwaj23

So these kids think that  . That’s what they are studying in their syllabus

When West Bengal education board have Shown Shri Milkha Singh Ji as actor Farhan Akhtar they might show Bengal as Australia.

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The Param Vir Chakra (PVC) is awarded to officers and enlisted personnel of all military branches for the highest degree of valor or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy. It may be awarded posthumously. The PVC is a post-Independent equivalent of the Victoria Cross (VC). — The Param Vir Chakra Winners : — 1947-48 J&K Operations • Major Somnath Sharma, 4 Kumaon, posthumous • 2nd Lt. Rama Raghoba Rane, Corps of Engineers • CHM Piru Singh, 6 Rajputana Rifles, posthumous • Naik Jadunath Singh, 1 Rajput, posthumous • Lance Naik Karam Singh, 1 Sikh 1962 Indo-China War • Major Shaitan Singh, 13 Kumaon, posthumous • Major Dhan Singh Thapa, 1/8 Gorkha Rifles • Subedar Joginder Singh, 1 Sikh, posthumous 1965 Indo-Pak War • Lt. Col. A.B. Tarapore, 17 Poona Horse, posthumous • CQMH Abdul Hamid, 4 Grenadiers, posthumous 1971 Indo-Pak War • Major Hoshiar Singh, 3 Grenadiers – 1971 War • 2nd Lt. Arun Khetarpal, 17 Poona Horse, posthumous • Fg. Off. N.J.S. Sekhon, No.18 Squadron, posthumous • Lance Naik Albert Ekka, 14 Guards, posthumous 1999 Kargil Operations • Captain Vikram Batra, 13 JAK Rifles, posthumous • Lieutenant Manoj K. Pandey, 1/11 GR, posthumous • Grenadier Yogender Singh Yadav, 18 Grenadiers • Rifleman Sanjay Kumar, 13 JAK Rifles UN Operations • Captain G.S. Salaria, 3/1 GR, posthumous – UN Operations Saichen Operations • Naib Subedar Bana Singh, 8 JAK LI – Siachen Operations IPFK Operations • Major R. Parameswaran, 8 Mahar, posthumous – IPKF Operations

Kar chale hum fida jaan-O-tann sathiyo (Muhammad Rafi)

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Aye Mere Watan Ke Logo l Immortal Patriotic Song Of India l Gautam Deonani

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THE end result of the new strategy of Kashmiri militants — travelling to Pakistan on valid visas and infiltrating via the LoC — was the same. The four Kashmiri militants who crossed Wagah with valid documents and infiltrated back into the Valley ended in coffins. Indoctrinated Pakistani youngsters pushed into the Valley too have an equally short shelf life. As Imran Khan promises a Naya Pakistan, the premier-in-waiting and his allies in GHQ need to ponder whether there is also a need to overhaul and, perhaps, dump the old tactics of stoking militancy as means to pressurise neighbours into accepting their worldview. Pakistan’s security managers also flag their concerns about militancy in Balochistan as if to justify their quarterbacking of the insensate violence in Kashmir.Today, when Pakistan stands at an economic crossroads — parlous foreign exchange reserves, sharply curtailed US assistance and put on notice by FATF — it may not be a terribly good idea to continue on the same path while depending on just Beijing for financial and political bailouts. An Imran-army axis has to move towards an era of internal reform which means jettisoning its tactics of unrelenting promotion of a militant mindset. The recent antics of the once-celebrated Afghan and Kashmiri ‘freedom fighters’ have brought only a bad name to Pakistan. In Gen Musharraf’s words, ‘religious militancy turned into terrorism. Now they are killing their own people and this should be controlled and stopped’.In other words, at least a section of the Pakistan army realises its active stoking of violence has backfired. Uncertainty has led to exacerbation of poverty, ascendancy of militarism and internal acrimony. The reductionist view of political occurrences to justify militancy across the borders has also stopped providing any external strategic advantage, if there ever was one. With Imran Khan at the helm and the army guarding his back, Pakistan needs to summon its creative capacity to change the nation’s ethos that now stands defined by its military muscle. It is in its own interest to become a welfare state rather than a national security state.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which was meant to quash Indians’ quest for liberty, resulted in reverse. It inspired people to demand freedom with more vigour. That’s what makes the abhorrable event a worthy subject to study

Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lt-Governor of Punjab

Miles Irving, DC of Amritsar

Brig-Gen Reginald Dyer

Kishwar Desai

When General Dyer ordered the troops to fire on an unarmed peaceful crowd in Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, thinking he was ‘saving’ the British Empire, he actually changed the course of history in a way he could not ever imagine.  But the atrocities did not start or end on that day. The massacre was one part of much larger systemic colonial oppression in Punjab that lasted months, even years. The role of Punjab was crucial to the freedom struggle, which is why the British were compelled to use the most terrible means to suppress it, not realising that this was a flame that would burn brighter every time they tried to extinguish it.  Amritsar was already a hub of revolutionary activity at the time — for instance Rashbihari Bose relocated here, and Punjab had been infiltrated by the Ghadrites. Leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh had been externed in the early 1900s, but the rebellion refused to die down.  Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha against the Rowlatt Acts in 1919 saw enormous mass meetings which baffled the British. It forced the Lt Governor of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer to advocate more and more repressive measures. But each turn of the screw only made the people of Punjab more determined to fight back. Partly responsible was the fact that Punjab had always been open to the world and was part of the important trade routes. Known for valuing their own independence, Punjabis in the 1800s had been at the centre of a very large and powerful empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh. In the early 1900s, they were specially recruited to fight in the World War I — which instilled them with ideas of freedom. But ironically, when they returned to India, after the war, they found that they were deprived of their rights in their own country. By 1919, the recently demobilised soldiers in the villages were restless, so were the educated classes in the cities. A whole generation of professionals, particularly lawyers and doctors, who had gone abroad and studied in Western countries, where they were treated as equals, also returned home to find that the oppression in Punjab was growing.When I began working on my book Jallianwala Bagh, 1919—Before and After (to be published shortly), I came across such a wealth of material, both in India and the UK, that one feels there is still a huge need to write and discuss more about the contextual story of Jallianwala Bagh from the Indian perspective, not just in India but abroad as well. Partly, the problem has been that the huge amount of documentation that was done by the British, during colonial rule, is from their point of view. And much of the material continues to lie in archives abroad.However, the eponymous books centred around Brigadier General Dyer, or any other individual, do not bring to fore the real calamity that had struck Punjab in the early 20th century.  Many historians have spent a whole lifetime trying to psychoanalyse him in a myriad ways. Yet, it was actually O’Dwyer who pressed him to pull the trigger, through the atmosphere of animosity that he had built up. Dyer said he had been given a ‘horrible duty’ as he put it, and he would have failed his task if he did not execute it. He even feared that the crowds would have laughed at him had he not shot them. Similarly, the ‘crawling order’ he imposed on Indians who wanted to go through the street in Amritsar where Marcella Sherwood — a missionary — had been brutally beaten, was bizarre. But by making the narrative about Dyer, in fact, the British escaped a lot of ignominy. In the debate in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill condemned the massacre as an act of ‘frightfulness’ by an individual, and managed to deflect  attention towards Dyer, rather than towards the system, which was already beginning to rot. The British were desperate to hang on to their richest colony. The truth was that the powers given to the Lt-Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer were so unlimited that he turned Punjab into a laboratory, in which he experimented in various ways to quash the quest for liberty. He was, unfortunately,  not the only one, as under him were many others who had unleashed a barbaric reign of terror in Punjab, and very little of this was known in the UK till the Hunter Committee report came out one year later in 1920. Alongside was the shocking evidence recorded by the Indian National Congress under Gandhi. And even then, as we go through the material today, we are horrified at what a huge number of atrocities had actually been committed under Martial Law in Punjab, starting from April 1919 onwards — where Indians were stripped, flogged, starved, jailed and humiliated in every way. There has been much to discover while working on the Jallianwala Bagh story and the curators, researchers and designers of the Partition Museum are putting up a new exhibition, Punjab under Siege — the Jallianwala Bagh Centenary (1919-2019), at the museum..The Partition Museum is a people’s museum, which narrates history through the voices of the people, and this is how we are launching first commemorative exhibition on the Jallianwala Bagh centenary in Amritsar. The story is largely told through the recollections of the witnesses and victims at the Bagh, and later, those who suffered under the ironclad rule of the Martial Law.But the exhibition is also the story of undivided India — examining protests by Indians from Amritsar to Lahore to Gujranwala and beyond — as well as the brutal repression, which was equally spread across. The symbiosis between the cities of that time is most visible in the relationship between the twin cities of Lahore and Amritsar, where events such as the arrests of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew in Amritsar on April 10 led to a hartal in Lahore that evening, and many of the local leaders of Amritsar, in fact, belonged to Lahore. We also hope to bring to the fore many of the lesser-known aspects of the protests against the Rowlatt Bills, such as the strong Hindu-Muslim unity of Gandhi’s Satyagraha, which greatly discomfited the British. There are newspaper reports stating the opening of many temples and mosques across India attended by people of different communities. In Amritsar, Ram Navmi celebrations on April 9, 1919, famously brought together Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, who shared food and water, and shouted political slogans such as “Gandhi Maharaj ki jai!” and even “Hindu-Musalman ki jai”. These aspects are of particular importance to the Partition Museum, which traces how close-knit the communities were till they were separated by policies of ‘divide and rule.’ The exhibition, at the Partition Museum, will befittingly be just a few minutes walk from the Bagh itself. The part of the Town Hall, where the Museum is based, used to be the Kotwali — and it was here that many respectable citizens of Amritsar were incarcerated for their role in the freedom struggle, and later for so-called transgressions under the Martial Law. In fact, along with the innocents, Hans Raj, who was accused of betraying the Satyagrahis by turning approver, was also locked in here on April 22 and 23, 1919. There will be some special displays in the actual jails, which will be thrown open to visitors. The Partition Museum is honoured to be the first home for this exhibition, which travel across India and has also been invited to the UK to mark the centenary commemoration of the tragic events of 1919. A  commemoration committee of the Jallianwala Bagh centenary comprising Indians and NRIs has been formed for this, and the exhibition will be displayed in other parts of India, London, Manchester and Birmingham.(Note: Punjab Under siege: The Jallianwala Bagh Centenary (1919-1920)  is a special exhibition at the Partition Museum at Town Hall Amritsar, beginning on August 11, 2018 (10 am to 6 pm),  but the normal Partition Museum exhibition will be maintained throughout)

The Exhibition

• A special exhibition titled:Punjab Under Siege: A Commemorative Exhibition on the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Centenary (1919-2019)
• Opens at the Partition Museum, Amritsar, On August 11, 2018.
• Location: Town Hall, Heritage Plaza near Darbar Sahib)
• Timings: 10 am-6 pm daily (closed Mondays)
• Entry ticket: Rs 10
• Contact: 0-81300-01947

Srinagar, August 4

At least 10 people were injured on Saturday as clashes broke out between security forces and stone-pelters near an encounter site in Shopian district where five militants were killed during an overnight operation, police said.Hundreds of protestors assembled near the encounter site at Kiloora village after the five militants were killed in a gunbattle and started pelting security forces with stones, a police official said.He said the security forces fired pellets and live rounds in air to disperse the mob in the face of relentless stone-pelting.Several people were injured in the security forces’ action, he said, adding that four of them had been referred to a hospital here for specialised treatment. PTI

Generic, unsubstantiated allegations over critical equipment vitiate the defence procurement process and put decision-makers on the defensive

The pre-election political slugfest between the two major political parties on the Rafale aircraft deal inv­olves a cacophony of narratives being sold to the less-informed prospective voters, even as the truth is getting buried. A good weapon platform, bought after a gruelling and technically sound selection process followed by both the UPA and the NDA governments, is being sullied at the cost of national pride and honour. It is time for professionals to step in and put things in the correct perspective. It is important to understand the differences between the deal the UPA was pursuing but could not complete, and what the NDA has signed.

It was in 2001 that the Indian Air Force (IAF) first app­roached the government for 126 fighters to fill the gap bet­ween the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) and the Su-30 MKI. When the procurement process for Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) got rolling in 2007, it was stated that 18 aircraft will be bought outright and 108 will be built by the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). The six contenders were Boeing F-18 and Lockheed F-16 from the US, the French Dassault Rafale, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Russian Mikoyan MiG-35 and the Swedish Saab JAS 39 Gripen. After meeting the technical parameters at extensive field evaluation trials, Rafale and Typhoon were shortlisted in April 2011. In January 2012, Rafale was announced the winner, based on lower life-cycle cost. Then began the final negotiations with the French company.

The deal, however, got stalled on two counts. Firstly, Dassault was unwilling to take responsibility for the quality control of aircraft produced by HAL due to reservations about the latter’s ability to accommodate the complex manufacturing technology, and also because it could not exercise any control over an Indian state-run company. It was perhaps an error to have made such a stipulation in the Request for Proposal because no one can ensure quality unless it has direct control over the organisation. Secondly, production man-hours indicated by HAL were 2.7 times more, which would greatly increase the cost and upset the calculations that had led to the initial choice of the lowest bidder. Given this background, it was legally untenable to go through with the MMRCA contract.

Interestingly, WikiLeaks exposed a confidential report by former US ambassador to India Timothy Roemer to the US Administration, in which it was said that “HAL was not competent to be a partner” of the American companies in the race for the MMRCA contract.

Dassault was not willing to be responsible for the quality ­control of the aircraft produced by HAL.

The deal for 126 aircraft was never signed. The cost estimates in the public domain in 2014 were anywhere between US$ 20-30 billion. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) under the NDA government that took over that year continued the process of negotiations with Dassault on the same lines as the UPA. By early 2015, it was clear that the deal was heading for a dead-end. Since the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) does not permit negotiations with the next lowest bidder (Eurofighter), the choices were limited. In view of the urgent need of fighter jets for the IAF due to depleting strength, in April that year, it was decided to go for a Government-to-Government (G2G) deal and increase the number of French-assembled aircraft to be bought to 36. The 126 aircraft tender was officially withdrawn on July 30, 2015, while the negotiations for the price of 36 aircraft stretched till September 2016.

The contract was finally signed for Euro 7.8 billion (US$ 9.1 billion). This reportedly includes weapons, training, rep­air facilities and spares package, among other things. Dassault is now contractually committed to provide performance-­based logistic support for five years to two squadrons against the earlier proposal to support only one. Further, it is committed to ensuring that a minimum of 75 per cent of the IAF fleet remains operationally available.

It is being alleged that the deal price is too high. Any cost comparisons must be for the total package—and in the ­absence of any earlier deal, it can only be conjecture. Egypt and Qatar ordered the Rafale around the same time. For 24 fighters each, Egypt paid Euro 5.2 billion and Qatar Euro 6.3 billion. Though the deals are quite different in terms of the overall package, but the ballpark figures are similar—in fact, cheaper for India.

“The approximate acquisition cost of the Rafale aircraft has already been provided to Parliament,” the MoD has clarified through a written reply to the Lok Sabha. “Provision of exact item-wise cost and other information will reveal, inter alia, details regarding the various customisations and weapons systems specially designed to augment the effectiveness and lethality of the assets, impact our military preparedness and compromise our national security.” Concerned with the controversy surrounding the purchase of a desperately needed fighter, the IAF chief had to go public and stress that the G2G deal was not only operationally better, but also cheaper.

The French government’s foreign affairs spo­ke­sman said, “France and India concluded in 2008 a sec­urity agreement, which legally binds the two states to protect the classified inf­ormation provided by the partner that could imp­act security and operational capabilities of the defence equipment of India or France.” Thus, these provisions naturally apply to the IGA (Inter Governmental Agreement) for 36 Rafale concluded on September 23, 2016. The 2008 agreement (signed during the UPA regime) must be honoured.

Worried about traditionally good diplomatic relations bet­ween the two countries, French President Emmanuel Macron had to immediately make a public statement about the secrecy clause. The good thing is that no one has questioned the due process having been followed.

Deals have often been mired in controversy. Wonder why such ruckus is rare in deals with Russia and the US.

India has signed G2G weapon deals with Soviet Union and Russia for decades. Similarly, the P-8I, C-17, C-130J, Chinook and Apache helicopters from US companies are all under Foreign Military Sales (FMS) route, which is in some ways akin to G2G. Such deals get sovereign backing of the government and are invariably cheaper.

Then there is the ‘offsets’ clause in the contract. To promote indigenisation, a robust offsets clause has been there in the DPP since the UPA days. The offsets were to ensure that for every dollar that went to a foreign arms supplier, 30-50 per cent got infused back into India for a defence-related investment or activity. The aim was to leverage capital acquisitions to develop the Indian defence industry, improve defence research and encourage the development of synergistic sectors such as civil aerospace and internal security. Defence offsets have been part of regulations of many countries, including the major arms suppliers.

In the Rafale deal, Dassault has to invest 50 per cent of the deal amount in any defence-related industry in India. For this, Dassault has to select Indian partners. The government has nothing to do with this selection as its role is limited to monitoring that offsets are as per the DPP. There was an offsets clause in the Pilatus PC-7 contract also, and they chose their Indian partners on their own.

Many defence deals such as Bofors and AgustaWestland got mired in controversies related to irregularities. One wonders why such ruckus is rare in deals with Russia and the US. The DPP is well laid out. All contingencies are clearly spelt out and expected to be followed by the book. The Comptroller and Auditor General oversees all irregularities and, if they exist, they can be handled as per the law of the land. In the Rafale deal, allegations appear to be generic and not substantiated. It is unfortunate that even after open tendering, painstaking technical evaluation, and endless negotiations, often in the public domain (though they should normally have been strictly confidential), such a spectacle is conjured midway through the contract execution.

Unsubstantiated political slugfest over critical defence equipment should be avoided as it not only shames the country internationally, it also vitiates the entire defence procurement process and puts decision-makers on the defensive. It also deprives the defence forces of critically required operational capability, impacting national security and even their morale.

(The writer is a test pilot)

The harm caused to Haryana for not having its own capital city, where Haryanvi culture could be valued and developed, has been deep. A new capital can have a new university suited to the needs of Haryana and resolve the PU status row.

Pritam Singh

Professor, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UKIn the context of the Haryana Chief Minister recently urging the Centre for restoration of Haryana’s share in Panjab University, Chandigarh, and its rebuttal by the Punjab CM, it is important to grasp the historical background. Panjab University, Chandigarh, is an inter-state body with hundreds of colleges in Punjab affiliated to it along with many regional centres of the university in different parts of Punjab. These colleges and regional centres are crucial to its functioning — administratively, academically and financially. They are at the core of the identity of PU. The funding of the university is shared between the Punjab government and the Central government, with a major part coming from the latter as the university is situated in Chandigarh which, unfortunately, is a Central government-controlled union territory since the flawed linguistic reorganisation of Punjab in 1966. Chandigarh is overwhelmingly a Punjabi-speaking city. This is an unquestionable social reality. To satisfy the conditions for empirically-based conclusions, the late Prof VN Tiwari had established the Punjabi-speaking character of Chandigarh through a survey of languages spoken by Chandigarh residents. He had published a book titled The Language of Chandigarh in 1967 based on that survey. The majority of Chandigarh residents are from the upper caste Punjabi Hindu background. While demarcating the boundaries of Punjab and Haryana during the linguistic reorganisation of pre-1966 Punjab, if the Central government had stuck to the linguistic principle, as it should have, Chandigarh would have been in Punjab. Had that been done, PU would have been in Punjab.Unfortunately, the religious/communal criterion was given prominence over the linguistic criterion and Chandigarh was allotted originally to Haryana. But sensing an explosive backlash in Punjab at this blatant discrimination, the city’s status was converted into a union territory. The glaring nature of the injustice to Punjab is clear from the fact that in the history of linguistic reorganisation of states in India, Punjab is the only state which upon such reorganisation was not allowed to keep its capital. On the face of it, a somewhat genuine attempt at undoing this injustice was made with the Rajiv-Longowal Accord in 1985 which stipulated that the first major step in implementing the Accord for peace in Punjab would be giving Chandigarh back to Punjab on January 26, 1986. That was not done under pressure of anti-Punjab lobbies within the Congress party which succeeded in influencing the Rajiv government that giving Chandigarh to Punjab would alienate Hindu voters in Haryana, with a cascading effect on Hindu voters in the neighbouring states in the Hindi belt. The communal/sectarian considerations again triumphed as they had in 1966. The Accord was dead that day and Punjab went into over a decade of further turmoil and violent conflict. The limbo status of Chandigarh as a UT and a joint capital city of Punjab and Haryana, apart from perpetuating injustice to Punjab, is not in the interests of educational and cultural development of Haryana. One of the ugly aspects of the regional dimensions of the Centrally-directed development path followed in post-1947 India that had implications for Punjab and Haryana was that the Punjabi elite that ruled Punjab from 1947 to 1966 treated Haryana almost as a colony for governance and took hardly any interest in the cultural, artistic and intellectual development of the Haryana people. Once freed from the shackles of Punjabi dominance in 1966, Haryana made impressive achievements in agriculture and industry. Where it did not do as well  were the cultural, artistic and intellectual domains. One glaring institutional gap in the new state for its cultural development was the absence of a state capital. A capital is not merely a set of buildings and administrative offices. It is supposed to be the nerve centre of the culture and life of the people of the state where people belonging to different zones of the state come together with a common identity. The capital city is a space of cultural identity and flowering of that identity. It is a creative venue for collective exploration and celebration of the songs, dances, paintings, sculptures, architectural experiments, theatre, films, museums, the collection of memory of the people through historical narratives — all relating to the people of the state and their relationship to the wider world. Chandigarh has the administrative offices as the capital of Haryana, but the city has no organic link with the people and culture of Haryana. The people of Haryana, their language and culture are viewed with contempt by the Punjabi-hegemonic culture of Chandigarh. Chandigarh may not be de jure capital of Punjab but culturally, it is de facto the capital city of Punjab. For the cultural renaissance of Haryana, having a capital city of its own, perhaps a new one, in an area of Haryanvi culture is of critical importance. One intellectual, DR Chaudhry, has had the wisdom to articulate this position once in these words: “Haryana badly needs a capital of its own and Chandigarh is the least suited for this purpose. It is a dead albatross around its neck. The earlier it is shed, the better it will be for Haryanvis.” Such a capital city can have a new university suited specifically to the cultural and educational needs of Haryana.A rationally arrived decision between the Centre, Punjab and Haryana to develop a new capital city for Haryana and giving Chandigarh back to Punjab would be of critical importance in reversing the damage done both to Punjab and Haryana. Such a solution will automatically resolve the question of the status of Panjab University.

The Army Wives’ Welfare Organisation, Northern Command, celebrated its 52nd anniversary at Udhampur on Thursday. A function at the Udhampur military station was organised on the occasion. The celebrations were also concurrently held at other family stations in the command, Srinagar-based defence spokesman said. Theme of the celebration was ‘empowerment of differently abled’.  A documentary on the empowerment of the differently abled was also screened. TNS

Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, August 18As rival attacks mount over his minister Navjot Singh Sidhu’s visit to Pakistan, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh finally broke his silence on Sunday.Answering questions on the row sparked by Punjab Local Bodies, Tourism and Cultural Affairs Minister Sidhu’s presence at Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s swearing in, Singh said the cricketer-politician went in his “personal capacity”. “As far as attending the swearing-in ceremony is concerned, he went there in his personal capacity, so it has nothing to do with us. About him being seated next to the PoK President, maybe he (Sidhu) didn’t know who he was,” Singh said on the sidelines of a photo exhibition here.Singh however was quick to call Sidhu’s act of hugging Pakistan’s army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa “avoidable”.“But as far as hugging the Pakistan Army Chief is concerned, I’m not in its favour. It was wrong of him to have shown  affection towards the Pakistan Army Chief.”The Punjab chief minister’s statements comes at a time when rival parties such as the BJP have excoriated Sidhu’s conduct in Pakistan, calling it a “betrayal of India”.

Sidhu reacts

Sidhu defended his actions on Sunday saying he had little say in what passed at the ceremony.Speaking to the press, Sidhu said he was asked to sit next President of Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (PoK) Masood Khan.  “If you’re invited as a guest of honour somewhere, you sit wherever you are asked to. I was sitting somewhere else but they asked me to sit there,” Sidhu said.Justifying the hug, he said: “If someone comes to me and says that we belong to the same culture and we’ll open Kartarpur border on Guru Nanak Dev’s 550th Prakash Parv, what else could I have done?”Sidhu’s Pakistan visit to his cricketing contemporary Imran Khan’s swearing in ceremony kicked up a massive storm back home—first because he accepted the invitation, and then because he sat next to Masood Khan and hugged Bajwa. With agencies