Tribune News Service

Jammu, May 13

Jammu’s first civilian shooting range, General Zorawar Singh Rifle Club, aims to popularise shooting as a sport in the state. The club management had its first meeting today and want to give a platform to budding sportsperson.The club, built in the Dogra Educational Complex, Bari Brahmana, has state-of-the-art facilities constructed with the help of the J&K Rifle Association.Speaking on the occasion, former minister and club president Gulchain Singh Charak thanked Dilbagh Singh, Additional Director General of Police (ADGP), who is also president of the J&K Rifle Association, for granting the club affiliation to promote shooting as a sport in the state.“Local youth are gifted to achieve excellence in sports and this will help them to further hone their skills in this sport,” Charak said.He cited the example of Chain Singh, son of the soil from Doda district, who made his mark in the Asian Games 2014 and he is a big hope for the Rio Olympics.The 10-metre shooting range for pistol and rifle will provide national coaches to train the youth from schools and colleges, in addition to the other civilian population, who can seek membership of the club.

Ambala, May 10

The Jago Yuva Jago Manch today commemorated the sacrifice of the 1857 revolt heroes in Ambala Cantonment and appealed to the state government to start the construction of Shaheed Smarak soon.UV Singh, retired history lecturer from SD College, and a member of the manch, said the revolt started at Ambala Cantonment on May 10, but it was unfortunate that even after many years, the heroes of the revolt were unknown. Chief Minister Manhoar Lal Khattar laid the foundation stone of the Shaheed Smarak in May last year, but the construction had not started yet. He appealed to the government to start it as soon as possible.SP Singh, vice-president of the manch, said: “The school children are being taught that the 1857 revolt started from Meerut, while it has been proved by historians that the revolt started from Ambala. The Centre must take steps to change the course of history in text books.” — TNS

Army men at the encounter site in Kupwara on Saturday. A Tribune photo

Majid Jahangir

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, May 21

Five unidentified militants were killed and two soldiers of the Army’s counter-insurgency units injured in a seven-hour gunfight with militants in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district today.The gunfight erupted at Check Drugmulla in Kupwara, nearly 100 km from Srinagar,  this morning when joint teams of the Special Operation Group of the J&K Police, Army’s 41 and 47 Rashtriya Rifles battalions and CRPF started a search operation after an input about the presence of militants in the area.As the search started, the militants, who were hiding in an abandoned house in the village, opened fire. As the forces retaliated, it triggered a gunfight.“In the seven-hour-long gunfight, five militants were killed. They were most probably from the Jaish-e-Mohammad,” said Deputy Inspector General of Police, north Kashmir Uttam Chand. He said it was being investigated whether the slain militants had infiltrated recently or had been active in the area.Defence spokesman Col NN Joshi said two Army men were injured in the gunfight and there condition was stable. “We recovered five weapons from the encounter site,” he said.Sources said the area was cordoned off on Friday night after an input that a group of recently infiltrated militants was hiding in the village.“The group of militants had infiltrated recently and one of the members was killed in a gunfight in the Zunreishi Chowkibal forest on May 17. They managed to escape that day and we were tracking them. We zeroed in on them at Check Drugmulla, around 25 km from the Zunrerishi encounter site,” the sources said.Kupwara had remained a key infiltration route of militants to enter the Valley. In the recent past, militants had stepped up efforts to sneak into the Valley.There were intelligence inputs that nearly 200 militants had been waiting to infiltrate from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.Sources in the security establishment said around 20 militants had infiltrated into the Valley this year till April. Last year, Union Home Ministry figures stated that 35 militants had infiltrated into Kashmir.The latest infiltration bid was foiled in north Kashmir’s Uri sector on Friday. The sources said a group of militants tried to infiltrate via Kamalkote in Uri, which witnessed a ceasefire violation by the Pakistani army four days ago.The sources said when militants were trying to sneak into the Valley, they were noticed and challenged by the Army. They fled to the Kamalkote sector without opening fire.The Army later recovered some jackets, blankets, rucksacks and other war-like stores from the area. A total of 44 militants have been killed across the Valley this year so far.

Vishavjit Singh

Washington, May 9

Donald Trump wants to make America great again, but “Sikh Captain America” feels the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is making America hate again.“Donald Trump has certainly been a candidate whose words have been alarming for someone like me, who happens to be at the front lines of bigotry in post-9/11 America,” said Vishavjit Singh, a Washington-born Sikh artist-activist in his mid-40s who occasionally transforms into “Sikh Captain America”.Singh, who is a political cartoonist, on occasions transforms into “Sikh Captain America”, a costumed soldier with a turban who fights bigotry and champions cultural understanding through public appearances and talks.As the film “Captain America: Civil War” plays at theatres, Singh drew a stark contrast between Trump and Captain America’s alter ego, Steve Rogers—two iconic New York characters born in the 1940s.“Captain America as a character would stand in complete opposition to Donald Trump and his candidacy. Today, besides the ISIS, the festering of extreme right-wing and supremacist forces at home will be targets for Captain America’s wrath,” he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post.The artist also creates cartoon campaigns, such as the “Send Sikh Note To Trump” postcard campaign, in which he and some of his fans send Trump a postcard every day “with a message focused on processing our anger inspired by his jingoistic madness into small kernels of humour and compassion”.“He might be full of himself, overstuffed with his achievements with a towering skyscraper of an ego, but even deep inside him resides seeds of benevolence,” Singh said.“I wish him well; I wish him compassion; I wish him to realise the violence of his words; I wish him a landslide loss in the elections for his own good,” he said. Captain America was born in New York during World War II, from the minds of Jewish creators and future comic-book legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who introduced their super-soldier by having him deliver a haymaker to the jaw of a reeling Hitler.“Sikh Captain America” was also born in the Big Apple for socio-political reasons, as Singh was planning to attend his first New York Comic-Con as an exhibitor in the fall of 2011. “Some of my art is informed by my own experience on the streets of America and being targeted as an outsider—at times as a threat just based on my looks,” Singh said. — PTI

The 1974 Pokhran blast site being inspected by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi along with top nuclear scientists.

Washington, May 19The US intelligence community had concluded as early as 1964 that India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons, a declassified State Department report said, citing frequent change of the fuel core of the Canada-supplied reactor at Trombay.”The Indians are now in a position to begin nuclear weapons development if they chose to do so. We have no evidence, however, of a weapon research and development programme and would expect to see some if the programme existed,” the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) said in a report on May 14, 1964.The report along with several others was published yesterday by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)Noting that the fuel core of the Canadian-Indian Reactor (CIR) at Trombay was being changed every six months, the US intelligence report had raised questions about India’s nuclear objectives.It said a six-month period was quite short for “normal research reactor operations,” but it was the optimum time for using the CIR’s spent fuel for producing weapons grade plutonium.The report said the Canadians had not established specific safeguards when they made the reactor available to India thus giving the Indians a free hand in using the newly-built Phoenix plutonium separation plant to produce the fissile material.According to the State Department report, “India’s leadership might have had nationalistic motives for building the Phoenix plant but if it wanted a nuclear weapons capability it would seek such a capability”.INR report said it had no “direct evidence” of an Indian weapons programme and believed it was “unlikely” that India had made a decision to build a bomb.Nevertheless, it was “probably no accident” that “everything the Indians (had) done so far would be compatible with a weapons programme if at some future date it appeared desirable to start one”.According to INR, India had taken the “first deliberate decision in the series leading to a nuclear weapon,” which was to have “available, on demand, unsafeguarded weapons-grade plutonium or, at the least, the capacity to produce it.”    The report said that a scholar characterised this as India’s “proliferation drift, the slow but sure moves towards the development of nuclear weapons”. —  PTI

The mother and wife of sepoy Dharma Ram of Mahar Regiment receive Shaurya Chakra (posthumous) from President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Saturday. Ram was honoured for saving the lives of two of his colleagues during an encounter with militants in Kashmir. He killed two ultras before succumbing to injuries during the firefight.

New Delhi, May 18IAS and IPS officers, who have retired before 2006, will get a hike in pension, in addition to the arrears, as the Centre has done away with a provision of 33 years of service for earning full pension.The move comes after the Department of Pensions and Pensioners Welfare decided that the revised consolidated pension of pre-2006 pensioners shall not be lower than 50 per cent of the minimum of the pay in the pay band and the grade pay even if they had served for less than 33 years at the time of retirement.Necessary orders directing authorities concerned to calculate the revised pensions in respect of Union Government pensioners, excluding retirees of three all India services have already been issued. — PTI