Current Events :
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The plane’s maiden flight is expected to pave the way for induction of these jets into the Indian Air Force. File photo
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), public sector plane maker, on Friday said the Tejas Mark-1A fighter jet will make its maiden flight from a facility in Nasik on October 17.
Also, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will inaugurate the third production line of jet – the first two lines are in Bengaluru.
The plane’s maiden flight is expected to pave the way for induction of these jets into the Indian Air Force. Deliveries are presently 18-months behind schedule.
Though HAL is a listed company, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) holds a majority stake.
The MoD had signed two separate contracts with HAL for producing 180 of the Tejas Mark- 1A jets. The first contract for Rs 48,000 crore was inked in January 2021 for the supply of 83 jets. Last month, the MoD signed another contract for procurement of 97 Tejas Mark-1A for Rs 62,370 crore.
The contract for 97 jets is in addition to the 83 aircraft already ordered, making it a collective order of 180 Tejas Mark 1A jets.
In the latest contract, the government has made a firm push towards self-reliance, the aircraft will have an indigenous content of almost 64 per cent, with 67 additional items incorporated, over and above the previous contract of the 83 jets of the same plane signed in January 2021. The integration of advanced indigenously developed systems such as the ‘Uttam’ Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar, electronic protection suite will further strengthen the Aatmanirbharta initiatives.
HAL is facing a delay in supply of F-404 engines for the Tejas Mark-1A from US company General Electric. Almost a dozen jets are ready at the HAL facility, but only four engines have been supplied by the GE, so far. In turn, this has meant not a single jet has been delivered to IAF, which is battling a dwindling combat strength. Deliveries should have commenced in March 2024 and the engines should have started coming a year prior to that date.
Tejas programme is to help the IAF to replace its fleet of MiG- 21s, which were finally being phased at ceremony at Chandigarh, last month.
Separately, the IAF already has 40 Tejas Mark1 jets.
The IAF presently has 29 squadrons (16-18 planes each) of fighter jets against the mandate of 42 to tackle a collusive two-front threat against Pakistan and China.
The IAF’s fleets of Jaguar, MiG-29 and Mirage 2000, all inducted in phases during the 1980s, are slated to retire in batches beyond 2029-30. These four types of jets are about 230-250 in number and are presently operating on an extended life cycle.
According to the plan, India needs to produce some 500 fighter jets for the IAF in the next two decades.
A Division Bench of the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh has granted six weeks’ time to amicus curiae advocate SS Ahmed to visit the Mughal Road to inspect the implementation process for recommendations regarding safety of the road for commuters.
The Bench comprised Chief Justice Arun Palli and Justice Rajnesh Oswal. The six weeks were granted with a view to submit a report with regard to the implementation process undertaken by the National Highway and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) and Government of J&K on the recommendations/ report of the expert committee constituted by the Division Bench on December 7, 2023. The committee had visited the vulnerable sites on National Highway-244, the road connecting Batote to Kishtwar via Doda under NHIDCL.
When the three public interest litigations (PILs) in this regard came up for hearing, the amicus curiae with advocates Supriya Chouhan and M Zulkarnain Chowdhary appearing for the petitioners submitted that pursuant to the Division Bench order dated April 22, the amicus curiae along with two petitioners — Syed Asim Hashmi (the then president, Bar Association, Doda) and Asif Iqbal Bhat (social activist) undertook the visit of the vulnerable spots on National Highway-244 in particular to carry out spot inspection of the sites along the NH i.e. Batote, Doda, Kishtwar.
Ahmed further submitted that necessary exercise has substantially been carried out and a detailed report dated August 20 in this regard has since been submitted. He further submitted that due to inclement weather, the amicus could not visit Mughal Road and, therefore, some more time would be required to complete the exercise.
Mughal Road connects Rajouri and Poonch district of Jammu region with Kashmir and is used by thousands of commuters as it is an alternative road to Jammu-Srinagar National Highway.
Four landmines and a mortar shell exploded near the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district without causing any harm to human lives, officials said on Thursday.
The mortar shell buried underground went off when an earth-mover was digging the land at Sagra village in Mankote area on Thursday morning, the officials said. The driver of the excavator escaped unhurt in the explosion that rocked the area.
A police team was rushed to the scene following the explosion to probe the matter. The mortar shell apparently remained unexploded during cross-border shelling, the officials said.
The body of the second missing Army paratrooper was found on Friday morning from the Gadool forests of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district, officials said here.
On Thursday, body of another soldier had been recovered, days after the two had gone missing during an operation in the high-altitude Gadool area, promoting authorities to launch a massive search operation.
A senior official told The Tribune that the second body has also been found from the same area. He said the deaths are weather-related. Indian Army is yet to issue a statement.
Army’s Srinagar-based Chinar Corps said on X late on Wednesday night that on the intervening night of October 6 and 7, an “operational team in the Kishtwar range encountered a severe snowstorm and whiteout conditions in the mountains of south Kashmir.”
“Since then, two soldiers have lost communication. Intense search and rescue operations have been launched, but progress has been hampered by prevailing adverse weather conditions,” the Army had said.
An ex-Army man, who served in the Army for 17 years and was among those arrested after the September 24 violence in Leh, has alleged that during the questioning by the Ladakh Police, he was asked about “Chinese and Pakistan funding” and even called “anti-national”. He is now out on bail.
Violence had broken out in Leh town, leaving four people dead and nearly 100 injured in security forces’ firing on September 24. The police launched a crackdown and arrested over 70 people. The court, however, has released half of the arrested persons on bail.
Talking to The Tribune, 42-year-old Tundup Namgyal said he had put up a post on an ex-Armymen WhatsApp group informing through a voice note about the hunger strike held from September 10 in Leh. He was detained on the day when the violence took place.
Released from jail on October 2, Namgyal, also an ex-nambardar and now a businessman, also alleged that he was beaten up as soon as he was taken to the police station. “Upon reaching the police station, they started beating me. I was told that I am anti-national. They asked how much funds do I get from China? How much funds do I get from Pakistan? How much funds does Sonam Wangchuk give you? Give the names of 5-6 boys,” said Namgyal, who is also president of Ex-servicemen Association in Durbuk block.
Namgyal said he continuously told them that he has served the country for 17 years and cannot think about any activity which goes against the country. “I retired in August 2018. I served in Siachen glacier twice, on the India-China border twice. I even served in the UN peacekeeping force in 2011…but I am very disappointed that I have been called anti-national and I have to face allegations like these,” he said.
Namgyal said that people like him are ready to “die for the country.”
“But democracy is completely destroyed here. This is not the way you treat your own men,” he said.
According to Namgyal, people have been raising genuine demands and the administration should listen to the people. “Our four-point demand should be fulfilled,” he said.
Leh Apex Body (LAB), which is one of the two groups spearheading the ongoing movement for statehood and constitutional safeguards for Ladakh under the Sixth Schedule, this week said that the body has raised the issue of “harassment” of nambardars (village heads) who were questioned by the UT Police.
LAB co-chairman Cherring Dorjay Lakruk had said on Wednesday that LAB has taken up this matter with the administration. The Ladakh police haven’t issued any statement with regard to these allegations.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday said India and Australia were in discussions to advance cooperation in quantum technology, artificial intelligence (AI), cyber security, information warfare and other areas of advanced science and technology.
He was speaking at the maiden India-Australia Defence Industry Business Roundtable in Sydney, where he highlighted ongoing collaboration between India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group on the production of towed array sensors for warships.
Inviting Australian industry participation, Singh said India welcomes companies to co-develop and co-produce high-end systems such as propulsion technologies, autonomous underwater vehicles, flight simulators and advanced material.
Such ventures, he noted, can help build interoperable platforms aligned with the strategic objectives of both nations.
He said the India-Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership places the two countries at a pivotal juncture to reposition their defence ties as co-creators of a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific.
Calling for closer industrial collaboration, Singh said: “I see this forum as an important instrument to make India and Australia natural allies in business and industry too. This alliance has compelling economic reasons to be successful and mutually beneficial.”
He noted that Australia excels in niche technologies such as quantum systems, autonomous underwater vehicles and advanced maritime surveillance, while India brings large-scale manufacturing capacity, software expertise and indigenous strength in shipbuilding, missile technology and space systems.
“There are huge opportunities for co-production of naval vessels and sub-systems, ship repair, refits and MRO support in India for Australian and partner-nation vessels, as well as joint R&D in autonomous systems and green shipbuilding technologies,” Singh added.
The roundtable was jointly organised by the Union Ministry of Defence, the Australian Department of Defence and the Australia-India Business Council.
“Do you keep the karwa chauth fast?” Make no mistake, that’s a googly, not a question, that has been asked of North Indian women over the years. Not just because you’re damned if you do (by feminists looking askance), or damned if you don’t (by the growing Sanskritisation of Middle India, which believes there’s only one answer to any riddle wrapped in an enigma), but because the question itself is a pigeonhole. Better not to answer it. Better to read the book that Ruhi Tewari has just written, called, What Women Want.
Ms Tewari’s book is about “understanding the female voter” in India, but the question is a larger one. If you have the imagination, you can broaden the canvas and ask it elsewhere too, including in neighbouring Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime carries out the most repressive actions against its own women.
In fact, the news from Delhi is that the Taliban Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who is on a six-day visit to India, during which time he will visit the Taj Mahal, the monument to love, as well as the Deoband seminary, refused to invite any Indian women journalists to his press conference in the capital on Friday.
Perhaps Muttaqi was worried what people would say back home if he was seen mingling with Indian women. And even though the press conference was held in the Afghan embassy, technically Afghan soil, the Taliban leader lost a huge opportunity to signal to half his population back home, why the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan should be given another half chance to emerge from the Dark Ages.
The Indian women journalists may have asked Muttaqi the question to which he doesn’t have an answer : What is it that Afghan women want? And if all they want is only half the sky, why don’t the mullahs in Kandahar give it to them?
Except, the answers are all there, if you really want to see them. This reporter was in Kabul on the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, in August 2022, and went into the ICU of the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital to see how women nurses and doctors dealt with the toughest cases. The ICU was clean and sanitised. The women doctors and nurses wore a uniform but no face covering. They were there to save lives, especially that of struggling neonates, not because they were women but because they had a skill, an expertise and a commitment to do so.
In Delhi, certainly, both India and the Afghan regime will want to downplay this avoidable kerfuffle over the exclusion of women journalists and urge everyone to look at the big picture — which is, that India has gone back on its own reservations about the Taliban and will now upgrade its mission in Kabul to a full-fledged embassy. This is truly a big step not just in India’s neighbourhood policy, but also signals a welcome return to pragmatism.
The sad part is that it took the Indian government about a decade to realise its own mistakes in the Afghan theatre. New Delhi was so heavily influenced by the Americans, especially by the Afghan-origin former US ambassador in Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad, that it forgot it was a heavyweight in the region. The US should have depended on India’s historical perspective and current analysis, not the other way round.
India should have played a role in the distribution of power in the Kabul landscape — at first help sort out the power struggle between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah; then when the Americans were parachuting Ashraf Ghani into Kabul, told them it was a terrible idea; once he was inserted, Delhi could have helped build a coalition against the emerging Taliban, even as it talked to the moderate Taliban to broker a deal between all sides.
Today, the story in Delhi is — look how smartly India has brought around the Taliban! But the tragedy is that the Taliban were ready to be brought around a really long time ago — talk to any Taliban or non-Taliban Afghan in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, male or female, Pashtun, Tajik or Hazara, and you will realise the incredible affection and regard Afghans have for Indians. Bollywood heroes and heroines, permanently on karva chauth and beyond, remain such a rage even today.
Never forget that the Taliban are also Afghan — Hamid Karzai reminds you about this fundamental truth each time you speak to him. The significant of this is that they will never really be in hock to the Arab. The question as to why Osama bin Laden left the mountains of Tora Bora to finally live within spitting distance of a Pakistan military establishment in Abbottabad, has its own answers.
The truth is that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has gone through convoluted hoops to arrive at this moment today — which is that Delhi and Kabul have a very special relationship that goes back centuries. Everyone else has always known that.
Here’s a second truth : India has seceded from its own neighbourhood and allowed other players to take precedence. China, Russia, the US and Pakistan, each of them are significant players in the Indian subcontinent — across all the nations that stretch from the Karakoram mountain ranges to Cox’s Bazaar on the Indian Ocean — and while they are welcome to play, India must return to its pre-eminent spot in this space.
The first step has been taken by hosting Amir Khan Muttaqi. The second must be to reopen India’s consulates in Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif — shut down under one pretext or another, mostly under US pressure and latterly, the fear of the Taliban takeover in 2021.
Perhaps the MEA should send a few of its amazing women diplomats to these consulates, just like it did in 2001 when Vijay Thakur Singh, the redoubtable diplomat on the Afghanistan-Pakistan desk, was sent to Kabul after the US bombed the Taliban into submission after the 9/11 attacks — along with Gautam Mukhopadhaya, Rudrendra Tandon and Vivek Katju, as India’s ambassador; Katju, now a columnist with The Tribune, was part of the team in December 1999 which negotiated with the Taliban on the Kandahar tarmac for a full week to send the passengers of IC-814 safely back home. Who says India doesn’t know the Taliban?
An Indian ambassador in Kabul is hardly a hardship posting. It’s like going home. That’s what Muttaqi should have told all the Indian male and female journalists he should have invited to his Delhi press conference on Friday — and patiently answered all their “what do women want” and all other questions.
Breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Amritsar-if-you-can’t-go-to-Lahore and dinner in Kabul? As Dr Manmohan Singh’s famous phrase resounds across the ether, you can imagine him having the last laugh somewhere.
Palestinians, who were displaced to the southern part of Gaza at Israel’s order during the war, walk along a road as they attempt to return to the north after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza comes into effect, in the central Gaza Strip. Reuters
Thousands of displaced Palestinians streamed back towards their abandoned homes on Friday after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect and Israeli troops began pulling back from parts of Gaza.
A huge column of displaced Gazans filed north through the dust and rubble towards Gaza City, the enclave’s biggest urban area, which had been under attack just days ago in one of Israel’s biggest offensives of the war.
The Israeli military said the ceasefire agreement had been activated. The Israel government ratified the ceasefire with Hamas in the early hours of Friday, clearing the way to partially pull back troops and fully suspend hostilities in Gaza within 24 hours.
Hamas is expected to release the 20 living Israeli hostages within 72 hours, after which Israel will release 250 Palestinians serving long terms in Israeli prisons and 1,700 others detained in Gaza during the war.
US Special Envoy to West Asia Steve Witkoff said the Israeli military had completed the first phase of a withdrawal in Gaza and the hostage release period had started.
Once the agreement is operating, trucks carrying food and medical aid will surge into Gaza to help civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom have been sheltering in tents after Israeli forces destroyed their homes and razed entire cities.
The first phase of US President Donald Trump’s initiative to end the two-year war in Gaza calls for Israeli forces to withdraw from some of Gaza’s major urban areas, though they will still control roughly half of the enclave’s territory.
In a televised address, PM Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces would stay in Gaza to ensure the territory was demilitarised and Hamas disarmed in future stages of Trump’s plan: “If this is achieved the easy way then that will be good and if not then it will be achieved the hard way.”
In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, some Israeli troops pulled back from the eastern area near the border, but tank shelling was heard, said residents.
In Nusseirat camp in the centre of the enclave, some Israeli soldiers dismantled their position and headed east towards the Israeli border, though other troops remained in the area after gunfire was heard in the early hours of Friday.
Israeli forces pulled out from the road along the Mediterranean coast into Gaza City.
“As soon as we heard the news of the truce and ceasefire, we were very happy and got ready to go back to Gaza City, to our homes. Of course there are no homes, they’ve been destroyed,” said Mahdi Saqla, 40.
“But we are happy just to return to where our homes were, even over the rubble. That too is a great joy. For two years we’ve been suffering, displaced from place to place,” he said.
The accord, if fully implemented, would bring the two sides closer than any previous effort to halt the war.
Much could still go wrong. The sides have yet to publish the list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for Israeli hostages. Hamas is seeking freedom for some of the most prominent Palestinian convicts held in Israeli jails.
