The activists stopped vehicles carrying meat items meant for the big
cats housed in the zoo. They blocked the roads leading to the zoo for
several hours before allowing authorities to take the food items inside.
By Utpal Parashar
Opposing the slaughter of cows, several Hindu activists on
Monday protested against serving beef as part of diet to tigers and
other big cats in the Assam state zoo located in Guwahati.
The
activists stopped vehicles carrying meat items meant for the big cats
housed in the zoo. They blocked the roads leading to the zoo for several
hours before allowing authorities to take the food items inside.
“The
vehicles carrying meat for the zoo inmates were stopped briefly by some
miscreants. We had to call the police to disperse them. There’s no
issue regarding supply of meat to the animals now,” said Tejas
Mariswamy, divisional forest officer (DFO), Assam state zoo.
Established
in 1957 and spread over 175 hectares in the middle of Guwahati in the
Hengrabari reserve forest, Assam state zoo, which has 1,040 wild animals
and birds of 112 species, is the biggest zoo in the Northeast.
At present, the zoo has 8 tigers, 3 lions, 26 leopards and other small cats like leopard cat, jungle cat etc.
The
zoo is a big attraction among people in Guwahati and others from across
the region, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been closed for
the public since March this year.
Mizoram home secretary Lalbiaksangi, in a letter to Tripura home
secretary BK Sahu, said that any activities could deteriorate law and
order at the interstate border.
By Priyanka Deb Barman
The Mizoram government sought stoppage of construction of a
temple and all sorts of activities within the disputed Tripura-Mizoram
interstate border near Phuldungsei village where 130 people were
identified in Mizoram’s voters’ list almost two months back.
Traditionally,
Phuldungsei village as a whole has been accepted as part of Tripura
despite the eastern side of the village falling into Mizoram’s side.
Mizoram
home secretary Lalbiaksangi, in a letter to Tripura home secretary BK
Sahu, said that any activities could deteriorate law and order at the
interstate border.
According to the letter, the Mizoram government
got reports that Songrongma of Tripura, a local indigenous
organisation, is attempting to construct a temple at the disputed
interstate border village near Phuldungsei at Thaidawrtlang, Mamit
district. There are reports of organising community work on October 19
and 20.
“Since
any activities within the disputed interstate border can result in law
and order problems, it is requested to kindly intervene and issue
necessary instructions to the concerned district administration for the
immediate and indefinite stoppage of the proposed construction,” the
letter read.
No comment from Tripura government is available on the issue.
Located in Kanchanpur sub-division of North district of Tripura, Phuldungsei village has a population of over 600.
Kanchanpur
sub-divisional magistrate Chandni Chandran in August informed her
higher officials that 130 people of the village, who have ration cards
of Tripura, were included in Mizoram’s voters’ list.
Chandran
stressed on demarcating the exact boundary between the two neighbouring
states incorporating the entire village in Tripura. Shortly after it,
the state government ordered a probe into the matter.
The Assam-Mizoram border remains
tense after a farmhouse was allegedly torched and plantations destroyed
by the Karimganj district administration of Assam in Mizoram’s Mamit
district along the inter-state border, a police officer said.
The incident occurred on Friday afternoon when a farmhouse, belonged to John Zolawma of Thinghlun village in Mamit
district bordering Assam’s Karimganj district, was torched by officials
of the district administration, police and forest department from
Karimganj, the Mizoram Police officer said.
Apart
from burning the farmhouse, they also destroyed more than 1,000 betel
nut plants and other vegetables in two farms owned by John Zolawma and
Ben Davida, he said.
The officer said Mamit district deputy
commissioner and superintendent of police (SP) visited the site on
Saturday to take stock of the situation.
The
police officer said an FIR has been registered at Kanhmun police
station and personnel of the 4th Indian Reserve Batallion are currently
camping in the area to avoid any further arson.
Mizoram DGP SBK Singh has communicated his Assam counterpart over the phone regarding the matter.
Meanwhile,
state chief secretary Lalnunmawia Chuaungo convened a meeting with top
officials of the home department and police over the incident on
Saturday, an official said.
The meeting vehemently blamed the Karimganj district administration of Assam for its “provocative act”, he said.
He said the state government will write to the Union home ministry and the Assam government to inform about its grievances.
The state’s apex students’ body, the Mizo Zirlai Pawl (MZP) on Saturday held an emergency meeting over the incident.
The
meeting blamed the district administration of Karimganj in Assam for
the incident and decided to rebuild the farmhouse, MZP president B.
Vanlaltana said.
“The meeting took the incident seriously and
considered it as a grave insult and impudent contempt to the people of
Mizoram,” he said.
He added that the students’ body also agreed to give monetary assistance to the two victims.
In
a statement, Mizo Students’ Union (MSU) also strongly blamed the
Karimganj district administration for the incident and alleged that
apart from torching the farmhouse and destroying plantations, Assam
officials and police “intimidated” local volunteers, who are guarding
inter-state border to prevent the spread of Covid19.
The students’ body demanded compensation for the victims.
Officials of Karimganj district administration could not be contacted over the incident.
The border dispute between Mizoram and Assam is a long-pending issue, which has remained unresolved till date.
Three
Mizoram districts of Kolasib, Aizawl and Mamit share about 123km long
border with south Assam’s Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj districts.
Several dialogues held since 1995 to resolve the border dispute have yielded little result.
The
last border stand-off took place in March 2018 at Zophai or Karchurthal
area near Bairabi town in Kolasib district along the Mizoram-Assam
border when the functionaries of MZP attempted to re-construct a wooden
resting shed, which was destroyed by the Hailaikandi district
administration, there.
More than 60 people, mostly students were
allegedly injured when Assam police resorted to lathi-charge and gunfire
to disperse the protesting students.
The border dispute, however,
was put under control with the intervention of the Centre, which asked
both the Mizoram and Assam governments to maintain a status quo till
issues are resolved.
Protest and journalism are criminal acts, Parliament is
irrelevant, duties supersede rights,and profanity flows from the
ordinary.
On October 8, Justice Sanjay Dhar of the Jammu and Kashmir
High Court delivered a judgement that was remarkable in its
ordinariness: it restated the law, common sense and the basic tenets of –
what was once – the world’s largest democracy.
The case he was called to adjudicate upon was a two-year-old story in the Times of India.
The headline read: “Stone pelters in J&K now target tourists, four
women injured.” It was ordinary journalism, but it led to a criminal
case against the reporter for “making or publishing a statement or
rumour creating fear or alarm”.
The freedom of the press, said
Justice Dhar, could not be imperiled on “grounds that are unknown to
law” and “reporting of events, which a journalist has bona fide reason
to believe to be true, can never be an offence”.
Yet, this is what journalism in India has become: an offence against the state.
Hectored, threatened, beaten
Journalists
in Kashmir bear the brunt of this belief, as they are hectored,
threatened, beaten and imprisoned; it is state policy, explicitly
stated, to discourage journalism that is “against the national
interest”. In Uttar Pradesh, it is unstated but state policy
nevertheless to file criminal cases against journalists who do their
jobs when the government does not want them to. It was little wonder
that earlier this year, India ranked 142 of 180 countries on a global
press freedom index, behind countries such as Myanmar, South Sudan and
Afghanistan.
In Uttar Pradesh, over the past year, journalists
have faced criminal cases for reporting on things as prosaic as a
derailed train to a protest; the spectre of arrest hangs over the executive editor of this website
for reporting the failure of a government programme; another journalist
has been in prison for 24 days over a tweet; and a day before Justice
Dhar delivered his judgement, a journalist from Kerala and three others
were arrested and charged with sedition and India’s now-notorious
anti-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The
circumstances of their alleged crime were mired in ordinariness – they
were headed to Hathras, which the Uttar Pradesh government has declared
a site of international conspiracy, and they, the police said, were
conspirators.
I
mention journalism because its wellbeing is a test of democratic health
(by that measure, of course, India is floundering, given the state of
its largely sensation-seeking, government-loving media), but these
outrages are not limited to journalism. They come thick and fast every
day, as peace activists, professors, students and anyone opposed to the
government and its Hindu-majoritarian narrative are questioned,
interrogated, threatened or simply imprisoned without bail for
investigations that never appear to end or are slapped with cases that
may never stand the test of law.
Advertisement
As
for the law, it is being reduced to, at best, a tool to be manipulated,
or, at worst, little more than a joke. It has been corrupted by the
government, the police and the courts beyond reasonable measure.
Last
week, Stan Swamy, 83 and the oldest Indian to be charged under the
UAPA, was arrested. A life-long advocate of Adivasi rights and bulwark
against their oppression, Swamy is a Jesuit priest, who, a writer once
said, “had made people his religion”. His arrest was the 16th in what
has come to be known as the Bhima-Koregaon case,
a vast, dubious enterprise of defamation and criminalisation that
began as a supposed plot to kill the prime minister – an accusation
never mentioned since – and degenerated into a vast conspiracy with no
credible proof and no sign of trial.
Journalism as crime
In
the blink of an eye, India has been dragged from flawed but functioning
democracy with reasonably robust institutions to the doorstep of
great-leader autocracy. Every disfigurement of the law leads to another,
often greater in severity, straining the credulity of the justice
system and pushing it further into disrepute and disrepair. Every
corrupted precedent encourages another until everyone encourages the
profane, even those who promise to stand against it.
In
Congress-run Rajasthan, on October 1, criminal conspiracy charges were
filed against a journalism for reporting that the deputy chief
minister’s phone was tapped. A week later, party leader Rahul Gandhi
announced that if India had a free press and functioning institutions,
Narendra Modi’s government would fall.
Advertisement
Indeed,
Justice Dhar’s judgement was not a sign of hope. It was an anachronism,
a whisper from the past, a straw in a changing wind. On the day that he
delivered a reminder of India’s fading democratic norms and
constitutional rights, the Supreme Court declared that the freedom of
speech and expression was the “most abused right in recent times”.
This
is a court that has almost entirely allied itself with the government
and its narrative. As many legal scholars monotonously point out – to no
effect – the Supreme Court has placed in cold storage urgent matters,
from the controversial new citizenship law to illegal detentions in
Kashmir. Far from placing fundamental rights at the centre of its
jurisprudence – as every constitutional court should – the Supreme
Court has increasingly turned to preaching about Modi’s pet theme,
fundamental duties (inserted into the constitution during the Emergency
by India’s first autocrat, Indira Gandhi).
Some fundamental duties
have been quietly weaponised and embedded into the emerging enterprise
of criminalisation of speech and expression, particularly one related to
protecting “sovereignty, unity and integrity”. It is as vague as the
interpretation of laws deployed to restrict fundamental rights and push
the narrative of one nation, one people, one religion and whatever other
façade of unity the government declares as the national interest.
In
the pursuit of this alleged national interest – which is anything but –
any perversion of democracy is acceptable. We have witnessed the slow
throttling of Parliament, which has gone from a house of robust debate
to a rubber-stamp of the ruling party. We have witnessed the willingness
of the bureaucracy, the police and judges to be enforcers of not the
constitution but the writ of the ruling party and its narrative.
Advertisement
We
are witnessing the distinct signs of a democratic twilight. But none of
it would be possible without our collective and widespread acceptance,
complicity and apathy.
Samar Halarnkar is the editor of Article-14.com, a project that tracks misuse of the law and the hope it offers.
V Vaidyanathan who gifted his school teacher 1,00,000 fully paid-up equity shares worth Rs 30,00,000 of IDFC First Bank.
A heart-warming post which involves the chief executive office
of a bank and a school teacher is melting hearts on social media. The
post shared by several people talks about the reason in detail behind
the wonderful gesture made by the IDFC First Bank CEO V Vaidyanathan who
gifted his school teacher 1,00,000 fully paid-up equity shares worth Rs
30,00,000 of IDFC First Bank.
The regulatory filing shared by the
bank says that he gifted the shares “as a token of gratitude for his
teacher's help to him at an earlier stage in his life.”
Mr V Vaidyanathan of @IDFCFIRSTBank
gifts 1 lakh shares to his former school teacher. If I remember it
correctly he did something similar in the past too when he was heading
Capital First. He gifted shares to maids. Kind gesture. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/ylKsRhr84z
Founder
of Careers 360, Peri Maheshwer took to Facebook to explain the specific
reason behind Vaidyanathan’s gift to his school teacher. He shared that
when Vaidyanathan was selected for admission in Birla Institute of
Technology (BIT), Mesra, he did not have the money to travel to
Jharkhand to complete the counselling formalities.
At this
juncture, his Maths teacher from school, Gurdial Saroop Saini gave him
Rs 500 to travel for the interview. Vaidyanathan went on to study in BIT
Mesra and became a successful person afterwards, making a name for
himself.
The post shares that Vaidyanathan tried to find his
former teacher for several years but as Saini had moved jobs, he could
not locate him.
Finally, the bank CEO found his former teacher,
who is currently living in Agra, Uttar Pradesh. The post says that
Vaidyanathan called Saini and thanked him for the timely help.
Maheshwer
ends his post attaching an excerpt from the notice shared by IDFC First
Bank which says that Vaidyanathan has transferred part of his shares to
his former school teacher.
The post has been liked over 1,800 times and many people are appreciating Vaidyanathan’s gesture.
The incident that happened years ago explains Vaidyanathan’s decision of transferring his shares to Saini.
The
notice shared by IDFC First Bank clarifies that Vaidyanathan has done
this in his personal capacity and that he and Saini are not related
parties as per the Companies Act. The recipient, Saini will pay taxes as
per the applicable tax laws.
Mercedes-Benz teases a new super-efficient electric car
concept, the Vision EQXX, with more than 750 miles of range on a single
charge.
At Daimler’s latest company update, the automaker teased a new
technical program to develop “the longest-range and highest-efficiency
electric car the world has ever seen.”
Mercedes-Benz’s head of research and development, Markus Schafer, commented:
We have set up a group of our engineers to take on an extraordinary
task: to build the longest-range and highest-efficiency electric car the
world has ever seen. This is a serious project, chasing next-generation
technologies. We intend to incorporate the learning into the next
generation of series production cars.
The project takes the shape of the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX concept, which the company teased with a few images:
The German automaker said that the electric vehicle should be able to
travel from Beijing to Shanghai, a journey that covers about 750 miles
(1,200 km), on a single charge.
This incredible range will be achieved through efficency improvements rather than just a bigger battery pack.
Daimler noted that the program will be used to test new technologies to improve efficiency and bring those to production cars:
While Vision EQXX is a technology program, it is expected to result
in innovations that will quickly make their way into series production
cars.
The automaker said that its Mercedes-Benz F1 HPP group in the UK is also working on the project:
Mercedes-Benz also announced an exciting next step in electric
vehicle development today, with the Vision EQXX technology program. The
aim is to build an electric vehicle with spectacular efficiency and
range. Mercedes-Benz has tasked its engineering group with pushing the
boundaries of electric range and efficiency with a cross-functional,
multi-disciplinary team based in Stuttgart, supported by specialists
from the Mercedes-Benz F1 HPP group in the UK, who bring expertise in
eMotors plus motorsport-inspired development speed.
They haven’t disclosed when they plan to unveil the Vision EQXX electric prototype.
A
12-year-old boy has managed to build a working fusion reactor and have
it recorded by the Guinness Book of Records, making him the youngest on
record to achieve this feat.
While
most 12-year-olds play video games and enjoy the lack of responsibility
that comes with youth, Jackson Oswalt had been fusing atoms. The young
man, who has just turned 13, has taken the time to explain his
motivation behind the endeavour and it is admirable to see how much work
the child has done.
Jackson, from Memphis, Tennessee, began building his own DIY fusion reactor after being inspired by the previous Guinness World Record
holder Taylor Wilson, who had managed to construct one by the age of
14. The teenager claims to have built the entire reactor himself, and
offered insight into how to achieve the fusion of atoms.
Guinness Book of R
Oswalt
explained that he had been working on the project for around two years,
and encountered issues with seals that gave him setbacks:
The
project was very hard. I’d say the hardest part was figuring out how to
make the seal airtight on the chamber, so I spent about…probably about
half a year trying to get the seal correct.
Nevertheless,
he persevered and his parents appear to have encouraged this activity –
which is still being attempted by some countries.
Jackson’s
mother claims that while she was excited by her son’s interest, ‘I
would definitely be googling things before he turned on various stages.’
This internet activity seems understandable given that atoms are being
collided in her house. She went on to explain that part of her support
was because her son explained what he was doing so well.
The
fact that a 12-year-old could even understand nuclear fusion is
incredible, never mind putting together the components to actually
perform the act. This will undoubtedly be a huge achievement for
Jackson, and it will be fascinating to see what he does next.
NEW
DELHI - China was accused by Taiwan of trying to impose
censorship in India after its embassy in New Delhi advised journalists
to observe the “one-China” principle after newspapers carried
advertisements for Taiwan’s national day.
Coming
just months after deadly clashes between Indian and Chinese troops on
the disputed Himalayan border between the two Asian giants, the
controversy has flared at a time when Indian sentiments toward China are
filled with antipathy and suspicion.
China’s
hackles were raised on Wednesday by advertisements placed in leading
Indian newspapers by Taiwan’s government to mark the democratic,
Chinese-claimed island’s national day on Saturday.
The
advertisement carried a photograph of President Tsai Ing-wen and hailed
India, a fellow democracy, as a natural partner of Taiwan.
China,
which claims Taiwan and regards it as a wayward province, made its
displeasure evident in an e-mail sent by its embassy on Wednesday night
to journalists in India, including Reuters.
“Regarding
the so-called forthcoming ‘National Day of Taiwan’, the Chinese Embassy
in India would like to remind our media friends that there is only one
China in the world, and the Government of the People’s Republic of China
is the sole legitimate government representing the whole of China,” the
embassy said.
“We hope Indian media can stick to Indian government’s position on Taiwan question and do not violate the ‘One China’ principle.
“In
particular, Taiwan shall not be referred to as a ‘country (nation)’ or
‘Republic of China’ or the leader of China’s Taiwan region as
‘President’, so as not to send the wrong signals to the general public.”
Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu scoffed at Beijing’s advice to Indian media.
“India
is the largest democracy on Earth with a vibrant press &
freedom-loving people. But it looks like communist #China is hoping to
march into the subcontinent by imposing censorship. #Taiwan’s Indian
friends will have one reply: GET LOST!” he said in a tweet.
New Delhi has no formal diplomatic relations with Taipei, but both sides have close business and cultural ties.
India’s
government has carefully avoided upsetting China over Taiwan. But
relations became fraught after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a clash
with Chinese troops in June, and there have been calls from some Indian
nationalist groups for a boycott of Chinese goods.
“The
Chinese government behaves like a street goon, not like an aspiring
super-power. It threatens us,” said Nitin Gokhale, the editor of a
defence and security website, after receiving the Chinese embassy’s
email.