PAKISTANBASED GROUP HACKS NIT SRINAGAR’S WEBSITE

SRINAGAR: The website of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Srinagar was hacked on Monday evening, allegedly by a Pakistani hackers’ group and “Free Kashmir” messages were posted on it, a senior official of the institute said.

As of Tuesday afternoon the website was not accessible. Following error message was displayed: “Service Unavailable. HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.”

“The attack took place last evening and a Pakistani group called Pak Cyber Skullz claimed credit. We are working to get the site up again and it should be done soon,” said the official.

A senior cyber police official in Srinagar said that the department has not yet received any complaint from the institute.

The original message pasted on the defaced website, whose screenshots are doing the rounds now in the Valley, said, “Go Modi Go”. NEWDELHI:The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) may have urban roots, but it has decided to back farmer agitations and reach out to rural people across the country to expand its base for future elections.

In an annual meeting chaired by national convenor Arvind Kejriwal last Sunday, the AAP national executive (NE) – the party’s second-highest decisionmaking body – decided to launch nationwide protests over agrarian distress from June 10. The plan to woo rural voters was spurred by its encouraging performance in interior regions of agriculture-dominated Punjab in the February assembly elections, and its relatively steep slide in the Delhi municipal elections last month.

The NE had assembled to discuss the party’s future roadmap in the backdrop of its poor performance in the Delhi municipal polls, where it won a measly 48 of 270 seats in three corporations, and the Goa assembly elections, where it drew a perfect zero.

The party had hoped to form the government in Punjab, but it ended up winning just 22 of 117 seats in alliance with the Lok Insaaf Party. Most of these were rural constituencies.

“We are encouraged by our experience in Punjab,” AAP national secretary Pankaj Gupta told Hindustan Times. “Our target is to create a farmers’ movement wherever state governments are insensitive to their plight.”

“The NE passed a resolution that the government should be made to waive off farmers’ debt, just as it waives off loans for corporate houses,” party leader Sanjay Singh said. The party will join the ongoing farmers’ agitations in Maharashtra, and then start one in Punjab to highlight the 60 alleged suicides that have occurred there since Amarinder Singh took over.

The party’s Madhya Pradesh unit had initiated similar protests last month. Future agitations in the state will prominently feature the alleged killing of three farmers by police in Mandsaur district on Tuesday.