Amid row, Dalai Lama reaches Tawang after 7-hr road journey
Tibetan spiritual leader The Dalai Lama on Friday reached Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang, which China claims as its own and wants desperately enough to offer a swap for Aksai Chin.
The exiled leader reached Tawang after a seven-hour road journey from Dirang in Arunachal. He was to have reached Tawang by chopper from Guwahati on April 4, but bad weather forced him to take the 550km road from Guwahati.
The Dalai Lama’s first stop was Bomdila in Arunachal Pradesh’s West Kameng district, from where the Chinese soldiers had retreated after the 1962 war. After a day of delivering sermon in Bomdila, he spent two days at Dirang about 40km north where Dhargye monastery. “His Holiness left Dirang in the morning (Friday),” said an officer of West Kameng district administration.
State police and paramilitary personnel kept a vigil along the 140-km stretch between Dirang and Tawang, particularly at Sela (13 700 feet) en route partly snow-covered, wet because of melting snow, muddy and slippery.
A series of religious discourses by the Dalai Lama will begin on Saturday and he will stay at the Tawang monastery for four nights before leaving on April 11.
Security has been strength
He said a group of the evangelists was active in impressing upon the poor people for conversion by distributing religious literature among them. Another BJP MLA alleged the conversion was done by luring the poor with money. The BJP legislators said missionaries were misguiding the poor by passing the message in the Bible and Jesus Christ as that of Tukdoji Maharaj and Tukaramdada Gitacharya, saints well-known in Vidarbha region.
Kesarkar also announced completing the probe in the case raised by the MLAS within 15 days. Bonde had made a complaint with the district collector in March this year. Kesarkar said the complaint had not reached the home department, but the police have been directed to investigate the case in a fortnight.
Shiv Sena legislator Jaiprakash Mundada asked what action would be taken against the people involved in the illegal conversion.
BJP legislator Atul Bhatkhalkar insisted on the law and said, “Many states, including Himachal Pradesh, governed by the Congress, have the anti-conversion law During the debate
“The idea is not to disturb the system once again. There has been disruption for more than four weeks between November and December and it is advisable to circulate these notes through the bank branches, though at present these are just proposals,” the official said.
The proposal to introduce ₹200 notes is part of a larger focus by the government and RBI on circulating lower denomination currency notes of ₹100 and ₹500. “People are still reluctant to take ₹2,000 and therefore there is still a shortage of currency notes and the need is to have lower denomination notes,” said the official. The problem was aggravated because the government and RBI couldn’t circulate ₹1,000 notes.
In a late-night address on November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi withdrew ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes, sucking out roughly 86% of cash in circulation. The government’s exercise to replenish cash is expected to be completed by the middle of April after months of cash crunch, a State Bank of India report said.
A sum of ₹15.44 lakh crore was sucked out of the system by demonetisation. Before the exercise, ₹8.58 lakh crore comprised ₹500 notes and ₹6.86 lakh crore in ₹1,000.
“ICPA strongly condemns his (Gaikwad’s) misconduct and demand an unconditional apology for the same, failing which we will be constrained to direct our members not to operate any flight which has Mr Gaikwad on board ” ICPA said in the letter Association also said that Gaikwad should not be allowed to fly until he tenders an “unconditional apology”.
“Ravindra Gaikwad is and will continue to be a risk to flight safety and flight operations and to cabin crew safety on board, and hence government must think long and hard about letting him back on,” the association said in a letter to AI chairman and managing director Ashwani Lohani.
It would be a “crying shame” if he is let off “without even a rap on the knuckles”, it added.
Air India spokesperson GP Rao said the civil aviation ministry “directed us to lift the ban in view of the apology tendered by Gaikwad” to Raju.
“Air India, however, remains committed to ensure that its employees are not assaulted and neither misbehaved with by any passenger and would always take strong action to preserve the dignity of its employees at all times,” Rao said.
The Centre moved in to defuse the crisis after Sena MPS paralysed Parliament on Thursday and threatened to stop all flights out of its stronghold Mumbai.
Since the incident on March 23, the national carrier had blocked seven attempts by Gaikwad to book tickets by changing the spelling of surname and using different prefixes such as Prof.
Putin demanded an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and immediately suspended a deal with the US aimed at avoiding clashes in Syrian airspace.
The Russian military also announced a series of measures “to strengthen and improve the effectiveness of the Syrian armed forces’ air defence system” in the wake of the strike.
The Syrian president called the strikes an “outrageous act”.
“This aggression has increased Syria’s resolve to hit those terrorist agents, to continue to crush them, and to raise the pace of action to that end wherever they are.”
Trump announced the strikes in a statement, saying they were in “vital national security interest of the Untied States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons”.
“Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” he said of Tuesday’s chemical weapons strike, which Western countries blame on Assad’s forces “No child of ror.”
The Pentagon said 59 Tomahawk land attack missiles —with a range between 1,250 km and 2,500 km — were fired from two destroyers, USS Porter and USS Ross, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, shortly after Trump’s meeting and dinner with visiting Chinese president Xi Jinping at his Florida resort.
The missiles targeted an airfield which is suspected to have been used by the Syrian air force for the sarin gas attack on Idlib province.
Over the past few days, photographs and video clips of rows of bodies – particularly one showing a young father craddling the bodies of his twin babies – have shocked the world and fueled more outrage against Assad, who is accused of largescale human rights violation to crush the rebellion.
Washington has long backed rebels fighting against Assad in a multi-sided civil war that has killed more than 400,000 people and driven half of Syrians from their homes since 2011.
Trump ordered the step his predecessor Barack Obama never took: directly target the Assad’s military. Obama had stopped short of direct action even when Assad crossed a “redline” by ordering a 2013 chemical attack outside capital Damascus.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said the strike was “understandable given the dimension of the war crimes”, and President Francois Hollande said he considered this “operation a response”.
The Syrian government and Moscow have denied that Syrian forces were behind the gas attack, but Western countries have dismissed their explanation -- that chemicals leaked from a rebel weapons depot after an air strike -- as not credible.
Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said in a statement that the target was the Shayrat airfield in Homs province, which was used to store chemical weapons and Syrian air forces.
The missiles hit aircraft hard and logistical storage, ammuni tion supply bunkers, air defense systems, and radars, he said. Rus sia said nine military aircraft were destroyed.
Russians stationed at the air base were notified in advance of the strike using the established deconfliction line, but US insisted there was no direct contact with Moscow.
But rebel leaders said an iso lated assault on a single target was still far from the decisive intervention they have sought for many years.
“One airbase is not enough There are 26 airbases that target civilians,” tweeted Mohammad Alloush, a senior rebel official.
(With agency inputs)
In Rajya Sabha, opposition members created a ruckus over the lynching in Rajasthan’s Alwar and sought an apology from Naqvi for his earlier com ments on the incident. Naqvi said he had only denied any such vio lence in Gujarat, Madhya Pra desh and Uttar Pradesh and had not referred to Rajasthan.
“A criminal, a murderer, a hooligan, or a rowdy should no be looked at as a Hindu or a Mus lim. A criminal is a criminal,” Naqvi told the House. In his peti tion, Poonawalla said violence committed by these ‘gau raksha groups have reached such pro portions that even Modi called them out as people who were “destroying the society”.
The plea alleged that these groups were committing atroci ties against Dalits and minorities in the name of protection of cows and they needed to be “regulated and banned in the interest o social harmony, public morality and law and order in the coun try”.
It sought a direction to remove alleged “violent content” uploaded on social media and hosted by the cow protection groups. It also asked that laws protecting vigilantes in Gujarat Maharashtra and Karnataka be