Shoe-blitz continues:Prime Minister escapes ‘impulsive’ attack

An engineering student hurled a shoe at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while he was addressing his first election meeting for the Congress in Gujarat at the Sanskar Kendra grounds here on Sunday.

The shoe fell some 15 feet away from the dais and the PM continued to speak without a break as the Congress workers overpowered the youth and security personnel whisked him away.

Hitesh Chauhan (21), a resident of Bapunagar who studies computer engineering at a government college in Gandhinagar, reportedly told the police that he was not connected with any political party and was just trying to gain some attention after watching reports on earlier shoe-throwing incidents.

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Rahul has qualities needed to be Prime Minister, says Priyanka

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Sunday said her brother Rahul Gandhi would one day become the Prime Minister of the country as he had all the qualities needed for the top post. However, she was quick to add that Manmohan Singh will be the Prime Minister if the Congress is voted to power in the coming elections.

Asked if she herself planned to join politics, Priyanka did not say a direct ‘no’. “I have realised that in politics one should never say no,” she said, and then added: “But I do not see this happening.”

When asked whether she thought Rahul was qualified enough to become the Prime Minister, she told reporters: “I have full faith in my brother. He is hardworking. He means well. He is, according to me, qualified... So, one day he will. He will do a good job of it.”

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Sonia dares Maya: I’m ready to go to jail

Unfazed by the Mayawati government’s moves to scuttle her visit to Rae Bareli, Congress president Sonia Gandhi today landed in her Lok Sabha constituency, calling it her “karmabhoomi” and declaring she was “ready to go to jail” for the sake of development.

“Rae Bareli and Amethi have been the karmabhoomi of Feroze Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. It is also Rahul and my karmabhoomi. Rae Bareli and Amethi are like my home. Can anyone prevent me from coming home? No one can,” she told reporters in Lalganj.

Taking a swipe at Chief Minister Mayawati, Gandhi said that like the rail coach factory in Rae Bareli, allotment of land for which was cancelled by the UP government, several other schemes were being blocked by the state. “There are over a dozen such development projects that the Central government has funded and plans to bring to the state. But in each, the state government has put some hindrance or the other,” she said.

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Blast-hit UPA wakes up to tougher law, faster courts

The UPA Government, under attack for seeming ineffective in the face of terror, for the first time has acknowledged the need for new counter-terrorism initiatives, including strengthening the existing law and introducing fast-track courts.

Before a two-hour emergency Cabinet meeting late tonight that discussed such measures, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking at the conference of Governors at Rashtrapati Bhavan today, had set the tone.

In an apparent rebuttal of the BJP charge that vote bank politics was the reason Congress was soft on terror, Singh said: “The public debate on the issue of terrorism has, unfortunately, tended to get driven by politics, and has centered on certain laws enacted or repealed by Governments of different political persuasions...Our Government has no fixed, inflexible or ideological view in this regard.”

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For clean polls in Congress youth wings, Rahul turns to former Election Commission

Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi has asked former Election Commission (EC) officials to help conduct organisational elections. So when the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) kickstarts direct elections for its Punjab unit in October, right from the block president to the state chief, K J Rao, who as an EC observer made a name during the Bihar elections of 2005, will act as the watchdog to ensure that criminal elements don’t find their way into the organisation.

“Rahul Gandhi has accepted our suggestion that any candidate found to have committed a crime punishable for two years under the law should be barred from contesting the organisational elections,” Rao told The Indian Express.

Rahul got in touch with former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) J M Lyngdoh some three months ago to streamline the organisational polls in the IYC and the National Students Union of India, the two organisations under his charge. Lyngdoh, in turn, directed him to Delhi based Rao.

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Is it end-deal?

What the Congress kept delaying finally happened today: its moment of reckoning has come, after the Left made it clear it would not let the Government go to Vienna to confirm the safeguards agreement, the key first piece in the operationalisation of the Indo-US nuclear deal.

The party’s top brass went into a huddle at 10, Janpath faced with perhaps the toughest choice since they took charge four years ago: give in to the Left and freeze the Indo-US nuclear deal to keep the government alive and a line with the Left open in an election year or seize the historic opportunity and stamp the party’s commitment to the “national interest.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke to Congress President Sonia Gandhi on the phone, was learnt to have argued in favour of going ahead with the deal after the Left issued a statement that it was of the “firm opinion” that “the government should not proceed to seek approval of the text of the India-specific safeguards agreement from the Board of Directors of the IAEA.”

This Left statement came a few hours after the government deferred today’s UPA-Left meeting to June 25 as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s discussions with CPM general secretary Prakash Karat on Monday and Tuesday failed to make any headway. The Left also said it did not get the full text of the agreement.

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Gurjjar quota hot potato is passed on to Law Ministry

With the Vasundhara Raje govemment passing the buck to the Centre on the Guijjar demand for ST status, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today called Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Law Minister HR Bhardwaj to discuss the matter.

Following Raje's latest letter to the PM,wherein she reiterated her earlier stance of seeking a separate category for Gujars, over and above the existing quotas, and giving them 4 to 6 per cent reservation, the Prime Minister's Office decided to refer the matter to the Law Ministry to examine such a possibility.

Today's meeting also saw a general appreciation of the fact that politics aside, the trouble in Rajasthan may not remain confined there and may spread to other states, including those ruled by the Congress, if not handled properly.

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Chinese comrades invite Rahul to mark 20th year of his father's visit

Beijing may have summoned the Indian Ambassador at 2 am to protest against the Tibetans trying to scale their Embassy wall in New Delhi but all this was off the record today as a high-level delegation of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) came knocking on the Congress doors with a red carpet.

Signaling a readiness to look beyond its ideological brethren among the Left, the CPC came to the Congress with a proposal to hold a conference in Beijing to mark the 20th anniversary of the late Rajiv Gandhi's path-breaking visit to China in December 1988. The CPC also invited Rahul Gandhi to inaugurate the conference likely to be held towards the year-end.

The CPC proposed to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Congress Party to form an "institutional mechanism of collaboration" between the two. The Chinese delegation, led by Li Jinjun, Vice Minister of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, proposed that Rahul should come to China to inaugurate the conference. These proposals were accepted by the Congress delegation led by senior party leader Devendra Dwivedi.

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Enemy No. 1 is BJP, Left working on third front: CPM

"It has gone to the IAEA. It will come back to the (UPALeft) committee which we have set up. When that comes we will see. It is not going forward anywhere," he said.

The draft political resolution, which provides CPM the larger direction framework for the next three years, states "the party differentiates between the BJP and Congress, considering the latter as a bourgeois party, though it often vacillates when communal forces take the offensive.

The party will continue to adopt tactics for isolating and defeating BJP. It will not enter into any alliance or united front with the Congress."

Karat said the party will maintain relations with all "non-Congress secular par ties" for a united struggle and joint action on common issues.

"We still want a secular government at the Centre.

But we also want a government which does not follow such economic policies. How we can achieve that, we will have to wait and see," he said when he was asked about CPM plans for the next Lok Sabha elections.

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Image and Article source: Indian Express
Article taken from the issue: 21 Jan 2008