UPA most corrupt dispensation India ever had: BJP

State unit of BJP on Sunday alleged that the UPA led government at Centre was the "most corrupt" dispensation the country ever had.

"Surfacing of one scam after another and direct involvement of union ministers of the UPA should leave no one in any doubt that it is the most corrupt dispensation India ever had," deputy in-charge of the Jammu and Kashmir BJP, Anil Jain said.

He alleged that Congress has never been honest towards the welfare of common men.

"During the election campaigns this party had a different face and when it returned to power, it took decision which could not be termed as people friendly by any yardsticks", he said.

 

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Suspected Somali pirates have hijacked a tanker with 21 Indian sailors on board near a port in Oman

Suspected Somali pirates have hijacked a tanker with 21 Indian sailors on board near a port in Oman, India's government shipping agency said.

The Mumbai-based Director General of Shipping (DGS) said in a statement that the Fairchem Bogey was hijacked on Saturday while it was at anchor outside the port of Salalah.

Piracy for ransom is a well-organised and lucrative operation in Somalia that has expanded into a vast area off the coast. In 2010 a record 1,181 seafarers were kidnapped by pirates, according to marine safety experts.

The Fairchem Bogey, managed by Mumbai-based Anglo-Eastern Ship Management, was seized while it was waiting for berthing instructions.

"The Omani Coast Guard... were warned off by the pirates who asked them to move away to avoid casualties to the crew," Anglo-Eastern Ship Management said in the statement.

Oman lies at the mouth of the Gulf, a strategic, heavily patrolled waterway which channels the bulk of the world's crude oil shipments.

In June this year, six Indian sailors were freed after being held for 10 months by Somali pirates. They were kept in chains, often without food or water and said they were treated "like animals".

More than 100 suspected pirates have been caught and are awaiting trial in India following a series of skirmishes with the navy near the country's Lakshadweep islands this year.

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Britain’s war on criminal gangs

To win the hearts and minds of the citizens, the government needs to focus on a reforms agenda. Racism in the police department has badly affected its credibility. Muslim communities in Britain often complain against police discrimination

The recent violent riots across the UK and the way the police has been tackling them put the credibility of the police, intelligence and New Scotland Yard into question. Many experts believe that the abrupt emergence of this violent criminal force and their ‘loot and burn’ action were due to the total failure of intelligence. Newspapers in London reported different news stories about the performance of the Metropolitan Police, surveillance system and national intelligence model during last week’s riots. The police was on the run, Scotland Yard still had to recover from the phone hacking and corruption scandals, and communities remained helpless.

The police were slow to react and the disturbance got out of control. The prime minister praised the police but said they had made a major miscalculation in their response to the riots. He called on a former New York police chief to help the UK police tackle criminal gangs but the Association of Chief Police Officers criticised the government and said that it had no trust in its force. Scotland Yard’s acting commissioner said that more than 3,000 rioters would now face punishment. In response to the UK’s police criticism, the US police chief said he was a “progressive” man who could lead British policing out of “crisis”.

The performance of the police has been very poor in tackling the few disorganised criminals last week. A total of 300 criminal gangs and their thousands-strong members have been running their criminal businesses across the UK for a decade. The question is: why did the police not carry out any thorough investigation into their networks in the past? Home Secretary Theresa May warned that the failure of the police in tackling the riots jeopardised a core British tradition. “Policing by consent is the British way,” May told MPs. The London police commissioner denied his commanders were ordered to “watch and wait”, rather than intervene. Senior police officers defended their force against the criticism of the PM.

Police and security agencies are responsible for maintaining law and order but, notwithstanding the allocation of extra resources to the police, the situation is getting worse. To win the hearts and minds of the citizens, the government needs to focus on a reforms agenda. Racism in the police department has badly affected its credibility. Muslim communities in Britain often complain against police discrimination and the stop-and-search policy under the terror law of 2000. The policing community has failed and the police are no longer welcomed into Muslim communities with their present face. There are complaints that the police do not hear Asian minorities’ complaints properly.

As previously pointed out, because of the failure of electronic intelligence, the police needs to reorganise the structure of old human intelligence. The installation of five million cameras along with a multi-dimensional surveillance system could not prove effective in countering the recent wave of economic terrorism in the country. Security experts understand that the national intelligence model showed its inefficacy during the protests.

The riots in London are said to be the worst in a generation. With the deployment of 16,000 police personnel and the arrest of hundreds of criminals, the crisis appears to be tapering off in the capital. Immigrants from Asia and Africa are living in poverty, low income families face acute financial pressure, while the behaviour of the Borough Councils is too sneering. Poverty is another cause of the recent violence. One and a half million children in the country live in severe poverty. Asian and African teenagers are playing into the hands of criminal gangs. The 300 gangs belong to over 40 nationalities that inflicted ruin on the country last week. Knife crimes and violence in schools and colleges are on the increase. Every week, some 800 knife crimes are reported. All these weaknesses, the weak performance of the police and the violent culture have badly affected the business climate of the UK. The Federation of Small Businesses complains that businesses are just shutting their doors. It is going to have a huge long-term effect on their profits. The British press has reported several causes of the recent shut down.

Some reports indicate that the wrong interpretation of multiculturalism, racism, inequality, poverty, the tolerance of criminal gangs in educational institutions, the poor state of education, the presence of hundreds of criminals in the country, drug trafficking, women and children trafficking, extremism, militancy, lack of education, the circulation of counterfeit currency, the networks of African and Asian extremist groups and the UK political and military involvement in the Middle East and South Asia are the leading factors behind the recent economic terrorism and criminality. The growing activities of terrorist groups in the UK have become a bold challenge for its security agencies.

In the UK, the poor state of education has left as many as a fifth of British teenagers functionally illiterate. Unemployment is widening the gap between the rich and the poor, making more young people violent. Sixty-one thousand people were officially recognised as newly homeless by various councils in 2010. Nepotism, racism and corruption in Boroughs, and the irregular allotment of houses to their favourite people have made thousands of poor migrants homeless. They have to wait for almost 10 years to get a house. A majority of homeless people are from ethnic minorities. This means that ethnic minority households are, overall, around three times more likely to become homeless.

In summation, the future of young people in the UK is bleak as they are becoming jobless and victims of the prevailing criminal culture and mafia groups. Communal violence may further shape itself in a more violent form, as terror and sectarian networks will harm the national security infrastructure of the country. The lack of institutional coordination and the present complex way of governance may create more economic and political problems in the near future. Reform in the police and intelligence agencies is a constant need while the government needs to focus on the domestic violent criminal culture and extremism instead of spending millions of pounds in tackling the threat of international terrorism. The UK may face more violence both at home and in Northern Ireland in the near future.

 

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Protests continue all over India

Unrelenting supporters of anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and BJP activists staged demonstrations across Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh today,

voicing their support for a strong Lok Pal Bill.

The BJP activists have staged demonstrations at different places in Punjab and Haryana against the Congress led UPA government, Punjab BJP chief Ashwani Sharma said.

“Congress is facing serious corruption charges and those who are raising their voice against corruption and blackmoney stashed in foreign banks are being forcefully

suppressed,” Sharma said.

“Congress' autocratic functioning was clearly visible during Ramdev's protest and Yuva Morch rally... Leaders of opposition are not being allowed to speak in both Houses of Parliament and now it has taken an undemocratic step against Hazare and his team members,” he said.

 

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Congress ministers have Rs 22cr in Swiss banks

Cashing in on the pro-Anna Hazare sentiments, BJP held a protest in Panaji where its leaders said that if their government comes to power in Goa, they will introduce the Lokayukta Bill within three months.

The leaders also alleged that a former Congress chief minister of Goa and certain Congress ministers have together stashed loot worth.`22,000 crore in Swiss banks. The charge and the assurance came at a BJP meeting at Azad Maidan, Panaji, to protest the arrest of anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and to extend support to his version of the Jan Lokpal Bill.

While BJP state president Laximikant Parsekar leveled the charge of Rs 22,000 crore being stashed in Swiss banks, opposition leader Manohar Parrikar assured that if the BJP came to power in Goa, it would implement the Lokayukta Bill within three months. Claiming credit for introducing the Lokayukta Bill in Goa in 2003, Parrikar accused chief minister Digambar Kamat of suppressing it for the last fourand-half years because he was scared it would expose the corruption in his government.

Alleging that Goa's illegal mining is much greater than Karnataka's as detailed in the Karnataka Lokayukta report, Parrikar said most of the state's illegal mining would have been curbed had there been a Lokayukta in Goa. Parrikar actually named Digambar Kamat, health minister Vishwajeet Rane and PWD minister Churchill Alemao saying they are "immersed in corruption". Parsekar reminded how recently Congress education minister Atanasio Monserrate was caught redhanded smuggling foreign currency out of India.

Though most of the speeches were made by BJP functionaries, Parrikar also invited advocate Satish Sonak of India Against Corruption and Porvorim-resident Juino De Souza to speak. While Sonak urged all political parties to learn from the BJP in staging dharnas against corruption, De Souza urged citizens not to sell their votes during elections.

 

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Shetty's wife almost stalled his deportation

Efforts to bring gangster Santosh Shetty back to India were almost stalled at the last moment, forcing authorities to make intervention at senior levels, officials here said.

As the efforts to bring Shetty to Mumbai were in the final moments last week, his wife filed a criminal complaint against him, accusing him of cheating her of all her property and made other allegations.

The complaint meant Shetty couldn't be deported until investigations into her criminal complaint were completed.

A senior official said they had to intervene at very senior levels to ensure that the clever move by Shetty's wife didn't scuttle the efforts to bring him back to India. "They were able to verify that the complaint was a ploy to stall Shetty's deportation," a senior official said.

Officials said they had been working with Thai authorities for the past few months to zero in on Shetty and arrest him. He remained in custody of Thai police for a few days, by when the formalities for his deportation were completed and he was brought back on Friday.

Shetty, a former Chhota Rajan aide leading a major extortion racket, was living in Bangkok on a fake Indian passport. He has several cases registered against him in Mumbai.

Shetty started his criminal career in the late 80s with smuggling of gold and narcotics. After spending five years in jail in the early 90s, he came out to join the Chhota Rajan gang and became a key member. In 2005, Shetty formed his own gang after splitting from Rajan.

Born into an affluent Mumbai family, Shetty was known for his love for latest gizmos, education and running his syndicate in a corporate manner. During his college days, he had interned with the Holiday Inn group.

 

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Oil Tanker’s Drift to Mumbai Beach Exposes Indian Security Woes

The oil tanker that India towed off a Mumbai beach this week after it had drifted undetected through coastal defenses underscored the country’s continued vulnerability three years after a seaborne terrorist attack.
Salvage tugs fixed lines to the 76-meter-long M.T. Pavit and pulled it away from the shore Aug. 15, six weeks after its crew abandoned it in the Arabian Sea. The tanker idled across 370 kilometers (200 nautical miles) of Indian coastal waters, unobserved by the country’s Navy and Coast Guard, until it nosed into Versova Beach, near luxury hotels and homes in South Asia’s financial capital.
The ship’s surprise landing “is a wake-up call” that exposes holes in India’s effort to secure its coasts and biggest city after it has spent millions of dollars on new patrol boats and radars, said Vijay Sakhuja, research director at the Indian Council of World Affairs, a government-backed think tank in New Delhi. The administration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said improved coastal security was a top priority in 2008 after guerrillas of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic militant group sailed to Mumbai for a three-day assault that killed 166 people.
The undetected drift to shore of an oil tanker 28 kilometers (17 miles) from where those gunmen landed “shows that there are gaps in terms of materials and especially in human resources” in India’s coastal defenses, Sakhuja said in a phone interview. Mumbai again was the target for India’s deadliest terror strike since the 2008 killings, as three bombs killed 25 people in the city July 13.
Defensive Muscle
While the Home Ministry says more patrol vessels and coastal police stations have bolstered security, the country’s auditor general told parliament this month that the Indian Coast Guard is operating at no more than half of its authorized strength.
India’s government plans to spend $3.1 billion within three years on maritime defensive muscle, including ships, helicopters and a coastal radar network, according to a February report by Aviotech, an Indian defense consulting firm.
As with India’s acquisition of fighter jets and artillery, the purchase of maritime defense equipment has been slowed by government policies to avoid the arms-buying corruption scandals that brought down the ruling Congress party in 1989, say Sakhuja and other analysts.
‘Human’ Failure
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in October said more than 200 new coastal police posts and 150 boats for security agencies had yielded significant progress in securing India’s coasts. Amid such acquisitions, “the human element, which uses the equipment, continues to be as poor in its alertness and reflexes as before,” wrote Indian security analyst Bahukutumbi Raman in an e-mailed comment.
Last month, the drifting Pavit undermined the government’s assurances of improved security. The tanker, which hauls oil among Indian Ocean ports, began its odyssey off the coast of Oman, where its crew abandoned ship after the engine stalled in rough seas, the Indian Express reported, citing Jugwinder Singh Brar, managing director for the ship’s operator, Prime Tankers LLC of Dubai.
The News, a Portsmouth, U.K., newspaper reported that a British navy helicopter evacuated the Pavit’s crew June 30 “just before the vessel sank to the bottom of the sea bed.” In fact, the Pavit floated into Indian-patrolled waters.
In the tanker’s undetected penetration to Mumbai, “there was no failure on the part of the Coast Guard as the ship was recorded sunk,” said R.V. Prasad, the force’s public relations officer in the port city.
Low-Quality Recruits
Defence Minister A.K. Antony met the Navy and Coast Guard commanders Aug. 10 to ask that they “take all steps required to ensure that incidents like M.T. Pavit drifting into Indian territorial waters do not recur,” a ministry statement said.
India’s effort to modernize the Navy and Coast Guard is complicated by a drop over two decades in the education and experience of recruits, said Sakhuja, a maritime security specialist and retired navy officer. A generation after economic liberalization expanded private-sector career paths for ambitious urban youth, “military recruits are coming less from the cities, and more from the rural heartland, where the youth have had less exposure” to the sea and to computer literacy, he said Aug. 10.
Radar Upgrade
India’s Coast Guard operations “remain largely reactive” because poor planning has prevented the force from spending its allocated budget for new vessels to replace those that “have outlived their prescribed life,” said the report last week by the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General.
Of 14 new Coast Guard stations authorized after the 2008 Mumbai attack, five had been opened by the start of this year, and many stations nationwide lack docks or fueling facilities, the auditor general’s report said. The Coast Guard has not received the report and has no comment, said Gurvinder Singh, a public relations officer for the force in New Delhi.
The Aug. 10 Defence Ministry statement said India will complete about September 2012 a first batch of 46 radar stations, built by state-owned Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BHE) to identify ships through India’s 22-kilometer-wide zone of territorial waters. The Coast Guard commander said in January that network would be completed this year.

 

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Fed up with corruption, activist strikes a chord across India

It was one shocking development after another as India’s simmering feud over corruption burst into a full-scale national drama.

Police arrested an elderly campaigner with a mass following, then released him – or tried to – while streets in cities across the country filled with protesters, angry at both the pervasiveness of bribery and their government’s draconian response. In Parliament, debate over the events descended into hysterical shrieking, and both houses were adjourned.


It began early Tuesday morning, when Delhi police detained a 74-year-old former freedom fighter named Anna Hazare, lately reinvented as the saintly face of the anti-corruption movement, as he was setting out to stage a fast-until-death for anti-graft legislation.

The police rounded up several thousand of his supporters, who had been converging on the park where Mr. Hazare was to hold his protest, and carted them off to a stadium in the north of the city. Thousands more protesters then began to gather outside the stadium. Street demonstrations demanding that Mr. Hazare be given his right to protest broke out in every major city in India.

Mr. Hazare was then taken from a police station to Tihar Jail on a seven-day judicial remand, and, bizarrely, locked up in the same wing that holds Andimuthu Raja, the former telecom minister. Mr. Raja is awaiting trial after being accused of costing the country as much as $40-billion through his graft-filled auction of the 2G cellular network licence. Several other senior government figures implicated in the scam are also held in Tihar.

The police shipped several of Mr. Hazare’s key supporters there, too, including Kiran Bedi, a dedicated social activist who, during her career as inspector-general of prisons, instituted the reforms at Tihar Jail that made it into a top-quality prison that, as a consequence, houses all the allegedly crooked politicians.

As candlelight vigils were staged across many cities, another announcement: Mr. Hazare was being released from jail. India’s hyperkinetic television news channels were soon reporting that it was Rahul Gandhi, son of Indian National Congress Party Leader Sonia Gandhi, who had ordered Mr. Hazare sprung (acting as head of the ruling party because his mother is hospitalized in New York with an ailment Congress won’t specify).

Then, 10 p.m. – more breaking news: Mr. Hazare refused to leave the jail. He said he would not go until he had a promise from government that he could stage his protest under his own conditions. At press time, he was still there. By this point, Mr. Hazare’s supporters seemed ready to collapse from exhaustion, while many people were recoiling from a sense that critical issues were degenerating into farce.

Mr. Hazare emerged from life as a local activist in a village in Maharashtra earlier this year, arriving unheralded to Delhi, vowing to fast until death unless the government took action against corruption. He was angry, in particular, about the 2G scam and he wanted government to pass legislation that would create the post of lokpal, or ombudsman, with the right to investigate all levels of government.

One among many fasters in the circle he chose – Mr. Hazare struck a nerve. People liked that he had once fought with Mahatma Gandhi against the British colonial regime and they liked his simple way of talking. Most of all, they liked that someone was finally overtly challenging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on corruption, which is blatant, ubiquitous, and woven tightly into the fabric of daily life in India.

 

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Sydney collar-bomb suspect is arrested by Kentucky Swat team

When it turned out that the collar bomb was a fake and the extortion note alluded to a character in an obscure novel, many Australians suspected the ordeal that a Sydney teenager was subjected to a fortnight ago was a schoolboy prank.

With the arrest of an Australian businessman in Kentucky yesterday, that theory appears to have been torpedoed. Although the motives behind Paul Peters' alleged targeting of the wealthy family of 18-year-old Madeleine Pulver are not yet clear, the incident has taken on a new air of seriousness.

Mr Peters, 50, who was held at his ex-wife's house in Louisville by an armed FBI Swat team acting in conjunction with New South Wales police, was an executive with a Sydney-based financial services group, Allco, which folded in 2008. Police are investigating links between him and the international software company, Appen, of which Ms Pulver's father, Bill, is chief executive. Ms Pulver endured 10 hours of terror after a masked intruder entered her home in the prosperous suburb of Mosman and strapped what he said was a bomb to her neck.

She telephoned her father, who contacted police. It was only after painstakingly removing the device that bomb-disposal experts were able to ascertain that it contained no explosives.

The mystery deepened when it emerged that a note left pinned to Ms Pulver's chest made reference to Dirk Struan, a ruthless businessman in James Clavell's 1986 novel Tai-Pan. Australian media noted that the book was on the recommended reading list for pupils at Sydney Church of England Grammar, attended by Ms Pulver's brothers and some of her male friends.

That line of speculation was quashed as officers with machine guns descended on suburban Louisville yesterday. Australian police, who will seek extradition, said the note contained financial demands and instructions to contact Mr Peters, who has three children. He will be charged with kidnapping, breaking and entering, and demanding property with menaces.

Australian authorities used an email account attached to the fake bomb to track down Mr Peters, who, according to police, flew out of Sydney five days after the incident. Mr Peters was managing director of Allco's Malaysia branch. The company was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. He has also worked for other businesses and reportedly lived at one time in Hong Kong, the setting of Tai-Pan. Recently he has divided his time between Australia and the US.

Mr Pulver and his wife Belinda said the family was "enormously relieved" by the arrest, but remained mystified.

 

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A British national has been killed in a suspected shark attack in the Seychelles.

The Foreign Office confirmed the death of a Briton on the islands where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently had their honeymoon.

The Daily Telegraph tonight reported that the 30-year-old victim was on his honeymoon.



"We are providing consular assistance to the next of kin," said a Foreign Office spokesman.

The shark attack happened off Anse Lazio beach on the island of Praslin.

Praslin is the second largest island in the Seychelles and is the site of the Vallee de Mai Unesco World Heritage Site, where the rare coco-de-mer tree grows.

It lies 45km (27.9 miles) north of Mahe, the largest island in the archipelago, and is measures 10km (6.2 miles) by 3.7km (2.3 miles), according to the official tourism website for the Seychelles.

The Seychelles is one of the most popular exotic destinations for British honeymooners, lying in the Indian Ocean between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Equator.

It has warm weather, white sand beaches and the opportunity for seclusion, luxury and romance.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge spent their honeymoon on North Island, four years after they took a week-long break on the island of Desroches.

Local police confirmed the man was killed off Anse Lazio beach, in the Baie Sainte Anne district of Praslin island.

An employee at the four-star La Reserve hotel confirmed the man was staying there with his wife.

According to reports, a 36-year-old French tourist died on August 1 after he suffered injuries which appeared to have been caused by a shark.

AFP France quoted police spokesman Jean Toussaint as saying the man's injuries looked like a shark bite, and reported that the victim had been diving in the Anse Lazio area.

Anse Lazio is Praslin's most famous beach, suitable for swimming and snorkelling, according to the tourism website.

It is said to have soft white sand leading to calm, clear waters with a gentle gradient.

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