Shun hostility for talks, India tells Pakistan

NEW DELHI, Nov 28: India cannot negotiate with Pakistan while having a gun pointed at its head, Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor said on Saturday, reacting to Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi accusing India of being “myopic”.

In an interview telecast on CNN-IBN on Saturday, Qureshi said that India was being narrow-minded in not coming to the table for talks. “I think you (India) are being myopic. You are being narrow-minded. You have to look at the boarder picture and the broader picture demands cooperation and not confrontation,” he said at Port of Spain, where he is leading the Pakistani delegation at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the absence of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. He also said that India had provided “inadequate” evidence to prosecute Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, who India has named as the mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. In Delhi, Tharoor retorted that any evidence that had to be unearthed against Saeed had to be done in Pakistan itself. “Surely the evidence is available in their country, where the man has been conducting his nefarious activities. So, it seems to me that in saying that the evidence is not enough, the Pakistani government is essentially saying that its own investigative capabilities are not what they should be,” Tharoor said here.

On the demand to restart talks, Tharoor said that there had to be adequate progress by Pakistan for India to return to the table. India had frozen all talks after the November 26-29, 2008 Mumbai carnage that claimed the lives of 166 people, including 26 foreigners. “We know that there is gun pointed at your head, but you still got to talk to us. Will you first get the gun removed from our head, then we will talk to you happily,” he said. “If we can see some real action on the two things that we have been asking for in a year, we would be very happy to persuade the public and the Parliament that we need to engage in serious talks,” he added. (IANS)

Government’s stand on rice import lacks transparency: CPI-M

KOLKATA, Nov 22: The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) on Sunday said the Central Government’s decision to import rice lacked transparency. In an editorial in daily Ganashakti, its Bengali mouthpiece, the CPI-M accused the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government of taking a casual approach to the fall in rice production and not helping farmers hit by this. “The Prime Minister, the Finance Minister and the Agriculture and Food Minister have repeatedly assured the people that there was no cause for worry as the country had a good stock of food grains, and that there was no danger of any food crisis. But now the government is publicly talking about importing rice,” the editorial said. “In fact, over the last few months, the government has been clandestinely preparing to import rice. It is obvious that the government’s stand lacked transparency,” it added. According to the CPI-M, the Central Government too no step to arrest the fall in crop production, and said: “It did not lay any importance on the probable consequences.” The editorial also said farmers were suffering because of the fall in production, and that the “government has not taken any steps to safeguard their interests”. It noted India was the world’s second largest producer and leading exporter of rice, and did not have to import it in the last two-three decades. “In the recent past, the country did not have to import rice. But this time we have to do so. This is a matter of concern,” the daily added. (IANS)

Centre mulls stringent law to protect biodiversity hotspots

COIMBATORE, Nov 22: The Centre is considering the introduction of a comprehensive legislation to protect three biodiversity hotspots in the Himalayas, North East and Western Ghats, besides amending the Protection of Wildlife Act 1972 to check poaching of tigers. Announcing this here today, Union Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh said the Ministry is holding talks with State Governments to bring in the law as tourism activities -- leisure tourism or religious tourism -- have an “adverse impact” on their biodiversity and ecological balance. “I am determined to protect the ecology since unbridled tourism is disturbing the balance,” he said when his attention was drawn to widespread damage caused by heavy rain and resultant landslips in Nilgiris district last week. The minister observed that poaching of tigers has become a serious issue and said the Ministry decided to amend the Wildlife Act to make punishment for such crimes very stringent, on the lines of Foreign Exchange and Money Laundering Act. (PTI)

Terror-hit hotels limp back to normal life

MUMBAI, Nov 25: “In memory and faith that peace can come on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Thus reads a scrawling handwriting in a memorial book placed at the historic Hotel Taj Mahal Palace & Tower. The book lies next to a sacred ‘Tree of Life’ setting, which commemorates those who laid down their lives when a handful of terrorists invaded the hotel on the night of November 26, 2008, and held guests and staff hostage for the next 60 hours.

The same night, another group entered the Trident-Oberoi Hotel, at Nariman Point barely a kilometre away from the Taj and two kilometres from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where they carried out a spate of similar atrocities. Including foreigners, 166 people were killed in the attack which also left 264 injured or maimed. Both hotels suffered extensive infrastructure damage, in amounts running into millions of rupees.