Brawl at dhaba

DIBRUGARH, Dec 1: A midnight brawl at a roadside dhaba at Chabua left one injured last night. According to reports, one Kundan Singh and president of the Chabua unit of the Bhojpuri Parishad, Ajay Misra, were drinking when an argument broke out between the two and the former hit the latter with an iron rod. The Parishad’s official had to be admitted to a private nursing home here. The families of the two lodged complaints at Chabua police station against each other.

Tata to produce hybrid Nano model in India

India’s Tata Group has announced plans to produce hybrid versions of its cheapest vehicle - the Nano - in its home market.

The Nano, which at 100,000 rupees (£1,306) for a basic model is the cheapest car in the world, first became available in India in July this year.

Ratan Tata, the chairman of both Tata Group and Tata Motors, India’s largest car producer, told the Maeil Business Newspaper in South Korea today that the firm now intends to produce a new vehicle that can run both on petrol or diesel and a battery.

He added that low-priced goods would continue to drive sales more quickly in India than high-cost goods, but the so-called price revolution would continue to spread across the world.

Tata’s move follows the announcement earlier this month by Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of both Renault and Nissan, that it had signed a deal with Indian partner Bajaj Auto to create a car able to trump any other, including the Nano, in terms of fuel efficiency by 2012 and market it in India.

‘Media a problem in India-Pakistan relations’

Hyderabad, Dec 1: Eminent Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi on Tuesday said media in both India and Pakistan is trapped in “narrow nationalism” and is part of the problem in relations between the two countries.

Speaking at the inaugural session of World Newspaper Congress after receiving the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Golden Pen of Freedom award here, Sethi said the media in both the countries was too intensely nationalistic and had pushed them to the brink of war after last year’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. “After Mumbai last year, both the media put on the war paint and pushed their governments to the brink of war,” said Sethi, the editor-in-chief of the Friday Times and the Daily Times.

Contending that media is part of a problem rather than solution in India-Pakistan relations, he gave instances of media stalling the peace dialogue at critical points. “In 1989 when the then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Pakistan, the Pakistani media stopped (the then Pakistan Prime Minister) Benazir Bhutto’s government from implementing the far-reaching cultural accords that were signed on that occasion. When Mr Gandhi went back, the Indian media stopped him from moving ahead on Siachen accord inked by the defence secretaries of the two countries in Pakistan,” he said.

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)