The Tribune – Reining in the menace; Anti-drug drive: BKU seeks Takht’s support

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, December 18. A delegation of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), headed by its president Balbir Singh Rajewal, today met Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh and urged him to support their anti-drug campaign in Punjab.

Rajewal said they would launch a drive in March in support of their demands aimed at curbing the drug menace. He said if the state government failed to respond favourably to their demands, they would stage an indefinite dharna in the state capital.

Highlighting their demands in a memorandum submitted to the Jathedar, Rajewal said the government should order closure of chemist shops in villages which did not have any doctor as most of these shops were resorting to selling banned drugs.

He said the government should initiate measures to curb drug addiction instead of boosting its revenue through auction of liquor vends.

The Jathedar said he would discuss the matter in the next meeting of the Sikh clergy and issue an edict aimed at curbing drug addiction.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20121219/punjab.htm#11

The Tribune – Namdhari sect succession row spills onto roads in Ludhiana; International unit’s members protests, want Uday’s brother Dalip appointed head

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana December 18. The tug-of-war over appointing the successor to late Satguru Jagjit Singh took an ugly turn today when members of the International Namdhari Sangat took to the streets here today.

Namdhari sect head Jagjit Singh had died on December 13 and his nephew Thakur Uday Singh was appointed the successor on December 16.

The International Namdhari Sangat, however, wanted Uday Singh’s brother Thakur Dalip Singh appointed as the new Satguru. The Sangat had even appealed to Jagjit Singh’s widow Chand Kaur to reconsider the decision to appoint Uday Singh as the new head.

The International Sangat members today burnt an effigy of Namdhari Darbar (Bhaini Sahib) president H S Hanspal and vice-president Surinder Lyal at Vishvakarma Chowk here. The activists alleged that Hanspal and Lyal were trying to create factionalism among the Namdhari Sangat over succession.

International Namdhari Sangat president Navtej Singh said Hanspal and Lyal allegedly had vested interests in appointing Uday Singh as the new head. “Hanspal and Lyal want to become politically important and, therefore, have appointed Uday Singh as the sect head. Both are indirectly trying to divide the Namdharis,” he said.

Navtej alleged that both these leaders had committed a sin by ignoring Jagjit Singh’s desire and announcing Uday Singh as the Satguru instead of Dalip Singh. He claimed that a majority of the Namdhari Sangat was in Dalip Singh’s favour and that Hanspal and Lyal had allegedly ignored the mass feeling.

When questioned on the issue, Lyal said the International Namdhari Sangat was a “fake organisation”. “There is no confusion over succession as Chand Kaur herself had announced Uday Singh as the new Satguru. A section of the Sangat is trying to defame the Namdhari sect,” he added.

Hanspal, however, refused to comment on the issue.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20121219/punjab.htm#1

The Hindu Editorial – Time to be ashamed

Wednesday 19 December 2012.  Perhaps the real tragedy we must contemplate, as we consider the story of the young woman who now lies in a Delhi hospital bed battling for her life after being brutally beaten and gang-raped Sunday night, is this: in six months or less, she will have been forgotten.

There will, by then, have been the next victim, and the one after — and absolutely nothing will have changed. Ever since Sunday’s savage crime, India’s political leadership has been loudly engaged in what it appears to believe is advocacy of women’s rights — in the main, dramatic but meaningless calls for summary trials, castration and mandatory death penalties.

The same leaders will, if past record proves a guide, do absolutely nothing to actually address the problem. For all the noise that each gang-rape has provoked, Parliament has made no worthwhile progress towards desperately-needed legal reforms. Even nuts-and-bolts measures, like enhanced funding for forensic investigations, upgrading training of police to deal with sexual crimes, and making expert post-trauma support available to victims, are conspicuous by their absence.

How does one account for the strange contrast between our outrage about rape — and our remarkable unwillingness, as a society, to actually do anything about it? For one, we are far more widely complicit in crimes against women than we care to acknowledge.

The hideous gang-rape in Delhi is part of the continuum of violence millions of Indian women face every single day; a continuum that stretches from sexual harassment in public spaces and the workplace to physical abuse that plays itself out in the privacy of our homes far more often than on the street. Nor is it true, secondly, that Delhi is India’s “rape capital.”

There are plenty of other places in India with a higher incidence of reported rape, in population adjusted terms — and Delhi’s record on convicting perpetrators is far higher than the national average. Third, this is not a problem of policing alone.

As Professor Ratna Kapur argues in an op-ed article in this newspaper today, there is something profoundly wrong in the values young men are taught in our society — values which bind the parental preference for a male child to the gang of feral youth who carried out Sunday’s outrage or the hundreds of thousands of husbands who were battering their wives that same night.

Finally, India’s society rails against rape, in the main, not out of concern for victims but because of the despicable notion that a woman’s body is the repository of family honour. It is this honour our society seeks to protect, not individual women. It is time for us as a people to feel the searing shame our society has until now only imposed on its female victims.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/time-to-be-ashamed/article4214334.ece

Luik / Liège Kirtan Darbar – 22 September 2012

Sky-blue tabla player with long beard

Sky-blue tabla player with long beard

Naujawan

Queuing to pay respects to Guru Granth Sahib

Kirtanis, Sadh Sangat

Sikhs from other areas of Belgium and from the UK were also present

Guru Nanak Prakash Gurdwara
625 Rue Saint Leonard
B-4000 Liège

To see more Belgium and Netherlands gurdwara pictures :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12445197@N05/sets/72157622147381380/

More Luik – Liège pictures to follow
Harjinder Singh
Man in Blue

The Tribune – Plan on track to revamp railways: Bansal

Aarti Kapur, Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 18. The Indian Railways will have a new face in the near future with Union Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal conceptualising a number of innovative plans for its expansion and renovation.

Interacting with The Tribune, Bansal said the country would require 33,000 more railway coaches over the next five years. The present number was 51,000.

To meet the demand, the ministry was planning to set up more rail coach factories in the country. He said the Haryana Government had recently offered land in the state to set up a coach factory and the railway officials were evaluating the feasibilities of the area proposed by the state.

Passengers’ safety was on top of the agenda and the railways planned to spend Rs 1.10 lakh crore on improving their safety in the next five years, the minister added.

A proposal to set up a railway Information Technology unit in Chandigarh was also in the pipeline. The railways had around 700 acres at its disposal in the city.

He said officials were working on the possibility of installing railway signal link and anti-collision devices here.

On improving the standard of food being served in trains, Bansal said they proposed to set up mini pantries in coaches. These pantries will have the provision for refrigeration and microwave oven to preserve and serve hot food.

In a bid to improve the quality of food, the ministry had chalked out a plan to set up state-of-the-art base kitchens at stations. The railways would allocate land to contractors to set up the kitchens, from where food would be served to the commuters in trains.

He said the railways was unable to provide mineral water bottles in all trains since only 6.50 lakh bottles were being supplied to it per day as against the requirement of 28 lakh bottles.

This problem would be resolved with the setting up of base kitchens at railway stations, the minister said.

Bansal said to reduce rail accidents on unmanned railway crossings, the ministry proposed to construct overpasses, for which 10 states had already given their concurrence to share 50 per cent of the construction cost.

He said there were 32,000 level crossings in the country, of which 18,000 were manned and 14,000 unmanned.

The ministry had recently mooted a proposal to permit the construction of overpasses at level crossings after conducting a survey of rail traffic on such sections. The ministry and the state would bear 50 per cent of the construction cost.

Bansal said instructions had been issued to all states seeking new tracks in their area to share the construction cost of the tracks besides providing land for the same.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20121219/nation.htm#2

BBC News – Karachi polio killings: Vaccination workers shot

Wednesday, 18 December 2012. Five female Pakistani polio vaccination workers have been fatally shot in a string of co-ordinated attacks – four within 20 minutes across Karachi.

The fifth woman was shot and wounded in the city of Peshawar in the north-west and later died of her injuries.

A UN-backed programme to eradicate polio – which is endemic in Pakistan – has been suspended in Karachi.

No group has said it carried out the shootings, but the Taliban have issued threats against the polio drive.

“These were pre-planned and co-ordinated attacks in various localities which took place within a span of 20 minutes,” Imran Javed, a police spokesman told the BBC of Tuesday’s attacks in Karachi.

Earlier reports said a male health worker had been shot dead in Karachi on Monday, but officials now say his death was not related to the polio vaccination drive.

Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf has condemned the attacks and praised the work of the polio vaccination teams, calling on regional authorities to guarantee their safety, Pakistan’s APP news agency reported.

Pakistani health officials said the latest three-day nationwide anti-polio drive – during which an estimated 5.2 million polio drops were to be administered – had been suspended in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city with a population of 18 million.

There has been opposition to such immunisation drives in parts of Pakistan, particularly after a fake CIA hepatitis vaccination campaign helped to locate Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

Militants have kidnapped and killed foreign NGO workers in the past in an attempt to halt the immunisation drives, which they say are part of efforts to spy on them.

However, the Pakistani government “would continue to mount its effort on polio eradication,” Mr Ashraf’s special adviser Shahnaz Wazir Ali told the BBC.

Mrs Ali said protection would be provided to workers, and campaigns would be staggered if necessary.

“Clearly, we are now so close to eradicating the polio virus,… acts of this type, which are intended to dissuade us, will not deter us,” she said.

Along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is still endemic.

Pakistan is considered the key battleground in the global fight against the disease, which attacks the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis within hours of infection.

Almost 200 children were paralysed in the country in 2011 – the worst figures in 15 years.

Earlier this year, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative warned that tackling the disease had entered “emergency mode” after “explosive” outbreaks in countries previously free of polio.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said polio was at a tipping point, with experts fearing it could “come back with a vengeance” after large outbreaks in Africa and Tajikistan and China’s first recorded cases for more than a decade.

Declaring polio a national emergency, the Pakistani government is targeting 33 million children for vaccination with some 88,000 health workers delivering vaccination drops.

Dr Bruce Aylward of the WHO told the BBC that vaccination programmes had been suspended in other countries before but that “when you’re dealing with something as basic as the health of children, usually there can be common ground found”.

Dr Aylward said he hoped for a “dialogue with community leaders who have positions of power to ensure root causes of this are being addressed and the perpetrators are brought to justice”.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20767138