Shaheen Bagh ‘protestors’ believe that coronavirus is a ploy by Home Minister Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to get them to end the protests.
Their blind hatred is gonna cost us big. Why don’t someone from bollywood from goes there to make them understand the gravity of situation? pic.twitter.com/FWaaLzdMJZ
The ‘protestor’ can be heard arguing how coronavirus can also happen to those who travel in metro but no one is asking them to stop. However, everyone wants Shaheen Bagh protests to end, she argues. “Is it necessary we will get coronavirus if we come to protests? It can happen in our homes also. Are we not stepping out of homes? We are going out of houses, children are going to school, taking metro, going to market. 10 people sitting in Parliament and talking. Won’t they get infected? It is an excuse to remove the protests. Either by Amit Shah or by Kejriwal,” she says.
It is imperative to note that in view of the pandemic, all shopping malls, cinema halls and public places except the ones dealing in basic essentials are shut down in Delhi. The central as well as state governments have issued advisory on social distancing. However, for women of Shaheen Bagh, blatant flouting of rules was not enough. Hence they now think that coronavirus is a conspiracy.
After being sent to judicial custody till April 2 by a Mumbai court in connection to a money laundering case, the lawyer of Yes Bank founder Rana Kapoor, Abbad Ponda, informed the court that his client had low immunity and was thus “easily susceptible” to the deadly Wuhan virus, Covid-19.
On being asked by Judge Parashuram Jadhav, Kapoor said that he was suffering from asthma from the past 6-7 years, besides low immunity and acute depression. Ponda said, “The virus is spreading very fast. It is a very precarious situation. If he goes there (to the jail) he might catch something which is very very serious. ”
His lawyer also demanded a bigger prison cell. The court directed prison health officials to take care of Rana Kapoor. The Judge also sent the accused to judicial custody until April 2 as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) did not seek his further remand.
Rana Kapoor, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Sunday around 3 am in Mumbai. He was arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), following allegations of mismanagement and financial irregularities. Earlier, his upscale residence in ‘Samudra Mahal’ complex in Worli area was raided by the ED on Friday night. Reportedly, Kapoor was questioned for over 20 hours by the central agency on Saturday, finally leading to his arrest on Sunday morning.
The Central Bureau of Investigation had booked Kapoor and his wife Bindhu Kapoor for receiving ₹307 crore bribe from Avantha Realty Ltd. in connection to the purchase of a 1.2-acre uber-luxe bungalow at 40, Amrita Shergill Marg, New Delhi that was valued at ₹550 crores. Yes Bank is accused of not initiating actions to recover ₹1900 crores from the Avantha Group, despite the group of companies defaulting on its payment.
The ED was also investigating whether a dummy company controlled by Kapoor and two of his daughters, Doit Urban Ventures, received kickbacks to the tune of ₹600 crores in return for granting a ₹4,450 crore loan to Dewan Housing Financial Corporation Limited (DHFL).
The Drug Controller General of India has given licenses to 18 companies to conduct tests for coronavirus (Covid-19)amid the outbreak in the country. Till now only govt laboratories are only conducting tests for Covid-19.
The agency has given license to 18 companies which include international and Indian private companies to conduct novel coronavirus tests.
As per reports, some of these companies include– Cadila healthcare limited, Zydus Health care limited, Medsource healthcare private limited, Cosara diagnostics private limited, Roche Diagnostics, Biomerieux etc.
An official requesting anonymity said, “a lot of companies have approached us. Only a few of them could fulfil the parameters. Since these are the test license, first we will do an assessment. Then we will provide to our laboratory technicians in India.” Currently, 75 government labs are doing tests for the Covid-19.
Yesterday Ahmedabad based CoSara Diagnostics Pvt Ltd had claimed that they have become the fiest company to get a licence from Central Drugs Standards Control Organisation (CDSCO) to manufacture coronavirus test kits. The firm claims its reagent kits can give coronavirus test results in about 2.5 hrs, as against five hours taken by the kits being used by ICMR and its labs. The company is a joint venture between Co-Diagnostics Inc of Utah, USA, and Ambalal Sarabhai Enterprises of India.
The Indian Council of Medical Research has confirmed that the novel Coronavirus cases in India have climbed to 206 on Friday. ICMR said in its report that a total of 14,376 samples have been tested from 13,486 individuals for testing the presence of SARS-CoV2 as on March 20, 2020. The Prime Minister has asked the country to observe a “Janata curfew” on 22 March and urged the citizens to remain indoors unless necessary. The PM also asked people to postpone non-essential surgeries, and avoid visiting hospitals.
Let us be clear on this. This pandemic is China’s fault.
First case of China traced to November 17, 2019
China, this is on you! YOU are responsible for thousands of deaths across the world. YOU are responsible for the global economic crisis and recession which is coming. YOU are responsible for what could be hundreds of millions of people losing their livelihoods.
China had the first case on Nov 17. They didn’t tell the world anything. They hid it all. By mid December, several Chinese labs had found evidence of a ‘mystery virus’. But China destroyed the samples, stopped the tests and covered up the news.
Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December
Even when the news filtered to the world, China kept feeding us nonsense news. Here is the World Health Organization on Jan 14, reporting what they had been told by Chinese authorities.
No evidence of human to human transmission? Really?
Why do we need to keep repeating this is China’s fault? Doesn’t everyone know by now has heard that the virus began in Wuhan in Hubei province in China?
Well, yeah. But history is an ever changing thing. Public memory is short. China has hit the propaganda game hard to stave off the PR nightmare.
Just two months ago, it was acceptable and totally commonplace to refer to this as the Chinese virus.
By mid-March, opinions published on CNN had shifted.
Opinion about referring to coronavirus as ‘Chinese virus’ change
In fact, liberal media was now publicly challenging Trump on why he and other Republicans were calling it “Chinese virus.” Suddenly the term that everyone was using just two months ago had been declared racist.
You know what’s coming. They will scrub it all clean. That tweet from CNN may disappear some day. Any website containing any reference to that term might be scrubbed clean. Algorithms of social media giants might start identifying the expression “Chinese virus” as hate speech and start auto deleting any post with those words.
Nothing is secure, except the thoughts in our head. They know human memory is perishable and they will work non stop to make us forget. See if you notice the game being played in this tweet.
That man is an Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.
Did you catch that? Did you see how cleverly he framed the sentence? He tried to misdirect us like a street magician. The really relevant part of that sentence is in the first part (which you are likely to miss), not the second (which you are likely to remember). Cleverly and wickedly, Prof. Wang has sown the idea that there is some “debate” over where the virus came from!
That’s how it starts. Now they will say we must “teach the controversy” over where the virus came from.
Nothing is safe, except for the thoughts that we can hold on to in our heads. And the thoughts we can pass around to those we know. The future generations must know what the world suffered because of the fault of the Chinese government.
With the Chinese virus pandemic, we are seeing something new and terrifying. For decades now, the network of political correctness has been laid all across the free world. But like many tech startups that later became giants, the revenue model for this was not immediately obvious. A lot of liberals got highly paid jobs working for this startup.
But, ultimately, the funding was coming from something resembling venture capital. A vast network for manipulating public opinion was being created, but it was not immediately clear how it would be ‘monetized.’
Well, now we know who would be willing to pay big $$$ for access to this network. Right now, the Chinese government wants history wiped clean. And liberals can help. Liberals can use their vast network to declare this or that as “politically incorrect.” And once something is declared politically incorrect, it is as good as banned!
That’s exactly what China wants. That’s exactly what China is getting right now.
The Chinese govt does not want the world to remember that the pandemic is their fault. Liberals have declared the term “Chinese virus” as racist, thus effectively banning it.
We all suspected that political correctness was a veiled form of fascism. And for the first time, we are literally seeing political correctness being made into a tool for serving dictators. Be very certain that this tool will be used again and again.
On this day, 20 years back, a phalanx of masked terrorists in military clothes had barged into the Sikh-dominated Chittisinghpora village in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district and had killed 36 Sikh men in cold blood, hours before the then American President Bill Clinton’s India visit.
The attackers, 15-20 in number, as per the eye-witnesses’ account, split themselves into two groups and approached two Gurudwaras- Shaukeen Mohalla Gurdwara and Singh Sabha Sumandri Hall Gurdwara and made two groups of Sikhs stand outside the two gurdwaras in the area located just 150 metres apart, oblivious of the terrible fate that was about to befall them. The masked terrorists, in their murderous frenzy, opened indiscriminate fire at point-blank range, killing 36 of them.
According to the only lone survivor Nanak Singh, who miraculously dodged an imminent death, he sensed something was amiss as soon as the terrorists who were masquerading themselves as Army men lined up the men outside the Gurudwara and asked them about a group of terrorists who were according to their intel going to visit the village. Nanak, who lost his son, brother and three cousins that macabre evening, recounted the horrible tragedy, which left dozens of pious Sikh men dead.
“Soon after the leader of the pack ordered to shoot at us indiscriminately, I dropped to the ground and played possum. I was frantically praying to God under my breath to save me. After a while, they stopped firing at us and flashed torches at us to determine anyone has survived their volley of bullets. One of them said ‘Akh round aur maro saalu ko. Koi nahi bachna chahiye (Shoot these idiots again. Make sure everyone is dead)’,” Singh said.
However, Singh managed to evade death this time again as the bullet shot at him pierced through his leg but he laid motionless, giving an impression to the murderers that life is already snuffed out of him. Singh claims that the assailants then fled the village. Singh was rushed to the Anantnag district hospital from where he was shifted to a speciality hospital in Srinagar. Later, he was referred to an army hospital where he stayed for 25 days and was operated on once. Singh then travelled to Amritsar where a senior doctor treated him. It took him months to recover from his injuries and much longer to get over the mental trauma.
Every year, Sikhs in the Chittisinghpura pay homage to the departed souls on the anniversary of the massacre. They commemorate the fallen ones by observing three days of mourning and memorial events. However, they have not been served with closure as justice still eludes them, 20 years after the tragedy.
According to the Intelligence agencies, the attack was carried out by Pakistan sponsored terror outfits, ahead of American President Bill Clinton’s visit, to draw international attention towards the vexed issue of Jammu and Kashmir. The government asserted that the targeted killing was carried out by Islamic militant groups Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizbul Mujahideen, like the other massacres in Jammu and Kashmir that have been happening for years. Five days later, the army and Jammu and Kashmir police had killed the terrorists allegedly involved with the massacre. There were claims that the government has not done a thorough investigation. The CBI had filed a charge sheet alleging that the persons killed in Pathribal were local Kashmiris and not Pakistani terrorists.
Massacre of innocent, unarmed villagers, especially non-Muslims, has been a regular occurrence in Jammu and Kashmir for decades. Islamist terrorists operating with secessionist forces in the valley have targeted non-Muslims on many occasions. Poor, innocent villagers in remote hamlets of the valley have on several occasions been massacred by terrorists. The Wandhama massacre of 1998, Chapnari massacre in the same year, the Nandimarg massacre of 2003, and the numerous terrorist attacks on Amarnath pilgrims are testimony to the brutalities.
A Lashkar militant Suhail Malik was arrested in connection with the massacre. When asked if he had regrets over the killings, Malik responded that he had no remorse that he participated in the massacre, which coincided with US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India. However, he was later acquitted by a court in Delhi. Malik was a nephew of LeT chief Hafiz Saeed.
In the aftermath of the Mumbai 26/11 attack, in which a Pakistani-American Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley was arrested for his involvement in the attack, confessed that LeT was behind the Sikh massacre in 2000. The National Investigative Agency(NIA) contended that Headley said that a LeT operative called Muzzammil, an aide of Lashkar’s chief military commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, had spoken to him of his involvement in the Chittisinghpora massacre. However, the claim made by Headley cannot be independently corroborated.
On Friday, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted that all malls, except grocery stores, pharmacies and vegetable shops, would remain closed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. On Wednesday, the Health Ministry informed that the total number of people who tested positive for Covid-19 has risen to 10 in Delhi.
In view of the prevailing situation, we are closing down all Malls (except grocery, pharmacy and vegtable shops in them)
On March 13, the Delhi government had announced that IPL and other sports events will not be allowed in the city-state. In a press conference, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister, Manish Sisodia had announced that all social and sports gatherings including the coveted Indian Premier League (IPL) will not be held in Delhi in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.
On Friday Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray also announced that all non-essential shops and offices in Mumbai, MMR Region, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad and Nagpur will remain closed till March 31 due to coronavirus scare. He said that the attendance of employees in government offices would be brought down to 25%. Thackeray also urged people to not step out of their houses unnecessarily.
Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray: In Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nagpur – which have international airports, all shops (other than essentials) and offices to remain closed till 31st March, 2020. #COVID19 (file pic) pic.twitter.com/kJdgt4cm0n
Earlier, one of the organisers of the anti-CAA protests in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri had shown symptoms of the COVID-19 and was undergoing tests after he met his sister, who was earlier tested positive. His sister had returned from the Umrah pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia on 11th March. The 35-year-old protestor said he had been to the anti-CAA protest site in Delhi “a couple of times” after meeting his sister on 13 March.
Protestors at Shaheen Bagh are defying rules to lead mass protests at the protest site despite warnings from the government that the virus could affect them. They also claimed that the protests were a call from Allah and they do not fear the Coronavirus. Instead, they asked to repel all the laws if they cared for the ‘protestors’ at the Shaheen Bagh.
The Indian Council of Medical Research has confirmed that the novel Coronavirus cases in India have climbed to 206 on Friday. ICMR said in its report that a total of 14,376 samples have been tested from 13,486 individuals for testing the presence of SARS-CoV2 as on March 20, 2020. Finally, 206 people are found positive of COVID-19 novel coronavirus among suspected cases and those who were in contacts of known positive cases.
Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and her son BJP MP Dushyant Singh were among the attendees of a party hosted by singer Kanika Kapoor, who was tested positive for the Coronavirus on Friday.
The singer has been found positive for coronavirus and health officials are in a fix as a number of other celebrities and politicians were present in Kanika Kapoor’s party.
Reportedly, Former Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia and her son Dushyant Singh were also present at the party, which is also believed to have been attended by high-profile politicians, including Uttar Pradesh’s health minister Jai Pratap Singh.
Taking to Twitter, former Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje confirmed that she had attended the party in Lucknow along with her son. She also said that she and her son Singh have now quarantined themselves and are taking all necessary precautions.
While in Lucknow, I attended a dinner with my son Dushyant & his in-laws. Kanika, who has unfortunately tested positive for #Covid19 was also a guest.
As a matter of abundant caution, my son & I have immediately self-quarantined and we’re taking all necessary precautions.
BJP MP Dushyant Singh had attended the Parliament the next day and interacted with fellow MPs raising serious concerns about chances of lawmakers being contracted with the deadly virus. Reportedly, Singh had sat next to TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien and had a long chat with him.
Reportedly, Singh was also sitting with Surendra Nagar Nishikant and Manoj Tewari in the Central Hall on Thursday. Former Union Minister and Congress leader Jitin Prasada was also believed to have been present at the party.
Kanika Kapoor travelled from London to India and returned to Lucknow on March 15. She had reportedly refrained from informing authorities about her travel history. Upon arriving in Lucknow, Kanika hosted a lavish party for her friends and family at a five-star hotel.
More than seven years after a 23-year-old medical student was gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi, four men convicted for the brutal assault were hanged on early Friday morning. The four convicts – Akshay Kumar Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh were hanged at 5:30 am at Delhi’s Tihar Jail, hours after the Supreme Court refused to grant them relief and stay their executions.
Six men were accused of gang-raping and murdering the 23-year-old medical student, who came to be called Nirbhaya. Of the six, four were convicted, one was a juvenile, who got convicted by the juvenile justice board. Accused Ram Singh committed suicide in jail even before his conviction. The juvenile later served three years in a reformation home and was released.
The juvenile belonged to a village some 240 km away from the national capital where his elder sister looks after the family of six. He left home at the age of 11 and worked with Ram Singh as a cleaner in his bus
After the heinous incident, the juvenile was arrested and sent to a rehabilitation home for three years in North Delhi’s Majnu Ka Tila as he was less than 18 years of age. The reports suggested that the juvenile was ‘one of the most brutal’ among all the accused as he attacked the victim with an iron rod. However, a Juvenile Justice Board brushed aside all the allegations and called it ‘media hype’.
The juvenile’s case was one of the most debated topics across the country as citizens had demanded that the juvenile rapist be tried in the case an adult since it was a heinous crime. However, he was never charged as an adult. Later, due to the public outcry, the possibility of booking juveniles as adults in case of a heinous crime emerged. Subsequently, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 was passed in which juveniles in the age group of 16–18, involved in heinous offences, can be tried as adults.
In 2015, according to intelligence officials, it was suspected that the juvenile had been radicalised because he shared his cell with another juvenile who was involved in the Delhi High Court blast case. An inquiry was undertaken by the Intelligence Bureau after BJP leader Subramanian Swamy wrote to PM Narendra Modi that he had learnt from police sources that the Nirbhaya convict had become an “Islamic fundamentalist/jihadi.
In November 2015, a month before he was going to be released, Nirbhaya’s family demanded that the juvenile’s identity be made public, keeping in mind the safety threat posed by him. “From what we have learnt from the media, he has shown no signs of improvement so far. He was getting indoctrinated in jihad inside his juvenile home. The police had said he has become street smart and learnt to abuse the system,” Nirbhaya’s father had said. However, the identity of the juvenile rapist was never revealed.
On December 20, 2015, despite massive public outcry, the juvenile was released from the correction homeafter he completed three years. A day before his release, he was sent to a secret location due to security reasons.
Just days prior to the release of the juvenile, the Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government had unveiled a rehabilitation plan for the juvenile under which the AAP government had decided to give him a one-time financial grant of Rs 10,000 and arrange for a sewing machine so that he can rent a tailoring shop. The move had provoked objections from the civil society and the government, who remained apprehensive about his mental condition and wanted his detention extended.
After his release, the juvenile was taken to an NGO which rehabilitated him in South India. A Hindustan Times report from 2017 states that he was working as a cook in South India at that point in time.
Bollywood singer Kanika Kapoor is one of the four latest confirmed cases infected by a novel coronavirus in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh reported four more positive cases of the deadly virus on Friday taking the toll to 23. The new patients of coronavirus have been taken to isolation wards in King George Medical University, Lucknow.
A prominent Bollywood singer is among the four people who have been tested positive for #Coronavirus in Uttar Pradesh today. https://t.co/LBvHWkTXnS
Some reports have claimed that the singer had evaded screening. As per claims, she returned from London this Sunday, stayed in a five-star hotel in Lucknow and threw a dinner party. Her dinner party was attended by at least a hundred people who are being contacted to be quarantined, as per the statement of the singer.
As per reports, she allegedly tried to hide her travel history, had defied self-isolation protocols and even evaded screening.
The Singer said in an official statement, “For the past four days I had symptoms of flu. I got myself tested and it came positive for COVID-19. My family and I are in complete quarantine now and following medical advice on how to move forward. Contact mapping of people I have been in touch with is underway as well.”
Recently the Yogi Adityanath government had warned to take strict action against those who will not cooperate with the authorities to control the novel coronavirus outbreak and spread misinformation and panic among the people.
The health minister of Uttar Pradesh Jai Pratap Singh clarified that concerned authorities have been given power under section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act to take all necessary actions in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Following the execution of the convicts involved in the brutal gangrape and murder of 23-year-old physiotherapy student in 2012 who was named “Nirbhaya” by the media, several self-proclaimed human rights activists assumed moral high ground and dubbed the death penalty handed out to the convicts as an act of revenge.
One such woke activist happened to be a man by the name of Jayanta Bhattacharya. He accused Nirbhaya’s mother, Asha Devi, of having a “slum mentality” and “lust for blood” for seeking justice for her daughter.
Screengrab of the Tweet
Another Twitter user, Prakash Sastry, engaged in virtue signalling said that one cannot rejoice the execution of rapists. He claimed that if the death penalty is not taken off the table, then, India will become a “regressive society.”
By hanging the culprits in Nirbhaya case we can’t rejoice in saying justice has been served. If we are to be progressive society, safety and respect to human life should be sacrosanct and death penalty should be off the table. Otherwise we will be a regressive society.
A Twitter user by the name of Mohammed Mojahid who claims to be a student of Aligarh Muslim University wrote that capital punishment was “escapism” and a symptom of a “culture of violence”.
Capital punishment isn’t the solution, it is escapism. The death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it. #Nirbhayahttps://t.co/tWHlKA2Zh9
Citing the report of Justice Verma Committee, Amnesty India, which is renowned for selective outrage and fake propaganda, claimed that death penalty is never the solution and that Friday’s execution allegedly added “another dark stain” to India’s human rights record.
All too often lawmakers in India hold up the #deathpenalty as a symbol of their resolve to tackle crime.
In fact, the Justice Verma committee report highlighted that failures on the part of the Govt and police were the root cause behind crimes against women.#NirbhayaCase
On Thursday, the Caravan Magazine known for its vicious propaganda wrote an article whitewashing the perpetrator, Mukesh Singh, while lacking empathy for the real victim, Nirbhaya.
https://t.co/Zc5ufJNiTz This is probably the most disgusting article I have read in a long long time. The amount of whitewashing, purposeful blindness and absolute lack of empathy with the real victim (there is only one victim in this case), made me gag. Vile attempt.
Earlier, controversial Supreme Court Judge (retired) Kurian Joseph asked whether heinous crimes such as rape would stop if the convicts were hanged. He said that capital punishment should be reserved for “rarest of rare cases”, implying that the brutal gangrape and murder was not a rarest of rare case.
Supreme Court Justice (retired) Kurian Joseph: By hanging these people (Nirbhaya case convicts), will such type of crimes stop? In Bachan Singh case, SC said that death penalty can be handed over in rarest of rare case & only when all other options are unquestionably foreclosed. pic.twitter.com/zt7UB5NcKD
It begs a counter-question: If their death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, then would it have eradicated rape from the country? Possibly no.
The last time a rapist, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, was hanged to death was way back in 2004. Only 3 other people (Afzal Guru, Ajmal Kasab and Yakub Memon) have been executed on charges of terrorism and inciting war against the nation in the past 20 years. If you compare the numbers with the world’s oldest democracy aka the United States of America, then, you will be surprised to know that 22 people were executed in 2019 alone. Comparatively, India has been using the death penalty more cautiously than it should.
Nirbhaya was brutally raped by 6 men, her intestines were ripped out and an iron rod was shoved in her private parts. Does this heinous crime not qualify as the “rarest of rare” crime? It does.
The case shook the conscience of the society as observed by the apex court. The convicts were given the opportunity to utilize all legal remedies available to them so much so that they were successful in prolonging their death penalty. Three death warrants were issued and stayed, as the convicts approached the courts with petitions one after another, delaying the process. In just 24 hours prior to the execution, the convicts had approached the courts five times, 3 petitions were rejected by Supreme Court, while one each was dismissed by Delhi High Court and the trial court. They were awarded death sentence back in 2014 by the trial court, and therefore they got ample opportunities to defend themselves. The convicts were executed only after they had exhausted all legal remedies available for them under India’s legal system.
Nevertheless, a mother (Asha Devi) who have been fighting an agonising legal battle for 7 long years could finally have closure. The execution of the convicts on Friday morning also sent out a stern message to the society that such crimes would not be tolerated.
