Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Wednesday reiterated that evidence against Jamat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed still existed on Pakistani soil and advised Islamabad to “bake” it fully, carry out investigations and bring the case before a court.
“It is only half-baked, they [Pakistan] are welcome to bake it fully. All the baking ingredients are on Pakistani soil,” he said while responding to a question on Pakistan’s dilly-dallying methods in carrying out the probe into the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.
He was responding to journalists who asked for his comment on Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s latest remarks that he could not take to court a “half-baked case” on Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, the suspected mastermind behind the terror attacks. Mr. Chidambaram said all the evidence on Indian soil had already been shared with Pakistan. “The remaining evidence is also on Pakistani soil,” he added.
“No visas for unskilled, semi-skilled workers”
Mr. Chidambaram said visa applications of unskilled or semi-skilled workers desiring to work in India will not be encouraged.
He said this when asked at a press conference about demands from some foreign companies that they would like to send their workers to India for implementing their projects. There was no dearth of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the country. “If it is a case of specially-skilled or high-skilled, we may consider it, but only till the project is set up,” he said
The government recently gave a month’s time to China to convert their visas from business to legitimate employment.
To a query on the BALCO incident, in which the collapse of a chimney last week caused the death of 45 people, Mr. Chidambaram said the Chhattisgarh government had ordered an investigation, and that 89 workers from China, not all of them supervisors and engineers, have been asked to stay put till investigations got over.
Mr. Chidambaram said that under the new visa regime, a foreign company has to make a detailed application before the Indian mission concerned, which would send it to the Home Ministry and later forwarded to the Labour Ministry. “If the Labour Ministry tells us that these skills are available in India, we do not recommend giving visas to such workers. If a special skill is needed and it is not available in India, we will grant that request.”
