Congress’s Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu on December 11 took oath as the new Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, days after the party edged the BJP out of power in the Assembly election. Mukesh Agnihotri, the leader of the Opposition in the outgoing Assembly, took oath as Deputy CM.
Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar administered the oath of office and secrecy to Sukhu and Agnihotri at the swearing-in ceremony held at the Ridge in Shimla.
Congress leaders including former party president Rahul Gandhi, general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, senior party leader and MP K.C. Venugopal and national president Mallikarjun Kharge and others were present on the occasion.
After hectic deliberations over the names of several contenders for the top post, the party’s ‘high command’ picked Sukhu, a former State president, and the MLA from Nadaun.
Sukhu edged the other contenders, including Pratibha Singh, the widow of the former six-time CM late Virbhadra Singh, and the outgoing CLP leader Mukesh Agnihotri, with support from a majority of MLAs. He will be the first Congress leader from Lower Himachal - comprising areas merged in Himachal in 1966 such as Nalagarh, Una, Hamirpur, Kangra and lower hills of Kullu - to occupy the top post. He will be the second chief minister from Hamirpur district, after BJP’s Prem Kumar Dhumal.
Lockerbie bomb suspect is in U.S. custody, say Scottish officials
A Libyan man accused of making the bomb that destroyed a Pan Am flight over Scotland in 1988 is now in U.S. custody, Scottish prosecutors said. Abu Agila Mohammad Masud was charged by the U.S. two years ago for the Lockerbie bombing. He had previously been held in Libya for his alleged involvement in a 1986 attack on a Berlin nightclub.
Only one individual has so far been prosecuted for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 on December 21, 1988, which claimed 270 lives.
Former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi spent seven years in a Scottish prison after his conviction in 2001. He died in Libya in 2012, always maintaining his innocence.
“The families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told that the suspect Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi... is in U.S. custody,” a spokesperson for Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said.
“Scottish prosecutors and police, working with UK government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the sole aim of bringing those who acted along with al-Megrahi to justice.”
PM Modi slams Opposition parties indulging in ‘shortcut politics’
Slamming Opposition parties and their leaders for their short-cut politics, Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted taxpayers to expose such politicians who were trying to sabotage the economy for their selfish purposes.
“A country cannot move ahead by shortcuts. There is a disposition among certain parties to indulge in short-cut politics for selfish ends. Parties who adopt this shortcut are the country’s biggest enemies whose aim is to merely come to power by making hollow promises,” he said.
“At a time when India is working on objectives for the next 25 years, these political parties, out of their own selfishness, want to destroy the economy,” he added, speaking during the inauguration of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Nagpur. Modi alleged that earlier governments had sacrificed taxpayers’ money for the sake of vote-bank politics and corruption.
The PM launched and inaugurated a slew of development projects worth ₹75,000 crore, notably the first phase of the Samruddhi Mahamarg, or the Nagpur-Mumbai Super Communication Expressway project named after late Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray.
Besides inaugurating the expressway, Modi flagged off the sixth Vande Bharat Express from Nagpur and the first phase of the Nagpur Metro rail project. He also laid the foundation stone of Phase II of the metro project and took a ride in the metro train between Zero Mile Freedom Park and Khapri stations with some students.
Every family in J-K to get unique ID; BJP welcomes the move, other parties raise concerns
The Jammu and Kashmir administration is planning to create an authentic database of all families in the Union territory with each of them having a unique alpha-numeric code – the objective being an easy selection of eligible beneficiaries of various social welfare schemes.
The proposed move to allot “Family ID” has been welcomed by the BJP but panned by other parties which raised concerns over personal data safety.
At the recent national conference on e-governance in Katra in Reasi district, Jammu and Kashmir Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha and Chief Minister of Haryana Manohar Lal Khattar released the Digital J&K Vision Document, unveiling the government plan to create an authentic, verified and reliable database of all families of the Union territory.
To thwart risks and protect sensitive and critical data, it said the Jammu and Kashmir government plans to work on an information security policy and also envisages formulation of appropriate cyber security framework.
However, the Congress, the National Conference and the PDP slammed the proposed move. Congress chief spokesperson and former legislator Ravinder Sharma questioned the government’s intention and also its capacity to protect such digital databases from cyber attacks while National Conference provincial president Rattan Lal Gupta termed the exercise “unproductive use of resources”. The People’s Democratic Party asked who the government wanted to identify through this database.
The BJP welcomed the move and said the people who have to stand in queues to get various benefits and certificates will benefit once a verified database is prepared.
Regrettable that government, judiciary not adhering to timelines in filling up HC vacancies: Parliamentary panel
Amid a standoff between the government and the Supreme Court Collegium over the appointment of judges, a Parliamentary panel has asked the Executive and the Judiciary to come up with “out of box thinking” to deal with the “perennial problem” of vacancies in High Courts.
The department-related standing committee on Law and Personnel in its report tabled in Parliament said it was not in agreement with the comments of the Department of Justice in the Union Law Ministry that “time for filling up of vacancies of judges in the higher judiciary cannot be indicated”.
The timeline has been drawn in the Second Judges Case and also in the Memorandum of Procedure (MOP) regarding the appointment of judges, it pointed out. “But regrettably, those timelines are not adhere to by both, the Judiciary and the Executive, which is leading to delay in filling up of the vacancies,” it said.
It said as per the data provided by the government, as on December 31, 2021, there were three high courts of Telangana, Patna and Delhi where vacancies were more than 50% and 10 HCs where vacancies are more than 40% of their respective sanctioned strength.
The committee also said that it is “surprised” to note that the Supreme Court and the government have failed to reach at a consensus on revision of the MOP for the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and the high courts, though the same is under consideration of both for “about seven years now”. The committee expects the government and the Judiciary to finalise the revised MOP, which is more efficient and transparent.
In Brief:
Ukraine attacked occupied Melitopol in the country’s southeast, the Russian-installed and exiled Ukrainian authorities of the strategically located city said. The pro-Moscow authorities said a missile attack killed two people and wounded 10, while the exiled mayor said scores of “invaders” were killed. “Air defence systems destroyed two missiles, four reached their targets,” Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-appointed governor of the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region, said on the Telegram messaging app. He said a “recreation centre” where people were dining was destroyed in the Ukrainian attack with HIMARS missiles. Russia’s defence ministry on Sunday said its air defence forces had shot down five HIMARS-fired rockets in the past 24 hours near the cities of Donetsk and Melitopol.
Evening Wrap will return tomorrow.
