The News Caravan

Tag: Bloody

  • Umesh Pal murder: The story of a bloody fallout

    Umesh Pal murder: The story of a bloody fallout

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    Prayagraj: It began with a defeat in an election, and the bruised egos had a bloody fallout.

    In 2004, after Atiq Ahmed won the Lok Sabha polls to Phulpur constituency here, his younger brother Ashraf contested from Allahabad West Assembly seat – polls necessitated after Atiq Ahmed resigned to become an MP – on a Samajwadi Party ticket.

    For Ashraf, victory was a foregone conclusion but he surprisingly lost to Raju Pal, a novice candidate fielded by the BSP.

    MS Education Academy

    Atiq Ahmed could not digest the defeat since it came as a challenge to his own fiefdom.

    The electoral tussle turned into political rivalry and on January 25, 2005, a day before Republic Day, when the BSP MLA was leaving for his home from Swaroop Rani Nehru hospital, a car overtook his SUV in the Sulem Sarai area of the city and Raju Pal was shot dead by assailants who heavily opened fire on his car.

    Two other people along with Raju Pal were also killed in the attack and the post-mortem report had stated that around 18 bullets were found in Raju Pal’s body.

    A CBI probe into the incident named 10 persons as accused including Atiq Ahmed and his younger brother.

    Raju Pal’s wife, Puja Pal, whom he married just 11 days before his murder, then contested from the Allahabad West seat but lost to Ashraf. However, she was again given a ticket by the BSP in 2007 Assembly elections and she won.

    In the 2017 Assembly polls, Puja lost to BJP’s Siddharth Nath Singh but won the 2022 polls from Chail seat.

    Ashraf’s political career could not take off despite the best efforts of his brother and for this, he never forgave Raju Pal and his friends.

    Umesh Pal, an associate of Raju Pal, was the main witness in his murder.

    Since Umesh Pal refused to succumb to Atiq Ahmed’s pressure, he was abducted in 2006 and forced to give a statement in court in their favour of Atiq Ahmed and Ashraf in the Raju Pal murder.

    Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf were convicted and were awarded a life sentence in the abduction case, a month after Umesh Pal was shot dead in February this year.

    In between, Umesh Pal’s stature grew independently and he was no longer comfortable tagging behind Puja Pal, widow of Raju Pal.

    Sources claim that Umesh Pal was finding acceptance in the Karwariya camp.

    Kapil Muni Karwariya is a former BJP MP and his brother Uday Bhan Karwariya, a former MLA – both were awarded a life sentence for the murder of SP leader Jawahar Yadav.

    When Uday Bhan’s wife Neelam Karwariya won the Meja seat on a BJP ticket in 2017, Umesh Pal became friends with the family whose clout was growing by the day.

    Interestingly, a number of Atiq Ahmed’s supporters also switched loyalties to the Karwariya family and photographs of Ghulam Mohd – who was shot dead with Asad on Thursday – posing with Neelam Karwariya at her birthday party are doing rounds on the social media.

    After the murder of Umesh Pal, in one video Puja Pal is seen reprimanding Umesh Pal’s wife for ‘feeding parathas to those people despite my warning’.

    The police, for some reason, did not pursue this angle.

    Sources in Prayagraj now say that Umesh Pal was killed because his loyalty was suspected – both to Atiq and to Karwariyas.

    Puja Pal’s studied silence on the Umesh Pal murder and its consequences also leaves much to be said.

    However, since investigators are firmly focusing on Atiq Ahmed’s role in the murder, the truth, perhaps, will ‘never be known’.

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    #Umesh #Pal #murder #story #bloody #fallout

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • She witnessed Bloody Sunday in person. 58 years later, she’ll go back again.

    She witnessed Bloody Sunday in person. 58 years later, she’ll go back again.

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    Her parents struggled to explain why they had to use a different bathroom, or why the entrances to stores and restaurants were different for people who looked like them. Webb-Christburg peppered her parents with questions, but she always listened and was well behaved.

    That would change on Jan. 2, 1965.

    Webb-Christburg and her best friend, Rachel West, were playing in front of Brown Chapel AME Church. There were more cars than usual — fancier cars than she was used to seeing in her neighborhood. She and Rachel walked closer and saw a man “dressed in a nice white starched shirt, black tie, black slacks.”

    A crowd gathered around the stranger, and another man walked up to the two girls, asking them if they knew who this was. They did not.

    It was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

    He saw the two girls and walked over to them. He asked where they lived (they pointed to the projects nearby), how old they were and where they went to school. One of the men in the crowd told them to run along — grown folks were about to meet.

    King disagreed. “Let them come in,” he said, taking them by the hand and leading them into the church. He sat them down in the back.

    “He said, ‘What do you little girls want?’” Webb-Christburg recalled. “We looked at each other. He said, ‘Now, children, when I ask you little girls what you want, I want you to say, freedom.’ And then he said, ‘Now, when do you little girls want it?’ We looked at each other again, not knowing how to answer that question. He said, ‘When I ask you, When do you want it? I want you to say, now.’”

    It was a moment that changed her life. She ran to tell her parents. But they weren’t receptive.

    “My daddy told me, ‘You just better stay from around that mess,’” she remembered. They were worried about her safety — and theirs — and about losing their jobs.

    She did the exact opposite: sneaking out, skipping school, spending hours at the church for mass meetings.

    “In my mind as a child, I was fighting for them,” she said, smiling.

    Spending time with King, Williams, Lewis and other activists — Jonathan Daniels, Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb — awakened something in her. “I was already inquisitive. But I gained some courage because I was around courageous people,” she said.

    When March 7 came, her parents begged her not to march. And even when she gathered at Brown Chapel AME Church, which served as a meeting place and offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that helped plan the march, adults discouraged her from going. She cried and they relented.

    The march had been planned by Lewis and Williams in response to the killing of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. The group planned to march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, 54 miles in all.

    As they walked the 15-minute route to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, she began to see dozens of white people and a wall of law enforcement.

    “Some of them start just yelling the n-word out, trying to distract the marchers. Some would even come up and spit on some of the marchers,” she said. “I could see the policemen with the billy clubs, tear gas masks. You see the horses, the dogs — my heart started beating very fast, and I just knew something was going to happen.”

    What came next shocked the country and forced action in Washington, D.C., leading to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Russia’s Bloody Sledgehammer

    Opinion | Russia’s Bloody Sledgehammer

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    serbia russia ukraine 96885

    The administration is of course right that Wagner is engaged in a range of criminal enterprises. There is speculation that its costly siege of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is motivated by a desire to control salt and gypsum mines in the area. It has also embraced far-right extremism, with links to a white supremacist organization — the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) — that the U.S. already designates as a terrorist group. But if you consider the range and severity of Wagner’s activities — mass murder, rape and torture; using terror to subjugate civilian populations; control of territory; looting of natural resources; enlistment of foreign fighters; sophisticated, Hollywood-style propaganda glorifying the group and Russia — it presents much more of a global threat than the average criminal racket.

    Branding Wagner as a transnational criminal organization is mainly a symbolic move. Because Wagner and some of its associates — including Prigozhin himself — are already subject to economic sanctions, the Biden administration’s designation offers no new meaningful tools for actually fighting the group.

    But if the group were also to be designated a foreign terrorist organization, the U.S. and its allies would be equipped with a much more robust set of tools to starve Prigozhin and his henchmen of resources and halt Wagner’s rampage of destruction.

    As we saw in the successful international effort to vanquish ISIS, designating a foreign terrorist group under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act would bring into play one of the most powerful economic tools that the U.S. government has: a criminal statute that would make it illegal to provide “material support” to the Wagner Group. Due to the extra-territorial nature of the statute, such a designation would substantially hamper Wagner’s operations by putting foreign individuals, companies and countries on notice that doing business with the organization means risking prosecution in the United States.

    Several legal and counterterrorism experts have already weighed in that the Wagner Group meets the legal definition of a foreign terrorist organization: a foreign organization, engaged in terror and presenting a threat to the national security of the United States. Members of Congress agree. So why the half measure?

    One answer may be a reluctance to further antagonize the Kremlin, which enjoys close ties to Wagner and has come to rely on the group’s mercenaries. But surely such a designation would be less of an irritant than the weapons Washington is sending to arm Ukraine. It would also fall short of the more aggressive proposal offered by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russia itself be designated a state sponsor of terrorism, which would bring with it a host of complications.

    Another concern may be the checkered history of “material support” prosecutions in counterterrorism cases. The many excesses of the post-9/11 era mean that this sort of expansive tool has been reviled, with ample justification, by human rights and humanitarian groups. As we have seen with ISIS, Al-Shabaab and Yemen’s Houthis (whose terrorist designation was withdrawn), when a terrorist group has de facto control of territory — as Wagner currently does in the Central African Republic — there can be a chilling effect preventing humanitarian organizations from providing aid and other support, leading to disastrous humanitarian consequences.

    But just because a powerful instrument of foreign policy has been used in an overly broad manner in the past does not mean that it should be jettisoned altogether. Last year, the Treasury Department issued a slate of general licenses to authorize ongoing transactions with individuals or entities subject to sanctions, provided that they are engaged in a range of humanitarian activities. If the Wagner Group is designated a foreign terrorist organization, it will be critical to implement these measures in a way that chokes off the group’s resources and frustrates its activities without visiting collateral damage on already vulnerable populations. This means that the Department of Justice should commit to not pursuing “material support” prosecutions against humanitarian actors.

    One reason for ISIS’ eventual defeat in Syria and Iraq was the collective efforts of the 85-member strong Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS. This alliance collaborated to cut off the group’s finances, combat its propaganda and reduce the flow of foreign fighters to its territories. A coalition to combat Wagner could focus on the same three pillars. Given Wagner’s continued expansion in Africa, it is critical that such an effort include African states.

    With the prospect of a spring offensive by Russia looming, it is time to step up pressure on this vicious fighting force that is prolonging the Ukraine conflict and destabilizing wide swaths of Africa. It requires a truly international effort to stop an ascendant transnational threat, and the U.S. should start by utilizing the most robust economic tool it has, designating the Wagner Group a foreign terrorist organization.

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    #Opinion #Russias #Bloody #Sledgehammer
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )