Bhubaneswar: Continuing the attack on the ruling BJD over the recent clashes in Sambalpur, senior Odisha BJP leader Samir Mohanty alleged on Tuesday that the ruling party is protecting the perpetrators of the communal violence.
Addressing a press conference here, former state BJP chief Mohanty said that Odisha has been witnessing anarchy and lawlessness.
“As the law and order situation has deteriorated, it has put a big question on the safety and security of the people of Odisha. The murder of a Cabinet minister, the kidnap and murder of a boy in Jharsuguda, and similar incidents in different parts of the state clearly show the deteriorating law and order situation in Odisha,” he said.
Mohanty also accused the BJD government of giving shelter to the rioters who unleashed violence in Sambalpur during Hanuman Jayanti celebrations.
When a Hanuman Jayanthi procession was taken out in Sambalpur On April 12, stones were pelted on it, people were attacked with sticks, and petrol bombs were seized from the roof of some houses. Besides, anti-national slogans were also raised, alleged the BJP leader.
However, Mohanty claimed that state minister Pratap Keshari Deb has blamed the organisers of the Hanuman Jayanti celebrations for the violence in Sambalpur.
“The language used by Deb shows that the government is shielding the rioters. Is it not an anti-Hindu mentality to blame the organisers for the violence that happened during the Hanuman Jayanti celebrations in Sambalpur,” he asked.
“In the FIR, the police mentioned that there were 150 to 160 rioters, whose videos are circulating on social media. However, the police are sitting idle after arresting only 30 persons,” he added.
Mohanty also asked who is creating pressure on the police to not arrest the other rioters involved in the violence?
Reacting to the allegations levelled by Mohanty, BJD spokesperson Lenin Mohanty said, “Due to the strong and whole-hearted resolve of the people of Sambalpur and resolute efforts of the police and administration, normalcy is returning to Sambalpur. But unfortunately, the Odisha BJP cannot tolerate.”
The BJD leader said the law and order situation in Odisha is much better than BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
The people of Odisha are peace-loving, but the BJP has been constantly insulting them by calling them lawless, Lenin Mohanty said.
Recognizing Sumrall’s prominence within the Jan. 6 community, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jordan Konig pressed the witness to identify others who went into the Capitol but had not yet been charged — raising the prospect that a truthful answer might incriminate his acquaintances or associates. After initially beginning to answer the question, Sumrall appeared to grow agitated.
Alberts’ attorney Roger Roots quickly objected, prompting U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper to recess the trial and debate the issue. After jurors left the room, Cooper professed to being blindsided by the line of questioning, calling it “unorthodox” and a “fairly unique situation.” He asked prosecutors to give him a heads-up next time if they planned to go that route.
Roots fumed that the line of questioning was a bid by prosecutors to turn Sumrall into a “cheese-eating rat” and “a snitch on the stand.” He accused prosecutors of “pretending they’re the FBI” and attempting to humiliate Sumrall in front of the jury.
“This is so outrageous,” Roots said.
Konig said Sumrall’s refusal to answer the question spoke to his credibility as a defense witness — proving that he was unwilling to testify in any way that would be harmful to a Jan. 6 defendant. His “ties to the Jan. 6 community,” Konig said, are proof of his bias that jurors should be permitted to consider.
He also cited two recent criminal tax cases in which prosecutors were permitted to cross-examine witnesses. In a 2019 case in Colorado, a federal judge ordered a defendant to respond to prosecutors’ request that he identify other people who refused to pay their taxes. The same year, in a federal criminal tax case in Nevada, prosecutors asked the defendant to identify other tax scofflaws — including one who happened to be in the room at the time of the testimony.
Cooper, though, did not permit prosecutors to go as far. He said he would permit Sumrall to decline to answer the question and would not order him to name names. Prosecutors agreed this was an acceptable outcome because jurors would still see that Sumrall had refused to identify people who might be implicated in Jan. 6 wrongdoing. When the jury returned, Cooper informed them of his decision.
Alberts called Sumrall in part because Sumrall was on Capitol grounds Jan. 6 filming the events. The defense contended that Sumrall’s video showed the thin police presence as pro-Trump protesters arrived at the Capitol and ultimately surged past several layers of barricades.
During their cross-examination, prosecutors highlighted Sumrall’s extensive commentary in support of Jan. 6 defendants, his help in fundraising for the legal defense of some of the most notorious perpetrators on that day — including one of Roots’ other clients, Dominic Pezzola, who is facing seditious conspiracy charges in a trial two floors away — and his sympathy for the “cause” that Jan. 6 rioters espoused that day.
They also emphasized that Sumrall had claimed “99 percent” of Jan. 6 defendants should not have been charged.
Sumrall was the final defense witness in the case, which now heads to closing arguments and jury deliberations.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: Union minister Jitendra Singh on Wednesday said perpetrators of terrorism are ultimately “consumed” by terrorism itself.
Singh said hailing from a terror affected region, he has been witness to terrorism in all its ramifications and can say with certain amount of confidence that the perpetrator of terror rides the tiger and is finally consumed by the same tiger, according to a Personnel Ministry statement.
Singh is a Lok Sabha member from Jammu and Kashmir’s Udhampur constituency.
Speaking at ‘Basanti Chola Diwas’ to pay homage to Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev here, the Union minister of state for personnel said the British reign of terror had come to an end as the internal contradictions forced the ‘Raj’ to finally wind up from India.
Paying glowing tributes to Bhagat Singh, a day ahead of Shaheed Diwas’ to mark the death anniversary of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, the revolutionary leaders who were hanged at the Lahore Central Jail in Lahore on March 23, 1931, Singh said, the revolutionary zeal of Bhagat Singh shook the British empire and only 16-17 years later the British were forced to quit India in 1947.
He said Bhagat Singh was the first Human Rights Activist of the 20th Century, much ahead of when the concept of Human Rights came into existence, the statement said.
Singh said apart from a martyr and freedom fighter, Bhagat Singh was a great thinker and philosopher and there was amalgamation of both Gandhi and Karl Marx in his writings and thoughts.
The minister also lauded the social work of Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, also known as SBS Foundation, and underlined that during the Covid pandemic, SBS was the only visible organisation working on ground.
Founded by Padma Shri Awardee Jitender Singh Shunty, since 1995, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal has been extending emergency services to people in Delhi-NCR, specifically for the management of funeral vans for ferrying dead bodies to cremation/burial grounds, for cremation of underprivileged, unclaimed and abandoned bodies, and organising voluntary blood donation camps, among other such services, the statement said.
The Sewa Dal has transported and cremated more than 4,500 Covid positive bodies, that were unclaimed or where the families were quarantined or under deep fear and could not perform cremation, it added.
The oppression of the Uyghurs and other Turkic and Islamic minority people in China’s Xinjiang region has come into stark focus over the past five years.
First, minorities were interned in “re-education facilities” for indeterminate periods. Then came evidence of Chinese “minders” being sent to live with Uyghur families and report on their behaviour, of checkpoints on pedestrian streets, face-scanning cameras, the enforced installation of state spyware on personal phones, forced controls on fertility and the closing or demolition of mosques and other religious sites. Throughout all this, a man named Erkin Tuniyaz has been a leading official in Xinjiang’s regional government, and an enthusiastic defender of this “Sinicisation” of Islam. Since 2021, he has been the formal leader of the entire region.
Yet none of this stopped British Foreign Office officials from planning to meet with Tuniyaz during a visit to London – a visit that has now been cancelled, after hurriedly arranged protests, condemnation by prominent politicians from the Labour and Conservative parties, and calls for his arrest under torture laws. News of the cancellation came not in an official announcement, but rather from the Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China, which tweeted that it had heard the news from government sources. This is characteristic of the whole affair: Tuniyaz’s visit was initially announced only in an email to activist groups , and his schedule was never published.
The furtiveness of the planned visit implies that the Foreign Office was fully cognisant of how unwholesome it was. Tuniyaz is not a peripheral figure in the mistreatment of Xinjiang’s minority peoples. Indeed, he has been a vocal defender of the mass internment camps there. The British government was aware of this: it has previously condemned the mistreatment of Xinjiang’s minorities and sanctioned other Xinjiang officials – including Tuniyaz’s deputy, Chen Mingguo – for their roles in the outrages that parliament has recognised as a genocide. In return, China has sanctioned many of our politicians, activists and academics for speaking out about the situation in Xinjiang.
That Tuniyaz is himself Uyghur is no irony. Rather, his role as chairman is a product of the Chinese state’s cynical use of complicit members of minority groups to provide a veneer of equality and representation to Beijing’s rule of Xinjiang. As elsewhere in China, the government is subordinate to the party. While Xinjiang’s chairmen have always been Uyghurs, the party secretaries to whom they are subordinate have – with a single exception in the 1970s – always been Han, China’s dominant ethnic group. Chairmen like Tuniyaz are simply the face of policies decided on by party secretaries.
It is likely that it was intended that Tuniyaz play a similar role in his visit to London, which was only one of his intended stops in Europe to “discuss this situation in Xinjiang”. In the face of the backlash, these trips have also been cancelled. However, the fact that they were planned at all suggests that Beijing was hopeful that the attention of the world had moved elsewhere, and it could begin to put behind it the scrutiny it has faced over the treatment of the Uyghurs. Given the willingness of British officials to meet Tuniyaz, such hopes may not have seemed farfetched.
Erkin Tuniyaz has been a vocal defender of Xinjiang’s mass internment camps. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP
The British government was slow to act on the abuses in Xinjiang from the start, imposing sanctions only after years of campaigning from brave Uyghur exiles and other human rights activists. Among those who attended a protest against Tuniyaz’s visit outside the Foreign Office on Monday was Rahima Mahmut, a longtime Uyghur activist, singer and translator. As with other vocal Uyghurs living in the west, her decision to speak out over the years has had terrible consequences – she can neither return home, for fear of arrest; nor contact her family there without putting them at further risk. Many Uyghurs living in the UK simply will not discuss Tuniyaz’s visit with journalists, fearful of drawing the attention of Beijing which, in its well-documented efforts to silence criticism from abroad, is fiercely engaged in efforts to control the discourse around Xinjiang. Tuniyaz’s planned visit can only be seen as a part of those efforts.
The cancellation of Tuniyaz’s visit is testament to the bravery and commitment of those who fought against it. But it also attests to the inconsistency of Britain’s approach. There should have been no meeting to cancel in the first place – Tuniyaz, as a defender and an overseer of the abusive policies in Xinjiang, should not be allowed to walk the streets of London. As the protesters argued on Monday, the British government should be listening to their experiences rather than to the state propaganda pushed by representatives of Beijing. Had it done so, Tuniyaz would already be on the sanctions list, as he is in the United States.
The claim, from the prime minister’s office, that the meeting was agreed to with the intention of making clear the UK’s “abhorrence over the treatment of the Uyghur people” makes little sense. The official British position is already clear, but it will remain unconvincing until those responsible for the mistreatment of Xinjiang’s Turkic and Muslim minorities know that they are not welcome here.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
