Declaring that the “old Republican Party is gone, and it is never coming back,” Trump in Nashville urged Republican donors to help put him back in the White House through electoral strategies he once decried, like robust mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.
Giving him another term, Trump said, would make the GOP an “unstoppable juggernaut that will dominate American politics for generations to come.”
Trump’s campaign has touched on these themes recently, including his evolving position on ballot harvesting alongside mail and early voting as well as his policy vision for the country, should he return to power.
But this was the first time Trump, since announcing his campaign in November and recalibrating some policy positions after the GOP’s midterm election losses, has made these arguments at an RNC event. Ronna McDaniel, the committee chair, has warned that the party must embrace messaging that encourages Republicans to vote early and by mail, though Trump and other conservative influencers did not jump to adopt the same type of rhetoric, and likely turned many GOP voters off from using those methods.
The change of tune comes as Trump, less than 10 months out from the first Republican primary events, is commanding a lead over the GOP field. And his message Saturday follows weeks of donors privately and publicly expressing doubts about Ron DeSantis’ ability to beat him in a primary, including a billionaire GOP donor telling the Financial Times this weekend he now plans to pull back his support of the Florida governor.
Trump on Saturday night reminded the donors of his current standing in the primary. At one point in the speech, Trump planned to list off recent polls and their results line by line — reading off the breakdown of his and all of his opponents’ totals in surveys from Morning Consult, Trafalgar, Reuters, Yahoo, McLaughlin, Florida Voice, University of Georgia, St. Anselm and more.
Trump, who for over two years has faced internal party criticism for focusing on an old election rather than the party’s future, articulated to donors on Saturday a different approach. Even in remarks during this weekend’s donor retreat, Trump critics like former Vice President Mike Pence and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp took jabs at Trump for his tendency to look backward. But his remarks Saturday did much less of that. Despite mentioning Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss, Trump steered clear of talk of past unsuccessful elections.
Instead of devoting time in his speech to decry voting machines or allege election officials to be corrupt, Trump touted accomplishments from his four years in office and made sweeping pledges for what he will do if elected again. One such promise was that he would end the war between Ukraine and Russia before even stepping foot into the White House — vowing to do so, without explanation on strategy, “shortly after” winning the presidential election. Similarly, Trump said he would put an end to cartel networks “just as we destroyed the ISIS caliphate.”
Trump vowed to “totally obliterate the Deep State,” directing the Department of Justice to go after local prosecutors deemed as “Marxist” or “racist-in-reverse.” He pledged to sign an executive order cutting federal funding from schools that teach critical race theory or “inappropriate” sexual content, as well as for schools and colleges implementing mask or vaccine requirements. And he said he would sign a federal law forbidding sex-change procedures on children.
Trump this weekend was spending a rare two nights away from his home in Palm Beach, arriving in Nashville on Friday after speaking at the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis. The former president dined with members of Tennessee’s congressional delegation Friday evening, played golf with Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) on Saturday morning and planned to remain in Nashville for the evening.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Without mentioning Trump’s name, Kemp pinned blame on the former president’s election loss grievances and warned that “not a single swing voter” will vote for a GOP nominee making such claims, calling 2020 “ancient history.”
Kemp, who found himself the object of Trump’s ire after declining to intervene to reverse his Georgia loss in 2020, represents a wing of the Republican Party that has sought to resist Trump’s grasp. So does New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. So does former Vice President Mike Pence. Here — while Trump held his own private meetings out of sight — all three were given prime speaking slots.
That the Republican committee invited dissenters of Trump, even prospective challengers in next year’s presidential primary, points to the fact that even though Trump has first place in the polls, there are still many months of fighting ahead of him. His potential nomination is unlikely to come as a coronation.
The party’s donors are still weighing whether there is a viable alternative to Trump, though there is still no clear consensus on the matter, several said in interviews this weekend.
Standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons on Saturday, Sununu talked about Trump like this: “I don’t think he can win in 2024,” the governor said in an interview. “You don’t have to be angry about it. You don’t have to be negative about it. I think you just have to be willing to talk about it and bring real solutions to the table.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung referenced a POLITICO report of Trump’s robust first-quarter fundraising and said, “Poll after poll [shows] President Trump crushing the competition, there is no doubt whoever stands in his way will get eviscerated.”
Over breakfast, according to a person in the room and a copy of his speech obtained by POLITICO, Kemp told the donors the Republican nominee “must” be able to win Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes in order to win the White House.
“We have to be able to win a general election,” Kemp said. His comments could apply not only to Trump, but also to the defeat this fall of Trump-backed and scandal-plagued candidates like Herschel Walker, who lost his race even as Kemp defeated a well-funded Democratic challenger by nearly 8 points.
So far, a solution to stopping Trump has proved elusive to donors and operatives who have claimed for years they were trying to do just that.
Other likely primary opponents of Trump, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), were also invited to the RNC gathering, but declined due to scheduling conflicts. Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race post-indictment, and a sunglasses-clad Perry Johnson, a Michigan businessman running for president, also received invitations. Hutchinson and Johnson buzzed around the retreat, but did not have speaking slots.
“They’re sorting through it,” Hutchinson said, referring to how donors here and party activists elsewhere have responded to officials like Kemp, Sununu, himself and others who say the party must avoid a repeat of the 2020 general election. “But they’ve got to hear that message, and it’s like realism is coming to the party. And it takes people actually having the courage to say it before people will face that reality.”
Sheltered from the party-tractors circling a honky-tonk district just beyond the doors, some of the GOP’s deepest pocketed supporters gathered inside the luxury hotel Friday and Saturday. There, they hoped to be reassured of the party’s upcoming electoral prospects after a bruising midterm cycle and as an uncertain presidential election looms. Donors sipping white wine in the lobby lounge gawked at the pink-cowgirl-hat-clad bachelorette parties on the sidewalk outside. Inside the hotel Friday afternoon, a couple in town for a country music concert squealed at the sight of Kellyanne Conway, who was among the panelists at the weekend-long donor summit.
Ahead of the get-together and throughout the weekend, a slate of Republican 2024 hopefuls jetted up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest, the mad dash of candidates marking the busiest campaign week to date in the nascent presidential race. And that primary contest, of course, is a fight for what appears to be an increasingly difficult shot at dethroning Trump.
“How in God’s name could Donald Trump be portrayed as a victim? But it’s being done,” said one Republican donor at the event referencing Trump’s indictment, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, like others there who discussed with POLITICO the unfolding presidential primary.
The donor charged that Trump as the 2024 nominee “would lose even against Biden, which is tragic in its own sense,” but raised doubts about whether the candidates he did like — Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — had the charisma or ability to push through.
Just minutes after the donor floated Pompeo’s name as a candidate of interest, the former secretary of state announced Friday evening he wouldn’t seek the nomination after all. Pompeo’s decision came after the GOP primary field has gradually swollen — and as Trump has surged in public polling.
But it didn’t stop Trump’s detractors from taking a swing in front of the audience of donors.
In his Friday night address and as donors dined on filet mignon and mashed potatoes, Pence decried “the politics of personality” and “lure of populism unmoored to timeless conservative values,” according to a copy of his prepared remarks. And Trump’s former running-mate described the presidential primary as not just a contest between the candidates involved, but a “conflict of visions” with existential implications.
Pence went after Trump directly on a number of policy areas, from defense and intervention in Ukraine to a ballooning national debt and Trump’s opposition to reforming entitlement programs, referring to him as “our former president.” He criticized Republicans’ waning interest in waging war against marriage equality, and the reticence some now appear to have about further restricting abortion rights — two areas where he finds himself at odds with his former boss.
The uncertain political atmosphere this weekend is much different from the RNC’s donor retreat a year ago, when an optimistic set of top party benefactors in New Orleans were expecting to see a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. President Joe Biden and Democratic incumbents had approval numbers in the tank, and the GOP had just given Virginia Democrats an unexpected shellacking months earlier.
But the anticipated Republican Senate takeover this fall never materialized — in fact, the party lost a seat in the chamber — and the GOP only narrowly took over House control (or, as Kemp put it Saturday, “barely won the House majority back.”). Republicans lost gubernatorial races in Arizona and Pennsylvania that were widely believed to be winnable, if not for nominating candidates who espoused Trump’s stolen-election claims and other conspiracy theories that proved unpopular with the general electorate.
As the party elite gathered this time, any sense of optimism about Republicans’ electoral prospects was much less palpable.
Another donor, who said he was no diehard Trump fan, questioned not just DeSantis’ ability to break through in the primary but whether he could win in a general election. Calling the recent indictment against Trump “jet fuel” in the primary, the donor — like others here — said he was nearly resolved to the fact that Trump will be the party’s 2024 nominee.
Kemp in his speech outlined the policies he ran on to cruise to reelection as governor, a race he won against one of the Democratic Party’s top stars. Rather than moving to the middle on policy, Kemp in his campaign still touted deeply conservative measures like a six-week abortion ban, approving the permitless carry of handguns and banning certain lessons in schools about racism.
But throughout his speech, Kemp chided Republicans who have become “distracted” by claims about stolen elections and, more recently, Trump’s current and pending legal cases in New York and Georgia, asserting that such conversations only help Democrats.
Johnson, the Michigan candidate not currently registering in presidential polls, carried a stack of his book, “Two Cents to Save America,” around the hotel lobby restaurant on Saturday. He laughed recounting his takeaways from conversations with donors this weekend, as well as from a panel of RNC advisory council members Friday evening.
“Obviously, they know Trump lost,” Johnson said. “Even though we may have had an irregular situation in elections, they’re saying right on stage, it hasn’t changed. We’re going to continue to have mass mail ballots. And if the Republicans want to win, they have to live under the new reality.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
To walk on to the Great Salt Lake, the largest salt lake in the western hemisphere which faces the astounding prospect of disappearing just five years from now, is to trudge across expanses of sand and mud, streaked with ice and desiccated aquatic life, where just a short time ago you would be wading in waist-deep water.
But the mounting sense of local dread over the lake’s rapid retreat doesn’t just come from its throttled water supply and record low levels, as bad as this is. The terror comes from toxins laced in the vast exposed lake bed, such as arsenic, mercury and lead, being picked up by the wind to form poisonous clouds of dust that would swamp the lungs of people in nearby Salt Lake City, where air pollution is often already worse than that of Los Angeles, potentially provoking a myriad of respiratory and cancer-related problems.
This looming scenario, according to Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University, risks “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, surpassing the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and acting like a sort of “perpetual Deepwater Horizon blowout”.
Salt Lakers are set to be assailed by a “thick fog of this stuff that’s blowing through, it would be gritty. It would dim the light, it would literally go from day to night and it could absolutely be regular all summer,” said Abbott, who headed a sobering recent study with several dozen other scientists on the “unprecedented danger” posed by lake’s disintegration.
Ben Abbott on a mound of bleached and exposed microbialites at the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
“We could expect to see thousands of excess deaths annually from the increase in air pollution and the collapse of the largest wetland oasis in the intermountain west,” he added.
There is evidence that plumes of toxic dust are already stirring as the exposed salt crust on the lake, which has lost three-quarters of its water and has shriveled by nearly two-thirds in size since the Mormon wagon train first arrived here in the mid-19th century, breaks apart from erosion. Abbott now regularly fields fretful phone calls from people asking if Salt Lake City is safe to live in still, or if their offspring should steer clear of the University of Utah.
“People have seen and realized it’s not hypothetical and that there is a real threat to our entire way of life,” Abbott said. “We are seeing this freight train coming as the lake shrinks. We’re just seeing the front end of it now.” About 2.4 million people, or about 80% of Utah’s population, lives “within a stone’s throw of the lake”, Abbott said. “I mean, they are directly down wind from this. As some people have said, it’s an environmental nuclear bomb.”
Alvin Sihapanya, a research student at Westminster College, looks in the water of the Great Salt Lake. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
Emergency action
The Great Salt Lake’s predicament is often compared to that of the dried-up Owens Lake in California, one of the worst sources of dust pollution in the US since the water feeding it was rerouted to Los Angeles more than a century ago. But the sheer heft of the Great Salt Lake, sometimes called ‘America’s Dead Sea’ but in fact four times larger than its counterpart that straddles Israel and Jordan, presages a loss on the scale of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake but strangled to death by Soviet irrigation projects.
The demise of the Aral Sea was dumfounding to many Soviets, who thought it virtually impossible to doom a lake so large just by watering some nearby cotton. “But these systems are actually very, very delicate,” said Abbott, and they can quickly spiral away. The Great Salt Lake, its equilibrium upended by the voracious diversion of water to nourish crops, flush toilets and water lawns and zapped by global heating, could vanish in just five years, a timeline Abbott admits seems “absurd”.
“History won’t have to judge us, not even our kids will have to judge us – we will judge ourselves in short order,” said Erin Mendenhall, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who is now regularly bombarded with questions about the toxic dust cloud from mayors of other cities. “The prognosis isn’t good unless there’s massive action. But we have to start within one year, we have have to take the action now.”
Haunted by these prognostications, Utah’s Republican leadership has responded with hundreds of millions of dollars in ameliorative measures and pugnacious rhetoric. “On my watch we are not allowing the lake to go dry,” Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, has vowed. “We will do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Cox, who previously requested Utahns pray to help alleviate the worst drought to grip the US west in the past 1,200 years, has suspended any new claims for water in the Great Salt Lake basin.
Two photos of the Great Salt Lake. One from 1985, and another from 2022 showing a greatly reduced size.
A swathe of bills before the Republican-dominated legislature would tear up thirsty turf, encourage farmers to be more efficient with water and create a new role of Great Salt Lake commissioner. “We have to re-evaluate our relationship with water and how we live,” Brad Wilson, the Utah house speaker, said. “We are second driest state in country and we have opportunity to reimagine use of water.”
But scientists who study the lake worry that the proposed remedies don’t yet match the extent of the problem. A network of dams and canals have siphoned off so much water from the three main rivers – Bear, Jordan and Weber – that flow from the mountains to the lake that in the past three years it has got just a third of its natural streamflow. The level of the lake is 19ft below its natural average level and the decline has accelerated since 2020, with the lake in just three years starved of enough water that could cover the whole of Connecticut in a 1ft-deep swimming pool.
Continue this way and the lake faces complete collapse. “It’s definitely the feeling of standing at the precipice and rocks are crumbling under your feet,” Bonnie Baxter, a biologist at Westminster College who has spent years studying the lake. “And you know you’re about to go over. It’s like that close. That’s what it feels like.”
Bonnie Baxter, professor of biology and part of the Great Salt Lake Institute, in the research labs at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
Baxter and her fellow researchers are anxious about the fate of the lake’s ecological foundations, structures called microbialites which look a bit like dull coral reefs but are made of millions of microbes. The microbial community grows in a mat, feeding brine flies which, in turn, along with the lake’s brine shrimp, feed the 10 million birds that use the lake a crucial stop-off.
The receding waters, however, have left many of the microbialites stranded in the open air, slowly dying. The lake’s shrinking pool of water is becoming far more saline, a bit like how the last of the bathwater concentrates the grime, making conditions intolerable for the flies, shrimp and microbes. The lake is typically three or four times saltier than the ocean but this year it is about six times as salty, which Baxter said is “just crazy. We are a little bit worried about that.”
The risks
Losing the lake threatens a strange and terrible cocktail of ramifications. Birdlife and recreation on the lake will vanish as the lake’s surface area – now less than 1,000 square miles, down from three times that in the 1980s – turns into a crusty, potentially toxic miasma.
The lucrative extraction of lithium, magnesium and other minerals from the lake would be in peril, as would ski conditions on the mountains that loom next to the lake – moisture from the lake is sucked up by storms that then deposits it as snow for skiers and snowboarders to enjoy. Billions of dollars in economic damage would result.
Westminster College students Cora Rasmuson, left, and Bridget Dopp set up an experiment testing the effects of water salinity and brine fly larva at Westminster College. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
A projection of a brine fly under the microscope in the research labs at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
As the lake’s plight has become apparent, there’s been an outpouring of unconventional ideas on how to save it. Lawmakers have pledged millions of dollars towards cloud seeding – putting chemicals into clouds to prompt more snowfall – while some have advocated cutting down trees, in the belief they are sucking up too much water, or even building an enormous pipeline to the Pacific ocean to funnel water into the lake.
Baxter said she gets a lot of “old retired men” emailing her or dropping by her office to impart such wisdom. “The pipeline – well I mean it would be too much money, too much energy, the carbon equation is huge,” she said. “Also, we don’t want to add salt to the lake, we need the fresh water that’s already in the watershed.”
Utah is America’s youngest and fastest growing state – the population leapt 18% in the past decade – but the Great Salt Lake is being parched by an antediluvian network of water rights for agriculture rather than thirsty newcomers. About three-quarters of the diverted water goes to growing crops, with the growing of alfalfa, a water-intensive crop that is turned into animal feed, the largest consumer. Just 9% of the diverted water goes to cities.
Already an overdrawn account subjected to unrestrained spending, the Great Salt Lake is being pushed further into the red by the climate crisis. Rising temperatures are winnowing away the snowpack that feeds its rivers and evaporating the water that sits in the closed, saucer-like lake. “The diversions got us in the situation we’re in now where we don’t have the resiliency to deal with the impacts of climate change,” said Baxter. “So now we’re dealing with both things.”
The shrinking shoreline of the Great Salt Lake. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
Urban growth and agriculture collide with drought
The story of the Great Salt Lake, much like that of the ailing Colorado River, is very much a tale of the US west, of scant resources being harnessed to seed major cities and bloom a cornucopia of food in an arid land.
But this fantasy of ongoing, untamed growth is colliding with a new climatic reality – the US west’s sprawling Great Basin network of terminal lakes, which includes the Great Salt Lake at its eastern extremity, is in the process of drying up as 3.3tn liters of water are diverted from its streams each year. The shortfall is sparking jarring disagreements between states over cuts to the Colorado’s use and, in Utah, calling into question the long-held water primacy of farming.
Abbott and Baxter’s report calls for “emergency measures” to cut water use in the region by up to a half. Such a massive reduction would probably require stringent curbs in alfalfa growing, among other major reforms, in order to push millions of gallons of water back through the system.
The Salt Lake City mayor, Erin Mendenhall. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
The state’s Republican leadership is wary of forcing farmers’ hands, however, leaning on the settlers’ principle of “right in time, first in right” for water allocations. “Alfalfa has got a really bad wrap lately but we have got to create economic incentives for water conservation, let the free market guide those decisions,” said Joel Ferry, the executive director of the Utah department of natural resources, and who has grown alfalfa himself at his farm near Bear river.
“Farmers fundamentally have the right to grow alfalfa, they produce some of the finest crop in the world,” Ferry added. “It’s not the role of government to say ‘you can’t do that.’” Wilson, the house speaker, has said “we don’t need sticks” to prod Utahns to do the right thing.
Ferry said that the challenges faced by the Great Salt Lake are “large but not insurmountable”, pointing to reforms taken by farmers to better conserve water through sprinklers and other technology. “I’m optimistic the people of Utah will rise to the challenge,” he said. “I’m a fifth-generation farmer and rancher and I want this to be sustainable for five more generations.”
Line chart of the elevations of the Great Salt Lake over time.
The crisis has, at least, prompted a reappraisal of what the Great Salt Lake means to its nearest inhabitants. John Fremont, a military officer who was the first white explorer of the lake in 1843, marveled that it “possessed a strange and extraordinary interest” and erroneously speculated that a “terrible whirlpool” took its waters to the ocean. Subsequent Mormon settlers found the area harsh but captivating, an oasis amid the desert, and rumours swirled for decades that monsters lurked within the lake. For a while, a few vacation resorts dotted the lake’s shores.
Since then, the Great Salt Lake has been rather looked down upon for its briny, fly-ridden appearance and rotten egg smell. It was a place to dump trash, rather than take a picnic. “We haven’t had a love affair with the Great Salt Lake until recently, there was a lot of disparagement that it was this inaccessible, useless lake,” said Mendenhall. “People thought it was ugly.”
A visitor to Lady Finger Point that overlooks the lake bed of the Great Salt Lake. Photograph: Kim Raff/The Guardian
But as the lake hit a record low level in 2021, and then again last year, a certain warmth started to stir among Salt Lakers of the body of water their city is named after. “We dismissed the Great Salt Lake, we ignored it,” as Joel Briscoe, a Democratic state lawmaker, lamented in January. “We failed to appreciate it for too long.” There’s a growing desire to save this sprawling, ebbing ecosystem, even if the main motivation is to avoid a choking miasma of dust pollution.
“There is this whole personal connection to the lake now,” said Baxter, who suggests the ‘first in time’ water priority should apply to the malnourished, 11,000-year-old lake itself. “People say to me we are losing this lake and that it is part of their fabric, someone even said they have written poems to the lake. It’s changing. We’ll see if it’s enough.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Delhi: Indian tunes based on Indian Classical Ragas will be the flavour of the ‘Beating the Retreat’ ceremony this year which will be graced by President and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Droupadi Murmu at Vijay Chowk in the national capital on January 29.
According to the Ministry of Defence, 29 captivating and foot-tapping Indian tunes will be played by the music bands of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the State Police and the Central Armed Police Force (CAPF).
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will also be present in the ceremony. The event will witness the country’s biggest Drone Show, comprising of 3,500 indigenous drones.
The drone show will light up the evening sky over the Raisina hills, weaving myriad forms of national figures/events through smooth synchronisation. It will depict the success of the startup ecosystem, technological prowess of the country’s youth and pave the way for future path-breaking trends. The drone show will be organised by Botlabs Dynamics.
For the first time, a 3D anamorphic projection will be organised during Beating Retreat Ceremony on the facade of the North and South Block.
The ceremony will begin with the massed band’s ‘Agniveer’ tune which will be followed by enthralling tunes like ‘Almora’, ‘Kedar Nath, ‘Sangam Dur’, ‘Queen of Satpura’, ‘Bhagirathi’, ‘Konkan Sundari’ by Pipes and Drums band, said the Defence Ministry statement.
Indian Air Force’s band will play ‘Aprajey Arjun’, ‘Charkha’, ‘Vayu Shakti’, ‘Swadeshi’, while ‘Ekla Cholo Re’, ‘Hum Taiyyar Hai’, and ‘Jai Bharati’ will be played by the band of Indian Navy.
The Indian Army’s band will play ‘Shankhnaad’, ‘Sher-e-Jawan’, ‘Bhupal’, ‘Agranee Bharat’, ‘Young India’, ‘Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja’, ‘Drummers Call’, and ‘Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon’.
The event will come to a close with the ever-popular tune of ‘Sare Jahan se Acha’.
The principal conductor of the ceremony will be Flight Lieutenant Leimapokpam Rupachandra Singh. While the Army Band will be led by Sub Maj Diggar Singh, the Naval and Air Force band commanders will be M Anthoni Raj and Warrant Officer Ashok Kumar.
The conductor of the State Police and CAPF bands will be Asstt Sub Inspector Prem Singh, said the official statement.
The Buglers will perform under the leadership of Naib Subedar Santosh Kumar Pandey, and pipes and drums band will play under the instructions of Subedar Major Baswaraj Vagge.
The ‘Beating the Retreat’ ceremony at the Vijay Chowk on January 29 every year marks the culmination of the four-day-long Republic Day celebrations. It has emerged as an event of national pride when the Colours and Standards are paraded.
The ceremony traces its origins to the early 1950s when Major Roberts of the Indian Army indigenously developed the unique ceremony of display by the massed bands.
It marks a centuries-old military tradition when the troops ceased fighting, sheathed their arms and withdrew from the battlefield and returned to the camps at sunset at the sound of the Retreat. Colours and Standards are cased and flags are lowered. The ceremony creates nostalgia for the times gone by.
