Prayagraj: Addressing an election meeting on what once was the home turf of slain gangster-politician Atiq Ahmad, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday appeared to invoke nature as a great leveller a force that delivers justice.
“Some people had turned Prayagraj, where people suffering from injustice and atrocities come with a desire for justice, into a land of injustice and atrocities,” Adityanath said addressing a meeting in the former Samajwadi Party MLA’s Allahabad West constituency.
“But this nature doesn’t commit an atrocity on anyone, nor does it accept an atrocity. It settles scores for everyone,” he said, without naming anyone.
Ahmad and his brother Ashraf were shot dead by three men, who posed as media persons, when they were being taken to a Prayagraj hospital for medical checkup under police escort on April 15. Ahmad was among those accused of killing Umesh Pal, a key witness in the 2005 murder case of BSP MLA Raju Pal.
Umesh Pal was shot dead, along with his two security guards, outside his home in Dhoomanganj area of Prayagraj in broad daylight on February 24. The shoot out had raised serious questions on law and order in Uttar Pradesh and Adityanath had vowed in the assembly to “destroy” the mafia in the state.
At his public meetings, he stressed on improvement in law and order during the term of the BJP government in the state.
On Tuesday, the last day of campaigning for the first phase of urban local body polls, the chief minister said, “It’s the same Uttar Pradesh where festivals were celebrated in the shadow of fear and terror. But today festivals bring prosperity. Today there is no curfew, no riots in the state.”
“Today, there is no terror of eve teasers in cities. Today, our cities are becoming safe cities. Girls can go to school safely, businessmen can do business. Today, the youth do not have ‘tamancha’ (country-made pistols) in their hands, they have tablets,” he said.
He said those who used to grab properties of the poor and extorted money from traders have been forced to surrender to the law. “Today, the state traders welfare board is giving a security insurance of Rs 10 lakh to traders.”
Adityanath said his government has focused on empowerment of people rather than appeasement. “Everyone has developed in our government,” he said.
“Today, Uttar Pradesh is moving beyond the dynasty-based and casteist-minded parties with a thought of nationalism. UP is scaling new heights of development now.”
The chief minister was campaigning for BJP mayoral candidate Umesh Chandra Ganesh Kesarwani at the Leaders Press Ground. Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, several other ministers in the UP government and BJP MPs and MLAs were present during the election meeting.
Later, at an election meeting in Jhansi, Adityanath said his government will keep cracking down on criminals. “We will not disturb any poor or a gentleman, but we will not let any criminal walk freely in the state,” he asserted. “There is no terror of miscreants in our cities now, rather they have been recognised as ‘safe cities’.”
Criticising those who ruled Uttar Pradesh previously, he said, “After independence, Bundelkhand was to participate in the development process, but the people in power never gave development any thought. Instead, their henchmen did not think twice before plundering Bundelkhand’s resources.”
Because of this, people were forced to migrate and youth became unemployed in Bundelkhand, he said.
“Modi ji gave a vision of development. He laid the foundation stone of a massive plant of Bharat Dynamics in this region and the work on the Defence Corridor is also going on, which will employ thousands of young people,” he said.
“The prime minister has dedicated the Bundelkhand Expressway, which has become the lifeline of Bundelkhand, and soon the government is going to start its Jhansi link,” Adityanath said.
He also said the government has announced Rs 6,000 crore for constituting the Jhansi Bundelkhand Industrial Development Authority (JBIDA). “Now the youth of Bundelkhand will not need to migrate to other cities as they will get employment here itself,” he said.
The chief minister also said a sound-and-light show is organised at Jhansi Fort on the life of Rani Laxmibai, the brave ruler of the princely state of Jhansi, and the First War of Independence in 1857.
Prayagraj and Jhansi will vote on May 4 in the first phase. The second phase of the urban local body polls will be held on May 11 and the counting of votes will be done on May 13.
Mysuru: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will campaign in the Varuna constituency on Tuesday, where the battle is between Congress strongman, Siddaramaiah and senior BJP leader and state minister V. Somanna.
The constituency is witnessing a tight contest, and campaigning has turned bitter. Violent incidents have also been reported. What seemed to be a cake-walk for Siddaramaiah has changed now, and with Shah campaigning the fight could be cut-throat.
Amit Shah is addressing a public rally in the Hosakote village of the constituency. Former Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa, MP and veteran leader V. Srinivasparasad, who is a prominent Dalit leader in the region, are participating in the programme.
The Home Minister wants to send a strong signal to the voters that fielding of Somanna against Siddaramaiah was a serious and calculated move of the party. The programme will also put an end to the rumours in the political circles that Somanna is being made a sacrificial goat by the party.
However, souces said that the BJP had planned to confine Siddaramaiah to Varuna constituency and plans to not allow him to take up statewide tours and campaign for Congress.
Siddaramaiah is considered to be the leader of oppressed classes and he often takes on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and RSS chief. BJP has been strategizing for his downfall in the state politics for a long time.
However, the contest for him this time is proving to be a cliffhanger as the Lingayat community comprises the largest group of voters in the constituency. By roping in veteran Dalit leader Srinivasprasad, the BJP wants to consolidate the equally biggest chunk of votes of SC/ST and OBCs in the seat.
It was rumoured that Yediyurappa and Somanna had locked horns and there would be division of Lingayat votes. However, Amit Shah is ensuring Yediyurappa is present and pledges his support for Somanna. In fact, Yediyurappa had already stated that he would ensure the defeat of Siddaramaiah.
Siddaramaiah, who stated he would not even bother to visit the constituency and his victory is ensured, had to rush and conduct day-long campaigning recently. The BJP and Congress workers are in confrontation mode and the situation is volatile as polling day is getting closer. Siddaramaiah is vying for the post of Chief Minister if the Congress is voted to power. BJP has promised a big role for Somanna if he defeats Siddaramaiah.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken would be the obvious first choice on the American side, but he is currently persona non grata in Beijing for canceling a visit in February after the U.S. shot down China’s alleged spy balloon. He annoyed China further by using a meeting shortly afterward in Munich with China’s top foreign affairs official to publicly warn China not to arm Russia in its Ukraine war.
That’s provided an opening for both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to become the lead envoy, according to current and former U.S. officials and China experts close to the administration. Both have said they wanted to travel to China, and, unlike Blinken, both have received public invitations from Chinese cabinet agencies. Treasury and Commerce have dispatched officials to Beijing to scout out possible meetings, although neither session is far along in planning. Yellen had expected to go to China in March until the balloon incident put the kibosh on that visit.
The bureaucratic wrangling has been fairly civil thus far by Washington standards, but the Biden administration is eager to tamp down any notion of internal conflict.
“The Administration has been clear about maintaining channels of communication with Beijing to manage competition responsibly,” said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in a statement. “The engagements Secretary Blinken, Secretary Yellen, Secretary Raimondo and others will have in the coming months will all be a part of that.”
It’s also not as simple as who the U.S. may want to send. Chinese officials are also jostling over who should meet an American emissary, and it’s uncertain whether any of the Americans could score a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, as friction grows between the two superpowers, some wonder if detente is even possible at this point.
“We have left strategic competition behind,” said Christopher K. Johnson, a former CIA China analyst. “We’re in strategic rivalry and are at the risk of careening toward strategic enmity.”
Last November, the two sides looked as if they wanted an accommodation. Biden and Xi met in Bali and, despite their many differences, agreed that the two sides should work together on economic stability, food security, climate and other issues.
But follow-up meetings were scrapped after the balloon saga embarrassed Beijing. Then, China launched military drills around Taiwan after the island’s leader met with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in early April, which outraged Washington.
Since March, the Chinese have sent conflicting signals about their interest in warming ties with the U.S. On the one hand, Chinese leaders have used mainland economic conferences to welcome U.S. business investment. On the other, Beijing has raided an American financial analysis firm in Beijing and slowed merger approvals needed by American companies. Xi accused the U.S. by name — a breach of Chinese etiquette — of “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression.”
There are two strands of thought among the Chinese leadership, said Harvard University’s Graham Allison, a prominent political scientist who recently met with top Chinese leaders in Beijing. “One strand is fatalistic,” he said. “The second strand says, ‘We can’t let things remain this way. We need to get back to Bali, with private conversations about the flashpoints that matter most.’”
The U.S. has tried to pick up on that second strand but hasn’t gotten very far. Meetings of U.S. and Chinese officials are “like being trapped in a bad episode of ‘Seinfeld’ where the ‘Festivus airing of grievances’ is a year-round holiday,” said Johnson, who now heads the political-risk consultancy China Strategies Group.
Administration officials acknowledge Blinken hasn’t had much luck changing that dynamic, but they argue China’s top foreign affairs official, Wang Yi, and others are at least as much at fault for the downward spiral. The Financial Times also recently reported that Chinese officials are worried that the FBI would release a report on the balloon incident if Blinken visited Beijing, once again embarrassing them. Still, the bad vibes have Washington weighing the pros and cons of various potential envoys.
So far, Yellen hasn’t been at the center of China policymaking. The National Security Council plays an outsized role there, with the State Department also having an important voice. But issues fundamental to Treasury — global economic growth, financial sector stability — are among those China wants to discuss with the U.S. even as the two countries tangle over Taiwan, Russia and technology.
There’s also precedent for Yellen taking a lead on China. In the past, Treasury secretaries have played important roles as China envoys. In 1999, the U.S. mistakenly bombed China’s embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, igniting protests across China. President Bill Clinton dispatched Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to meet China’s premier in the dusty city of Lanzhou in western China. Summers carried a letter from Clinton pledging to help China join the World Trade Organization. The tactic worked and the two sides soon started negotiating again.
Nine years later, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had long been friends with Chinese leaders, helped convince Beijing to work closely with President George W. Bush in fighting the global financial crisis. China’s economic officials in turn pressed Paulson to protect China’s stash of $1 trillion in U.S. government debt.
But Summers and Paulson were close to the White House and had something China wanted from the U.S. — WTO membership in Summers’ case, cash preservation in Paulson’s. Yellen has neither advantage. In many parts of the administration, the former Fed chair is still seen as academic and politically naive. Notably, she publicly criticized the heavy tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by the Trump administration, which Biden so far has decided to keep.
“She is afflicted with honesty,” said Ryan Hass, an Obama White House China expert now at the Brookings Institution.
Treasury is also viewed elsewhere in the government as holding on to the idea that a formal economic “dialogue” between the two nations would be useful, although the Biden White House has picked up Trump’s position that the Chinese used earlier dialogues, where senior officials met regularly, to filibuster a subject. Some at Treasury make sure not even to use the word “dialogue” when asking for White House approval to call or meet with Chinese counterparts.
“Yellen has been somewhat dovelike,” said a senior Biden foreign policy official. “On a number of key issues, she and the president aren’t on the same page. That will play a role where this ends up.”
During a speech last week at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Yellen gave a tough-minded preview of the kinds of conversations she anticipated having with the Chinese. The speech had two audiences: Beijing and those in Washington and the allied capitals that doubted the White House fully trusted her.
National security is of “paramount importance,” she said, with the U.S. focusing on keeping leading-edge technology from reaching the Chinese military and security establishment. But she tried to assure her Chinese listeners that the U.S. doesn’t want to decouple entirely from the Chinese economy, which, she said, “would be disastrous for both countries.”
“These national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernization,” Yellen said.
In other words, the two nations would disagree on many fronts, but there were still plenty of areas where they could profitably work together.
Within the White House, no decision has been made on whether Blinken, Yellen or Raimondo will be the initial envoy to Beijing. One consideration: Which of them would wrangle a meeting with the highest-ranking Chinese official?
That makes Raimondo a long shot for the first trip to Beijing. Commerce secretaries traditionally rank low in the Washington hierarchy and have been generally treated in Beijing as salespeople for corporate America. However, Raimondo plays a critical role in sanctioning Chinese companies and overseeing U.S. industrial policy — areas the Chinese want to discuss. Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, one of the seven members of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee, is expected to oversee technology issues for Beijing and would be a high-profile interlocutor on the Chinese side.
The State Department argues that Blinken should go first because State has a wider portfolio of issues than Treasury, including Taiwan, Russia’s war against Ukraine, military cooperation, fentanyl exports, imprisoned Americans and climate talks.
Some at State also are concerned that the Chinese could look to splinter the U.S. government by favoring Treasury and trying to cut out the State Department. In the Trump administration, for instance, the Chinese focused their lobbying on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to try to sideline the uber-hawkish U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who was pressing a trade war between the two nations.
It didn’t work under Trump, and U.S. officials say it wouldn’t work now. Beijing “won’t find a way to divide what we’re doing,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo. “What we are trying to do is make it clear that we are going to protect our national security, but our goal is not to constrain China’s economy from growing.”
Before the balloon incident, Blinken intended to fly to Beijing to discuss a range of issues with his Chinese counterparts, including macroeconomic issues — but no dialogues — and expected to get a meeting with Xi Jinping. Treasury secretaries rarely meet with the top leader in one-on-one sessions. Instead, they often get time with China’s premier, the number two official who is usually in charge of running the economy. At the very least, Yellen would expect to meet with He Lifeng, China’s new vice minister in charge of trade and macroeconomics. In his previous job, He oversaw domestic economic planning and didn’t meet much with U.S. officials.
For all the aggravation with Blinken in Beijing, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also has been throwing up some roadblocks to an early Yellen visit, said several China experts who have recently visited Beijing. Presumably, that’s for reasons similar to those in Washington; each ministry wants to assert its preeminence and have its ministers host the first U.S. cabinet visit since the balloon imbroglio. That’s especially important now in Beijing where Xi has reshuffled top government and Communist Party officials.
“There is a little bit of staking out one’s turf,” said former Clinton trade representative Charlene Barshefsky, who closely tracks Chinese politics. “There is a new set of ministers. They are letting it be known their jurisdiction and their predilections for policy.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said in a statement that the U.S. “should follow through on the common understandings between the two heads of state in Bali, so as to create the conditions and atmosphere needed for high-level exchanges and bring China-U.S. relations back to the right track.”
In the end, who Biden chooses to make the first cabinet-level trip to Beijing may come down to who is available to travel when preparations are completed. The U.S. envoy may carry a letter from Biden during the trip. An important goal of this round of diplomacy is promoting a summit between Biden and Xi in November in San Francisco when the U.S. hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, an organization of 21 major economies, including the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.
But it’s far from clear that cabinet-level meetings will be enough for China to start modulating its policies. The U.S. has plenty it could offer China as inducements — cuts to tariffs that even Biden criticized when he was running for president in 2020, limiting U.S. export controls, backing away from banning TikTok in the U.S., among many other possibilities.
“At this moment, we need deeds as well as words,” said Summers, the former Treasury secretary.
But across the government, U.S. officials say the focus now is on restarting talks, not about making changes in policy — particularly anything resembling a concession that could be criticized by Republicans.
“We want senior empowered channels of communication,” said a senior State Department official. “We want to engage regularly.”
For Washington, in other words, the meetings are the message.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: Smarting from back-to-back defeats, Sunrisers Hyderabad will have a lot to ponder, especially addressing their batting frailties, when they take on a high-flying Punjab Kings in the Indian Premier League here on Sunday.
For a team that finished at the eighth spot in the last two editions, SRH would have hoped for a better start to the season but they ended up suffering two crushing defeats at the hands of Rajasthan Royals and Lucknow Super Giants respectively.
A poor show with the bat despite some exciting players in the line-up is the prime reason behind their failure. Sunrisers’ struggles to build partnership saw them score 131 and 121 in their two matches so far.
Losing wickets in a heap has proved to be their bane as they failed to get any momentum. If SRH was 30 for 2 in the powerplay in the first game, they managed 43 for one against LSG, only to fritter it away, slipping to 55 for 4 in nine overs.
The return of new skipper Aiden Markram too didn’t change their fate as he made a duck. The ability to play spin was behind the rise of Harry Brook but he got out to spinners in both the matches.
In the top-order, SRH tried wicketkeeper Anmolpreet Singh as an opener instead of Abhishek Sharma in their last match and he looked promising, but Mayank Agarwal and Rahul Tripathi have been inconsistent.
In fact, it took two cameos from Abdul Samad to take SRH to a decent total in the two matches. With big-hitting Heinrich Klaasen waiting in the wings, it remains to be seen what combination they go for to prop up the batting.
Afghan pacer Fazalhaq Farooqi has been most consistent for them but to be fair, the bowlers didn’t have enough total to defend, something which SRH will have to fix at the earliest.
Punjab, on the other hand, are soaring high after two comprehensive wins.
If Kolkata Knight Riders were beaten by seven runs via DLS at Mohali, Rajasthan were crushed by five runs in Guwahati as Punjab produced a fine display of their bowling and batting prowess.
Captained by the experienced and calm Shikhar Dhawan, PBKS rode on their superior batting, led by their Indian players, to put up 190-plus scores and then defended the totals with Arshdeep Singh producing the goods in the two matches.
Dhawan has led from the front with two fifties, while Prabhsimran Singh and B Rajapaksa raised their hands when needed as the top order has looked solid.
Among foreign recruits, Nathan Ellis was sensational against RR in the last match but pace bowling all-rounder Sam Curran — the most expensive buy ever in IPL history at Rs 18.50 crore — has so far leaked a lot of runs.
However, on paper PBKS has the edge and it will take a special effort from SRH to outwit them at their own den.
Teams (from):
Sunrisers Hyderabad: Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Abdul Samad, Abhishek Sharma, Mayank Agarwal, Anmolpreet Singh, Harry Brook, Mayank Dagar, Fazalhaq Farooqi, Akeal Hosein, Kartik Tyagi, Heinrich Klaasen, Mayank Markande, T Natarajan, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Glenn Phillips, Adil Rashid, Sanvir Singh, Rahul Tripathi, Umran Malik, Vivrant Sharma, Samarth Vyas, Washington Sundar, Upendra Yadav.
