by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, News, Startup Basics
Panaji : Former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin will offer “free expert advice” to the Goa Ranji team following the inclusion of his son Asaduddin, a Goa Cricket Association (GCA) official said on Friday.
Shadab Jakati, Goa’s highest wicket-taker, slammed the 28-year-old’s inclusion in the state team.
Asaduddin has not played a single Ranji trophy match and his inclusion has triggered a furore in the coastal state’s cricketing circles, forcing the GCA on the backfoot.
“Because Asaduddin is his son and he is now a part of our team, we will get Azharuddin’s guidance for free. The expert assistance from someone of the stature of Azharuddin, a former India captain, will work wonders for the Goa team and its young cricketers,” GCA Secretary Daya Pagi told IANS.
He, however, said that no written agreement had been signed by the association with Azharuddin over the sharing of the latter’s expertise for the benefit of the state’s young players.
“Asaduddin has been roped in as a guest player. We have not paid a single rupee to him… we are going through a cash crunch and that is why we chose this route,” Pagi said.
Earlier in the day, Jakati, who has taken 275 wickets for Goa in 92 first-class matches and played nine editions of the Indian Premier League with teams like Chennai Super Kings, Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Gujarat Lions, slammed the GCA decision on Asaduddin.
He dubbed the decision a “joke on the cricketers of Goa”.
“Just because (he is the son of former India captain (Mohammad Azharuddin), who was a great player, does that automatically allow for his son to play for Goa?” Jakati told a press conference on Friday.
“He (Asaduddin) is aged 28 and never played a single Ranji trophy match, nor even a first-class match. Even the last match he played for a state was in 2009, that too for Hyderabad Colts team in an invitational tournament. He tried to play for Uttar Pradesh, he tried various states, but he was not given a chance,” Jakati said.
“But this is almost like ‘this is Goa, come, we welcome you’. What about our Goan players? We are also struggling, we are also training very hard, we also want to play for Goa.”
“GCA President Suraj Lotlikar is not bothered about Goan players. We are calling players from outside to make a debut for the Goa cricket team,” Jakati added.
The 38-year-old Goa cricketer alleged that despite a good performance last season, he was asked by Lotlikar to retire.
“Suraj Lotlikar told me to consider retirement and told me to make way for junior cricketers. He even went to the extent of telling me that I will never be part of any IPL team this year,” he claimed.
While Lotlikar, who is currently out of India, was unavailable for comment, Pagi said that the decision to drop senior players, including Jakati, was part of a new policy to promote young players.
“His performance has been average for the last few years. That is why we have taken a decision to drop him and other senior players. We want to promote young talent in the Goa team,” Pagi said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, Success Stories, World
Altaf Nazerali
By Gurmukh Singh,
Vancouver : An Indo-Canadian businessman, who is originally from Bhuj, Gujarat, has been awarded $1.2 million in damages after he was defamed in a series of fake news articles instigated by a prominent American blockchain investor.
It is one of the biggest compensations of its kind in Canada.
Vancouver-based Altaf Nazerali had sued Patrick Byrne, CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, for a campaign of lies aimed to tarnish the reputation of the NRI businessman.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Byrne’s appeal against $1.2 million granted to the NRI businessman by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2016.
The huge compensation for Nazerali comes after a seven-year legal battle to clear his name after a series of articles published in 2011, on an American website DeepCapture.com tried to depict the NRI businessman as a drug trafficker, arms dealer and gangster and a financial supporter of al-Qaida. The articles tried to show that he had links to Russian and Italian mafias.
The articles were written by Mark Mitchell and published on the website – owned and published by Byrne- which reports on criminal financial conspiracies.
In its 2016 judgment in favour of the NRI business, Justice Kenneth Affleck of Vancouver-based British Columbia Supreme Court had said: “Mitchell, Byrne and Deep Capture LLC engaged in a calculated and ruthless campaign to inflict as much damage on Nazerali’s reputation as they could achieve.
“It is clear on the evidence that their intention was to conduct a vendetta in which the truth about Nazerali himself was of no consequence.”
The American blockchain investor challenged the judgment in the Supreme Court of Canada which last week threw it out.
(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh100@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Hamburg (Germany) : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday made a strong attack on the Narendra Modi government by referring to incidents of lynching and attacks on Dalits, saying people in India were angry and the ruling alliance was weakening support structures meant for the weaker sections.
Speaking at the Bucerius Summer School here in Germany, Gandhi also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over attacks on women, “lack of jobs,” demonetisation and “flawed” implementation of the Goods and Services Tax and said corporates were being favoured over the rights of the marginalised communities.
Gandhi, who later took questions from the audience, also referred to his hugging the prime minister during the debate in parliament on the no-confidence motion, saying certain “hateful remarks” made against him by Modi prompted him to do so but “he (Modi) didn’t like and was upset by it”.
Gandhi is in Germany as part of reach out to the NRI community ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha elections. He will also go to the United Kingdom.
The Congress leader accused Modi government of not being keen on benefiting all sections from transformation taking place due to urbanisation.
“They do not feel that every single person in India should have access to fruits of transformation. They feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, Dalit, should not get the same benefits as the elite of the country gets. We feel everybody took the risk, everybody should get the reward,” Gandhi said.
“The other thing they have done is they have started attacking the support structures that were designed to help certain groups of people,” he added.
Gandhi said welfare measures of UPA government such as the right to food and the right to guaranteed employment had been weakened and money going into these schemes “is going into the hands of very few people, the largest corporates in the country.”
Gandhi alleged that demonetisation carried out by Modi had taken away lakhs of jobs as it had destroyed cash flow of small and medium businesses.
“China produces 50,000 jobs every 24 hours, India only 450,” Gandhi said, adding that bad implementation of GST had let to closure of thousands of businesses.
“These things are what has made people in India angry. That is what you get to read in the newspaper. When you hear about lynchings in India, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that is the reason for it,” Gandhi said.
He said the transition that is shaping the world requires certain protection for people. “That protection is being taken away and India is reacting to that. It is very dangerous in 21st century to exclude people. If you do not give people a vision in the 21st century, somebody else will which is not going to be good. That is the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes,” he said.
Gandhi said hate is a dangerous thing in a connected world and it is a choice. “I can fight you, take you on. I can compete with you but hating you is something I have to actively chose to do.”
Gandhi said his main complaint with Modi is that India has jobs problem but he does not say it and asked how it will be fixed if it is not even acknowledged.
Gandhi said level of violence is increasing in India and “women were getting a huge share of it.” He called for a change in the attitude of Indian men at the way they treated women.
He said non-violence in India was a foundational philosophy of India’s nationhood and noted violence can only be fought by non-violence.
Referring to assassinations of his grandmother Indira Gandhi and his father Rajiv Gandhi, he said the only way to move forward after violence is forgiveness.
Answering a question on the US and China, Gandhi said India’s role will be to balance like that of Europe.
He said India’s actions will be guided by self-interest and noted that it is closer to the US than to China.
Referring to Modi coming to power in India and “certain style” of leaders coming to power in the US and some European countries, he said the reason was failure of jobs, particularly to non-white collar persons.
“We are outcompeted by Chinese. That is creating a lot of anger,” he said.
He also said India was not in a race with China but was wanted to develop according to its values.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Supreme Court will hear on September 4 a plea by a group of serving Army officers against the dilution of AFSPA that gives immunity to military personnel from prosecution for their actions in disturbed and insurgency-hit areas.
A bench of Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit will hear the matter. The bench is already hearing a plea by kin of victims of alleged fake shootouts or extra-judicial executions in Manipur by state police and the armed forces.
A bench of Justice Madan B. Lokur, Justice S. Abdul Nazeer and Justice Deepak Gupta listed the matter for hearing by the two-judge bench on September 4.
The petition is essentially rooted in the top court’s order on alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur.
The petitioners have sought specific guidelines to protect military personnel from criminal proceedings for bona-fide actions done in the discharge of official duties in areas infested with insurgents and witnessing proxy wars against India.
The petitioners range from Section Commanders to Commanding Officers who lead section, platoon, company, battalion made of 10 to 1,000 men each.
They have contended that the protection provided by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) does not confer any special right on a soldier for himself, but facilitates his functioning and operations in extraordinary circumstances of proxy war, insurgency, armed hostility, ambushes, and covert and overt operations.
Drawing a distinction between routine policing and military operations in disturbed areas, they contended that absolute protection for bona-fide actions of soldiers in extraordinary situations is imperative to enable them to carry out their duties effectively and efficiently.
This protection from criminal prosecution for bona-fide actions of a soldier in the course of military operations in disturbed areas, the petition says, is sine qua non for the protection of the country’s sovereignty and integrity.
The officers have sought a court direction that “protection of persons acting in good faith under the AFSPA is sacrosanct with the sovereignty and integrity of the nation” and that “no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central government….”
They further averred that it was the Army alone which is familiar with the dynamics of these operations, and was capable of probing allegations of criminality, misuse, abuse, or of excessive use of power by men in uniform.
“Civil police or even the Central Bureau of Investigation can’t even be expected to be in the know of complete picture,” they claimed.
The petition by Colonel Amit Kumar and others is rooted in the persecution and prosecution of military personnel for carrying out their bona-fide duties in disturbed areas of the northeast, particularly in Manipur and trouble-torn Jammu and Kashmir, and directing registration of cases.
The military personnel, the petitioner officers contended, were being targeted without making any distinction or determination whether their actions were in good faith and without any criminal intent.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Ghulam Nabi Azad
New Delhi : In an apparent dig at the Narendra Modi government, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday said there was “no distance, as it is today” between the government and the opposition in Vajpayee’s era.
Paying tributes to former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at a prayer meeting here, Azad recalled how as the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister in Narasimha Rao government, he would frequently meet Vajpayee – who was the Leader of Opposition then – and share food and drinks with him.
“As the Parliamentary Affairs Minister between 1991 and 1996, I used to meet Atalji very frequently as he was the Leader of Opposition then. Three-four meetings between a Parliamentary Affairs Minister and Leader of Opposition are quite common. Since we were a minority government, it was natural to be dependent on the opposition,” Azad said.
“We would often eat together, sometimes in my chamber and at other times in his chamber (during Parliament session). There were no distances, no aloofness, unlike these days between the government and the opposition,” Azad said.
He said that Vajpayee was dedicated to the welfare and progress of the nation and its people.
—IANS
