Filing review petition will harm Hindu-Muslim unity, claims Rizvi

News Network
November 24, 2019

New Delhi, Nov 24: Filing a review petition challenging the Supreme Court's Ayodhya verdict will not be in the interest of Muslims and will "harm" Hindu-Muslim unity, National Commission for Minorities chairperson Ghayorul Hasan Rizvi said on Sunday.

The minority panel chief said filing the review petition would send a message to the Hindus that they were trying to put roadblocks in the way of building the Ram temple.

He also urged the Muslim side to accept the five-acre alternative land to be given for a mosque, saying they would be respecting the judiciary by doing so.

In an interview to PTI, Rizvi said the NCM had held a meeting after the Supreme Court verdict and all its members in one voice had said the verdict should be accepted.

The NCM chairperson said Muslims should help in building the temple in Ayodhya, while Hindus should help in the construction of the mosque. He said it would prove to be a milestone in strengthening the social harmony between the two communities.

According to Rizvi, filing of the review petition would send a message to the Hindus that the Muslim community wanted to put roadblocks in the way of building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, which he said would "harm" Hindu-Muslim unity.

"Review petition should not be filed at all because all sides, including the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, had promised that the verdict given by the Supreme Court will be respected," Rizvi said.

He alleged that Muslim bodies like the AIMPLB and the Jamiat were going back on their word after making the proclamation that the apex court's verdict would be respected.

"Not just now, for years they have been saying that they will accept the verdict by the Supreme Court, then what is the need for review?" Rizvi asked.

He wondered what was the point of the Muslim bodies in filing a review petition if they were also saying the review petition would be rejected "100 per cent".

"The common Muslim of this country is not in favour of a review petition because he or she does not want that matters which have been settled are again raised and the community gets caught up in such things," the NCM chief said.

"So the question is for whom are you filing the petition for? Are you filing the petition to harm the brotherhood and disturb the harmony among the communities? Are you doing this for your personal satisfaction?" he asked.

Rizvi said just four-five members of the AIMPLB, including All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi, were in favour of filing a review petition.

The NCM chief alleged that Owaisi does politics using Muslims and wants to "keep them caught up in such issues so that he gets the votes".

Rizvi underscored that leaders should avoid all this as there are several issues of Muslims and work should be done for that.

"This (review) will not be in the interest of Muslims. As the chairman of the commission, a number of Muslims meet me everyday and they say that review should not be filed," he said.

"It will not be in the interest of Muslims because the message will go to the Hindus that Muslims want to keep the temple issue unresolved which in a way will harm Hindu-Muslim unity," Rizvi said.

In its judgement in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi title case on November 9, the Supreme Court had ruled that the entire 2.77 acres of disputed land should be handed over to deity 'Ram Lalla' (infant Ram), who was one of the three litigants.

The five-judge constitution bench also directed the Centre to allot a five-acre plot to the Sunni Waqf Board in Ayodhya to build a mosque.

Rizvi said the Muslim side should accept the five-acre land, adding that they would be respecting the government and the court by doing so.

"There are six-seven mosques in Ayodhya and Muslim population is not much so they suffice," he said. "But it is not an issue of mosque, if the Muslim side accepts the land to be allotted by the government, it will be respecting the government and the court."

The AIMPLB and the Maulana Arshad Madani-led Jamiat had announced last Sunday that a review petition would be filed against the Ayodhya verdict.

The board, after a meeting in Lucknow, had also said it was against accepting the five-acre alternative land given for a mosque as it "will neither balance equity nor repair the damage caused".

The Maulana Mahmood Madani-led faction of the Jamiat, however, has said filing a review would not be fruitful.

The Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Waqf Board has said it would not file a review petition in the Ayodhya verdict. The board will hold a meeting to discuss various issues related to the verdict at its meeting on Tuesday.

Comments

abbu
 - 
Monday, 25 Nov 2019

rizvi jiii where is unity now within muslims and hindu.... raise your voice on lynching ... and other cases which is happening everyday to the muslims.... where is brotherhood now... even majority of hindus are saying that this verdict is not correct.. what u say abt that....

patroit
 - 
Sunday, 24 Nov 2019

robber come and attack your house and demolish then you go to supreme court of india to get justic but the court say give the land to robber who demolished your house....wah re waaa what a justic of our hindu suprem court...in other word

 

if you say we have power now & we are majoriry then mark my word in commining centure we will build the masjid in same place...

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Agencies
January 14,2020

Farukkhabad, Jan 14: In a shocking incident, a new-born baby was mauled to death by a dog inside the operation theatre (OT) of a private hospital in Farukkhabad on Monday.

Family members of the baby boy said that they noticed the hospital staff shooing a dog away from inside the operation theatre and soon after, they were told the baby boy, born just two hours ago, was dead.

The family members said that they found the baby's body on the floor and it had deep gashes around the neck and other parts of the body.

District magistrate Manvendra Singh has ordered an FIR and the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Chandra Shekhar said the hospital has been sealed and an inquiry ordered into the incident.

Sources said that the hospital where the incident took place was unregistered and was being run adjacent to a government hospital.

According to the FIR lodged with Sadar Kotwali police, the infant's father Ravi Kumar said he had admitted his wife Kanchan in the hospital on Monday and she was taken for a C-section to the operation theatre.

After the delivery, Kanchan was shifted to the ward but the family was told that the baby would be shifted later.

An hour later, the family was informed that the baby had died.

The family members then saw the hospital staff trying to chase a dog out of the operation theatre.

The family members forced their way into the operation theatre and found the infant lying on the floor with several injuries on the neck.

The police said that the baby's body has been preserved for examination and post mortem.

The FIR has been registered against Dr Mohit Gupta, and some of the staff members who were present during the delivery.

The hospital owner, Vijay Patel, however, feigned complete ignorance about the incident and said that he had been told that the baby was born dead.

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News Network
June 27,2020

Jun 27: Alittle-known Indian IT firm offered its hacking services to help clients spy on more than 10,000 email accounts over a period of seven years.

New Delhi-based BellTroX InfoTech Services targeted government officials in Europe, gambling tycoons in the Bahamas, and well-known investors in the United States including private equity giant KKR and short seller Muddy Waters, according to three former employees, outside researchers, and a trail of online evidence.

Aspects of BellTroX's hacking spree aimed at American targets are currently under investigation by U.S. law enforcement, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

Reuters does not know the identity of BellTroX's clients. In a telephone interview, the company's owner, Sumit Gupta, declined to disclose who had hired him and denied any wrongdoing.

Muddy Waters founder Carson Block said he was "disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that we were likely targeted for hacking by a client of BellTroX." KKR declined to comment.

Researchers at internet watchdog group Citizen Lab, who spent more than two years mapping out the infrastructure used by the hackers, released a report that BellTroX employees were behind the espionage campaign.

"This is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed," said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

Although they receive a fraction of the attention devoted to state-sponsored espionage groups or headline-grabbing heists, "cyber mercenary" services are widely used, he said. "Our investigation found that no sector is immune."

A cache of data reviewed by Reuters provides insight into the operation, detailing tens of thousands of malicious messages designed to trick victims into giving up their passwords that were sent by BellTroX between 2013 and 2020. The data was supplied on condition of anonymity by online service providers used by the hackers after Reuters alerted the firms to unusual patterns of activity on their platforms.

The data is effectively a digital hit list showing who was targeted and when. Reuters validated the data by checking it against emails received by the targets.

On the list: judges in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers in France and environmental groups in the United States. These dozens of people, among the thousands targeted by BellTroX, did not respond to messages or declined comment.

Reuters was not able to establish how many of the hacking attempts were successful.

BellTroX's Gupta was charged in a 2015 hacking case in which two U.S. private investigators admitted to paying him to hack the accounts of marketing executives. Gupta was declared a fugitive in 2017, although the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on the current status of the case or whether an extradition request had been issued.

Speaking by phone from his home in New Delhi, Gupta denied hacking and said he had never been contacted by law enforcement. He said he had only ever helped private investigators download messages from email inboxes after they provided him with login details.

"I didn't help them access anything, I just helped them with downloading the mails and they provided me all the details," he told Reuters. "I am not aware how they got these details but I was just helping them with the technical support."

Reuters could not determine why the private investigators might need Gupta to download emails. Gupta did not return follow-up messages. Spokesmen for Delhi police and India's foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

HOROSCOPES AND PORNOGRAPHY

Operating from a small room above a shuttered tea stall in a west-Delhi retail complex, BellTroX bombarded its targets with tens of thousands of malicious emails, according to the data reviewed by Reuters. Some messages would imitate colleagues or relatives; others posed as Facebook login requests or graphic notifications to unsubscribe from pornography websites.

Fahmi Quadir's New York-based short selling firm Safkhet Capital was among 17 investment companies targeted by BellTroX between 2017 and 2019. She said she noticed a surge in suspicious emails in early 2018, shortly after she launched her fund.

Initially "it didn't seem necessarily malicious," Quadir said. "It was just horoscopes; then it escalated to pornography."

Eventually the hackers upped their game, sending her credible-sounding messages that looked like they came from her coworkers, other short sellers or members of her family. "They were even trying to emulate my sister," Quadir said, adding that she believes the attacks were unsuccessful.

U.S. advocacy groups were also repeatedly targeted. Among them were digital rights organizations Free Press and Fight for the Future, both of whom have lobbied for net neutrality. The groups said a small number of employee accounts were compromised, but the wider organizations' networks were untouched. The spying on those groups was detailed in a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2017, but has not been publicly tied to BellTroX until now.

Timothy Karr, a director at Free Press, said his organization "sees an uptick in breach attempts whenever we're engaged in heated and high-profile public policy debates." Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said: "When corporations and politicians can hire digital mercenaries to target civil society advocates, it undermines our democratic process."

While Reuters was not able to establish who hired BellTroX to carry out the hacking, two former employees said the company and others like it were usually contracted by private investigators on behalf of business rivals or political opponents.

Bart Santos of San Diego-based Bulldog Investigations was one of a dozen private detectives in the United States and Europe who told Reuters they had received unsolicited advertisements for hacking services out of India - including one from a person who described himself as a former BellTroX employee. The pitch offered to carry out "data penetration" and "email penetration."

Santos said he ignored those overtures, but could understand why some people didn't. "The Indian guys have a reputation for customer service," he said.

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Agencies
February 29,2020

Islamabad, Feb 29: A coalition comprising digital media giants Facebook, Google and Twitter (among others) have spoken out against the new regulations approved by the Pakistani government for social media, threatening to suspend services in the country if the rules were not revised, it was reported.

In a letter to Prime Minster Imran Khan earlier this month, the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) called on his government to revise the new sets of rules and regulations for social media, The News International reported on Friday.

"The rules as currently written would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses," reads the letter, referring to the Citizens Protection Rules (Against Online Harm).

The new set of regulations makes it compulsory for social media companies to open offices in Islamabad, build data servers to store information and take down content upon identification by authorities.

Failure to comply with the authorities in Pakistan will result in heavy fines and possible termination of services.

It said that the regulations were causing "international companies to re-evaluate their view of the regulatory environment in Pakistan, and their willingness to operate in the country".

Referring to the rules as "vague and arbitrary in nature", the AIC said that it was forcing them to go against established norms of user privacy and freedom of expression.

"We are not against regulation of social media, and we acknowledge that Pakistan already has an extensive legislative framework governing online content. However, these Rules fail to address crucial issues such as internationally recognized rights to individual expression and privacy," The News International quoted the letter as saying.

According to the law, authorities will be able to take action against Pakistanis found guilty of targeting state institutions at home and abroad on social media.

The law will also help the law enforcement authorities obtain access to data of accounts found involved in suspicious activities.

It would be the said authority's prerogative to identify objectionable content to the social media platforms to be taken down.

In case of failure to comply within 15 days, it would have the power to suspend their services or impose a fine worth up to 500 million Pakistani rupees ($3 million).

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