"Thrash Rahul Gandhi": Savarkar's Grandson Tells Uddhav Thackeray

New Delhi, Jan 18: Senior advocate Indira Jaising urged the mother of Nirbhaya to pardon the men on death row who were convicted for the 2012 gang rape of her daughter.

Jaising took to Twitter to make the request shortly after Asha Devi on Friday expressed her disappointment following a Delhi court postponed the date of the execution of the four convicts.

"While I fully identify with the pain of Asha Devi I urge her to follow the example of Sonia Gandhi who forgave Nalini and said she didn't not want the death penalty for her. We are with you but against the death penalty," Jaisingh tweeted.

While I fully identify with the pain of Asha Devi I urge her to follow the example of Sonia Gandhi who forgave Nalini and said she didn’t not want the death penalty for her . We are with you but against death penalty. https://t.co/VkWNIbiaJp

— Indira Jaising (@IJaising) January 17, 2020

Asha Devi lashed out at Jaisingh suggesting pardon for the convicts. "I can't believe how Indira Jaising even dared to suggest such this. I met her many times over the years in Supreme Court, not once she asked for my wellbeing and today, she is speaking for convicts. Such people earn livelihood by supporting rapists, hence rape incidents don't stop," Asha Devi told ANI.

Nalini was arrested and convicted for her role in the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Earlier on Friday Asha Devi had lashed out at the courts and the government stating that "the same people who had in the year 2012 gone around participating in rallies and raised slogans for women's safety are playing with the death of my daughter for their political gains. They have stopped the execution for their political gains."

The death-row convicts who were earlier slated to be executed on January 22 at 7 am are set to be hanged on February 1 at 6 am.

Asha Devi rued that the convicts got what they wished for. "I will not be satisfied until they are hanged," she added.

Four convicts, Vinay, Akshay, Pawan and Mukesh were convicted and sentenced to death for raping a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in the national capital on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012.

The victim, who was later given the name Nirbhaya succumbed to injuries at a hospital in Singapore where she had been airlifted for medical treatment.

New Delhi, Mar 9: The Centre and the Delhi government are working in close coordination to deal with coronavirus, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said here on Monday.

Talking to reporters after a review meeting with Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on the preparedness for COVID-19, the chief minister said people arriving from foreign countries are being screened at airports.

A campaign will be run to make people aware of the preventive measures to contain the spread of the disease, Kejriwal said.

Health Ministry sending directives to states: Vardhan

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said the government is prepared to deal with novel coronavirus and his ministry is sending directives, including guidelines, to states in all the languages on ways to contain it.

"We are sending detailed guidelines to all states on ways to contain coronavirus. Have asked states to strengthen laboratories and manpower to effectively deal with coronavirus and form early rapid action teams," Vardhan told reporters adding, that the government is prepared to deal with the infection.

Vardhan stressed on a coordinated action between all concerned departments and agencies for activities such as contact tracing, community surveillance, hospital management, identification of isolation wards, ensuring adequate personal protection equipment and masks and risk communication for mass awareness.

Jan 13: India lost more than $1.33 billion to internet restrictions in 2019 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government pushed ahead with his party’s Hindu nationalist agenda, raising tensions and sparking nationwide protests.

The worst shutdown has been in Kashmir, where after intermittent closures in the first half of the year, the internet has been cut off since Aug. 5 following the government’s decision to revoke the special autonomous status of the country’s only Muslim-majority state, a study said. The prologued closure was criticized by India’s highest court, which ruled Friday that the “limitless” internet shutdown enforced by the government for the last five months was illegal and asked that it be reviewed.

India imposed more internet restrictions than any other large democracy, according to the Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2019 report released by Top10VPN, a U.K.-based digital privacy and security research group. The South Asian nation recorded the third-highest losses after Iraq and Sudan, which lost $2.31 billion and $1.86 billion respectively to disruptions. Worldwide internet restrictions caused losses worth $8.05 billion, the report said.

The cost of internet blackouts was calculated using indicators from groups including the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union, and the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center. It includes social media shutdowns in its calculations.

India’s ministry of information and technology didn’t respond to an email seeking a response to the report’s findings.

‘Conservative Estimates’

Through 2019, India shut access to the internet for over 4,000 hours. The report added shutdowns in India were often narrowly targeted, down to the level of blocking city districts for a few hours to allow security forces to restore order. Many of these incidents were not included in the report.

“These are conservative estimates,” said Simon Migliano, head of research at U.K.-based Top10VPN. “Internet shutdowns are increasing and it shows a damaging trend.”

India’s other major internet disruptions coincided with two moves by the government that affect India’s Muslim minority. The first disruption took place in November in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan after the Supreme Court handed a victory to Hindu groups over Muslim petitioners in a long-simmering dispute over a plot of land.

There were further disruptions in December when protests erupted against the introduction of a religion-based law that allows undocumented migrants of all faiths except Islam from neighbouring countries to seek Indian citizenship. The government enforced shutdowns across Uttar Pradesh and some Northeastern states in order to quell the protests, the report said.