The singer was detained on February 13 at Indira Gandhi International Airport. Besides Rahat, his manager Maroof, owner of an event management company Chitresh Shrivastava, and two employees of Mumbai-based Foreign Exchange firm were detained and have been questioned at length about the source of the money.

The DRI has impounded Khan’s passport along with the passports of his two associates Mahroof and Chitresh, who also have been set free.  According to reports, Khan and his associates have been asked to appear for questioning before the DRI on February 17.

The DRI is set to estimate the fine to be paid by the Pakistani singer. Earlier today, revenue intelligence officials questioned the singer extensively to find out where the money came from and why it was not declared.

Khan was detained on Sunday for allegedly attempting to leave the country with over 124,000 dollars. Indian laws allow up to 5,000 dollars in cash, or 10,000 dollars in traveller’s cheques to be taken abroad. Khan, along with his troupe of about 20 people, was scheduled to fly to Lahore on a Emirates flight after a series of performances in India.

They said the singer was carrying a huge amount of foreign currency which he did not declare to the immigration authorities. Two other persons accompanying him have also been detained, the sources said. Khan is being questioned and the amount of the money is being ascertained, they said.

The 37-year-old is nephew of Pakistani singing legend Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Three people, including a 17-year-old boy, were killed when Indian forces fired live ammunition to disperse protesters in Palhalan, a village north of Srinagar, said a police officer. Local residents said there was no clash with the troops, but soldiers fired when the protesters refused to disperse. The state government has ordered a probe into the shooting incident. “A clash had occurred near a highway in the morning and much after that we were peacefully protesting in the village,” said resident Merajuddin.

Later, as news of the shooting spread, thousands of people from Palhalan and neighboring villages chanting “Go India, go back” and “We want freedom” marched to a nearby highway and blocked it. Police and paramilitary soldiers fired warning shots and tear gas to quell those protests, said the officer. There were no reports of injuries.

USA and India object that this deal will breach the international protocol, regarding the trade of nuclear equipment and material. U.S also object that this deal will overstep “the guidelines of the 46-country Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which bars nuclear commerce between Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) members like China and non-member states like Pakistan”. Indeed, Pak-China Nuclear Deal was concluded in 1986, when China was neither the member of NSG nor it had signed the NPT. China signed the NPT in 1992 and became the member of NSG in 2004. By 2004, almost ¾th progresses had already been made on the deal between Pakistan and China. Therefore, neither of the two is applicable in case of this deal. Furthermore, the ‘Indo-US Nuclear Deal-2005’ later finalized in 2008, provides the precedence, and actually has opened the door for any such like deal in the future. Indeed, after setting precedence by itself, U.S has no legal and moral grounds to object the Pak-China Nuclear Deal.

As India was signing its eighth civilian nuclear deal with Canada on the sidelines of last month’s G20 meeting, its officials were voicing concerns about China’s sale of two power reactors to Pakistan. India’s deal with Canada follows similar agreements with a number of other countries including France and Russia since the exemption it received from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in the wake of the US-India nuclear accord that entered into force in 2008.

So why all the fuss over nuclear power reactors being provided under full international safeguards? The answer might lie in the timing of the orchestrated campaign. Although plans for the third and fourth reactors at Chashma were publicly known years before, opposition to them surfaced at the time of the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in May. This seemed a rather transparent bid to distract attention from the US-India nuclear deal, a fundamental violation of the Treaty and for that reason the source of continuing misgivings among many NPT members.

The reason the US has taken this stance is not hard to fathom. Having concluded a sweeping civilian nuclear deal with India, which was finalised this March, the US is hardly in a position to make a big deal out of this and actively oppose such cooperation between China and Pakistan. In fact the more Washington protests the more its own double standards are exposed to the non-nuclear weapons states. Moreover as some in the nuclear non-proliferation lobby in Washington have acknowledged the US may object but it “cannot prevent China from exporting these reactors”.

Attempts in the Indian media to depict China-Pakistan civilian nuclear cooperation as a “counter” to the Indo-US pact and equate the two are deliberately misleading and spurious. The latter deal has global scope and enables India to gain global access to nuclear material and technology as well as assured fuel supply from whichever supplier nation lines up for commercial advantage. The NSG waiver in fact opened the way for a veritable nuclear souk with eight countries signing agreements with India and Japan about to begin negotiations.

Kasab, 22, dressed in a traditional white tunic, sat with his head in his hands staring at the floor of the dock as the judge issued the sentence, three days after the Pakistani’s conviction on Monday.

“Today’s sentencing sends the message that keeping Kasab alive would be a crime in itself,” the public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said. “Terrorism and terrorists like Kasab cannot be tolerated. The death penalty is the only option.”

Defence lawyer K.P. Pawar had argued against capital punishment, suggesting his client was brainwashed into committing the offences while under the influence of Pakistan-based extremists.

Ajmal Kasab’s two alleged Indian accomplices were acquitted by the court which makes it clear that Mumbai attacks were planned in Pakistan without any assistance from within India. The verdict is also based mostly on the confession of Ajmal Kasab which he later denied and claimed to be given under torture.

The death penalty is likely to trigger a lengthy, possibly open-ended, appeal through the Indian courts. It will take years before the execution.

Source: The Dawn

Pakistan has also welcomed US President Obama’s call for security of nuclear material and hoped the summit would be a catalyst for fostering a nuclear security culture around the world while outlining its nuclear policy in a national statement at the Nuclear Security Summit. Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani is heading the Pakistani delegation at the two-day summit.

Islamabad said in a statement:

Pakistan has more than 35 years of experience in running nuclear power plants. With trained professional manpower and a strong nuclear safety and security culture, Pakistan fully qualifies for participation in civil nuclear cooperation at the international level.

The statement expressed Pakistan’s support for the renewed international interest in nuclear power generation to meet the challenge of climate change. “As a country with advanced fuel cycle capability, Pakistan is in a position to provide nuclear fuel cycle services under IAEA safeguards, and to participate in any non-discriminatory nuclear fuel cycle assurance mechanism.”

On nuclear security, Islamabad said it “would continue to refine and modernize its technical and human resources and mechanisms on safety and security of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, facilities, and assets. Pakistan would cooperate with the global community in accordance with its national policies and requirements as well as international obligations.”

Islamabad informed the world leaders that its nuclear program is security-driven with a policy of minimum credible deterrent but said it is against an open-ended arms race in South Asia.

Mr Singh further said ‘We worry about these contingencies. But, we have been assured by the United States, the Americans, that they are in safe hands’. He was referring to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Mr. Singh is forgetting one fact here that according to Indian government, the terrorists involved in Mumbai attack traveled hundreds of miles from Pakistan to India and were able to carry out the terrorist act. It took days for Indian forces to overcome the terrorists to end the bloodshed. Does it not show how weak the Indian security arrangements are? Are Indian security of nuclear arsenal also not vulnerable to terrorists?

World should be more worried about Indian nuclear weapons falling into terrorists’ hands rather than Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

This is what Dawn’s editor has to say about Rehman Malik’s comment about the involvement of India in Balochistan:

Talking about Indian involvement in terrorists activities in Pakistan, the Interior Minister Rehman Malik has come down hard on India. ‘We have solid evidence that not only in Balochistan but India is involved in almost every terrorist activity in Pakistan,’ Mr Malik recently claimed. On Balochistan, it is understood that, despite denials by both sides, Pakistan handed over a dossier on Indian activities there at the meeting between the Pakistani and Indian prime ministers in Sharm el Sheikh in July 2009, capping a long series of complaints on the issue by Pakistan.

What is notable about the claims of Indian involvement in Balochistan is that the international powers have not downplayed them. On the issue of Indian involvement in ‘almost every terrorist’ act in Pakistan, however, Mr Malik’s claim would appear to be an exaggeration, for it is well known that there are non-state actors inside Pakistan whose goal is to destabilize the state for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with India; indeed, many of those non-state actors regard ‘Hindu’ India as an even bigger enemy.

Be that as it may, we believe that the gist of Mr Malik’s blunt comments on India is correct. Whatever India may or may not be doing inside Pakistan, it is clear that the Indians are still unwilling to move out of the accusation mode. From the prime minister downwards, hardly a few days pass without some statement on ‘Pakistani’ involvement in yet-to-be-committed terrorist acts inside India. Puzzlingly, the Indians appear to be content with issuing public warnings and seem uninterested in sharing intelligence with Pakistan on the planning of such attacks. Surely, whatever doubts the Indian government has about Pakistan’s bona fides as a partner in the fight against terrorism, it has a bigger duty to try and thwart future attacks. Only public warnings but no intelligence-sharing seems to run contrary to the fulfillment of that duty.

More generally, the Indian pressure is counterproductive for two reasons. One, Indian cage-rattling is liable to distract the security establishment here just as the Pakistan Army is locked in battle with militant groups. True, India’s concerns are about the Kashmir-centric, anti-Indian militants, whereas the Pakistan Army is focused on fighting the anti-state militants. But consider this: many of the groups the army is fighting today are the same ones it was willing to ‘shield’ only a few years ago. Clearly, then, the Pakistan Army’s security calculations are not inflexible. Second, the problems between India and Pakistan go beyond militancy and involve genuine disputes. Ignoring the latter will not help defeat the former; India must recognize this and re-engage a Pakistani government that has repeatedly expressed its willingness to talk.

Source:

Jaswant Singh said that a prominent magazine India Today got five eminent historians to determine who was responsible for the partition of India. According to Singh, the editor of the magazine said that there was consensus among the historians that Jawaharlal Nehru, not Jinnah, was responsible for partition, and that his book was based on this consensus. Singh added that we need to re-examine history objectively and truthfully to figure out a path for the future.

Responding to a question, Singh said that Jinnah was forced to choose the option of partition, and that partition was an instrument to end all peace in the South Asian region. But, Singh added, “we can find a solution as we are all victims. We should know that no one will come back to restore peace for us unless we ourselves wake up…try and find out where we went wrong.” The veteran politician, now an independent member of the Indian parliament, concluded by stressing that “we must expand the constituency of peace in the region”.

In his new book “Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence“, which hit the stands on August 17, he recalls the events leading to Partition as well as the “epic journey of Jinnah from being the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, the liberal constitutionalist and Indian nationalist to the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan”. Some of the excerpts from the book “Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence” are quoted here to give an idea about the book.

“…Jinnah did not win Pakistan, as the Congress leaders – Nehru and Patel finally conceded Pakistan to Jinnah, with the British acting as an ever helpful midwife”.

“The cruel truth is that this partitioning of India has actually resulted in achieving the very reverse of the originally intended purpose; partition, instead of settling contention between communities has left us a legacy of markedly enhanced Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or other such denominational identities, hence differences…”.

“The searing agony of it torments still, the whys and what-fors of it, too. We relieve the partition because we persist without attempts to find answers to the great errors of those years so that we may never, ever repeat them. Also, perhaps by recounting them we attempt to assuage some of our pain”.

Mr. Jawant Singh has been expelled from the BJP and his basic membership has been canceled because of the book.

“Jaswant Singh’s views on Mohammad Ali Jinnah is against the party’s core ideology and amounts to grave indiscipline. The party’s move to expel him is justified,”

said Senior BJP leader and party incharge of Uttar Pradesh Kalraj Mishra. The book has been banned in state of Gujrat, India where the BJP has the government. This is freedom of speech in the so called largest democracy in the World.