BJP CONCENTRATING ON UTTAR PRADESH
As the Bharatiya Janata Party is wary of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party coming closer in Uttar Pradesh, it is planning to hold at least one rally a month of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the state in the run-up to the 2019 general elections.
The BJP leadership is said to be preparing a list of “non-performing assets” in the state and may deny tickets to many of the 68 sitting MPs. The BJP has also stepped up efforts to strengthen its weakest link in the Hindi heartland—Purvanchal. PM Modi visited Sant Kabir Nagar in eastern UP on 28 June. His 14 July rally in Azamgarh, again in eastern UP, was in an area where even at the peak of the “Modi wave”, the BJP could not breach this Samajwadi Party bastion. It also lost nine of Azamgarh’s 10 seats in the 2017 Assembly elections.
Meanwhile, days after the government’s decision to increase the minimum support price of kharif crops to 1.5 times the cost of production, the PM is set to address farmers across the country. A few days ago, he addressed a Kisan Kalyan Rally in Punjab’s Malwa region. He will address one such rally in West Bengal’s Midnapore on 16 July. On 21 July, he will address another farmers’ rally in UP’s Shahjahanpur. He will then address a rally in Karnataka.
RUNAWAY GROOMS BEING BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
The NRI runaway grooms are proving to be a problem for Indian brides. More than 20,000 women, mostly in Punjab, have been abandoned by their NRI husbands based in the United States, Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand.
The Punjab government and the Ministry of External Affairs have been trying to tackle the situation for quite some time, and it has started showing results. The MEA has been advising girls’ families to take its help in checking the grooms’ antecedents before the marriage. But many fall prey to false claims made by the prospective husbands living abroad.
On Tuesday, an NRI groom, Nishan Singh Kahlon, who was declared a “proclaimed offender”, was “caught” at the Regional Passport Office (RPO) in Chandigarh. He had earlier fled to New Zealand after abandoning his wife and a son (10) about a decade ago.
Kahlon was deported from New Zealand after his wife Davinder Kaur, who belongs to Sardulgarh (Sangrur), moved an application. His passport was impounded. A native of Sangrur, Kahlon was detained as he appeared before the officials for the re-issue of his passport and was handed over to the police.
“At the RPO,” an MEA officer told this paper, “we have a dedicated staff to fast-track deportation applications moved by wives against their NRI spouses. One of the applications was by Kahlon’s wife.”
The couple was married in 2005. The husband fled to Australia in 2008. The man returned the following year and promised to take his wife and son with him, and even got the marriage registered. But he fled again to Australia after selling his ancestral property.
He was deported in 2011. In 2014, he got a new passport and fled to New Zealand along with his mother. A police case was registered against him and he was subsequently declared a proclaimed offender by the court. “We are pursuing many such cases to get the runaway NRI grooms deported from foreign countries,” the MEA official informed.
RS GIVES VOICE TO MORE LANGUAGES
Rajya Sabha members will now be able to speak in any of the 22 Indian languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, thanks to a decision taken by House Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu. The Rajya Sabha Secretariat has arranged for simultaneous interpretation facilities for five more languages—Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, Santhali and Sindhi. Naidu formally inducted the interpreters for these languages a few days ago.
Of the 22 scheduled languages, Rajya Sabha had earlier established simultaneous interpretation services for 12 languages—Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. For five languages—Bodo, Maithili, Manipuri, Marathi and Nepali—interpreters of the Lok Sabha are being deployed.
Naidu has always felt that the mother tongue is the natural medium to convey one’s feelings and thoughts without any retention. “In a multilingual setting such as Parliament, members must not feel handicapped or inferior to others due to language constraints,” Naidu told The Sunday Guardian.
Earlier, while presiding over a meeting of Rajya Sabha’s Hindi Committee Naidu had urged the members of the House of Elders to speak in Hindi preferably, “without fearing for grammatical mistakes”. Naidu once told this writer that he did not know Hindi when he first came to Delhi from Andhra Pradesh but soon picked up the language by speaking without any hesitation.
AYODHYA PRINCESS BECAME A QUEEN IN KOREA
A South Korean entrepreneur, Dale Han, 33 (Korean name, Deugcheon Han), who came to India as a member of the business delegation accompanying South Korean President Moon Jae-in, had vaguely heard of an Indian princess who had travelled by sea to his motherland to marry into the royal family and become a queen. “I did not know the importance of this princess who established India and Korea’s strong relations 2,000 years ago till President Moon Jae-in and Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build her memorial in Ayodhya,” Dale told The Sunday Guardian.
Every year, a large number of South Koreans visit Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Rama, to pay homage to their legendary Queen Heo Hwang-ok. She was first mentioned in a 13th century Korean text, Samguk Yusa, as the wife of King Suro of Geumgwan Gaya, which was a ruling city-state in Korea during the period of the Three Kingdoms.
According to the Samguk Yusa, Queen Hwang-ok was a princess (of Ayodhya) named Suriratna, which means “precious gem”, who travelled to South Korea in 48 AD to marry King Suro (which means yellow jade). She came to be known as Queen Hwang-ok and together they founded the Karak dynasty in the present Gimhae area of South Korea.
A book, Heo Hwangok Route: From India to Gaya of Korea, by Kim Byung-mo, an archaeologist and emeritus professor at Hanyang University, talks about ancient cultural and genetic connections between Ayodhya and Gimhae. The majority of Gimhae and Incheon citizens are proud of their old and unique connections with India, because they are direct descendants of Queen Hwang-ok’s 12 children.
A South Korean delegation recently interacted with the Uttar Pradesh government to discuss the construction of the Queen Hwang-ok’s memorial park in Ayodhya. Queen Hwang-ok’s memorial was reportedly first inaugurated in Ayodhya in 2001. In 2016, when PM Modi visited South Korea, the two countries agreed to build her bigger monument in Ayodhya.