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India Today
3 days ago
- Business
- India Today
Nehru didn't give Bengaluru HAL, we did: Mysuru royal fact-checks DK Shivakumar
While the dust seems to be settling on the rumour surrounding Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) being supposedly moved from Bengaluru to Andhra Pradesh, another one regarding its origins seems to be Karnataka Ministers had strong reactions to the rumour, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu issued a reality check and clarified he did not intend to relocate the Mysuru scion and BJP MP Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar has stepped in with a fact-check of his own — this time aimed at Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, who had claimed that former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru 'gave us HAL'. SHIVAKUMAR'S NEHRU CLAIM CHALLENGED Wadiyar, through a series of posts on X, contested the Deputy Chief Minister's claim that HAL was established in Bengaluru by Nehru. Shivakumar had said, 'As our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru ji gave us, it is a base.'The BJP MP, in a thread of tweets explained the history of HAL and its establishment. HAL was founded in 1940 by Indian industrialist and 'Father of Transportation in India' Walchand Hirachand, with support from American businessman and then president China National Aviation Corporation William D Pawley, and the Kingdom of had nothing to do with HAL,' Wadiyar stated, offering a detailed historical rebuttal, asserting that the first Prime Minister of independent India had no role in HAL's founding. 'William D Pawley, president of InterContinent Corporation, had earlier partnered with China's Nationalist government to start CAMCO, which assembled Hawk 75 and CW-21 fighter aircraft, in 1933.'Wadiyar went on to narrate how, in October 1939, Pawley met Hirachand on a Pan Am Clipper flight to Hong Kong. It was during this meeting that the idea of manufacturing aircraft in India was floated. Pawley visited India in July 1940 and obtained British approval for the project. Hirachand, however, failed to convince shareholders of The Scindia Steam Navigation Company to back the BJP leader then explained why Hirachand turned to the princely states when — Baroda, Gwalior, Bhavnagar and Mysore — when private support became elusive. According to Wadiyar, only his ancestor Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, stepped forward with recounted how the Mysore government, in October 1940, under the Maharaja, granted 700 acres of land and invested Rs 25 lakh in shares to support the venture after Hirachand and Pawley arrived in ESTABLISHMENT DETAILSadvertisementHindustan Aircraft Company was incorporated on December 23, 1940, under the Mysore Companies Act, with Hirachand as chairman. Its office was opened at Eventide on Domlur Road. Construction began on December 24, and by mid-January 1941, the first building and runway were to Wadiyar, the company's first order came from the British Government of India — 74 Vultee Attack Bombers, 30 Harlow PC5 Trainers, and 48 Curtis Hawk Fighters, all to be delivered by 1942. In April 1941, the British Indian Government injected an additional Rs 25 lakh into the the Japanese threat intensified, CAMCO shifted its machinery to Mysore STATE'S WARTIME ROLEWadiyar elaborated on the war years, noting that on August 29, 1941, the first Harlow Trainer was handed over to the Government of the Pearl Harbour attack and the loss of British naval strength in Malaya, fears of a Japanese invasion led the British to buy out Hirachand's shares in April 1942. The Mysore government, however, refused to sell its stake and only transferred control temporarily for the duration of the also pointed out that Hirachand made a profit of Rs 57 lakh from his Rs 25 lakh investment. In 1943, the United States Army Air Forces took over the factory, renamed it the 84th Air Depot, and used it as a major hub for Allied aircraft repairs in India and Burma. By the end of the war, it was one of Asia's largest aircraft overhaul facilities. 'During World War II, the British Indian Government paid the Mysore State a solatium of Rs 12.11 lakh to sterilise its interest,' Wadiyar said. 'Mysore State became an active partner again in April 1946,' he October 1,1964, the factory was restructured as Hindustan Aeronautics Limited under the Union Defence FOR RIGHTFUL RECOGNITIONTurning to the present, Wadiyar expressed disappointment over the lack of institutional memory and public Mysore State's pivotal role, HAL and the Karnataka government barely acknowledge the Maharaja's contribution to its establishment. Its website features only Walchand's photo,' he noted. He urged the government to refrain from rewriting history for political mileage: 'Instead of misrepresenting facts and glorifying the Nehru/Gandhi family — especially with false claims — the Karnataka government and the Deputy Chief Minister should focus on ensuring that HAL is strengthened and given the impetus it requires to become a leader in its sector.''Shivakumar should take pride in the fact that HAL was built by Karnataka's leaders and contributes to the progress of Bharat,' he concluded. IN THIS STORY#Karnataka
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
First white South Africans arrive in US after Trump grants them refugee status
The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by Donald Trump's administration has arrived in the US, stirring controversy in South Africa as the US president declared the Afrikaners victims of a 'genocide'. The Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists, were met at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC by the US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and deputy secretary of homeland security, Troy Edgar, with many given US flags to wave. Reuters reported that the group numbered 59 adults and children, citing a state department official, while Associated Press said there were 49. At Dulles airport, Landau told the assembled white South Africans: 'It is such an honour for us to receive you here today … it makes me so happy to see you with our flag in your hands. He invoked his family's history, saying: 'My own father was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in … We respect what you have had to deal with these last few years.' He added: 'We're sending a clear message that the United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.' On the same day the group arrived in the US, Trump's government also ended legal protections that had temporarily protected Afghans from deportation, citing an improved security situation in the country, which is ruled by the Taliban. One consideration for resettling Afrikaners not Afghans was that 'they could be easily assimilated into our country,' Landau told reporters at the airport. Trump suspended the US refugee settlement programme in January, leaving more than 100,000 people approved for refugee resettlement stranded. Then, in February, he signed an executive order directing officials to grant refugee status to Afrikaners, whose leaders ruled during apartheid while violently repressing the Black majority. 'It's a genocide that's taking place,' Trump told reporters at the White House, when asked why white South Africans were being prioritised for resettlement above victims of famine and war elsewhere on the continent, echoing a far-right conspiracy theory that has also been amplified by his South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk. Trump added that the Afrikaners' race 'makes no difference to me'. He said South Africa's leaders were travelling to meet him next week, but that he would not attend the G20 leaders' meeting in Johannesburg in November unless the 'situation is taken care of'. Related: Trump administration offers refugee status to 49 white South Africans South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said at a conference in Ivory Coast that he had told Trump by phone that he had received false information about white South Africans being discriminated against, from people who disagreed with government efforts to redress the racial inequalities that still persist three decades after white minority rule ended. 'We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we'll continue talking to them,' he said. White South Africans typically have 20 times the wealth of Black people, according to an article in the Review of Political Economy. The Black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, compared with 9.2% for white people. Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director of Homes Not Borders, a refugee care non-profit in the Washington area, stood in the airport check-in area with a sign reading: 'Refugee. Noun. A person who has been forced to leave his or her country due to persecution, war or violence. Afrikaners are not refugees.' Related: Episcopal church says it won't help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status Osuri said of Trump's policy: 'It's for showing: 'Look at us. We do welcome people as long as they look like us.'' Democrats also condemned the Afrikaners' resettlement. The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen told a thinktank event: 'To watch the Trump administration apply what I call their global apartheid policy … is just an outrageous insult to the whole idea of our country.' Meanwhile, the Episcopal church said it was ending its decades-long work with the US government supporting refugees, after it was asked to help resettle the white South Africans, citing its 'commitment to racial justice and reconciliation'.
NDTV
15-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
A Blindfolding In J&K, To Headley: What Reporting Days Taught Me About Pakistan
It was the evening after the guns had fallen silent. A ceasefire - hurriedly brokered by Washington, as many in the West believe but India denies - had halted the missile-and-drone skirmish between India and Pakistan that had brought South Asia to the brink. British journalist Piers Morgan, ever eager to provoke, assembled a panel: two Indians, two Pakistanis, including a former foreign minister, to dissect what had just unfolded. What followed was all too familiar. The Pakistani guests denied involvement in the Pahalgam terror attack - not just this one, but all others going back to the early 1990s. Instead, they cast themselves as victims, suggesting India was the aggressor, allegedly orchestrating attacks in western Pakistan. The show has a global following, and the Pakistani panellists were fully aware of that. I watched with growing unease. After more than three decades in journalism - many of them covering Kashmir - I have heard this script before. But knowing what I know, having seen what I have seen, it's not just misleading. It's an insult to the truth. The Pahalgam massacre, where families were gunned down in broad daylight, was no anomaly. It followed a grimly familiar playbook - one authored not in the meadows of Kashmir, but in the war rooms of GHQ Rawalpindi. The Pakistani Army, alongside the ISI, has long used terror as a proxy, orchestrating attacks while denying involvement. Some of my British colleagues in media and academia struggle with this, often falling back on the "both sides" narrative. But the victims and the perpetrators are not equal. Let me recall a few moments that bring this reality into sharp relief: The Afghan In Downtown Srinagar It was the early 1990s. A small, easily missed PTI report claimed that Afghan militants had, for the first time, infiltrated Kashmir. It sent ripples through Indian intelligence. My photographer colleague, Neeraj Paul, and I tracked a lead to a rundown part of downtown Srinagar. We were blindfolded, bundled into a van, and taken to meet the Afghan group's leader. He was short, tense and masked with a handkerchief. Two pistols glinted in his hands. He confirmed he was Afghan and admitted being pushed into Kashmir by the handlers of camps run by the Pakistani military. But before we could go further, his aides whispered urgently. Moments later, 30 to 40 gunmen emerged from behind walls and fired into the sky. Neeraj and I thought we wouldn't make it out alive. The commander told us to leave - he wasn't in the mood to talk anymore. Later that day, I visited 'Papa 2', the joint interrogation cell. An army colonel I knew there told me they had sent a team in pursuit of some infiltrators. When I said we had been caught in the crossfire, he looked visibly relieved. The Man Who Knew Too Much Fast forward to 2011. A federal courtroom in Chicago. Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, tall, composed, speaking in a flat American accent, laid bare the truth behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. It wasn't just Lashkar-e-Taiba, he said. The ISI had funded and guided the operation. He named an ISI officer- 'Major Iqbal' - as the man who gave him $25,000 for surveillance missions to Mumbai. Headley described how targets were handpicked, how his reconnaissance was coordinated from Pakistan. The evidence: emails, phone intercepts, travel records. Sitting in the courtroom, I watched as years of whispers and suspicions solidified into testimony under oath. It was one of those moments when the fog of geopolitics lifted, and the hand behind the curtain was suddenly visible to all. The Gunman Who Changed Course Farooq Ahmed, or Saifullah, once trained in a terror camp in Pakistan and took up arms in Kashmir. Years later, he stood for election in Srinagar, urging young Kashmiris not to make his mistake. 'There was no one to stop me,' he said. 'Now I want to be that voice.' Men like him - some reformed, some captured, some gone - confirm one thing: the road to terrorism runs through Pakistan's military-intelligence complex. So, watching that post-ceasefire panel, with Pak panellists in denial mode, felt like history being erased in real time. But this is about more than television spin. It's about memory. It's about the truth. The Support For Khalistani Movement Set Kashmir aside for a moment. Pakistan's military support to the Khalistan movement was just as calculated and corrosive. In 1997, during a visit to Lahore to report for a global channel, I was shown around a Khalistani indoctrination centre, where a Sikh father-son duo casually told me they had planted bombs across Punjab until the barbed wires came up. I met several of the men who had served jail terms for the hijacked Indian Airlines flights in 1981 and 1984, including their leader Gajinder Singh, whose presence in Pakistan has always been officially denied. Having covered both the Sikh and Kashmiri insurgencies closely, I am left with no doubt that Pakistan's deep state has long used these movements as tools to bleed India, driven by an unrelenting obsession with avenging 1971. Even David Headley, in his Chicago testimony, admitted it outright. That brings us to May 12. That evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation - not with bureaucratic restraint, but with raw emotion. The country was still reeling from the bloodshed in Pahalgam. His speech was grief-stricken, furious, resolute. Operation Sindoor, he declared, was India's answer. 'Every terrorist and every terror organisation now knows what it means to strike at our people,' he thundered. Modi revealed that Pakistan came to the table only after being hit militarily and morally. The damage from India's swift retaliation was not just surprising; it was, in his words, devastating. Modi's speech was more than a policy statement. It was a message - to Indians and the world - that terror would no longer be treated as routine tragedy. These strikes went deeper into Pakistan than ever before, targeting not just the foot soldiers but the very roots of the infrastructure of terror. Is Rawalpindi Listening? Yet, for those of us who have witnessed Kashmir's long, bruising history, a familiar unease lingers. Will this response be enough to deter Rawalpindi's generals, who've long seen terror as strategic depth? Pahalgam wasn't an isolated event. It's part of a bloody continuum - from Uri to Pulwama, from the Parliament attack in 2001 to Mumbai 2008. All bear the same fingerprint: Pakistan. And beneath these headline horrors is a quieter, ongoing war - low-intensity, high-cost - that's festered since 1989. Modi's tone evoked his past addresses. After Uri in 2016, he reminded Pakistan that the true fight should be against poverty and illiteracy. After Balakot in 2019, he struck a chord of unity. But this time, the warning was stark: 'If Pakistan doesn't act against terror, it will destroy itself.' The tragedy is, attacks like Pahalgam happen because memories fade. Mumbai blurred, then Uri happened. Uri faded, then came Pulwama. Now it's Pahalgam - a brutal reminder that the enemy across the border remains rogue, unrepentant and skilled in denial. A Long-Term Plan That leads to a conclusion I have long held: surgical strikes, such as Balakot and now Operation Sindoor, grab headlines, but their impact is fleeting. If India truly wants to uproot the machinery that breeds and exports terror, short-term retaliation must be anchored in a long-term doctrine. The real challenge lies in Pakistan's power structure -- not its people, who are busy surviving, but the twin pillars of its military and mullahs, who are obsessed with Kashmir. If the Pakistani Army genuinely wants to dismantle the terror network, it could erase Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed - both globally designated terror outfits - in a day. But it won't. Learn From Mossad And CIA Both Israel and the US, under the banner of national security, routinely eliminate threats: no UN outrage, no moralising. In 2018, Mossad agents stole Iran's nuclear archives from a Tehran warehouse; in 2020, Iran's top nuclear scientist was assassinated, reportedly by an AI-assisted remote weapon; in 2024, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was gunned down in Tehran. In 2020, the US killed General Qassem Soleimani with a drone near Baghdad. There are dozens of similar covert operations conducted by the CIA and Mossad. India could consider such precision tactics - but it needs Mossad-level intelligence and the will to strike where it truly hurts. Pakistan is not a monolith. Its Punjabis dominate, while Balochs, Sindhis, Muhajirs and Pashtuns simmer with resentment. That's where India should invest - discreetly. There's already suspicion of Indian support in Balochistan; true or not, it's the right nerve to press. And I firmly believe that in the national interest, we must also quietly back democratic actors within Pakistan who despise the army but toe its line to stay politically alive. Many of them I have met in London and Washington - they're waiting for a shift. In the end, eradicating the roots of terror requires more than missiles. It demands patience, precision and a vision that outlasts the headlines. Let the guns blaze in silence.
Express Tribune
12-05-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
Apple may raise iPhone prices, reports WSJ
Apple is weighing price hikes for its upcoming fall iPhone lineup but is keen to avoid linking any increases to US tariffs on imports from China, where most of its devices are assembled, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The technology giant's shares were up 7% in premarket trading, tracking gains in the wider market after Washington and Beijing agreed to temporarily slash the reciprocal tariffs on Monday. But Chinese imports will still be subject to a 30% levy in the US. Apple is among the most prominent firms caught in US -China trade tensions, which intensified in recent months after a series of tariffs initiated by President Donald Trump. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the WSJ report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Raising prices could help Apple cushion higher costs stemming from the tariffs that have hampered global supply chains and forced the company to shift more production to India. Apple said earlier this month that tariffs were expected to add about $900 million in costs during the April-June quarter and that it would source a majority of the iPhones sold in the U.S. in the period from India. Analysts have for months speculated about a price increase from Apple, but warned that such a move could cost it market share, especially as rivals such as Samsung try to attract consumers with AI features that Apple has been slow to roll out. The cheapest iPhone 16 model was launched in the US with a sticker price of $799, but could cost as much as $1,142 due to tariffs, per projections last month from Rosenblatt Securities, which say the cost could rise by 43%. The WSJ report said Apple was planning on coupling the price hikes with new features and design changes including an ultrathin design, which could help justify the increases. was in the crosshairs of the White House last month after its low-cost Haul unit weighed listing import charges due to US tariffs, prompting the Trump administration to accuse the company of engaging in a hostile political act.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Apple considers raising iPhone prices, WSJ reports
(Reuters) -Apple is weighing price hikes for its upcoming fall iPhone lineup but is keen to avoid linking any increases to U.S. tariffs on imports from China, where most of its devices are assembled, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The technology giant's shares were up 7% in premarket trading, tracking gains in the wider market after Washington and Beijing agreed to temporarily slash the reciprocal tariffs on Monday. But Chinese imports will still be subject to a 30% levy in the U.S. Apple is among the most prominent firms caught in U.S.-China trade tensions, which intensified in recent months after a series of tariffs initiated by President Donald Trump. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the WSJ report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Raising prices could help Apple cushion higher costs stemming from the tariffs that have hampered global supply chains and forced the company to shift more production to India. Apple said earlier this month that tariffs were expected to add about $900 million in costs during the April-June quarter and that it would source a majority of the iPhones sold in the U.S. in the period from India. Analysts have for months speculated about a price increase from Apple, but warned that such a move could cost it market share, especially as rivals such as Samsung try to attract consumers with AI features that Apple has been slow to roll out. The cheapest iPhone 16 model was launched in the U.S. with a sticker price of $799, but could cost as much as $1,142 due to tariffs, per projections last month from Rosenblatt Securities, which say the cost could rise by 43%. The WSJ report said Apple was planning on coupling the price hikes with new features and design changes including an ultrathin design, which could help justify the increases. was in the crosshairs of the White House last month after its low-cost Haul unit weighed listing import charges due to U.S. tariffs, prompting the Trump administration to accuse the company of engaging in a hostile political act. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
