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1 ! " # $ % &#' #( " ) *#+* , ! 0 /2$ ! " #$ %&# % 3 " % " - 4 *! ) 5 6 " 1 7 $ 1 " " " * $ ./, )/891: 31 -4 Touted as the relaunch ofRahul Gandhi, theCongress on Sunday held amega Mehengai Hatao rally inJaipur addressed by Rahul,general secretary PriyankaGandhi and other leaders in thepresence of party chief SoniaGandhi. However, Sonia didnot address the rally due to ill-health. Around one lakh peo-ple gathered at the venue inJaipur and the Pink City waspeppered with huge cut-outsand placards of the Gandhifamily. However, Rahul got themaximum visibility on theposters, giving enough indica-tions about the party s effort topresent him as its leader of thefuture. The Congress is working tobring back Rahul as party pres-ident, a post he quit on moralgrounds following the 2019 Lok Sabha election sources said that theparty cadre was hinting that therally must focus only on Rahuland should be crafted as partof the strategy for his instal-lation as the head of the partyin a few months.

2 Sonia is cur-rently working as interim at once launchedan ideological attack on the BJP,saying that Hindu and Hindutvavadi were two dif-ferent terms and that the coun-try was of Hindus and notHindutvavadis. There is a collision oftwo words in the politics of thecountry today. One wordHindu and the other wordHindutva. I am a Hindu andnot a Hindutvavadi. The dif-ference between Hindu andHindutvavadi is that Hindusearches for the truth, it iscalled satyagraha butHindutvavadi searches forpower and it is called asSattagraha, Rahul said address-ing the gathering. Mahatma Gandhisearched for the truth,Nathuram Godse pumpedthree bullets into him. He(Godse) was a Hindutvavadi. AHindu is interested inSatyagrah. Hindutvavadi areonly after power, they don t careabout the truth.

3 AHindutvavadi is only afterSattagrah (search for power). Last month, Rahul soughtto differentiate betweenHinduism and Hindutva at aninternal meet of the party. Is Hinduism about beat-ing a Sikh, or a , of course, is. Inwhich book is it written? I havenot seen it. I have read theUpanishads. I have not read it, he said. We say there is a differ-ence between Hindutva andHindu religion. It is a simplelogic -- if you are a Hindu thenwhy do you need Hindutva?Why do you need this newname? Rahul the NarendraModi Government, Rahul said, Today one per cent of the pop-ulation of India has 33 per centwealth in their hands while 10per cent of the population has65 per cent of the money intheir hands. And the poorest 50per cent of the population hasonly six per cent of the moneyin their hands.

4 Those who ask what theCongress has done in 70 years,I want to ask you, leave this talkabout 70 years. What have youdone in the past seven years?The AIIMS, the airport fromwhere your plane flies, theCongress built them. The BJPG overnment is selling what theCongress created in 70 Government is workingonly for its industrialists, stat-ed on P11 93.)1 349 After returning from Delhi sborders, the farmers andfarm labourers in Punjabopened a front against theCongress-led StateGovernment on by the farmers,various unions of the farmlabourers in Punjab held a railroko agitation, disrupting railtraffic at several places for fourhours, seeking loan waiver,among other thingsPunjab s 32 farm organisa-tions have decided to raise theissue of complete loan waiver,as promised by the CongressParty before the 2017 elections,among other issues.

5 During the meetingbetween Punjab Chief MinisterCharanjit Singh Channi and 32kisan organisations onDecember 17, the issue ofcomplete loan waiver would beraised. The Punjab Congressshould immediately fulfil thepromises made in the electionmanifesto before the 2017 Assembly elections, as theforthcoming elections are veryclose but the farmers are bur-dened with debt, saidBharatiya Kisan Union-Ekta(Dakonda) president ButaSingh rail roko agitationthat was held on a call given bythe Sanjha Morcha a groupof farm labourers in Punjab -was held for four hours, seek-ing waiver of loans taken frommicrofinance companies,restoration of snapped powerconnections over non-paymentof bills, allocation of five-marlaplots to needy labourer fam-ilies in villages, among , the SanjhaMorcha had a meeting withChief Minister Charanjit SinghChanni on November 23.

6 At the time, the ChiefMinister did not give anyassurance over our demandsthat we raised. We decided towait for a few whennothing has been done, wedecided to launch the agitationto make the Government notonly listen to us, but do some-thing for us, said a represen-tative of Punjab Khet MazdoorUnion (PKMU), who did notwish to be representative saidthat most of the people whoparticipated in the protest onSunday, have returned from theDelhi borders on agitation was sup-ported by BKU Ugrahan thelargest farmers union on P11 ./, )/891 Prime Minister NarendraModi s Twitter handle wasbriefly hacked on Sunday, anda tweet claiming that India has officially adopted bitcoin aslegal tender was put out the handle of themicroblogging site wasrestored later, a link promisinga bitcoin giveaway had alreadybeen shared from the accountand was later deleted.

7 TheMinistry of Electronics andInformation Technology sIndian Computer EmergencyResponse Team (CERT-IN) ison the job and is trying toidentify the source of the hack-ing incident. Latest technolo-gy is being used for the same. This hacked push for cryp-tocurrencies comes amid theCentre s plan to table theCryptocurrency andRegulation of Official DigitalCurrency Bill, 2021 in theWinter Session of to Twitter, thePrime Minister Office (PMO)stated, The Twitter handle ofPM @narendramodi was verybriefly compromised. The mat-ter was escalated to Twitter andthe account has been immedi-ately secured. Continued on P11 ./, )/891 With four more people test-ing positive for Omicroninfection on Sunday, India stally of new variant of Covid-19 has climbed to 38. For thefirst time, Andhra Pradesh, kerala and Chandigarh report-ed Omicron cases.

8 Till now the new SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern inthe country has been detectedin Maharashtra (18), Rajasthan(9), Karnataka (3), AndhraPradesh (1), Delhi (2),Chandigarh (1), and kerala (1).However, bringing majorrelief, 15 people infected withthe Omicron variant were test-ed negative and were dis-charged from Governmenthospitals in Rajasthan andMaharashtra on Friday, healthofficials in the two States Maharashtra StateGovernment banned largegatherings and imposed otherrestrictions within Mumbai asits yet another district, Nagpur,reported its first Omicron caseon Sunday with a 40-year-oldman testing positive for thisvariant of coronavirus afterreturning from a West the 18 cases of Omicronvariant in Maharashtra, fivehave been reported fromMumbai, 10 from PimpriChinchwad, and one each fromKalyan Dombivli, Pune , a third case ofOmicron was detected inKarnataka.

9 A 34-year-oldreturnee from South Africahas tested positive. He is iso-lated and being treated in aGovernment Chandigarh, a 20-year-old man from Italy, who land-ed in India on November 22and was diagnosed with Covidon December 1, has testedpositive for the Omicron vari-ant. He is fully vaccinated withthe Pfizer vaccine. Continued on P11 ! 60 91 Paul Zacharia, whom theprogressive writers forum,describe as Malayalam litera-ture s lone avant-garde writerand who has been honouredwith the kerala Government shighest literary award,Thunchathu Ezhuthachan in2020, finds himself as anaccused in a multi-crore finan-cial embezzlement chargesheet filed bythe Central Bureau ofInvestigation against Zachariaand four others in aThiruvananthapuram courtstates that the accused misusedthe foreign aid received fromWord and Deed (W&D)

10 , aNetherlands-based evangelistorganisation, allegedly for reha-bilitating street children in thedistricts of Kottayam andErnakulam and to start schoolsfor re-educating the accused, accordingto the CBI, purchased fouracres of land in Ernakulamsuburb which they later sold toa private individual at an exor-bitant rate. The children whowere inmates of the resettle-ment centre were admitted toGovernment schools and put inorphanages, said financial and proce-dural irregularities wereexposed by some of the mem-bers of the director board ofGood Samaritan Project Indiaand Catholic ReformationLiterature Society, two evan-gelical organisations whichwere the beneficiaries of the aidfrom W&D. The organisationW&D is headed by celebratedevangelists like John Otten andRick Postma, who are the mainstrategists behind the missionlaunched by Free the alleged crimewas committed in 2006, thethen Government and thepolice chief, Jacob Punnoose,had dismissed the pleas sub-mitted by the director boardmembers of Good SamaritanProject India and CRLS demanding a probe into thecharges.