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France, UK and the US launched a fresh bid Wednesday to name Masood Azhar, the founder of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed that carried out the Pulwama attack and others, as a UN-designated terrorist, as calls mounted for India and Pakistan to de-escalate tensions and exercise restraint. The United States, separately, called for restraint by both India and Pakistan in view of the Pakistani retaliatory action in response to an Indian airstrike on a Jaish training camp in Balakot, Pakistan. But it also told Pakistan, keeping the focus on terrorism, to abide by its UN “commitments to deny terrorists safe haven and block their access to funds”. France leads the new, and fourth, attempt to put Azhar on a UN blacklist that already includes the outfit he founded after his release by India in 1999 in exchange for passengers of an Indian Airlines flight hijacked by five people including one who would go on to run Jaish’s Balakot camp hit by India on Tuesday. All three previous atte

The government said Wednesday it has brought 42 non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs under price control, capping trade margin at 30 per cent, which would reduce their retail prices by up to 85 per cent. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has invoked extraordinary powers in public interest, under Para 19 of the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013 to bring 42 non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs under price control through trade margin rationalisation, an official release said. “Invoking paragraph 19 of DPCO, 2013, the government hereby puts a cap on trade margin of 30 per cent and directs manufacturers to fix their retail price based on price at first point of sale of product… of the non-scheduled formulations containing any of the 42 drugs,” the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DOP) said in a notification. As per data available with NPPA, the MRP for 105 brands will be reduced up to 85 per cent entailing minimum saving of Rs 105 crore to consumers, it added. Currently,

There’s a wrinkle in plans made by Asia’s richest man to take on  Amazon. com Inc and  Walmart  Inc on his home turf in India: his telecom and retail businesses can’t share data. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd., has outlined how he will marry the might of his group’s 9,900-plus retail stores and 280-million strong telecom user base to bolster his e-commerce venture. A senior  Reliance executive  says that any data sharing on customers between the two, could run into a legal wall. “They are different  companies  so there are data privacy rules,” Ashwin Khasgiwala, Reliance Retail Ltd.’s chief financial officer said at a conference in Mumbai on Tuesday. “They’re different platforms,” he said while declining to elaborate on how the group plans to overcome it. While its brick-and-mortar retail businesses are housed in Reliance Retail, the telecom operations are in a separate legal entity Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. Legal hurdles in sharing info

At an energy conference in New Delhi in March 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had set out a road map for reducing India’s crude oil imports by 10 per cent by 2022. This at a time when almost 77 per cent of the country’s fuel requirements were met via imports. Four years later, the “2022 dream” appears to be a distant reality. The share of imports, in fact, increased to 81.7 per cent in 2016-17, 82.9 per cent in 2017-18 and 84.7 per cent in 2018-19, according to the latest available government data. This is despite the ministry of petroleum and natural gas (MoPNG) taking all possible policy measures — including steps to ramp up production, reforming the Hydrocarbon Exploration Licensing Policy, or HELP, and taking a series of de-bottlenecking measures in NELP, or New Exploration Licensing Policy, and pre-NELP regimes. One basic question one might ask is: Do we have enough hydrocarbon resources? “We may not be blessed with natural resources as Saudi Arabia is, but esti

Mumbai/New Delhi: The Indian economy’s momentum continues to slow, shows the latest update of the Mint Macro Tracker, launched in October last year to provide a state-of-the-economy report each month based on trends across 16 high-frequency economic indicators. The Mint Macro Tracker shows that out of the 16 macroeconomic indicators, only four were in the green (above the five-year average trend) as of January 2019, while eight indicators were in the red (below the five-year average trend). This reading is significantly worse than what it was six months ago, the data shows. January’s score is also a shade worse than that of December 2018—which itself marked a downward slide compared to previous months—when five indicators were in the green, and eight indicators were in the red. The domestic consumer economy remains the weakest spot, with automobile sales falling, air passenger traffic sluggish, and tractor sales anaemic. Data from the consumer confidence surveys of th

On the face of it, India getting an invite to address the gathering of the foreign ministers from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation may not look like a big deal. Sceptics have long argued that the OIC has the distinction of competing with the Non Aligned Movement and the League of Arab Nations for the unflattering tag of the world’s most ineffective international organisation. Yet, there is no question that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s participation at the meeting in Abu Dhabi is a significant discontinuity in India’s engagement with the Muslim world. It also caps one of the least understood but most successful endeavours of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy — its recasting India’s relations with the Middle East. To be sure, analysts around the world have noted Modi’s felicity to be befriend apparent adversaries — Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, Egypt and Turkey as well as Israel and Palestine. Observers are also impre

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is often in the news for its own doings, or due to the doings of others and sometimes because of the intent of the accused to evade the law. The CBI, legally known as Delhi Special Police Establishment, cannot function in a state unless the matter is referred to it by a high court or the Supreme Court or by the consent of the state government concerned. Even the central government employees posted in states are not within its jurisdiction as per anti-corruption and other laws. Advertising There was always a demand for an all-India legislation to give the CBI statutory powers over central government employees posted anywhere in the country. But no such legislation has been passed. State governments have resisted such a law on the plea that a central agency would take away the powers of policing vested in them. The ruling party in a state, sometimes genuinely and many times on flimsy grounds, has denied permission to the CBI to inve

You kill two, 20 will be born to take up the cause. How many will you kill?” Maulana Masood Azhar, then 27, asked Arun Chaudhary, deputy director in the Intelligence Bureau (IB), who interrogated him in the high-security Kot Balwal jail in Jammu in the 1990s. Born in Bahawalpur in Pakistan, Azhar was arrested in Anantnag in 1994 after he entered Srinagar from Bangladesh on a fake Portuguese passport. Before that, he stayed near Regent’s Park in London, propagating the activities of Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), the parent body of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). He used Quran verses, which he knows by heart, to justify jihad in Kashmir. “The HuA was created on an anti-India sentiment by motivating the youth of the Punjab province of Pakistan against India and blaming it for all their problems, including water shortage,” said Chaudhary, who retired as special director, IB. “Azhar was responsible for sowing the seed that the only way to get Kashmir out of India was through jihad, which propell

In the winter of 1953, the Indian prime minister received an unusual letter, from a five-year-old boy. “Dear Mr Nehru,” it began. “Here in Granby, a small town in Canada, we have a lovely zoo, but we have no elephant.” Peter Marmorek had heard from his father that Jawaharlal Nehru had “lots of elephants and could probably dig up one for us.” Having understood the need to “dig up” quite literally, the child added, “I never knew that elephants lived underground, [but] I hope you can send us one.” It was an odd letter to merit the attention of a prime minister involved in the whirl of postcolonial nation-building. But it was not altogether surprising to government officials. Since Independence, the Indian government had cultivated an international reputation for generosity when it came to gifting baby elephants—often in response to requests from children. Nehru’s personal fondness for children aside, the highly favourable international publicity that accompanied these gifts advanc

AS Dulat is among India’s foremost experts on India-Pakistan relations and Kashmir. Since the late 1980s, he has worked in several high-ranking government offices in Jammu and Kashmir, giving him a ringside view of its highest political circles. Dulat went on to serve as the chief of the Research and Analysis Wing and the special director of the Intelligence Bureau between 1999 and 2000, during the Kargil war. From 2000 to 2004, during the term of the former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Dulat served as his advisor on Kashmir. In a conversation with Arshu John, an assistant web editor at  The Caravan , Dulat discussed the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan. On 26 February, India conducted air strikes in Balakot, in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, following a militant attack on a Central Reserve Police Force convoy, on the Jammu-Srinagar highway in Pulwama. The following day, tensions escalated as the two nations engaged in an aerial c