National Politics

Grand Alliance’s Cabinet Expansion Today

RJD-JDU cabinet expansion
Mahagathbandhan or the Grand Alliance’s cabinet expansion ceremony will be held at around 11.30 am at the Raj Bhavan.

Mumbai:  Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar will expand his two-member cabinet today with a huge number of seats going to its alliance RJD as per the sources.

A total of 31 ministers, including members of the Congress, from different Mahagathbandhan or Grand Alliance parties, will be sworn into the cabinet today. At the Raj Bhavan, the ceremony will start at around  11.30 am.

All of the Janata Dal United’s ministers, including Vijay Kumar Chaudhary, Ashok Choudhary, Sanjay Jha, Madan Sahni, Jayant Raj, Sheela Mandal, Bijendra Yadav, Shravan Kumar, Sunil Kumar, and Jama Khan, are likely to remain in office under Nitish Kumar.
Tej Pratap Yadav, Surendra Yadav, Lalit Yadav, Kumar Sarvjeet, Surendra Ram, Shahnawaz Alam, Sameer Mahaseth, Bharat Mandal, Anita Devi, and Sudhakar Singh are the RJD candidates most likely to win cabinet positions.

Afaque Alam and Murari Lal Gautam from the Congress, and Santosh Suman from Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha will also take oath, along with Sumit Kumar Singh mostly, the sources said.

The Bihar cabinet can have up to 36 ministers, including the Chief Minister. Some ministerial posts will be kept vacant for future cabinet expansion, the sources said. Nitish Kumar broke away from the BJP and formed a government earlier this month with the RJD and other parties. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy, RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, were sworn in on August 10.

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International

Sri Lanka: Anti-India rebel leader’s wife approaches court to locate him 29 yrs after his arrest

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Colombo | The wife of an anti-India rebel leader in Sri Lanka has filed a petition to trace her husband, who has not been heard of since his arrest 29 years ago.

Srimathi Wijeweera, wife of former Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Rohana Wijeweera, yesterday filed a habeas corpus petition before the Appeal Court here, seeking an order for the government to produce her husband before court or release him.

Wijeweera, who led two bloody rebellions in the south of the country in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989, was believed to have been extra-judicially executed in November 1989 during the then government’s brutal crack down against the JVP.

She has cited several former state officials and military commanders as respondents in the petition. But some of them are not among the living now after 29 years of his disappearance.

The then Opposition had also accused the government of “extra-judicially executing” the Russia-educated Marxist leader.

She said that her husband was arrested in 1989 but was not heard of since.

Former Defence Secretary General Cyril Ranatunga, former State Minister of Defence Ranjan Wijeratne, General Hamilton Wanasinghe and General Cecil Waidyaratne are among the respondents named in the petition.

On November 13, 1989 Wijeweera was reported to have been shot dead, but the actual circumstances remain a subject of speculation.

Several versions of his death were circulated following the incident. The Sri Lankan Army stated that he had been shot in a confrontation between members of the JVP and the Army when he was taken by the Army under custody to help look at a JVP safe house.

A rumour later circulated that he was taken to a cemetery, shot in the leg and then summarily executed by being burnt alive in the crematorium.

The official line from the then Minister of State Defence Ranjan Wijeratne was that Wijeweera and a fellow JVP member, H B Herath, had been taken to the safe house to help the Army locate part of the JVP’s “treasure” and while the search was in progress Herath had pulled out a gun and shot Wijeweera dead.

Wijeweera’s 1987-1989 rebellion was triggered by the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of July 1987 when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took direct intervention steps to solve Sri Lanka’s north and east Tamil issue.

Wijeweera’s JVP called the Indian peace keepers who were sent to Sri Lanka’s north and east as the “Indian monkey force”.

The JVP’s terror campaign unleashed saw parliamentarians and political parties who supported the Indo-Lanka accord being shot and killed branding them traitors.

It also charged that Gandhi was planning to annex Sri Lanka as one of the Indian states.

Indian Peace Keepers were soon fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leading to the deaths of thousands of Jawans.

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