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Delhi gang-rape case: Accused Ram Singh commits suicide in Tihar

NEW DELHI: In a sensational twist in the gruesome Delhi gang rape-cum-murder case, one of the accused Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide in a high-security cell in Tihar Jail early on Monday morning, raising questions over monitoring of undertrials.

Significantly 33-year-old Ram Singh, who has a slight deformity in his right hand after an accident, hanged himself from the grill of his cell in jail No.3 using his clothes, jail officials said.

The news of his death immediately triggered demands from his lawyers and family for a CBI probe. They alleged that he was murdered inside the jail and refused to believe that he could have committed suicide.

Forensic experts have visited the jail premises to collect samples. Singh was under depression for the past couple of days and on Sunday evening, he even did not have food, jail sources said, a claim contested by his lawyers.

Since it was a death under suspicious circumstances, Delhi government ordered an inquiry by a metropolitan magistrate.

"Singh was not alone in the cell when he committed suicide. Other inmates were present and a guard was also posted. But nobody came to know about it. Around 5am, he was found hanging," a senior jail official said.

Prone to violent behaviour and mood swings, he had suicidal tendencies and was under "suicide watch," he said.

Singh, who was to be produced before court for its daily hearing, was rushed to the jail hospital where he was declared brought dead. His body will be taken to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital for post mortem.

"There is already an inquiry which has been ordered by Tihar Jail on suicide of the main accused. We are enquiring into the matter," R P N Singh, minister of state for home affairs, said.

The girl was raped in the bus by him and his five associates, including a minor, in south Delhi after brutally beating her and also her male friend. The girl died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.

Singh, who was arrested a day after the incident, was the driver of the bus in which the girl was raped. His brother Mukesh was driving the bus when the girl was sexually assaulted allegedly by them.

All the adult accused, charged with murder and gangrape, face punishment up to death. The other four accused came to the Saket court where lawyers are on strike.

M L Sharma, a lawyer claiming to appear for Singh, had moved the Supreme Court seeking transfer of the case out of Delhi on grounds that the trial would be vitiated in the capital. The court rejected it.

Singh's lawyer V K Anand said after the death that again they would move the Supreme Court for shifting the trial from Delhi as they feel that the accused are not safe here.

In a related development, the court hearing the case was informed about Singh's death. Additional sessions judge Yogesh Khanna ordered that an inquiry be held into it.

Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit met Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde in the wake of the alleged suicide by a December 16 gang rape case accused.

"A magisterial inquiry has already been ordered. Till the report comes, it will be difficult to comment on the issue. Let the autopsy report come, things will be clear," Dikshit said.

Singh's family alleged that he was murdered and demanded a CBI probe into the incident. "He has not committed suicide. He has been murdered and then hanged. I am saying this on the basis of the fact that evidences has been erased. He could not move his hand as it have fractures.

"I am also demanding that the post mortem be held infront me," he said.

Reacting to the incident, the girl's family said they were "surprised but not saddened" by the suicide and are waiting for the four others to be sent to the gallows.

"We are surprised at the suicide but we are not sad. He would have been hanged even otherwise. We wanted him to be hanged publicly. He might have hanged because of shame. Now we are waiting for the four others to be sent to gallows," he said.

Lawyers appearing for Singh and four others said "there is some foul play" behind the death.

"There is some foulplay. He cannot commit suicide. He is not such a person that he can commit suicide. He was very happy with the way the trial was going on," advocate V K Anand, who represents Singh and his brother Mukesh, alleged.

Lawyer A P Singh, appearing for Vinay Sharma and Akshay Singh, said that Ram Singh was "killed by jail authorities" and that Tihar is no longer safe for undertrials.

M L Sharma, who appeared for Singh initially, also alleged that Singh was killed by police.

Mamata Sharma, National Women's Commission chairperson, raised questions about the functioning of Tihar Jail, saying it was "shocking" that the administration could not protect the undertrial and demanded an inquiry.

Former Tihar director general Kiran Bedi said only an inquiry will tell under what special watch was he and what happened to that watch. "How did this man give this watch a slip? I think we need to wait for the inquiry," she said. 

India’s longest elevated road ready in Mumbai

Mumbai (TNP), March 10
India’s longest elevated road, the Eastern Freeway Project (EFP), is likely to be thrown open to traffic on Maharashtra Day (May 1). The construction work was completed on Saturday.

Construction work on the Eastern Freeway Project was completed on Saturday. — TNP

The 16.4-km-long facility is being constructed by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) as one of the showpiece infrastructure projects in the Maximum City.

The freeway will connect South Mumbai to Wadala and onwards to Ghatkopar in the eastern suburbs.

While 12.1 km of the EFP is completely elevated, the remaining 4.3 km will have a 500-metre-long twin tunnel. “Such kind of a tunnel is being built for the first time for an urban road in the country," MMRDA chief engineer Sharad Sabnis told reporters.

Once thrown open to traffic, the EFP will be India's longest elevated road, MMRDA officials say. At present, the country’s longest elevated road is the 10-km- long overpass on the NH 1 in Panipat which was thrown open last year.

“Over 2,000 workers, 100 engineers and other officials toiled for more than two years with 1.6 million bags of cement, 32,000 tonne steel, 3,346 girders and 2,600 km-long high-tension steel wires to complete the first part of the EFP,” said MMRDA officials.

The first part of the EFP will be a boon for the northeast-south traffic movement in Mumbai, passing through some of the most congested areas. It will be a high-speed corridor since it won't have any signals and thus would allow quick dispersal of traffic from South Mumbai to the eastern suburbs and onwards to Thane and Raigad to other parts of Maharashtra.

What Hugo Chavez did contibute to Venezuela?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died Wednesday. He was 58. For two years, an unspecified cancer in his lower body resisted surgery and treatment, and ultimately carried him away from the people who came to love him during his 14-year rule.
As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara wrote the day after Chavez’s death, the president earned the love of Venezuelans at home and leftists across the world for combining “the fiery rhetoric of Italian fascism” with the egalitarian priorities of Scandinavian socialism. The progressive social and economic policies he instituted from his election in 1999 onward inspired the business class he was successfully tethering to plot his death or disappearance. In 2002, an American-supported attempt to oust Chavez failed. Afterward, the privately owned media in the United States and Venezuela relentlessly sought to portray him as a dictator.
What were his achievements? One of Chavez’s first acts was to nationalize Venezuela’s oil industry. Before Chavez, the oil supply was privately owned. A small class of monopoly-holding elites sold the oil to the United States at low cost and took the profits for themselves. Chavez immediately raised the prices and sold the oil directly to purchasing countries. As he explained in an interview with “Democracy Now!,” this eliminated the speculators in the middle, and allowed Venezuela to provide Latin America and Caribbean countries with cheap fuel.
Chavez used Venezuela’s oil profits to end illiteracy, provide elementary, high school and college education, help poor mothers cover the cost of raising their families, expand and increase retirement benefits, provide neighborhood doctors to all communities and launch massive housing construction programs. He cut poverty in half and reduced extreme poverty by two-thirds. Venezuelan transformed from the most unequal country in Latin America to the least. Democracy thrived as well. More than 30,000 newly created neighborhood councils gave members of the public the means to have their wants and needs heard.
In 2005 Chavez declared himself a socialist. But not in the authoritarian mold of the Soviet Union under Stalin. He voiced his commitment to a socialism that was participatory and fully democratic. The political variety would exist alongside the economic kind.

Chavez’s reforms did not merely bring greater dignity to Venezuelans. Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and author of “The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela,” told “Democracy Now!” how Chavez’s nationalization of the oil industry allowed the leader to unite Latin American and Caribbean countries in a relationship of cooperative economic and political good will.
“[O]il has to be understood as something that is not simply an economic question for Venezuela,” Salas said. Before Chavez, the oil industry functioned “essentially as an international conglomerate that was housed in Venezuela but did not really consider itself Venezuelan.” Once reclaimed, Chavez used his control over oil “to buttress relations with Latin America in a very important way, to provide oil and long-term credits to countries like Nicaragua, like Dominican Republic, like Jamaica and other countries in the region, and including Cuba, and [to use] that to create a tremendous amount of political good will, [recognizing] that Venezuela has an important role, not simply as a purveyor of energy to the First World, to the U.S., which was its dominant trading partner, but really to Latin America.”
“And then that notion of economic nationalism, of economic sovereignty, spread throughout Latin America. We saw the same example in Bolivia nationalizing the gas industry. We saw Ecuador rejoining OPEC. We saw the creation of Petrocaribe, a Caribbean initiative that provided oil ... to the Caribbean. We saw the provision ... of heating oil to communities in the U.S. under the banner of Citgo, so that Northeastern communities that had to pay onerous prices received oils at subsidized prices, as well. And we saw also Petrosur, the creation of a South American oil body that actually helped negotiate conditions for oil industry.”
Thus Chavez inspired a generation of Latin American voters and politicians to pursue left-wing social and economic policies that served the people rather than a tiny privileged class.
His detractors, many of who come from the upper classes of socially unjust countries, say he was not democratic enough. Gregory Wilpert, founder of Venezuelanalysis.com, said on “Democracy Now!”: “Certainly Chavez had his top-down management style, which certainly clashed and bothered many people. But on the other hand, one cannot deny, I think, that participation in Venezuela increased from any measure that you look at.” When polled, Venezuelans said their political process was more democratic than it had ever been before.
Those who claim his policies spurred economic inflation have to answer the fact that inflation dropped from 50 percent in the years before his presidency to about 20 percent after he was elected, Wilpert said. Criticisms of the administration’s failure to combat crime are justified, however. “They believed that once you get poverty down, crime would go down by itself,” Wilpert said. “And they didn’t do enough to actually make sure that there’s enough police, a decently functioning judicial system.”
As Juan Cole pointed out this week, Chavez’s enthusiasm to find international allies conflicted with his populist values. Though he could be admired for calling President George W. Bush “the Devil” in front of a U.N. General Assembly in 2006 and earned the love of many Arabs for opposing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Israel’s conflict with Gaza, he also voiced his support for the leaders of Libya, Iran and Syria as their governments were doing everything they could to stifle democracy within their borders. “Chavez did sully his legacy as a progressive with his superficial reading of what ‘anti-imperialism’ entails and his inability to see the neo-liberal police states of the Middle East for what they had become,” Cole wrote. But his positions had little tangible effect. “Despite a lot of verbiage, [Venezuela’s] economic cooperation with Iran has been minor for both countries, and Chavez did no more than make angry speeches about Libya and Syria.” And “[g]ood Iranian-Venezuelan relations provoked a great deal of hysteria in the US, but they don’t actually appear to have been consequential, either in the sphere of economics or in that of security.”
A telling of Chavez’s youth, his radicalization and his failed and successful quest to take power from the rich and comfort the dispossessed, produced by The Real News Network, can be seen below. For his in-your-face decency on behalf of the poor and against the people he despised, for being a principled opponent of economic as well as imperial terror, and for giving an unequivocal demonstration of what socialism makes possible, we honor Hugo Chavez as one of our Truthdiggers of the Week.

Hugo Chávez Dies, Leaving a Bitterly Divided Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died Tuesday afternoon after a struggle with cancer, the government announced, leaving behind a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis that grew more acute as he languished for weeks, silent and out of sight, in hospitals in Havana and Caracas. Close to tears and his voice cracking, Vice President Nicolás Maduro said he and other officials had gone to the military hospital where Mr. Chávez was being treated, sequestered from the public, when “we received the hardest and most tragic information that we could transmit to our people.”

In short order, police officers and soldiers were highly visible as people ran through the streets, calling loved ones on cellphones, rushing to get home. Caracas, the capital, which had just received news that the government was throwing out two American military attachés it accused of sowing disorder, quickly became an enormous traffic jam. Stores and shopping malls abruptly closed.

As darkness fell, somber crowds congregated in the main square of Caracas and at the military hospital, with men and women crying openly in sadness and fear about what would come next.

In one neighborhood, Chávez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days earlier to demand more information about Mr. Chávez’s condition.

“Are you happy now?” the Chávez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chávez is dead! You got what you wanted!”

Mr. Chávez’s departure from a country he dominated for 14 years casts into doubt the future of his socialist revolution. It alters the political balance not only in Venezuela, the fourth-largest supplier of foreign oil to the United States, but also in Latin America, where Mr. Chávez led a group of nations intent on reducing American influence in the region.

Mr. Chávez, 58, changed Venezuela in fundamental ways, empowering and energizing millions of poor people who had felt marginalized and excluded, and his death is sure to bring vast uncertainty as the nation tries to find its way without its central figure.

“He’s the best president in history,” said Andrés Mejía, 65, a retiree in Cumaná, an eastern city, crying as he gathered with friends in a plaza. “Look at how emotional I am — I’m crying. I cannot accept the president’s death. But the revolution will continue with Maduro.”

The Constitution says that, since Mr. Chávez was at the start of a term, the nation should “proceed to a new election” within 30 days, and Foreign Minister Elías Jaua said in a television interview that Mr. Maduro would take the helm in the meantime. The election is likely to pit Mr. Maduro, whom Mr. Chávez designated as his political successor, against Henrique Capriles Radonski, a young state governor who lost to Mr. Chávez in the presidential election in October.

But in light of Mr. Chávez’s illness, there has been heated debate in recent months over clashing interpretations of the Constitution, and it is impossible to predict how the transition will proceed.

“We, your civilian and military companions, Commander Hugo Chávez, assume your legacy, your challenges, your project, accompanied by and with the support of the people,” Mr. Maduro told the nation.

Only hours earlier, the government seemed to go into a state of heightened alert as Mr. Maduro convened a crisis meeting in Caracas of cabinet ministers, governors loyal to the president and top military commanders.

Taking a page out of Mr. Chávez’s time-tested playbook, Mr. Maduro warned in a lengthy televised speech that the United States was seeking to destabilize the country, and the government expelled the two American military attachés, accusing one of seeking to recruit Venezuelan military personnel to carry out “destabilizing projects.” He called on Venezuelans to unite as he raised the specter of foreign intervention. 

During the speech, Mr. Maduro said the government suspected that the president’s enemies had found a way to cause his cancer, a possibility that Mr. Chávez had once raised. Mr. Maduro said scientists should investigate the source of his illness.  

Mr. Chávez long accused the United States of trying to undermine or even assassinate him; indeed, the Bush administration gave tacit support for a coup that briefly removed him from power in 2002. He often used Washington as a foil to build support or distract attention from deeply rooted problems at home, like high inflation and soaring crime. 

Over nearly a decade and a half, Mr. Chávez made most major decisions and dominated all aspects of political life. He inspired a fierce, sometimes religious devotion among his supporters and an equally fervent animus among his opponents. As many of his followers say, “With Chávez everything, without Chávez nothing.”

But that leaves his revolution in a precarious spot without its charismatic leader. 

Mr. Chávez’s death could provide an opportunity for the political opposition, which was never able to defeat him in a head-to-head contest. Mr. Capriles lost to Mr. Chávez by 11 percentage points in October.  

And Mr. Maduro is far from having Mr. Chávez’s visceral connection to the masses of Venezuela’s poor. Even so, most analysts believe that Mr. Maduro will have an advantage, and that he will receive a surge of support if the vote occurs soon.

But even if Mr. Maduro prevails, he may have a hard time holding together Mr. Chávez’s movement while fending off resistance from what is likely to be a revived opposition.

Mr. Chávez’s new six-year term began on Jan. 10, with the president incommunicado in Havana. In his absence, the government held a huge rally in the center of Caracas, where thousands of his followers raised their hands to pledge an oath of “absolute loyalty” to their commander and his revolution. Officials promised that Mr. Chávez would have his inauguration later, when he had recovered.

But the hoped-for recovery never came. Now, instead of an inauguration, Mr. Chávez’s followers are left to plan a funeral.

The foreign minister, Mr. Jaua, announced that on Wednesday Mr. Chávez’s body would be taken to the military academy in Caracas and lie in state there.

Mr. Jaua said that the government would hold a ceremony on Friday with visiting heads of state and that officials would announce later where Mr. Chávez would be laid to rest. 

Venezuelans in Caracas after President Hugo Chávez’s death was announced