hi INDiA | July 17, 2020 | The Nation First

HiIndia Newsdesk

‘Talks on to solve border dispute, can’t guarantee anything’: Rajnath Singh

The tension between India and China has been going on for months, but flared up after 20 army soldiers were killed in a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese troops on June 15.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh, who arrived in Ladakh

on Friday morning, said that talks are underway to resolve the border dispute with China in Ladakh, but stopped short of giving any guarantees on the resolution. However, Singh underlined that not an inch of our land can be taken by any power in the world. India and China have held many talks over the past few weeks, even activating the Special Representatives Group to resolve the issue. “Talks are underway to resolve the border dispute but to what extent it can be resolved I cannot guarantee. I can assure you, not one inch of our land can be taken by any power in the world. If solution can

be found by talks, there is nothing better,” said Singh. On Thursday, reflecting on the disengagement process between the two armies along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the army said it is an “intricate process” and “requires constant verification”. “The senior commanders reviewed the progress on implementation of the first phase of disengagement and discussed further steps to ensure complete disengagement,” army spokesperson Colonel Aman Anand said yesterday. The disengagement effort involves rival troops pulling back a specified distance from face-off sites, with further retreat taking place in phases as the plan progresses on a verifiable basis on the ground every 72 hours by both sides.

Man of all reasons

Did Mumbai cold shoulder him as an interloper?

I have never felt like an outsider,” stated the actor who has unwittingly made a trilogy of “isolation” movies that began with Aligarh (in which he played the lonely Marathi professor Siras hounded for his sexual preferences), continued with Gali Guleiyan (mind games of a man obsessed with watching

the world through closed-circuit cameras), topped off with Bhonsle (a retired Mumbai cop who watches a parochial Bihari versus Maharashtrian battle play out in his chawl). When migrants from UP-Bihar began to be targeted for a brief spell in Maharashtra in 2008, he watched, assessed and concluded, “It was politically motivated, it wasn’t the ground reality. When it took an ugly turn with violence and manhandling, it disturbed me as a person from Bihar. It bothered me that political ambition could actually divide people on religious and regional lines. It upset me as a fellow citizen. We are informed people who know the ground reality of the country and the state.” Bhonsle, his film, said it all. Talent and destiny apart, he reached there

through a mix of “stubbornness and fearlessness”. “I take failure on the chin, I’m never scared of failing. In fact, the more I fail the more powerful I become in my resolve. I’ve been like this since my childhood. To this day my mother, an immensely strong lady, says, ‘You never give up.’ She had six of us to manage but always said she felt harassed by me,” he chuckled. He described celebrity voices incessantly chattering in public as “a desperate need to be counted on every topic and that doesn’t go down well with me.”

Bachchans stable

Actor Amitabh Bachchan and his son Abhishek, who were admitted to Nanavati Hospital after testing positive for Covid-19, are stable, hospital authorities said on Monday. Abhishek will be discharged soon, they added. Twenty-six staffers working across four bungalows of the Bachchans tested negative for coronavirus on Monday. In all, 54 close contacts of the family were traced. While most were staffers, BMC officials said they also traced people who had come in contact with Abhishek Bachchan, as he had travelled recently for film-related work. Of the 54 contacts, while 26 were tested, 28 low-risk contacts have been sent to home quarantine.