Srinagar: More than 3,500 babies were born in government hospitals in Kashmir at the peak of devastating floods that affected most of the tertiary care hospitals in the Valley.

Nearly 2,300 normal deliveries and 1,260 Caesarean sections were conducted from September 4 to 20 in various hospitals of Kashmir, which were functional during this period, an official spokesman said on Tuesday.

The spokesman said statistics now available show that 5,77,595 patients came to the OPDs in all the district hospitals across the Kashmir Valley during the fortnight ending September 20.

"Nearly 34,600 patients were admitted for treatment while 1,435 major surgeries and 1,03,160 lab tests were conducted at these hospitals," he said.

During this period, 145 medical camps were set up, including 62 in Srinagar city, and essential medicine was provided in most of the areas, the spokesman said.

Despite having suffered losses to the tune of Rs 100 crore, the SMHS Hospital authorities set up a free medical camp in which patients suffering from diabetes, hypertension and other chronic ailments were given consultation and treatment.

The Bone and Joint Hospital Barzulla was made functional immediately after the floods. The out patient department of Lal Ded and G B Pant hospitals have been made functional after water was drained out and clean up operations conducted yesterday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the first Indian Prime Minister in over a decade to stay at the U.S. President’s guest house — the 190-year-old Blair House — when he travels to Washington on September 29.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the last one to stay at the guest house.

“Built as a private home in 1824, Blair House has played an important role in nearly 190 years of American political, diplomatic and cultural history— from Andrew Jackson’s `Kitchen Cabinet’, to private chats with Abraham Lincoln, to Harry S Truman’s crucial leadership as World War II ended and the Cold War began.

“Now, as then, U.S. Presidents continue to rely on Blair House as a significant foreign policy tool,” as per the official information.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh never stayed in the Blair House and always preferred a hotel during his U.S. visits.

The Blair House is the designated guest house of the U.S. president where all his state guests are traditionally known to have stayed.

Located across from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Blair House has served as the President’s Guest House since its purchase by the U.S. government in World War II and under the stewardship of the Department of State, it welcomes visiting heads of states and other top dignitaries.

In New York, Mr. Modi, like Dr. Singh, will stay at the New York Palace Hotel in Manhattan when he arrives on September 26 late afternoon.

His first public engagement next day would be a visit to Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Centre which was destroyed in the terror attacks by al-Qaeda in 2001 followed by a visit to the 9/11 Memorial Museum built in the honour of the victims of 2001 attacks.

Mr. Modi will then proceed towards the United Nations to deliver the speech at the General Assembly, scheduled in the first half of the day.

The Prime Minister will then have a series of bilateral meetings including one with his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina.

In the evening, Mr. Modi is scheduled to visit the Central Park where he will attend Global Citizen festival.

Google on Monday said that it was collaborating with the government to support and enable Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision for 'Digital India'. The company said that as part of the plan, it would run a number of campaigns in collaboration with the Indian government.

The noteworthy among these programmes are:

• MyGov, the citizen engagement platform of the government, and Google will soon launch contest to develop a mobile app for the PM's Office. Google claimed that the "mobile app will bring the PMO to every citizen and the contest will showcase how Indians can build a world class app".

• Google would build a multi -language ecosystem on the web to help the government transition into the increasingly 'mobile' India.

•  The company will push programmes like Helping Women get Online and getting Indian SMEs Online in a bid to promote the digital empowerment of citizens. It will also continue to map and photograph heritage and culture sites to bring them online.

• To encourage digital literacy and Internet safety, Google will introduce curriculums for schools, officials and elected representatives.

While announcing the initiative, R S Sharma, secretary of the Department of Information Technology said, "The Digital India Program has been launched with the vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It can truly transform India and bring it on par with other developed countries. I'm happy Google is coming forward to roll out initiatives that will contribute to the Digital India vision. I'm sure others will come forward and join this movment."

Rajan Anandan, vice president and managing director of Google India, added: "India is already home to the 3rd largest number of internet users globally with 245 million users as of June 2014. We are on track to become the 2nd largest user market by 2015 and a 500 million-user market by 2016. Yet, there are more than a billion people who will need to be brought online for India to realize the vision of a digitally connected, knowledge economy. Prime Minister Modi's Digital India program will play a transformational role in achieving this."

Bhai, what is this “love jihad”?

“Arre hai kiya? Humein nahin maloom, (What is it? I don’t know it) ” Home MinisterRajnath Singh tells the media with a smile.

Digvijaya Singh promptly writes an open letter to the minister asking him to brush up on his reading of RSS mouthpieces Panchjanya and Organizer. “The cover stories are on love jihad,” says Singh.

Or Rajnath Singh could just go to Garba nights in Godhra. Or Indore.

Apparently that’s the newest battleground for love jihad.

According to the Indian Express, the newly formed Hindu Asmita Hitrakshak Samiti will create a team of “volunteers” who will ensure no Muslim youth can get inside a garba venue this Navratri though a Muslim councilor in Godhra insists he has got invitations every year and these directives from “unelected” people were “baseless”.

However Jaimin Shah, a member of the Samiti is clear. “Why should they be so keen on participating in garbas? They do so to lure Hindu girls. We are here to oppose such intrusions and stop them,” Shah tells Indian Express.

Shah does not explain what irresistible charm these Muslim garba-crashers wield to seduce Hindu women right in the middle of a big dance hall while surrounded by throngs of festive gaily caparisoned Hindu men. Were they hitting on the twirling women while the men were lining up for plates of khandvi and dhokla?

Shah did say the presence of Muslims “made no sense” at a religious event for “our wives, daughters and sisters”. Even last year the organizers had asked around half a dozen Muslim men to leave the venue.

Were they causing a ruckus? They “might” have created a nuisance says Shah.

When it comes to garba-poaching, pre-emptive measures are very important.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, led by Praveen Togadia has blessed the endeavour.Togadia has demanded that ID cards of participants be checked at all garba venues.

“Navratri is the festival of Mother Amba’s prayers and worship, so we cannot allow beef-eating Muslims to enter into garba places," says Togadia. No word about beef-eating Christians or for that matter beef-eating Hindus.

Togadia who has a long history of crossing swords with Modi clearly relishes fishing in troubled waters. He wants to bait and draw out Modi more than anything else. Godhra remains potent shorthand for the starting point of the 2002 bloodbath after 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned in a train there. As PM Modi tries to put 2002 well behind him, Togadia would like nothing better than to try and bring Godhra back into the spotlight and an inflammatory decree trying to ban Muslims from Garba is just the ticket. It’s not about banning Muslims from Garba, it’s about the idea of it.

But while Rajnath Singh can coyly feign ignorance about “love jihad”, other BJP politicians are happy to rush in where Singh fears to tread.

The Daily Bhaskar reports that Indore’s BJP MLA Usha Thakur is planning to write to all garba organizers in the state asking them to “restrict entry of Muslim men to the dance venues and seducing women”. Thakur alleges nearly 4.5 lakh Hindu girls got converted last year during the garba festival. Wherever she gets this number from, this points to an urgent need, more than anything else, for the Hindu Asmita Hitrakshak Samity to invest more energy in Romancing 101 workshops for Hindu men.

The Congress leader Manish Tewari tells ANI that the “synchretic culture of India” is strengthened when we participate in each other’s festivals. We can be skeptical about whether young Muslim men, if they do indeed show up at Garba festivals, are there for an interfaith project of synchretic nation-building or just to have fun and yes, watch women dancing. But ogling is hardly a character trait unique to Muslims men. Or is it that during Garba, Hindu men only look at the dancing women fondly as maa-behen-beti while their Muslim counterparts are making their chhupa Rustam moves?

This would all be utterly ludicrous if it was not becoming used as a political organizing tool. The beauty of the love jihad conspiracy is it does not really need facts and figures. Like all good conspiracies it thrives on rumour and anecdote. BJP leaders Shahnawaz Khan and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi might be married to Hindus but there’s always a counter example like that of Tara Shadeo and Ranjit Kumar Kohli/Raqibul Hasan Khan to keep the conspiracy fires stoked.

Love jihad conspiracy theorists are also quick to trot out the story of a sex scandal in Britain from 2010 where a group of Pakistani men were found guilty of sexually exploiting teenaged white girls some as young as 12, many from troubled homes, in the town of Rotherham by plying them with gifts of alcohol, drugs and gifts. This was an abominable sex abuse story now being dressed up as Exhibit A in the Love Jihad conspiracy. But it was a horrendous sex trafficking racket, nowhere close to a proselytization mission to marry women from another religion under false pretexts and turn them into good Muslim wives. The authorities said they were slow to act because of political correctness, afraid of being perceived as racist. That argument wears a little thin after 1400 girls fall prey to this racket over 16 years and the Guardian says that’s also to cover up for a “cozy indifferent bureaucracy” with their “own prejudices about the poor”.

“Like all slanders, 'love jihad' works best in places where communal violence has already stoked distrust and hostility,” writes Mukul Kesavan on NDTV. He says it’s not a “coincidence” that after the Muzaffarnagar riots an allegation that used to be part of the “Parivar’s lunatic fringe” is now “the BJP’s favourite meme.” And Amit Shah can bothcall it a “media creation” and at the same says there is nothing wrong with the BJP responding to “a grave social problem” in “genuine cases of injustice”.

In short, you can deny your love jihad and have it too.

The UP by-election smack for the BJP is not a referendum on Modi who is now safely PM but it is hopefully a comment on that kind of wink-and-nudge divide-and-rule policy using the likes of Yogi Adityanath. It hardly means the Samajwadi Party with an Azam Khan is the standard bearer of secular “synchretic” values but as Tavleen Singh notes on Twitter “The BJP could pay in U.P for changing the subject form 'vikas' to love jihad. The PM did not win a full mandate for Hindtuva.”

That lesson will likely not percolate to Hindu Asmita Hitrakshak Samiti or Usha Thakur who want to drag the politics of majoritarian victimhood inside the dance circle. And despite UP, Modi will not want to publicly smack down a Praveen Togadia and thus give him the recognition he craves. But someone should alert Modi to the annual Sheri Garba organized by the alumni association of St Xavier’s College spearheaded by folks like Shaunak Parikh and Naved Siddique.

It’s happening this year, as always, St Xavier’s College confirms to Firstpost and best of all it’s in the PM’s own backyard of Ahmedabad. Mr. Modi could even stop by and prove that sometimes a dance move can speak way louder than words.

JAMMU : This was not first time that Mohammed Riaz and 30 other families of Jammu's Gujjar Basti have turned homeless. Back in 1999, during the Kargil war, all these families had been uprooted from their homes in RS Pura. They had rebuilt their lives on the banks of the Tawi river. Now, they have lost everything all over again.

On September 6, when Tawi flooded its banks, these people just had to rush out of their homes to save their lives. There was no time to carry even the most basic items. A change of clothes. Or food.

Now, they are at the army's makeshift camp, depending on the free food. But even that stopped this morning when the langer was dismantled. Even by evening, they hadn't had a morsel. 

Later a three-ton army truck came in, carrying rice, dal, chapati and vegetables - fulfilling army jawans' pledge to "help as long as they can". But there's not much they can do.

The army cannot be engaged in relief and rehabilitation for too long, since all training activities get suspended, which in turn, can hamper operational preparedness. After the first crush of a crisis is over, they hand over the operations to the state government. 

For the camp inmates, uncertainty looms large. "Government officials came and took down our details, but they never came back," said Riyaz's wife Yasmin Akhtar. 

But neither Riaz nor his family expect or want help from anyone -- least of all the state government. 

"Had I been able to move, I could have worked as a labourer. Just pray that I get better and can work again," said Riaz, for whom the floods had come as a double calamity. A welder by profession, he had been rendered immobile by an accident three months ago

Then, there was Farooq Malik -- a portly man with a trimmed beard who used to run a diary. Most of his cattle have gone. So has his house. Today, he has another identity - "Chachu", a sobriquet bestowed by the 15-odd kids hanging onto his shirt-tails. 

Chachu's concern showed: "Over the last 15 years we had built our houses. Now we have nothing again. But it is not about us or our homes alone. What about their education? Back in 1999, most of us did not have kids."

Kolkata: A 40-year-old woman, who was allegedly raped inside a moving car in 2012, on Sunday said she was denied entry to a restaurant for being a 'rape victim'.

The Anglo-Indian woman alleged that the management of Ginger, a restaurant-cum-bar in south Kolkata's Kalighat area turned her out.

"The management said they can't allow me because I was the Park Street rape victim. They said they have orders not to allow me inside. If I was raped, is it my fault? Why can't I try to live a normal life," the woman said.

The restaurant management, however, denied the charge and claimed the woman was turned out for being "troublesome".

"She was not barred for being a rape victim. Rather she had earlier created trouble. We have video footage to show how she had created trouble after getting drunk, and so we barred her," said eatery owner Dipten Banerjee.

The mother of two was allegedly raped at gun-point inside a moving car and later thrown out in February 2012.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had courted controversy after she dubbed the incident "fabricated".

While five people were charged by the court, only three are behind bars. Two, including the prime suspect, are still untraced.

(Image is representation purpose  only)