[The police raid quickly transformed what had been a quirky mixture of yoga sit-in and political protest into a political firestorm. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the country’s main opposition party, assailed the Congress Party for mishandling the hunger strike and described the police action as “a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country.”]
By Jim Yardley And Hari Kumar
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| Early Sunday, police officers removed a supporter from the site where Swami Ramdev was holding a hunger strike in New Delhi. |
NEW DELHI — A sobbing Swami Ramdev vowed Sunday to continue his hunger strike against corruption and blamed the governing Congress Party for a chaotic, early morning raid in which thousands of his followers were dispersed by police officers spraying tear gas.
Swami Ramdev, a yoga guru with a large following in India, had organized a mass hunger strike that began Saturday in New Delhi. But less than 14 hours later, amid the tumult of the raid, he was detained by officers and later flown to the state of Uttaranchal, where he was taken to his ashram near the city of Haridwar.
Appearing later on national television, he described how he tried in vain to escape the police raid by dressing as a woman and covering his flowing black beard with white cloth.
“The government wanted to kill me,” he said. He added: “My hunger strike is not broken. I will continue. My agitation will continue.”
(Video courtesy: The Times of India)
The police raid quickly transformed what had been a quirky mixture of yoga sit-in and political protest into a political firestorm. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the country’s main opposition party, assailed the Congress Party for mishandling the hunger strike and described the police action as “a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country.”
Nitin Gadkari, president of the BJP, said the party would stage a demonstration. L.K. Advani, another BJP leader, described the police raid as “naked fascism” and called for a special session of Parliament to address governmental corruption.
“I feel that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the president of the Congress Party owe an apology to the nation,” he said.
But Congress leaders were hardly apologetic on Sunday and instead accused Swami Ramdev of trying to deliberately stir up trouble as a proxy for the BJP and right-wing Hindu groups. “You cannot allow people like Ramdev to run riot in the capital,” said Digvijay Singh, a powerful Congress Party leader who has been outspoken in his criticism of the swami. “He was trying to incite people. Therefore, the action of the police is justified.”
Meanwhile, other Congress leaders blamed Swami Ramdev for deliberately violating a secret agreement to call off his hunger strike on Saturday afternoon. The swami had focused his protest on the issue of “black money,” the untold billions of dollars in misappropriated funds stashed in foreign banks.
Last week, ministers met with him several times to explain governmental initiatives on the issue as part of their effort to head off the hunger strike, and on Saturday he announced that the government had met his demands. But after the government announced publicly that there had been an agreement and that Swami Ramdev had promised to end the strike, he angrily vowed the strike would go on.
On Sunday morning, the police moved in to break up the protest.
Kapil Sibal, the Congress Party’s point man on the issue, said the government delegation actually struck a deal with the swami on Friday, in which the government pledged to take certain actions on black money, while Swami Ramdev agreed that he would strike on Saturday morning but call it off by the afternoon.
But when Swami Ramdev continued with his fast into Saturday evening, Mr. Sibal appeared before reporters brandishing a written copy of the secret agreement and accused the yoga guru of breaking their deal.
The Delhi police said Sunday that they had broken up the demonstration because Swami Ramdev had a permit to conduct a yoga meditation session with 5,000 people but the crowd had surpassed 50,000 and he was imploring more people to come to New Delhi to join the strike.
Rajan Bhagat, a police spokesman, denied that police had instigated the confrontation. He said some protesters began pelting officers with bricks after the police ordered everyone to go home. Officers then used tear gas to disperse the crowd; Mr. Bhagat said 23 police officers and 39 civilians suffered minor injuries in the ensuing scuffle, though all but three had been discharged from local hospitals.
Dharmendra Kumar, special police commissioner of New Delhi, added another twist, saying that intelligence reports suggested a possible death threat against Swami Ramdev, intended to stir rioting and communal violence throughout the country. It was not clear how or why those threats influenced the police action.
These official explanations hardly satisfied opposition leaders or Swami Ramdev, who excoriated Mr. Sibal and Mr. Singh, along with other Congress officials, during his rambling, emotional news conference in Haridwar. “The central government and Congress does not want to see Baba Ramdev alive,” he said.
Corruption has become a major national political issue, with India’s public increasingly disgusted by scandals and other scams in the government.
A special committee of civil society leaders and government ministers is negotiating over legislation on an anti-corruption agency. But Anna Hazare, a veteran anti-corruption campaigner, said he and other civil society representatives would now boycott a special committee meeting originally schedule for Monday. In a statement, Mr. Hazare and other civil society leaders said they “strongly condemn the barbaric and unprovoked action of the government of India last night.”
HACKING OF WHITE HOUSE E-MAIL AFFECTED DIVERSE DEPARTMENTS
[Administration officials said they had no evidence any confidential information was breached, or even that many people fell for the attack by providing information that would allow a breach of their Gmail accounts.]
By David E. Sanger And Verne G. Kopytoff
It is unclear how many White House staff members — or those of other departments in the executive branch — might have been affected, according to two officials with knowledge of the investigation. But the intended victims ranged across various functions in the White House, and were not limited to those working on national security, economic policy or trade areas that would be of particular interest to the Chinese government.
Administration officials said they had no evidence any confidential information was breached, or even that many people fell for the attack by providing information that would allow a breach of their Gmail accounts.
White House classified systems run on dedicated lines and information on those systems, the officials said, cannot be forwarded to Gmail accounts. But investigators were trying to determine if the attackers believed that some staff members or other officials used their personal e-mail accounts for confidential government communications.
“Right now,” said one senior official, “that’s a theory, not a fact.”
Google disclosed the attack this week and said that it was directed at not only American government officials, but also human right activists, journalists and South Korea’s government. Google tracked the attack to Jinan, China, which is the home to a Chinese military regional command center.
But that does not necessarily mean the attackers were Chinese or related to the government. The Chinese government denied any involvement.
The attack used e-mails that appeared to be tailored to their victims, the better to fool them, a technique known as spear phishing. Recipients were asked to click on a link to a phony Gmail login page that gave the hackers access to their personal accounts.
The attacks come as the United States government considers expanding its use of Web-based software for e-mail, along with word processing, spreadsheets and other kinds of documents. Google is one of the many companies vying for the business with its Apps product, as is Microsoft.
Web based e-mail would be vulnerable to hackers who steal login information through phishing attacks. But Web-based systems are not necessarily any easier to hack than traditional e-mail, which a government agency would usually manage using its own servers, said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a computer security firm in Traverse City, Mich.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday that all White House-related electronic mail was supposed to be conducted on work e-mail accounts to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which governs how those communications are protected and archived. Mr. Carney said there was no evidence that any White House accounts were compromised.
White House employees are permitted to have private e-mail accounts, he said, but cannot use them for work purposes.
Officials at the White House and other agencies often keep two computers in their offices, one for unclassified work and another for classified. Senior officials sometimes have a “secure facility” in their homes, in which computers and telephones are on dedicated lines and communications are encrypted.
Given its size, Google and its Gmail system will always make an attractive target.
Other personal e-mail services, including Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail, have faced similar attacks, according to Trend Micro, a computer security company in Cupertino, Calif. “The types of attacks that are happening against Web mail users aren’t confined to Gmail alone and extend to other e-mail platforms,” said Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher for Trend Micro.
