Ujjain: NDA will make sincere efforts to arrest Dawood: Union minister Satyapal Singh

Ujjain: “NDA government will make sincere efforts to arrest terrorist Dawood Ibrahim who has been hiding in Pakistan for a long time,” Union minister of state for human resource development Satyapal Singh said here on Thursday. Speaking to the media at the city press club, Singh, who worked as commissioner of police, Mumbai, before getting elected as Lok Sabha member from Bagpat (Uttar Pradesh), said he would not blame any previous government for delay in the arrest of Dawood.

“Dawood has been hiding in Pakistan for a long time and it is difficult to arrest him as Pakistan has yet not accepted his presence on their land. Many countries including the US have accepted India’s stand that Pakistan is a terror factory and pressure would be increased gradually with more and more countries to join India in its fight against terrorism. We will definitely be successful in arresting Dawood, though I cannot fix a deadline for his arrest,” he added.

Singh was here to attend the meeting of the governing body of Maharishi Sandipani Ved Vidya Pratishthan. Stating that the ‘pratishthan’ was a very important institution under his ministry, continuous activities, he said, would be done to organise Vedic conferences and open National Vedic School in Ujjain, for which he gave various sanctions on Thursday itself.

“Vedas are not only the basis of India, but of all cultures. We should attain knowledge from the science of our ancestors. Vedas are scientific texts and the root of knowledge. Vedas are not just the agenda of India, it is an agenda of the whole world,” the minister said. He also said illusions were spread by the British that the Aryans were foreigners, while in reality an Arya is a native of the Aryan civilization and there was no issue of caste or religion in this civilization. The British also believed that high character and exquisite literature are found in India, he added.

Responding to a query on rape in India, Singh said it was a trend that most of the accused in rape incidents were either relatives of the victims or well known to them. “In more than 90 per cent of rape cases reported, the accused turned out to be a close relative of the victim or very well known to them and just about 8 to 10 per cent outsiders were involved in such cases,” he remarked.

The former IPS officer also said while rape itself was a cime, raping of under aged girls less than 12 years of age was the most heinous crime and a special provision must be made to punish the guilty accused of such crime.

“I would like to felicitate the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan who decided to hang such rapists to death. This law must also be implemented across the country on the lines of Madhya Pradesh,” Singh added.