May 11, 1979, Forty Years Ago: AMU attacksAMU attacks
Home Minister H M Patel today assured an agitated Lok Sabha that the government would go “thoroughly and fully” into various aspects of the attack on the students of Aligarh Muslim University during their train journey to Delhi yesterday. He rejected the near-unanimous demand for a judicial, parliamentary or a high-level independent probe into the incident. An “official Inquiry” would be sufficient, Patel asserted.
Iran oil hike
Iran has decided to increase the price of a barrel of crude oil by 60 US cents effective from May 15 due to market demands, a National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) official announced in Tehran today. The 60 US cents affects all existing contracts, the official said, and was in addition to a surcharge imposed on April 15. The 3.6 per cent increase on all grades of oil came as a surprise and was expected to bother the tenuous stability into which oil prices had settled. The increase came as post-revolutionary Iran was producing well below its potential, as a matter of government policy.
Suing Moynihan
Union Home Minister H M Patel advised Indira Gandhi to sue the Indian publishers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s book, which speaks of CIA pay-off to the Congress party and once to her for election purposes. Patel said this during a three-hour discussion on a call-attention motion in the Rajya Sabha today. While he denied that there was collaboration between Indian intelligence agencies and those of other countries, Patel added that they kept each other informed. There was also a plea for the placement of a report prepared in 1967 by the Central Bureau of Investigation on the subject, on the table of the Rajya Sabha. Members of the Communist Party of India described Moynihan as a Zionist and imperialist. Mody, however, claimed Moynihan as his friend whom he respected.
