DAILY FROM: AHMEDABAD, CHANDIGARH, DELHI, JAIPUR, KOLKATA, LUCKNOW, MUMBAI, NAGPUR, PUNE, VADODARA JOURNALISM OF COURAGE FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2024, LUCKNOW, LATE CITY, 16 PAGES Pune minor’s blood sample replaced with his mother’s sample: Probe ANURADHA MASCARENHAS & CHANDAN HAYGUNDE PUNE, MAY 30 THEBLOODsampleof theminor, who was allegedly driving the Porsche that crashed into and killed two people in Pune on May 19, was replaced at Sassoon General Hospital with a sample given by his mother, sources in the Maharashtra government said, citing an inquiry report. While the minor was taken into custody after the accident, and his father and grandfather were subsequently arrested, the focussoonshiftedtotheinvolvement of two doctors and a class IVstaffer—fromBJGovernment Medical College and Sassoon General Hospital — who are accused of throwing away the blood sample collected from the minor and replacing it with another. The two doctors and the staffer have also been arrested. On Tuesday, a special investigation team was sent to Sassoon hospital, where they questioned a series of officials and viewed the CCTV footage. Sources in the government told The Indian Express that the team submitted an inquiry report saying that it was the boy’s motherwhohadgivenherblood sample to replace her son’s. According to the sources, the inquiryalsofoundthattheblood samples collected from two others who were in the Porsche had also been replaced by the brother and father of the respective persons. There were a total of four persons in the car — the minor boy who was allegedly driving the Porsche, his two friends, and a driver. Meanwhile, the Pune Police submitted to a special court Thursday that the blood sample of theminor,andthesamplethat replacedhis,werebothdrawnin an area of the hospital that was not covered by CCTV cameras. Dr Ajay Taware, the former head of Sassoon hospital’s Forensic Department, and Curtains on Campaign 2024 In final poll speech, Modi attacks Opp, says his Govt about to get a ‘hat-trick’ ANJU AGNIHOTRI CHABA & VIKAS PATHAK THE WORLD PAGE 1 ANCHOR voteSaturdayintheseventhand finalphaseof theelections,Modi referred to Hoshiarpur, home to a sizeable number from the Ravidassia and Valmiki communities, as “chhoti Kashi”. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addresses a public meeting in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar, Punjab, on Thursday. ANI BEGINS 45-HOUR MEDITATION Prime Minister Narendra Modi offers prayers at the Sri Bhagavathi Amman Temple in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, before beginning his 45-hour meditation at the Vivekananda Memorial on Thursday. PTI REPORT,PAGE6 EXPRESSING CONFIDENCE that theINDIAblocwillformthegovernment with absolute majority after June 4, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the BJP campaign all about himself while hurling abuses at the Congress and the INDIA bloc. Addressing a press conferenceatthepartyheadquartersin Delhi on Thursday, the Congress chief said, “I will tell you a sam- ple.In15days,hetookCongress’s name 232 times, he used ‘Modi’ 758 times… He named the INDIA alliance 573 times… He didn’tsayanythingaboutunemployment and inflation…” “The PM spoke about temples-mosques,Muslimandother religions 421 times. He spoke about dividing society. He spoke about Muslim, Pakistan and minorities 224 times,” Kharge said. He also said they (Congress) are “confident that on June 4, the peoplewillgiveamandateforan alternate government”. Kharge said this Lok Sabha election will be remembered for a long time. “The PM and top leaders of the BJP have made innumerable attempts to divide people on the basis of religion and divisive issues and divert their attention. Despite this, the people chose issues and we sought votes on issues,” he said. The Congress has always thought about the problems of the people and worked towards them, he said. “Wetookissueslikeinflation, unemployment, condition of farmers, economic inequality, CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 E Only the second ● time THE SEVENTH and final phase of polling concludes Saturday and the results will be declared on June 4. This is only the second time that Lok Sabha elections have extended into June. The 44-day election period, necessitated by a combination of factors, is the secondlongest after the first Lok Sabha election in 1951-52. AS CAMPAIGNING for the Lok Sabha elections came to a close Thursday,formerPrimeMinister Manmohan Singh accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of havingdeliveredthe“mostvicious” form of “purely divisive” “hate speeches” during his electioneering, lowering the dignity of public discourse and gravity of his office. “No Prime Minister in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary and coarse terms, meant to target either a specific section of the society or the opposition ... People of India areseeingthroughallof this.This narrativeof dehumanizationhas now reached its peak. It is now our duty to save our beloved nation from these forces of discord,” Singh said in an appeal, meant for the people of Punjab, which is voting in the last phase on June 1. The rare intervention by the 91-year-old former Prime Minister, who headed the UPA government from 2004 to 2014, came at the end of the bitter and gruelling campaign which had seen Modi repeatedly targeting Singh’s UPA government claiming that the Congress wanted to allocate15%of thegovernment’s CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Shah, senior BJP leaders hold fort for Modi in Varanasi: ‘Koi fight nahi hai’ BHUPENDRA PANDEY VARANASI, MAY 30 Amit Shah offers prayers at Kashi Vishwanath Temple. AS THE curtains came down on theLokSabhaelectioncampaign and Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his 45-hour meditationretreatattheVivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, the one place missing from his itinerary in the final days leading up to polling on June 1 was his constituency Varanasi. The PM left the responsibility of supervising the election in Varanasi to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, his secondin-command who in the past couple of days held meetings with senior leaders Union MinistersPiyushGoelandGiriraj Singh, and BJP national general secretarySunilBansal.Thethree, along with a team of key BJP and In Punjab, acid test for Mann as AAP rides on free power, clinics CHANDIGARH, MAY 30 PAGE 11 NEW DELHI, MAY 30 NEW DELHI, MAY 30 MANRAJ GREWAL SHARMA ISRAEL TAKES OVER GAZA BORDER WITH EGYPT S AFRICA’S ANC SET TO LOSE MAJORITY, WILL REMAIN LARGEST PARTY MANOJ CG ASAD REHMAN EXPRESS NETWORK PAGE 10 Targeted a section of society, says former PM BY UNNY PM campaign about himself, abusing Cong; INDIA will form govt: Kharge CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 START-UP CARRIES OUT TEST FLIGHT OF AGNIBAAN ROCKET Manmohan on Modi: ‘Vicious hate speeches’, lowered PM office dignity BUSINESS AS USUAL JALANDHAR, NEW DELHI, MAY 30 HOURSBEFOREthecurtaincame down Thursday on campaigning fortheLokSabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launching a frontal assault on the DECISION OppositionIN2024 DIA bloc and the ruling AAP inPunjabonefinaltimethiselection, invoked Guru Ravidas and said his government had worked in line with the teachings and principlesoftheBhaktipoet-saint. Addressing a rally in HoshiarpurinPunjabwhichwill APPEAL TO PUNJAB E X P L A I NE D PORSCHE CRASH `6.00 WWW.INDIANEXPRESS.COM SINCE 1932 “MISSION AAP: 13-0”. Call it an ambitiousorunrealisticgoal,but this is the target Punjab Chief Minister and AAP leader Bhagwant Singh Mann has set for the party in the Lok Sabha elections in the state. Last month, Mann told The IndianExpressthatheviewedthe parliamentary polls as a reality check for his over two-year-old AAP VOTE SHARE IN PUNJAB (%) 42.01 24.4 23.72 7.38 2014 2019 2017 2022 Lok Sabha Assembly government. And that is what he has been telling voters as he criss-crosses the state to spearhead the campaign: “Vote for AAP if you think we have delivered on our promises.Voteformycandidate,kaam di guarantee main dinda haan (I guarantee development).” At Patiala’s Mehraj, the ancestralvillageof formerCongress CM Captain Amarinder Singh, who is now with the BJP, Mann reminds the locals of their “misplaced” loyalty to Amarinder CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 RSS functionaries, have been managing the party’s affairs in the run-up to voting. Among the others who held a meeting with Shah were BJP ally and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar and former Samajwadi Party (SP) leader NaradRai,whojoinedtheBJPon Tuesday. Sources in the BJP said Shahassigned taskstohissenior partycolleagues,Rajbhar,andRai DECISION 2024 VOTE SHARE (%) Party BJP SP Cong AAP BSP 2014 56.37 4.39 7.34 20.3 5.88 2019 63.62 18.4 14.38 --- SP and BSP were allies in 2019 who is from the Bhumihar community. Of the 19.62 lakh voters in Varanasi, there are more than 1.5 lakh Bhumihar and about 70,000 Rajbhar voters. In the past few days, the BJP has mobilised workers from differentstatesanddistrictsof Uttar Pradesh to help with the campaign. Party workers from Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan are making rounds of BHUBANESWAR, MAY 30 ● On Bengal poll street, local corruption trumps other issues PAGES 4, 6 & 7 CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 Naveen hits back at BJP: Pandian not my successor, all falsehood SUJIT BISOYI EXPRESSINTERVIEW ‘FightnotBJPvsCongress, butBJPvspeople...no threattoCongressgovt’ SUKHVINDER SINGH SUKHU, HIMACHAL CM areas where Tamils, Telugu people and people from Rajasthan live. At the party’s massive central election office in Varanasi’s Mehmoorganjlocality,therewas an air of calm and confidence. Apart from the out-of-state workersbeingassignedtheirduties, five local BJP office-bearers sat in a corner of a big hall, a registerandheapsof saffronscarves lying in front of them. WITH THE BJP turning up the heat on the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD over the growing influence of his aide and former bureaucrat V K Pandian, the Odisha Chief Minister on Thursday sought to make it clear that Pandian was not his “successor”, and speculation suggesting this was “an exaggeration”. "I can’t understand these exaggerations. You may have CM Naveen Patnaik; V K Pandian noticedthatheisnotevenstanding for elections,” said Patnaik while speaking to ANI in Bhubaneswar, when asked whether Pandian was being groomed to take over from him. Asked whether Pandian was his successor, he said, “He is not my successor. And I see all of this asexaggerationsandfalsehoods.” On whether his party has a succession plan, Patnaik reiterated that the successor “will be decided by the people of the state; that is the natural result in these things” — comments that echo what his father and former chief minister Biju Patnaik once said. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 ‘A time when women want to cheer for each other more than ever’ DEVYANI ONIAL NEW DELHI, MAY 30 THE ELEGANT and pastel interiors of the Indian Navy's Kota House in Delhi have a pop of colour and glamour today. Anasuya Sengupta, fresh from Cannes where she won the award for the Best Actress in the Un Certain Regards category at theCannesFilmFestival,thefirst Indian to bag the honour, has madeastopintheCapital,where her husband, Lt Cdr Yashdeep Sharma, is posted. "I was just happy that meri picture Cannes jaa rahi hai (My film is going to Cannes). I didn’t want anything more. That was myexcitementandjoy,andthen came the reception to my film. People loved the film, they would come up to me on the streets and were appreciative of my performance. But I felt that something more was at play, something deeper was resonating and I think it’s because this is a film where women are at the forefront. It’s giving people a sense of hope. My film has an almostangryfeminismbutPayal’s (Kapadia) film is gentle and beautifulbuttheyarebothabout feminism,” she says. Kapadia’sfilm,AllWeImagine AsLight,thatwontheGrandPrix, the second highest award at Cannes, too, has women at its centre. “It’s a time when we, more than ever, want to support each other,it’satimeforfriendship,of cheering each other on loudly, being there for each other. It is going even beyond cinema. Honestly, I am seeing it everywhere. We want women at the forefront. There is deep value in it.” she says. In Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless, a film in Hindi, Sengupta plays Renuka who runs away from a brothel in Anasuya Sengupta in New Delhi on Thursday. Tashi Tobgyal Delhi after killing a policeman and gets involved with a young girl, a sex worker. For Sengupta, justgoingtoCanneswasenough, getting the best actress award was overwhelming. It was all that she imagined and more. It was about cinema and glamour, about being next to legendary filmmakers,abouttheredcarpet andbuyinga25-Eurodressfrom the flea market to wear at the ceremony. But, as she emphasises, it’s not just about the yachts and glamour, love of cinema is at the core of Cannes. The film also marks Sengupta’s transition from working behind the camera as a production designer to facing it. It came more than 10 years after she first acted in Anjan Dutt's Madly Bangalee (2009), a film about a rock band which featuredmanymembersof TinCan, thetheatre group in Kolkata that Sengupta was part of. "Acting in Madly Bangalee was, of course, very different from now. I was fresh out of college and working on that film was like hanging out with friends. It didn’t feel like acting," saysSengupta,whograduatedin English from Jadavpur University. Her first job was with a magazine called Kindle and within three months, she quit to work as a director’s assistant to Claire McCarthy in the IndoAustralian production The Waiting City that was being shot in Kolkata. That was her first foray in films and soon she moved to Mumbai where her brother,afilmmaker,lived.“Ihad just these two experiences but I thoughtthatwas enoughammo to move to Mumbai,” she says. There, she did theatre and a few ads, worked as an assistant director and went on to become a production designer for films andseriessuchasSaatUchakkey, Ray, Chippa and the first season of Masaba Masaba, among CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Lucknow