Kochi, The Customs Commissionerate has arrested five persons from West Bengal and Assam in connection with the smuggling of high-end used cars from Bhutan, officials said on Saturday.. Kerala: Five held for smuggling high-end used cars from Bhutan; DTO among accused. In a statement, Customs said the arrested persons were Biswadip Das of Jaigaon in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal, Dipak Patowary of Paltanbazar in Kamrup district, Ayub Ali of Jogighopa in Bongaigaon district, MD Mostafa Ahmed of Boladmari in Goalpara district and Jalal Mandal of Chapar in Dhubri district. All four belong to Assam.. Customs officials said Patowary was the District Transport Officer of Bongaigaon in Assam.. The arrests were made following a widespread investigation conducted in Assam and West Bengal, with the assistance of police and Customs formations in the northeastern states, officials said.. “During an investigation by Assam Police, they were found to have registered 460 such vehicles using forged documents. The vehicles include foreign-made cars as well as Indian-made vehicles that were exported earlier and later smuggled back into the country without payment of Customs duties. These were then illegally registered using forged documents,” Customs said.. The Customs Commissionerate, Kochi, launched “Operation Numkhor” last year after it was found that used vehicles, mostly high-end SUVs from Bhutan, were being illegally smuggled into India, re-registered in various states, and sold to buyers who claimed they were legally imported.. Last year, Customs seized several vehicles, including some belonging to film actors in Kerala, which had been sold to them by persons involved in the illegal smuggling of vehicles from Bhutan.. The Customs statement said Das, who was arrested on February 22 and is an employee of a major IT firm, was the mastermind behind the smuggling of vehicles from Bhutan.. He was apprehended near the India-Bhutan border and later brought to Kochi on a transit warrant before being remanded in judicial custody.. Customs will soon approach the court seeking the custody of the arrested persons for further investigation, officials said.. According to Customs, a recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India found that 15,849 vehicles with the same chassis and engine numbers were registered in multiple northeastern states.. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text. 

 West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said that she would “expose the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – Election Commission (EC) conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters”, as she launched a dharna outside Kolkata’s Esplanade metro station to protest the alleged arbitrary deletion of several million people during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee stages a sit-in protest against the alleged arbitrary deletions from the post-SIR electoral rolls in the state. (PTI). “I will expose the BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters,” she said in her speech.. “I will present those voters, who have been declared dead by the EC, at this protest site.”. During the dharna, Trinamool Congress (TMC) national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee exhorted voters to “boycott” the BJP in the upcoming state assembly polls.. “Boycott BJP. You may have reasons not to like TMC but Bengalis with the minimum sense of honour should not vote for BJP unless they don’t want something bad to happen to Bengal. I predicted earlier that BJP will not get more than 50 (of 294) seats. After what has happened in the name of SIR, their tally should not cross 40,” he said.. Also Read: ‘Subjected to some pressure’: Mamata Banerjee questions Bengal governor change ahead of polls. “In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls we said ‘No vote to BJP’. Now we are saying ‘Boycott BJP’. Boycott them socially,” he added.. On February 28, the EC published the first part of the final electoral roll for West Bengal, dropping 6.18 million names and keeping 70.46 million voters in the list after the SIR.. To be sure, another six million people were flagged under a controversial “logical discrepancy” category and their final status is currently being adjudicated by around 500 serving and former judicial officers.. The BJP hit back at Banerjee over the sit-in protest, saying she is holding such a demonstration to protect infiltrators.. “Banerjee is only interested in saving the infiltrators belonging to the Muslim community, which constitutes the bulk of her vote bank. She should be ashamed that she is holding a sit-in protest to save infiltrators, with whose help she managed to win the previous elections. But not any more,” said Union minister and BJP leader Giriraj Singh.. (With inputs from PTI). 

 The Karnataka government on Friday proposed the removal of state control over liquor pricing and a shift to a duty system based on alcohol content percentage.. Govt proposes shift to a duty system based on alcohol content percentage. Presenting the state budget in the assembly, chief minister Siddaramaiah said the reforms would modernise the state’s decades-old excise framework and introduce a taxation method commonly used internationally. The new model, called the Alcohol-in-Beverage (AIB) excise duty structure, links tax rates directly to the amount of alcohol in a drink.. “An Alcohol-in-Beverage based excise duty structure is globally recognised as the gold standard for alcohol taxation, as it directly targets the alcohol content which is the primary source of negative externalities,” he said.. The system is scheduled to come into force in April 2026.. The chief minister added that the transition from the existing duty structure will take place gradually over three to four years to prevent disruption in the market. Under the new framework, excise duty will be calculated on the alcohol content per litre rather than the total volume of the beverage.. The government also plans to change how liquor prices are determined. At present, the state plays a role in fixing retail prices, but that mechanism will be removed under the new policy. “Product placement within slabs will be left to the producers based on market considerations,” Siddaramaiah said.. The budget also proposes to simplify the pricing structure for alcoholic beverages by reducing the number of price categories. “Pricing slabs will be rationalised and reduced to eight slabs from the existing 16 slabs,” he added.. The excise department has been assigned a revenue target of ₹45,000 crore for the 2026–27 financial year.. The Brewers Association of India (BAI) hailed the shift to the new excise duty structure as transformative. “It (the new system) reflects the global gold standard in alcohol taxation, where the tax is levied on the alcohol content rather than the water in the beverage. No state has adopted such a structure so far. If implemented in line with this principle, beer and wine could become cheaper,” said Vinod Giri, BAI director general. 

 A 22-year-old woman from Delhi alleged that a taxi driver attempted to sexually assault her late on Thursday night on her way to Nainital, police said, adding that she escaped his clutches and hid an entire night in a forested area to evade him.. Photo for representation (Parveen Kumar/HT). Also read: India allows Iranian warship to dock at Kochi, crew housed at naval facilities. Police have registered a case against the unidentified driver and are on the lookout for him. Police officers said the woman, a Delhi resident, had hired a taxi from Haldwani to Nainital around midnight. She was travelling alone, they said.. Station house officer of the Tallital police station, Manoj Nayal, said the woman alleged that the driver was inebriated. “The woman alleged that the driver, who appeared to be drunk, started molesting her and attempted to sexually assault her. When she resisted, the driver allegedly assaulted her,” Nayal said.. Also read: Sukhoi-30 wreckage found in Assam, both pilots dead as jet crashes Karbi Anglong. Police said the incident occurred near Patwadangar, about 12 kilometres from Nainital. The driver allegedly diverted the taxi from the highway to a link road leading towards the area and stopped the vehicle.. Fearing for her life, the woman managed to escape from the vehicle and ran into a nearby forested area. She raised the alarm, following which the accused fled the spot, police said.. Also read: 4 more held in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar after killing in Holi clash triggers protests. Nayal said the woman said she spent the entire night hiding near the roadside in the forested area. On Friday morning, a local spotted her and helped her reach the police station in Nainital. Police said they have registered a case and carried out a spot inspection. The woman was sent to BD Pandey Hospital for medical examination. Nayal said teams have been deployed to trace the accused driver and and arrest him. 

 New Delhi: The era of a few major powers shaping the global landscape through deals and compacts is over and multipolarity is here to stay, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said at the Raisina Dialogue on Friday.. Jaishankar at Raisina Dialogue: Multipolar world replacing old global order, era of big power deals is over (PTI). Participating in a discussion on Finland President Alexander Stubb’s book “The Triangle of Power”, which explored the rise of the Global South and new power configurations, Jaishankar said power is distributed across several regions, preventing a handful of countries from dictating outcomes to the rest of the world.. “My sense is you’re going to have a future which will be much more multipolar because no country today has hegemony over so many domains that it is an overall hegemon,” he said. This is not just about the distribution of GDP and capabilities, and various regions of the world will be “more contributive” in different domains, he said.. “Multipolarity is here to stay. What we will have…is to some extent, some of the bigger countries will make temporary compacts on limited issues,” Jaishankar said. “Structurally, there is not going to be some big deal between powers and the rest of the world has to put up with it. That era is over.”. Jaishankar also argued that multipolarity is not against multilateralism. “You can have multipolarity with multilateralism and multipolarity without multilateralism,” he said.. “The success of multilateralism should not depend on the weakening of multipolarity because the weakening of multipolarity is not going to happen.”. Changes are occurring on the global stage because any expectation about freezing the order created after the end of World War II in 1945 or after the end of the Cold War in 1989 is “very unrealistic”, he further argued.. India has hosted the Voice of Global South gathering for the past three years as there is a “new basis for a Global South platform”, he said. The era of big countries creating spheres of influence and reaching huge compacts of a sweeping nature has effectively ended, he added.