Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi paid floral tribute to former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on his birth anniversary at Shantivan in the national capital on Tuesday.

“Paying tribute to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ji on his birth anniversary, who took India from zero to the pinnacle, the creator of modern India, the fearless guardian of democracy and our source of inspiration. His progressive ideas advanced India’s social, political and economic development despite all the challenges and encouraged the people of the country to live together at every moment, without any discrimination and always keeping the country first,” Congress President Kharge posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the prime architect of modern India.

In his understanding, only a Democratic structure which gave space to various cultural, political, and socio-economic trends to express themselves could hold India together.

Today, as we gather in Shanti Van, to… pic.twitter.com/SMGpvEWx7a

— Mallikarjun Kharge (@kharge) November 14, 2023

कांग्रेस अध्यक्ष श्री @kharge और CPP चेयरपर्सन श्रीमती सोनिया गांधी ने शांतिवन पहुंचकर प्रथम प्रधानमंत्री पंडित जवाहरलाल नेहरू जी की जयंती पर उन्हें श्रद्धांजलि दी।

आधुनिक भारत के निर्माता नेहरू जी को आज पूरा देश याद कर रहा है। pic.twitter.com/NvSh8dQkdb

— Congress (@INCIndia) November 14, 2023

Children’s Day is celebrated on November 14 every year as a mark of respect to the first Prime Minister of independent India.

Jawaharlal Nehru was fondly called ‘Chacha Nehru’ and was known for emphasising the importance of giving love and affection to children. After the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, it was unanimously decided to celebrate his birthday as ‘Bal Diwas’ or Children’s Day in India.

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj. He breathed his last on May 27, 1964.

He became the Prime Minister on August 15, 1947, following an active role in the freedom struggle of the country.

On this day, a number of activities are organised for students in schools nationwide, such as games, competitions, and so on, while government bodies pay tribute to the late prime minister and organise commemorative events.

In 1954, the United Nations declared November 20 as Universal Children’s Day and India used to celebrate Children’s Day on that day before 1956 but after the death of Prime Minister Nehru in 1964, a resolution was passed in the Parliament unanimously declaring the day of Pt. Nehru’s birth anniversary as National Children’s Day.

Rescuers battled for a second day Monday to save 40 workers trapped underground after the road tunnel they were building in Uttarakhand collapsed, bringing down tonnes of debris.

Teams using heavy excavators have been working nonstop since the collapse early Sunday morning to clear piles of concrete and earth, but with more debris falling as workers tried to clear a passage, a giant steel pipe was being prepared as an escape route.

“All the 40 workers trapped inside the tunnel are safe,” Karamveer Singh Bhandari, a senior commander in the National Disaster Response Force, told AFP from the site in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, adding that water and food had been sent.

Oxygen was being pumped into the blocked portion of the tunnel, with food sent through a water pipe.

Mr Rathodi said excavators had removed about 20 metres (65 feet) of heavy debris, but the men were 40 metres beyond that point.

“Due to excess debris in the tunnel, we are facing some difficulty in the rescue, but our team is leaving no stone unturned,” he added.

Teams plan to use a heavy machine to drive a steel pipe with a width of 90 centimetres (nearly three feet), wide enough for the trapped men to squeeze through, the government’s highway and infrastructure company said.

“Water, food, oxygen, electricity all are available with the work force trapped inside the tunnel… All the stranded workers are safe as communicated by them,” the statement added.

Initial contact was made via a note on a scrap of paper, but later rescuers managed to connect using radio handsets.

“Some small food packets were sent in through a pipe which is also taking oxygen inside,” rescue official Durgesh Rathodi told AFP from the site.

– ‘Bring them out safely’ –

Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, who on Monday flew to the site of the accident, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the work to remove the tumbled concrete debris was “being made continuously to bring them out safely”.

“Contact has been made with the workers trapped in the tunnel through a walkie-talkie,” he said. “Efforts are being made to get them out safely soon.”

One rescue worker, quoted by the Press Trust of India news agency, said the men were contacted shortly after midnight on Monday.

Disaster response official Devendra Patwal said that while the men were trapped, they had space in the tunnel area where they were.

“The good thing is that the labourers are not crammed in, and have a buffer of around 400 metres to walk and breathe,” Mr Patwal told the Indian Express newspaper.

The 4.5-kilometre (2.7-mile) tunnel is being constructed between Silkyara and Dandalgaon to connect two of the holiest Hindu shrines of Uttarkashi and Yamunotri.

Photographs released by the government rescue teams showed huge piles of rubble blocking the wide tunnel, with twisted metal bars on its broken roof poking down in front of the rubble.

The tunnel is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s road project aimed to improve connectivity for some of the most popular Hindu shrines in the country, as well as areas bordering China.

Accidents on large infrastructure construction sites are common in India.

In January, at least 200 people were killed in flash floods in ecologically fragile Uttarakhand in a disaster that experts partly blamed on excessive development.

Days after Myanmar’s military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in February 2021, an Australian economist working with her received an anonymous email telling him the police were watching his room and that he should flee.

Sean Turnell, an economics professor at Macquarie University, was detained soon after, as the military launched a sweeping and bloody crackdown on democracy protests and those who had worked with Suu Kyi’s government.

Accused of being a spy and convicted by a junta-run court in a case slammed by rights groups, Turnell served 650 days in prison in Myanmar before being pardoned and released last year.

In an interview with AFP marking the publication of his new book about the ordeal, he recounted feeling he might not make it out alive, being a co-defendant with Nobel laureate Suu Kyi and the most memorable birthday cake ever.

The warning email he received from “A Secret Friend” came too late and he was arrested at his hotel shortly afterwards — while giving an interview to the BBC.

Held first in a police station in Yangon, he could still hear the banging of pots and pans that marked the early protests against the coup, he wrote in “An Unlikely Prisoner.”

Of the weeks-long investigation into him by the police and military: “I can only use that overused label of Kafkaesque,” he told AFP in Sydney.

Once, he was presented with a document marked “confidential” and asked how it had come into his possession.

It was a document he had written as part of his work for the government, he explained.

“I said, ‘Look, I had it because it was mine. I wrote it’. And they said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have had it’.

“And so at that moment, you know, I realised not for the first, not for the last time that I was way beyond the looking glass.”

Away from the interrogations, life in prison was hard and lonely, Turnell told AFP, adding he received “minimal” health attention.

During the steamy monsoon season, he described being “damp and hot and, all at the same time, your food goes mouldy, insects and rats and other rodents come.”

“The health risk factors were to the max,” he said. “I was worried about that. I thought I just might die there.”

Amid the darkness, there were lighter moments too.

On his 58th birthday, his fellow inmates did the impossible and made him a birthday cake in a makeshift oven.

They “somehow managed to get some flour and water and various other things, which you weren’t even sure what they were, some raisins and other things, and made this cake,” he said.

“It was the most wonderful cake imaginable.”

– On trial with Suu Kyi –

Turnell was later moved to a prison in the military-built capital Naypyidaw, where Suu Kyi was his co-defendant in his trial for allegedly breaching the country’s official secrets act.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her opposition to a previous junta, was detained on the morning of the coup and hit with a raft of other charges.

She has been largely hidden from view since the coup, appearing only in grainy state media photos, with Turnell one of the handful of people to interact with her.

“She was incredibly strong throughout” their trial, he said.

“She was, I think more concerned to keep the spirits up of the people, like me, charged alongside her, than she was about her own situation.”

The compound she was being kept in was “marginally” better than the cell of an average political prisoner, he said, but added he still worried about the health of the 78-year-old.

During the days they were together, they talked about literature, movies and what little they could glean about world affairs, he said.

They were each jailed for three years on official secrets charges and Turnell was preparing for another Christmas away from his family.

Then a pardon came “out of the blue,” and he was released alongside three other high-profile foreign prisoners — former British ambassador Vicky Bowman, Japanese journalist Toru Kubota and Myanmar-US citizen Kyaw Htay Oo.

Back in Australia, he spoke to the media about the conditions he was kept in and about the junta’s ongoing bloody crackdown.

He said he later learned this had “upset” the junta, which rescinded his pardon, making him technically a wanted man in Myanmar again, which was a “real shock.”

“I hasten to add it hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm nor sense of duty about speaking out on Myanmar,” he said.