Perth, 1985. India were trailing West Germany 1-5 at hockey's Champions Trophy with about eight minutes left when a 20-year-old fullback picked up the ball near the halfway line, ran at the defence, skipped past four defenders, and lifted it over the goalkeeper. It sparked a comeback still counted among Indian hockey's greatest. India scored four times in that spell to draw 5-5. Forty-one years later, the Congress has handed him the ball in Punjab with lots to defend against, and everything to play for. "It all happened so fast. Maybe the Germans did not expect it from me," Pargat Singh recalled about that match in Australia in a 1991 interview. On Friday, the party named the former Olympic captain its state unit chief, two days after Amarinder Singh Raja Warring resigned and months before the 2027 Assembly elections. Picking Pargat was a fallback, though not purely defensive. Former minister Vijay Inder Singla, a Hindu from the Bania (trader) community who he...
Speaking on the deadly suicide bombing inside a mosque in Peshawar on Tuesday, Pakistan Defence Minister Khwaja Asif said worshippers were not killed during prayers even in India, the Dawn reported. The suicide attack left 100 people dead and scores more injured. Expressing his views on the attack at the National Assembly, Asif said, "Worshippers weren't killed during prayers even in India or Israel but it happened in Pakistan." The explosion took place in the central hall of the mosque on Monday around 1 pm. Calling for unity in the fight against terrorism, the minister said it was time for Pakistan to set its "house in order," according to Dawn. Recalling terrorism incidents from 2010- 2017, the minister said, "This war started from Swat during the PPP's tenure and it was concluded during the PML-N's previous tenure, and peace was established in the country from Karachi to Swat." "But if you remember, a year-and-a-half or two years...