Hyderabad: The Indian Air Force will ascertain the cause of the recent crash of AN-32 aircraft in Arunachal Pradesh and ensure such accidents do not recur, IAF chief B S Dhanoa said Saturday.

His comments come days after the wreckage of the IAF aircraft was found in a remote area in Arunachal Pradesh more than a week after it went missing with 13 people on board.

"We have recovered the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder...We will go into the detail (to ascertain) as to what happened and how do we make sure that it does not happen again," he told reporters on the sidelines of Combined Graduation Parade at Air Force Academy in Dundigal near here.

He was responding to a query on the accident involving the AN-32 transport aircraft in Arunachal Pradesh, which left 13 people dead.

"In Arunachal Pradesh, the terrain is very treacherous and most of the time, it is cloudy...When you are flying in that terrain, in that cloudy weather, there have been many, not only Air Force, even otherwise, Pawan Hans and all, accidents, because of controlled flight into terrain," he claimed.

The Russian-origin aircraft went missing in the afternoon of June 3, around 33 minutes after taking off from Jorhat in Assam for Menchuka in Arunachal Pradesh.

After eight days of a massive search operation, the wreckage of the plane was spotted by an IAF chopper on Tuesday at a height of 12,000 feet near Gatte village on the border of Siang and Shi-Yomi districts.

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Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.

Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.

He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.

Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.

He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.

Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.

He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.