Priyanka Mohite becomes first Indian woman to scale five peaks above 8,000 m
Mumbai (PTI): Priyanka Mohite from Satara in western Maharashtra has become the first Indian woman to scale five peaks above 8,000 metre after she climbed Mount Kanchenjunga on Thursday.
Priyanka (30), the recipient of Tenzing Norgay Adventure Award 2020, successfully completed her expedition to Mount Kanchenjunga (8,586 m), the third highest mountain on the planet, at 4.52 pm, her brother Akash Mohite told PTI.
In April 2021, she had scaled Mt Annapurna (8,091 m), the 10th highest mountain peak in the world and had become the first Indian woman climber to achieve the feat.
Priyanka has also climbed the world's highest peak Mount Everest (8,849 m) in 2013, Mount Lhotse (8,516 m) in 2018, Mount Makalu (8,485 m) and Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895 m) in 2016.
Passionate about mountaineering since childhood, Priyanka started to scale mountains in the Sahyadri range of Maharashtra as a teenager and in 2012 scaled Bandarpunch, a mountain massif of the Garhwal division of the Himalayas, in Uttarakhand.
In 2015 Priyanka scaled Mt. Menthosa which at 6443 metres is the second-highest peak in the Lahaul and Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.
The Bengaluru-based climber is also the recipient of the Maharashtra Government's Shiv Chhatrapati State award for adventure sports for 2017-2018.
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
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.
