by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
More than the social impact of the Supreme Court’s judgment on gay rights, what will be of concern to the ruling party at the Centre is its political fallout. Hence, the eloquent silence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the subject.
For the BJP and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), any expansion of the concept of civil liberties is fraught with danger to their restrictive worldviews since a widening of human rights carries the prospect of greater individualism.
If the rights of the homosexuals to live without legal constraints are conceded, it can only encourage the people to free themselves of other restrictions as well such as on choosing live-in partners (of whatever sex) and eating, dressing and speaking as they please.
It is noteworthy that the verdict on gays has come close on the heels of the judgment which described the right to dissent as a “safety valve” which the government can only shut off at its peril lest there is an explosion.
Moreover, the court had also upheld not long ago the right to privacy which the government described as an “elitist” concept.
For the Hindu Right, as also for other religious fundamentalists, this dalliance with civil rights — the freedom to criticise the government, the exaltation of privacy and now the decriminalisation of homosexuality — entails a push towards liberalism and modernism which are anathema to any group which wants the society to be bound by shackles of orthodoxy and obscurantism.
It is ironic that although the Hindutva brotherhood speaks of decolonising the Indian mind, the two colonial laws which have long been its favourites are the section on homosexuality in the Indian Penal Code and on sedition.
Now that one of them is gone, there is little doubt that these closet followers of Britain’s 19th century politician Lord Macaulay — even as they decry the secular groups as “Macaulay’s children” — will hold on resolutely to the law on sedition as their only safeguard against the “anti-nationals” who, they believe, stalk the land.
It is also possible that the saffronites will keep a hawk’s eye on any social problems that may arise because of the assertion of gay rights. As the BJP MP Subramanian Swamy has said, with eager anticipation, if a five-judge bench can overturn an earlier judgment in favour of criminalising homosexuality, a larger bench can undo the present verdict if gay bars begin to flourish and there is a rise in the cases of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infections.
Interestingly, what these judgments underline is how the judiciary is more attuned to the changing world than the elected representatives of the hoi polloi who often argue in favour of giving greater primacy to the legislature than the judiciary since they claim to represent the people while the judges are unelected denizens of an ivory tower.
However, one possible reason why MPs and MLAs, especially of the BJP, seem to be out of sync with the present-day world is the presence in their midst of a large number of criminal elements who can hardly be regarded as the most progressive sections of society.
For instance, of the 543 elected members of the Lok Sabha, of whom 186 have a criminal record, 63 belong to the BJP, followed by eight of the Shiv Sena, four of the Trinamool Congress and three each of the Congress and the AIADMK.
What the Supreme Court judgment appears to have done is to persuade parties like the Congress, which usually hedges its bets lest it should fall on the wrong side of public opinion, to come out in the verdict’s favour, presumably because it senses that this judgment, more than any other, has become a touchstone in the matter of breaking out from the stranglehold of the past.
To distance a party from it, as the BJP is doing, will amount to virtually alienating the entire youth community. Even if a majority among them do not have homosexual instincts — according to official figures, there are 2.5 million gay people in India, but this may be an underestimate since, till now, it was unsafe for them to reveal their sexual orientation — the youths nevertheless see the ruling as an assertion of living life on one’s own terms and not be held hostage by the dictates of a society steeped in conservatism and of political parties which believe that their agenda can only advanced if the country is made forcibly to conform to khap panchayat-style social and cultural norms.
To these youths, being or not being gay is of little consequence. What matters to them is to be able to make up their own minds and not be told by elders to abide by certain rules which are regarded as outdated by the younger generation.
If parties like the BJP and “cultural” organisations like the RSS realise the value and motivation of such mindsets, they will desist from their present attempts to impose a straitjacket of their pseudo-religious identity on the nation.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Mohit Dubey,
Lucknow : Is Shivpal Singh Yadav, the estranged uncle of Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, the weapon the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is looking for in Uttar Pradesh — a state which gave it 73 of 80 seats in the 2014 general election, but where it is threatened by the coming together of the SP and former Chief Minister Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections?
While the jury is still out on the “lethality of Shivpal”, the Yadav chieftain is already braced for a long haul against what he describes as “injustice and marginalisation of seniors within the SP”.
Sidelined in the SP, Shivpal has openly rebelled against his nephew after a 22-month hiatus and has floated his own Samajwadi Secular Front. This, many feel, is an open signal that all efforts to mend fences in the Yadav clan and among the party satraps have failed. Mulayam Singh Yadav, the elder brother of Shivpal, who has on many occasions preferred him over his son Akhilesh, called his younger brother for “another round of peace-making” but the latter refused, saying time has run out.
“I have taken a final and logical step, it’s impossible to go back now,” he told reporters recently, while pointing out how he had waited for long to be rehabilitated in the party to which he had given his “blood and toil” to bring it to its present status.
“They do not invite me to any party meetings, my counsel is not taken, the present dispensation in the party continues to ignore me,” Shivpal told IANS.
He has also started meeting party workers across the state and has announced that his Front would field candidates in all the 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2019. Though he trashes reports that he has the backing of the BJP to act a “vote katwa” — a vote “cutter” — and dent the prospects of the potential BSP-SP combine, it is a fact that any vote weaned away from SP by Shivpal would be a plus for the BJP, which is in choppy waters and is fighting hard to retain its position in Uttar Pradesh, a state which gave it a three-fourth majority in last year’s assembly polls.
Known for his organisational skills and camaraderie with party cadre and leaders of other parties, Shivpal’s decision to float the Samajwadi Secular Front, political pundits feel, is a step towards roping in other regional parties so that his “political value gets a boost”.
Om Prakash Rajhbhar, a minister in the Yogi Adityanath government and SBSP president, has already met Shivpal twice and sources say something is cooking between the two. Shivpal also enjoys good relations with independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh aka Raja Bhaiyya and jailed mafia don and former MP Atiq Ahmad.
Two former MLAs — Raghuraj Singh Shakya of Etawah and Malik Kamal Yusuf of Domariaganj — have resigned from the BSP to join Shivpal.
“Yadav may not throw his lot in with the BJP openly, but he certainly is a potent weapon in the armoury of (BJP President) Amit Shah,” says a senior leader of the BJP.
There are those who feel that Shivpal is acting at the behest of old colleague and Rajya Sabha member Amar Singh who has the backing of Amit Shah, the man feeling the heat of the SP-BSP alliance. “The script is written by Amit Shah as the ruling party has lost all by-elections since Akhilesh-Mayawati came together and if this continues Modi’s dream of returning as Prime Minister goes up in smoke,” an SP veteran told IANS.
Shivpal himself has given signals of going soft on the BJP; he recently said that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was honest, but the bureaucrats were letting him down. Amar Singh too has publicly said that he had arranged a meeting between a BJP big shot and Shivpal, but the latter did not turn up. The quick recommendation to the Union government of Shivpal’s IAS son-in-law for extended deputation has also raised eyebrows about the growing proximity between Shivpal and the saffron camp.
Keeping in view his close ties with Shivpal, political observers here are also keenly watching Amar Singh’s hobnobbing with the BJP. He has lost no opportunity to praise BJP leaders, specially Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Last month, at a public event in the state capital, Modi reciprocated by saying that “Amar Singh is sitting here, he knows all and can expose everyone”.
When asked about Shivpal’s rebellion against the party and his forming a Front, Amar Singh told IANS that this “was just a trailer” and that “picture abhi baaki hai”. He, however, added that “the political journey of Shivpal is a matter (for discussion because) he has nothing to do now”.
Like Mayawati and Akhilesh, who have joined forces in their common hatred for Modi, the Shivpal and Amar Singh are anchored their common dislike for Akhilesh Yadav. The 63-year-old Shivpal, insiders say, has vowed to “teach Tipu (Akhilesh’s pet name) a lesson of his lifetime”. Shivpal Singh Yadav, thanks to his many stints as a powerful minister in Uttar Pradesh, has a popular base in many central districts.
Both Shivpal and Amar Singh are insiders who know too much and have the potential of causing colossal damage to the SP, chuckled a senior minister in the state government, who added that their covert joining hands with the BJP will certainly damage the SP if not benefit his party.
He must, however, to realise that many regional satraps, mightier than him like Kalyan Singh, have fallen flat on their faces once they left their parties for personal ambitions.
A many-time legislator from Jaswantnagar, Shivpal may not be the wrestler his elder brother Mulayam is, but he sure has some moves up his sleeves to take on his nephew and former state Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and spoil his plans for a comeback piggy-backing on Mayawati and her BSP. How far he succeeds, only time will tell
(Mohit Dubey can be contacted at mohit.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The arrest earlier this week of civil rights activists was carried out to “Divert and Rule”, writer-activist Arundhati Roy alleged on Thursday and expressed fear that in the run up to the 2019 general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will “try to derail everything” with “some surprise attack”, urging people to hold the government accountable for its actions.
Launching a series of attacks on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led NDA government, the Booker-winning novelist and activist at the forefront of many social and environmental struggles, asked the people to not allow their “attention to stray from even when strange events befall us”.
“Modi government is following divert and rule. We will not know from where and how and when and what kind of fireball is going to fall on us. They are trying to distract us,” Roy said at a press conference here to condemn the arrests, before firing a series of salvos that targeted the government on its “anti-dalit” “anti-poor” “anti-minority” policies such as demonetisation and the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
“While the poor have suffered enormously, several corporations close to the BJP have multiplied their wealth several times over. Businessmen like Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya have run away with thousands of crores of public money while the government looked away,” Roy alleged.
“He (Modi) said that every man and woman will get Rs 15 lakh in his account if the BJP comes to power in 2014. On the contrary, poor of this country have been robbed. What kind of accountability can we expect from this government?” she asked.
Roy pointed to the investigation by the Karnataka Police into the assassination of firebrand journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh and said that it has “unveiled several Hindu right-wing organisations like the Sanatan Sansthan”.
“This has shown the existence of a full blown terror network with hit-lists, hideouts, safehouses, arms, ammunition and plans to bomb, kill and poison people… As it prepares for the 2019 general elections, the BJP has emerged by far the wealthiest political party in India. Outrageously, the electoral bonds ensure that the source of the donations to political parties can remain anonymous.
“How many of these groups do we know about? How many of these are still working in secret? They have the assurance and blessing of the powerful and even the police. With the elections coming what plans do they have in store for us? What surprise attack, where will they be, in Kashmir, in Kumbh mela, or in Ayodhya. They will attempt to derail everything with some minor or major attack,” Roy alleged.
Referring to the “manner in which the education institutions are being dismantled”, she said that the government is carrying out “re-brahmanisation of education” by rapid privatisation.
“Even the poorest beneficiaries of reservation are now being denied and pushed out at an alarming rate. This turning over of the educational institutions to the corporates is going to create a level of patronisation that we cannot recover from,” she said.
She termed the arrest of the five activistsas “illegal” and asked people not to forget that “by arresting public interest lawyers and human rights activists, the government is actually isolating lakhs of people because these are their representatives, the helpers of the poorest of the poor.”
“You are arresting and silencing those who work for the poor, you are stripping away the constitutional rights of whole population. When they arrested these people, it was their way of discrediting the dalit aspiration,” she said.
Pune police had on Tuesday arrested lawyer-activist Sudhar Bharadwaj and civil liberties activists Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Fereira and P. Varavara Rao from different parts of India, triggering a massive outcry.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Opinions, Politics
By Naresh Kaushik,
Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book, Congress President Rahul Gandhi used his Europe tour to reach out to non-resident Indians, or NRIs — a group largely known to support Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years. Throughout the tour, he targeted Modi for his style and policies, bitterly attacked the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and tried to project him and the Congress party as a better alternative.
Gandhi comes from a family where access is carefully controlled and only a select few are allowed to reach its members. But in London, he gave the impression that he’s accessible to the common man. He even mingled with the guests at his gatherings and shook their hands.
Speaking to journalists on Saturday (August 25), he mocked Modi for not talking to them openly. He accused the Prime Minister of not having the courage to answer reporters’ questions. This was a reminder of Modi’s public event in London in April, where he was accused of taking pre-planned and selected questions from the audience and not addressing even a single press conference. But one has to remember that Modi was also accessible to the media before he became Prime Minister. The question is, will Gandhi attend such open events and answer unscripted questions if he ever becomes the Prime Minister of India?
But still, this was a new Rahul Gandhi in London — more mature, aggressive, confident and ready to challenge his rivals. His sustained attacks on Modi, the BJP and the RSS were deliberate and sounded like part of a well-planned theme. It’s clear that he wanted to provoke the ruling party in India in order to set an agenda for debate. By comparing the RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, he wanted to plant a doubt in the minds of the Hindu right-wing organisation’s new supporters in India. This was also an attempt to drive away some voters from the BJP.
By targeting Modi and raising the issue of the alleged threat to India’s institutions under his government, Gandhi was trying to become the darling of the intelligentsia that supported the BJP in 2014. By praising Sushma Swaraj, who he’s bitterly criticised in the past, and attacking Modi for isolating her, Gandhi sought to create a wedge in the cabinet and was trying to impress upon the audience that he favoured an inclusive government where individual ministers were as important as the Prime Minister.
But we all know that Modi’S style of functioning is very similar to Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi. And it’s a fact that in present-day India, leaders of all political parties act like dictators and once in government they rarely allow individual ministers to have an independent voice.
In Europe, Rahul Gandhi cleverly avoided talking about his own ambitions of becoming Prime Minister. He didn’t want other opposition leaders to stop dreaming about that ambition and thus jeopardise their support for an anti-BJP front during next year’s elections. It also went with his theme of projecting himself as a consensus politician.
He fumbled at the press meet earlier when he seemed to agree with Pakistan’s position that the main problem currently between the two countries was that India didn’t want to talk. But later, in answer to a direct question about Imran Khan’s election, he made it clear that relations with Pakistan couldn’t improve as long as institutions like the ISI continued to export violence to India.
The Congress president rightly focussed on the unemployment issue and was honest in saying that most countries are facing that problem and don’t know how to tackle it. He wanted India to follow China where he said small and medium industries had resulted in large-scale industrialisation and massive job creation. But he should know that a democratic India can’t be compared to a totalitarian China. In India, no government can take a decision without attracting scrutiny by the opposition and the media.
But where Rahul Gandhi didn’t come out really clever and mature is when he said that the Congress party was not responsible for the massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of his grandmother in 1984. For the second day in London, he failed to correct himself that members of his party were not only responsible but some of them led mobs to kill Sikhs. Although later his party didn’t give them tickets for parliament and state assemblies, they were never expelled.
Gandhi’s explanation that he condemned all violence and wanted the guilty to be punished, is similar to Modi and BJP leaders saying that they condemned all violence, including those by cow vigilantes, and wanted the perpetrators to be brought to justice. All of a sudden, just months before the general election, Gandhi, has given the BJP and the Akali Dal a major political issue. As Sikhs are in large numbers among the NRIs, he has only managed to provoke their anger against the Congress party.
Gandhi still has a long way to go. He still appears to lack new ideas and the political acumen required to take on Modi. But his Europe tour suggests Modi and the BJP will have to take him seriously. The man they dismissed as “Pappu” for a long time appears to have emerged as a tough challenger.
(Naresh Kaushik is a senior journalist based in London. He can be contacted at uknaresh@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
Rahul Gandhi has had another of his escape-velocity-of-Jupiter moments.
His reference to the massive gravitational force of the solar system’s largest planet was in the context of “explaining” how much velocity was required by a spacecraft to lift itself from the surface of Jupiter compared to what was required on earth — 60 km/sec against 11 km/sec.
According to him, this was the kind of stupendous “effort” which the Dalits needed to “escape” from their present lowly socio-economic conditions.
Following that foray into space science, the Congress president has now offered an economic “explanation” for the lynchings in India during a speech in Germany by arguing that the unemployment caused by demonetisation, which hit small businesses, is behind the mob violence.
Moreover, the traders and entrepreneurs have also experienced grave difficulties because of the “badly implemented” Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The link, however, between demonetisation and lynching is tenuous. For one thing, the people in general showed exemplary patience in lining up for hours before banks and ATMs after the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes were withdrawn from circulation.
For another, the cow-related lynchings of Muslims are widely believed to be the outcome of the atmosphere of hate created by the longstanding anti-minority propaganda of the saffron brotherhood, which has gained traction with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) assumption of power.
Demonetisation and GST have nothing to do with the attacks on Muslims for consuming beef or transporting cattle.
After this flawed interpretation of communal incidents, Rahul Gandhi ventured into another dicey area by linking the rise of the Islamic State in West Asia to the US intervention in Iraq and the resultant insurgency caused by the stalling of the “development process”.
If the Congress president’s point is that the absence of adequate economic opportunities for Muslims and Dalits can breed terrorism in India, he can only be said to be grossly exaggerating.
He had earlier acknowledged during a visit to the US that he is not as good a speaker as Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Now he has shown that his arguments are not always credible.
Little wonder that the BJP is cock-a-hoop with joy, for Rahul’s speech has reinforced, in its view, his Pappu image which he had been gradually shedding.
In the present highly charged political atmosphere, there is every need for public speakers to weigh their words with care lest the slightest slip enables their opponents to trip them up. No quarter is given at the moment, which is perhaps as it should be, for the age of gentlemanly parry and thrust in politics is over.
For Rahul Gandhi and the national opposition, there are any number of issues on which the BJP can be criticised. These include, among other things, the insecurity of the Muslims as a result of the lynchings and the perception among Dalits of being oppressed, which has been reinforced by the prolonged incarceration of one of their top-ranking leaders, Chandrashekhar Azad “Ravan”.
The fear among the Muslims and also peace-loving Hindus have also been heightened by the possibility of violence caused by various diktats of the Hindutva lobby such as banning animal slaughter on the occasion of Eid or the provocative shows of strength with the brandishing of arms by saffron groups during Navaratri which used to be earlier always observed peacefully.
Apart from these flashpoints, there are also the problems of unemployment and agrarian distress. There is no need, therefore, to range further afield by referring to the Islamic State, especially when the Muslim community in India has always shunned terrorism except for a few who have gone to Syria.
If anything is to be highlighted, it is this spirit of forbearance and tolerance for which the country has always been known rather than the possibility of deprivation leading to the adoption of extreme measures.
India is on the brink of a seminal change. The two opposing political forces facing each other — the BJP on one side and the Congress and the national opposition on the other — represent two virtually diametrically opposite “ideas” of India.
While one is avowedly Hindu-centric, the other emphasises the country’s composite culture.
As one of the leaders of the latter group, Rahul Gandhi has to demonstrate that he and his party are ready to put behind them the ignominious past of being able to win only 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and are ready to take on the BJP’s formidable election machinery and its highly articulate orator, Narendra Modi.
To do so, Rahul Gandhi has to choose his words with care whether speaking at home or abroad and concentrate on the BJP’s obvious weak points instead of looking for parallels from world events.
Since the BJP has the advantage of having a domineering “presidential” figure at its helm, it is keen on turning the next year’s general election into a one-to-one contest with Rahul Gandhi in mind since there is no other leader in the non-BJP camp with a pan-India appeal as his not inconsiderable 27 per cent approval rating compared to Modi’s much higher 49 per cent shows.
But to make it a battle of equals, Rahul Gandhi must not neglect his home work.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
