by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
Sitaram Yechury
By Amulya Ganguli,
Given the weakened position of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) at the national level, the uneasy truce between its two factions led, respectively, by the present and former General Secretary, will be of interest mainly to the party faithful.
Even then, what the other political parties will be looking at is the kind of “understanding”, as mandated by the party congress, which the CPI-M will be able to reach with the Congress and whether the opponents of this line — former General Secretary Prakash Karat and his comrades — will accept the formulation or wreck it.
The tussle between Karat and the present General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury, will be at its most intense in the three states where the CPI-M still has some influence — Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura.
Of these, it is in Kerala that the Yechury-Karat confrontation will be most fierce since the state is the home ground of Karat and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, both of whom are against any deal with the Congress.
Since communist “discipline” stipulates that once a political line has been accepted, everyone, including its critics, has to abide by it, the Kerala scene will be enlivened by the CPI-M’s pursuit at the ground level of an “understanding” with the party’s main rival, the Congress.
True, the arrangement will be only for the Lok Sabha elections when the two parties are expected to work together against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is known to be rather weak in the state.
Had there been a stronger opponent, there might have been a possibility, however faint, of the red flag and the tricolour fluttering together. In the present context, the distance between the CPI-M and the Congress is unlikely to be bridged, whatever the party line. All that can be expected is that their mutual recriminations will be put on hold.
Unlike Kerala, where the CPI-M and the Congress are evenly matched as can be seen from the way the two parties come out on top in alternate assembly elections, both are quite weak in West Bengal at present.
It is perhaps for this reason that the animus between them is not as strong as in Kerala, which is why they were able to fight the last assembly election jointly against the Trinamool Congress although to no avail.
The two parties will also know that they are losing ground to the BJP in West Bengal, which has pushed the CPI-M down to the third position in recent elections and the Congress to the fourth. The Trinamool Congress, of course, remains at the top. For the two “losers”, however, the setbacks may facilitate their coming together in a rescue act.
From this standpoint, there is unlikely to be any difficulty in reaching an understanding between the CPI-M and the Congress, except for the fact that it is not known what the ties will be between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress.
If the projected joint platform against the BJP advocated by Mamata Banerjee takes shape, then a threesome comprising the Trinamool Congress, the CPI-M and the Congress cannot be ruled out although such a combination will be a rerun of the hodge-podge anti-Congress Janata conglomerate of 1977 and may prove to be equally fragile.
In Tripura, the scene will be rather weird because the Congress has been politically assimilated by the BJP as the reversal of the vote shares of the two parties show. While the polling percentage of the Congress dropped precipitously from 36.5 in 2013 to 1.8 this year, that of the BJP rose from 1.5 per cent to 43, showing a wholesale migration of the Congress’s base of support to the BJP.
The CPI-M, on the other hand, managed to hold on to its base by securing 42.6 per cent of the votes compared to 48 in 2013. But, given the virtual disappearance of the Congress, the Marxists are unlikely to be interested in an understanding with a non-existent party. In Tripura, therefore, the CPI-M will be taking on the BJP on its own.
Of the other states, the CPI-M’s impressive performance in organising the week-long, 180 km “long march” of the farmers from Nashik to Mumbai last month has shown that the communists have retained some of their influence in Maharashtra although it is nowhere near what it was in the 1950s and 60s.
If there is a Congress-Nationalist Congress Party tie-up in the state, the CPI-M will not have any difficulty in joining the two. It is in cementing an alliance (the word is anathema to Karat) of this nature in Maharashtra and elsewhere that the amiable Yechury can play a crucial role even if the Marxists will have no option but to play second fiddle.
Even then, there is little doubt that as the electoral race gathers momentum, Yechury can be expected to be engaged in stitching the loose ends of the anti-BJP combination together, thereby gaining stature which his party’s position does not warrant. If he succeeds, it will put the final seal on his “victory” over Karat.
(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 | Opinions, Politics
Nowhera Shaik (centre)
By Saeed Naqvi,
On May 15, when the Karnataka election results are announced, and the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) find themselves in an almighty scrum bargaining for power, a certain mysterious lady will be watching the proceedings from her suite in the country’s most luxurious, seven-star Leela hotel on Bengaluru’s old airport road.
The hijab clad, 45-year-old, Nowhera Shaik, President of the All India Mahila (Women’s) Empowerment Party (MEP), is fielding candidates for all the 224 assembly seats. It is a mistake to regard MEP as a woman-only party. “A woman has a brother, father, son,” she says. Moreover, there is no taboo on men seeking MEP tickets.
Her hijab is a far cry from a docile acceptance of male oppression. It is an assertion of feminine independence. She is CEO of the Hyderabad-based Heera Group of companies, dealing with a wide range of commodities across the globe — building material, gold and diamonds. The last mentioned happens to be something of an obsession with her. Heera, name of her company, means diamond. Her election symbol is the Diamond. Who knows, her name Nowhera may be a contortion of Nav Heera, which means “novel diamond”.
In the Sherlock Holmes classic, mystery deepens when the dog “does not” bark. In Shaik’s case the deathly silence of politicians and the media at the high voltage election debut is as intriguing.
There are all sorts of ironies involved. The latest Congress policy towards Muslims is based on the appraisal that the BJP’s shrill allegation, that the party appeases Muslims, has begun to affect the majority community. The Hindu increasingly sees the Congress as a “Muslim Party”. How should a party which is greedy for Hindu as well as Muslim votes cope with the predicament?
It was to meet this situation that the new “cloak and dagger” policy towards Muslims was enunciated. The party will distance itself from Muslims to prevent a haemorrhage of Hindu votes. But by hint and gesture the Muslim voter will be persuaded that this “distancing” is only a tactic in the Muslim interest. The Muslim must not leap into the Congress lap in full public view, but, with expert slyness, sneak towards the Congress polling agent.
The game acquires a touch of situation comedy when an audacious, hijab-wearing lady, with wealth beyond measure, a credible image of a philanthropist, jumps into the electoral fray. The Congress cannot throw up its hands and scream, “Help, help, she is nibbling away at Muslim pockets in a close election where even a few hundred votes matter.”
Nor can the BJP be ecstatic: “Welcome dear Begum Sahiba; go, damage the Congress.”
Unobtrusively, she just may end up marginally harming the Congress. If each one of her 224 candidates is pillowed with cash, the law of averages may return two, three or five winners. This may give her a hand to play in post-poll poker. Her ambitions for 2019 leave one gasping.
If the Congress loses the Karnataka election, it will be difficult for the party to escape the label the opposition is in gleeful readiness to paste on the Congress forehead: P2, a party confined to Punjab and Puducherry.
While nobody is conceding outright victory to the Congress, punters are willing to give it the largest single party status and therefore hope for coming state elections.
A representative group of eight senior journalists and political activists (including two having deep links with Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS) pondered over the election scene in my Bengaluru drawing room. There was no great difference of opinion on the way the cookie was expected to crumble on May 15. The Congress, BJP and Deve Gowda led-JD-S were expected to poll 95 to 100, 85 to 95 and 35 to 40 seats, respectively. A hung house will enable the JD-S to play a leading role in the post-poll poker.
Let us pick up the narrative in 2010 when Siddaramaiah, then in the opposition, chastised the infamous Reddy Brothers (more popularly known in Karnataka as the Bellary mining mafia) on the floor of the state Assembly.
The Reddys promptly dared him to repeat his charges in Bellary where, they threatened, he “would be finished”. Siddaramaiah took up the challenge. He undertook a 200-mile padyatra to Bellary. The voter, desperately searching for something he can respect, spotted a touch of heroism in Siddaramaiah.
There are now three principal caste groups (hundreds of smaller ones) in the contest:
Siddaramaiah with his diligently consolidated Kuruba caste; Deve Gowda, something of a Vokkaliga stalwart and B.S. Yedurappa, the tallest Lingayat who had almost been ruled out by the BJP because of a jail term for massive corruption. His powerful caste Lingayat has trumped all negative considerations.
Siddaramaiah is not a classical Congressman. Rather, his background should be a cause for concern for the Congress: There is in his DNA a trace of Lohia Socialist. This is what kept him in the JD-S for 35 years. But his parting with Deve Gowda was so bitter that theirs is now a blood feud. Deve Gowda would jump in front of a train rather than allow Siddaramaiah a second term in Bengaluru.
Yedurappa poses the Lingayat challenge. This has propelled Siddaramaiah towards an audacious gamble. An old demand by a section of Lingayats seeking a status outside the Hindu structure has been dusted up by him. Yes, he says, Lingayats will be outside the Hindu fold. This is far-reaching, tearing into Veer Shaivaite-Lingayat divide.
Trust a Lohiaite to have played this hand. There are echoes of V.P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report. V.P. Singh himself was not a beneficiary of his machinations. But the post-Mandal tumult brought to the fore Mayawati, Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad, Rath yatra to Ayodhya and so much mayhem. Let’s see how Siddaramaiah’s gamble plays itself out.
(A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday accused the Congress of spreading lies by hiring foreign agencies and dividing societies on caste lines. He said political purity cannot come unless the Congress culture ends.
In an interactive session with BJP candidates, state office bearers and leaders of Karnataka via the Narendra Modi app, the Prime Minister urged them not to fall for the Congress’s lie and focus on people-to-people contact till the voting.
“If you analyse last few elections, you will realise how a few political parties have indulged only in dividing societies on religious lines. They give lollipops to a community before elections and then forget them,” he said.
Modi said that this is the working style of the Congress in which they exploit emotions of some community before elections and forget them after the elections.
“They will never give account of their works. They keep indulging in dividing the society. The political purity can not be established in the country till the Congress culture is finished from the mainstream,” he added.
Hitting out at the Congress for spreading “rampant” lies, Modi asked the party workers not to fall for the opposition’s trap of falsehoods.
“Congress has resorted to rampant lying after a series of defeats in elections. Earlier, the Congress used to spread lies over five to 10 issues they raised. Now out of 50 issues, 40-45 are based on lies,” the Prime Minister said.
Modi said, in such circumstances, karyakartas must stand their ground, expose their lies and also fight their means of deceiving people by “hiring foreign agencies”.
The Prime Minister said that the other political parties hesitate to talk on development because development can be quantified.
“This was unacceptable to those parties which only concentrated on division. We govern and also fight elections based only on development model,” he said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
Yashwant Sinha
By Amulya Ganguli,
Yashwant Sinhas departure from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is an event which ranks as low on the political Richter scale as the entrances of S.M. Krishna or Rita Bahuguna Joshi in the saffron outfit from the Congress.
All these individuals are has-beens in the political world whose comings and goings are of greater interest to themselves than to the general public.
One reason for the latter’s disinterest is that these departures and arrivals are not seen to be driven by ideological considerations, but by personal factors like ego which makes them look for new pastures to overcome the feeling of being neglected by their old parties.
Age is another aspect, especially in the cases of Yashwant Sinha and S.M. Krishna. They can even be mocked on this count as Finance Minister Arun Jaitley did when he described Sinha as an 80-year-old job applicant when the former finance and external affairs minister of the Atal Behari Vajpayee government started criticising the party.
Not surprisingly, the BJP has now lambasted Sinha for singing the Congress’s tune. Ever since he started acting like a dissident along with Arun Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha, the trio has been seen as renegades although they were not expelled.
It is possible that the step of eviction was not taken lest it allows them to pose as martyrs or because the party did not have the time to spare on those whom it did not consider important enough.
Unlike Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha, Yashwant Sinha apparently did not like the idea of playing the in-house rebel for long, presumably because despite his protestations about adopting sanyas (monkhood) from party politics, he still hopes to play a notable role, albeit in the opposition camp, if only to prove that he is not “brain dead” which is how, according to him, the BJP regards all those above 75.
Nor did he want to be relegated to the ranks of those in the so-called Margdarshak Mandal or purported visionaries like L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, who have palpably been sidelined to play the role of mute and powerless observers.
As Yashwant Sinha’s latest step shows, he believes that he has enough of the political oomph in him to make an impact on public life by playing a meaningful role. What that role will be — if any — will only become clear with time.
But, meanwhile, what can be expected of him is to add greater volume to the kind of discontent with the government which has been voiced by 49 former bureaucrats (a category to which Yashwant Sinha belongs as he was once in the IAS) and also by a group about 600 academics who have noticed a link between the violence against the minorities and the ruling dispensation.
The academics have also endorsed what the former bureaucrats have said about the “terrifying state of affairs” in the country. These protests recall the decision of a section of writers, historians, scientists, filmmakers and others in 2015 to return the awards which they had once won in view of the prevailing atmosphere of “intolerance”.
Since these voices of dissatisfaction express the angst of a section of the middle class, Yashwant Sinha will not find much difficulty in mingling with the crowd of malcontents and even becoming a focal point of the demonstrations during the proposed nationwide campaign which he intends to launch to “save” democracy, as he has said.
There is little doubt that he will be joined in this endeavour by the non-BJP parties of which several like the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Lok Dal, the Aam Admi Party and others were present in Patna when Yashwant Sinha announced his parting of ways from the BJP.
Since he is an effective speaker, as are Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha, the BJP cannot but be a trifle wary if only because he will know some of the party’s secrets as well as its ways of functioning.
The BJP will also be on guard about the two others. If they, too, jump ship, it will not be good publicity for the party even if it dismisses them as opportunists who are unhappy about not having been accommodated in the government.
The party will also be cautious about Sinha’s subterranean lines of communication with the other senior citizens in the Margdarshak Mandal who cannot be too pleased about their marginalisation.
Outside the party and its few restive members, there is the Shiv Sena, which is unlikely to lose any opportunity to take a dig at the drip-drip of desertions from the BJP of a former member as well as former allies like the Telugu Desam Party and the presumed unhappiness of Janata Dal (United) over the 200-odd communal incidents that have taken place in Bihar ever since Nitish Kumar switched his allegiance from the RJD and Congress to the BJP.
For the moment, Yashwant Sinha’s revolt may look like a storm in a tea cup. But no one can say what impact his teaming up with the BJP’s opponents will have on the political scene, especially if the election results — in Karnataka, for instance — do not go the BJP’s way.
(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
Gandhinagar : A Division Bench of the Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former BJP Minister Maya Kodnani, saying there was absence of sufficient proof of her presence at the crime scene in the Naroda Patiya massacre case of 2002.
The court also upheld the conviction of Bajrangi Dal activist Babu Bajrangi, who was sentenced to imprisonment for life by the trial court.
The Bharatiya Janata Party Minister was one of the key accused in the riot case and was convicted by a special SIT court in August 2012. She was sentenced to 28 years in imprisonment.
The judgment was pronounced on the appeals filed by the former BJP Minister and others against their conviction by the SIT court.
The Division Bench of Justice Harsha Devani and Justice A.S. Supehia upheld the conviction by the special court of Babubhai Patel alias Bajrangi, a prominent leader of the Bajrang Dal Hindu outfit.
He was a key conspirator in the massacre in Naroda Patiya area, where 97 Muslim persons were killed in the Godhra aftermath.
The Naroda Patiya riots was one of the worst incidents during communal conflagration that engulfed Gujarat, following the train burning incident on February 27, 2002, at Godhra in which 59 Kar Sevaks were killed.
The High Court in August 2017 had reserved its order after the hearing concluded against the judgment of the special court.
The special court had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani and Bajrangi. Seven others were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years’ imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).
The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment of 14 years.
The trial court’s acquittal of 29 other accused in the case, for want of evidence was challenged by the SIT, even as those convicted had challenged the lower court’s order in the High Court for respite.
Government counsel Prashant Desai said: “It is clear from the Gujarat High Court’s judgment that the court has gone on no witness theory.”
“Twelve accused have been convicted. Besides Babu Bajrangi, Prakash Rathod and Suresh Chara alias Suresh Langda have been convicted under the IPC 120 (B) as key conspirators.
“The sting operation by the Tehelka was not taken into account by the court. The 12 have been convicted with 21 years imprisonment without remission.
“Whatever Babu Bajrangi did was no different from what the others did, so his conviction was on parity. Court believed police witnesses.”
“On Maya Kodnani, there were contradictions in the witnesses’ testimony against her presence at the crime scene. None of the police witnesses have said that they saw Kodnani at the scene.
“The SIT will have to appeal within 90 days to the Supreme Court if they want to challenge the Gujarat High Court verdict,” added the counsel.
Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel said: “Our minister Kodnani was wrongfully implicted in the Naroda Patiya massacre case. But today after the Gujarat High Court acquittal, she has been found innocent.”
“We are happy with the verdict and welcome the decision. She has worked hard for the party and definitely she will be given an active role in the party if she wishes to continue.”
Meanwhile, the state BJP president Jitu Vaghani has blamed the Congress party for arraigning Kodnani in the case. “The Congress wrongfully involved our former minister.”
—IANS
