by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
There are three aspects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech in parliament — which was probably his most combative in recent times — that deserve attention.
First and foremost is the undeniable fact that he is today by far the most effective speaker in Indian politics. His oratory has the potential, therefore, of carrying the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) well ahead of the others.
It is such attributes which can have a seminal impact on events. It may not be inappropriate to mention in this context that but for Hitler’s rousing eloquence, the Nazis would not have become — albeit for a decade — the force that they were in Germany.
However, the success of such declamation lies in a one-sided articulation of a viewpoint devoid of nuances and marked by a blindness to the possible flaws in the presenter’s own case. But more of that later. For the present, it is worth noting the second feature of Modi’s speech, which was an unrelenting focus on the Congress to the exclusion of all other parties.
What this approach emphasised is that despite the Congress’s present weakened condition, it is still perceived by the BJP as a major threat. A corollary to this perception is that the BJP’s dream of a Congress-mukt Bharat or an India without the Congress will not be easy for the party to achieve.
What is more, the Prime Minister’s speech was a pointer to the political reality that at the national level, a virtual two-party system has come into being in India. The two leading parties may have their allies but, notwithstanding the latter’s influences in their local areas, they are no more than appendages to the two main players with little possibility of replacing the two top parties at the Centre.
However, a caveat is necessary at this point. It is that the clout of today’s BJP is entirely due to Modi. There is no one else in the party who can take his place. No one can say with certainty how the BJP will fare if he is dislodged. The present primacy of the two parties is heavily dependent, therefore, on personalities (in the Congress’s case it is the Nehru-Gandhis) rather than on their respective organisations.
The third aspect of Modi’s speech is the stress on the Congress’s — and, as a result, on the country’s — past, since the history of the 132-year-old party is intertwined with Indian history since well before Independence.
As it is, the past played a major role in the BJP’s politics considering that its elevation into the mainstream of Indian political life from the margins was based on raking up the depredations of Muslim invaders in medieval times, including the destruction of temples and the building of mosques in their place such as the one in Ayodhya in 1528 on a site regarded as the birthplace of Lord Ram, venerated by Hindus.
From the 16th century to the 20th was but one step for Modi when he put the onus on the Congress for the partition and all that followed, including the division of Kashmir. Modi’s contention that the division would not have taken place if Vallabhbhai Patel was the Prime Minister in place of Jawaharlal Nehru was no more than a surmise, but what it underlined was the BJP’s current game plan of denigrating at every available opportunity India’s first Prime Minister.
The disparagement of Nehru began in Ram Nath Kovind’s first speech as the President when he omitted the first Prime Minister’s name from the list of those he mentioned, which included Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, the Hindutva brigrade’s latest icon about whom little is known to the average Indian outside the Sangh Parivar.
However, nothing showed the bias of the saffron brotherhood more starkly than Modi’s refusal to credit Nehru with the establishment of democracy in India since, as he said, democratic principles have marked the country’s polity since the time of Lord Buddha.
Even if, for argument’s sake, this point is conceded, it would have been interesting if Modi had dwelt on the teachings of Buddha’s disciple Emperor Asoka about tolerance — “one should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others” — when a BJP MP, Vinay Katiyar, was reiterating M.S. Golwalkar’s diktat about Muslims having no right to live in India when they have carved out of the subcontinent two homelands for themselves — West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh.
True, the Congress has much to be ashamed of — dynasticism and corruption being the foremost among them — but for a Prime Minister to be so ahistorical in his outlook as to believe that the Congress’s earlier electoral successes were based solely on the weakness of the opposition and help from the NGOs is odd, to say the least. History is as complex as the reasons for the choice of the people of one party over another.
As a matter of fact, Modi undermined his own case by devoting virtually his entire speech to a party which he thinks should listen to Gandhi’s advice to disband itself.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmaill.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Politics
Sheila Dikshit
By Sarwar Kashani,
New Delhi : Former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit is not averse to returning to active politics if her party asks her because the time is ripe for the Congress to bounce back as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s credibility has hit “rock bottom” due to the “all-talk, no-action” politics of the BJP government.
But the 80-year-old Congress politician does “not have the confidence” to say if her party can beat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) riding a Modi wave in the 2019 general election.
“I don’t have the confidence to give you the answer on this. The Congress knows it well; its leader (President Rahul Gandhi) knows it well. Rahul is doing as much as he can and as much as is possible,” Dikshit told IANS in reply to a question on the Congress’ chances in the next Lok Sabha elections.
She, however, said if the Congress talked about real issues and didn’t get lured by the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, it can stage a comeback.
“We have to talk about issues, the aspirations of people that the Modi government has failed to address, failed to meet. People are suffering because of rising prices, people find it difficult to buy fuel, there are no jobs, India’s growth is declining… These should be our political planks.
“We have to scrutinise the promises made by the BJP and seek answers from Prime Minister Modi on why he has failed to keep them.”
She said BJP’s Hindutva narrative may no longer be saleable to the electorate of India because “by now they must have understood that Modi is all talk and no action”.
“Modi’s and the BJP’s credibility has hit rock bottom… it is shaken. The BJP has not delivered on its election promises. Mere foreign visits (by the Prime Minister) don’t bring jobs, don’t bring growth. The country has not progressed. In fact, it is on a regressive path. We will have to counter that,” the three-time Delhi Chief Minister said.
Asked if she was ready to return to active politics after she withdrew her nomination as the Congress’ chief ministerial face in last year’s Uttar Pradesh elections, Dikshit said: “I am ready, but am not seeking any role. I am underlining the word seeking. I am ready to take any role if the party asks me to.”
She said she withdrew from the Uttar Pradesh elections only after the Congress allied with the Samajwadi Party much against her wish.
“There was a mismatch. We fought elections with a slogan ’27 saal UP behaal’ (27 years of Uttar Pradesh’s sorry state). It was a reference to the number of years that the state remained in the hands of non-Congress governments, including the Samajwadi Party. However, the alliance contradicted the slogan and I voluntarily announced that I am stepping down.”
About Delhi politics, she said she won’t mind either returning to the capital where incumbent Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has also failed to keep the promises he made before coming to power.
She, however, regretted how “we underestimated” Kejriwal when he was debutting as a politician in Delhi and thought he won’t make unrealistic promises for contesting elections.
“Kejriwal made promises that he cannot keep because an elected government in Delhi has limited powers. He made promises without understanding the realities of Delhi’s limited statehood and today you see people are realising it. I am not sure if people at the grassroots level have understood it, but I know he (Kejriwal) won’t be able to do much about it.”
Having grown and lived most of her life in Delhi, Dikshit, who is largely credited with transforming the capital during her 15-year rule, said it “of course hurts” to see the city called unsafe for women or the crime capital of India.
She has penned a 175-page autobiography “Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life” (published by Bloomsbury India), recalling her childhood days cycling around the city in a carefree manner.
“The times were also such that it never occurred to my parents that something could go wrong if we were left largely to our own devices,” she recalls in the book, wishing if only those days of innocence could return and children of Delhi could be safe and carefree.
“Rape was not talked about, at least in our family and in our circle. We didn’t know what it was. In fact, I didn’t know what rape was until after many years of my marriage when I read about it. That was the age of innocence, those were times of innocence,” she said.
(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : BJP chief Amit Shah on Friday described Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s style of politics in Parliament as “undemocratic” after the opposition party created a ruckus during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech.
Shah’s comments came at a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party Parliamentary Party here, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar told reporters. The meeting was attended by Modi too.
Slamming the Congress for disturbing Parliament over the Rafale jets deal with France, Shah explained the main points about the agreement. “But will it be good for the nation to discuss details of each and every component?”
Shah also praised the Union Budget 2018, saying it was meant to benefit the farmers and the middle class.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Politics
By Sarwar Kashani and V.S. Chandrasekar,
New Delhi : The BJP government is looking to make a “major assault” on the Constitution if the ruling party gets a majority in both the Houses of Parliament, says Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who feels the attack on various constitutional provisions, like Article 370 on Kashmir and secularism, will be part of attempts to create a “Hindu rashtra” (nation).
Tharoor, a second-time Lok Sabha member from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, also feels that the Congress and like-minded secular parties should come together on a common platform to resist the Hindutva onslaught in the next Lok Sabha elections. Even the Left parties could come on that platform post elections if necessary, according to him.
“I think a lot of their real agenda is waiting for the time when they have both Houses under their control. And once they do, I think you can certainly look to a major assault on the Constitution. Then the question is, will the Supreme Court stand by the basic structure doctrine and interpret it to include these principles of equality, freedom of religion, freedom of worship, non-discrimination, etc., which would make it impossible to reduce the Constitution to the document of a religiously-derived majoritarianism,” Tharoor told IANS in an interview.
He recalled that during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee a constitution review committee was formed under former Supreme Court judge M.N. Venkatachaliah, but it didn’t work on the idea of a Hindu rashtra.
But, Tharoor said, it seems a committee under K.N. Govindacharya, an ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh (RSS), is working for the present dispensation, according to media reports and interviews, which have never been challenged. Govindacharya has already talked with some candour to journalists about what he is trying to do.
“He says socialism, secularism, all that will have to go. If they are embarking on such a project, I think they are quite serious about it. The only thing is that they probably felt this would be too much of a risk to be taken on in the first term, unless they also have a majority in the Rajya Sabha.”
Tharoor said the BJP doesn’t have a two-thirds majority now because almost no other party is going to go along with its approach.
“So, I think they were really hoping, and perhaps unrealistically hoping, to consolidate two-thirds majority in both Houses and then go for the kill. Rather than fighting the battle prematurely, when they could lose.”
Meanwhile, he said, the BJP did some “test-drives” like the triple talaq bill as one way of trying to get an issue that they believe will both be dog-whistle at their hardcore base and at the same time test their strength on an issue of religious significance.
“But once they get two-thirds in both Houses, I do believe the Constitution, including Article 370 on Kashmir… on the Hindu rashtra concept, on use of words socialism, secularism, all of these would be up for grabs. There is little doubt about it.”
He said he was surprised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi prescribing that Jana Sangh leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s ideology is the one those in the ruling party should follow, as it was the same Upadhyaya who said the Constitution should be torn up because it is full of imported ideas.
At the same time, the Prime Minister said the Constitution is the holy book for him, Tharoor said.
Asked if Modi should not be holding this view because he is occupying high office, the Congress leader said: “That will be terrific, I think, if the Prime Minister were to say ‘I admire many things about Upadhyaya, but I don’t agree with him on the Constitution’.”
In the context of his latest book “Why I am a Hindu” (Aleph), Tharoor was asked whether he would like his party to counter the BJP on the lines of what he had written about Hinduism and Hindutva. He replied he would not like to overemphasise on this issue because of the inherent strength of Hinduism.
“In other words, while we were behaving like we were good people who worshipped in private but thought it unseemly to demonstrate our faith in public, they (the BJP) were the ones ostentatiously being religious and saying to their voters ‘see, we are Hindus like you and you should vote for us and those are godless secularists’.
“So, by Rahul Gandhi going to temples in Gujarat and so on, what is he saying: He is saying they go to temples, we also go to temples. So, let’s neutralise our issues. Now let’s talk about vikaas, talk about development, let’s talk about whether your life has become better in five years of the BJP ruling you.”
Tharoor said ultimately the key political arguments ought to be that these people made all sorts of promises five years ago that they have not fulfilled.
“And to my mind, politically, that is the most powerful argument that we can make — are you better off than you were four years ago or five years ago? And if not why do you want to vote for them again? You think about the price of your gas cylinder. You think about whether you’ve got a job. You think about whether you’ve been able to afford to pay for petrol or diesel at the pump even though world prices dropped for four years.”
Asked about who should be the Congress’ allies in the next Lok Sabha elections, Tharoor said it was too early and wrong because he is not in a position to speak about it.
“I would say there would be states where there would be straight fight between us and the BJP, and alliances would be of less consequence. But we may still have an alliance for the sake of opposition unity.
“But there would be other states where regional parties would be more powerful electorally than we are, and where we may have to reconcile ourselves either by allying with them or, if necessary, tying up a post-electionsalliance.”
Asked if the Congress would ally with the Left post-elections, he said: “They will, certainly. As far as the CPI-M is concerned, they have already announced they will not ally with the Congress and now we have the final decision to be made by their Congress. If that is confirmed by the party congress, then we will only see post-election (alliance).”
Asked what prompted him to write his latest book, Tharoor said he had been playing around with the idea 20 years ago “in the context of the Babri Masjid demolition”.
“The idea to do a full book on the subject became more urgent and compelling because of the extent to which Hindutva has tried to make the issue of the Hindu face front and centre in our public discourse.”
But the real trigger was the way Hinduism was being abused and to counter that abuse.
“You know, when you have been abused as I have been on social media and so on… as ‘anti-Hindu’ and you always thought of yourself as a decent human being within the Hindu faith. What do they mean by anti-Hindu? How can I be anti-myself?
“My father was a very devoted Hindu. Am I anti him? My father was in every respect a profoundly sort of convinced practitioner and believer of Hinduism. And yet the way he brought us up was one of such respect for other faith and such willingness to accept the ideas and sacred objects of other faiths.”
(Sarwar Kashani and V.S. Chandrasekar can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in and chandru.v@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Lokendra Singh Kalvi
By Archana Sharma,
Jaipur : Shree Rajput Karni Sena chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi on Saturday dismissed reports that his outfit has withdrawn protests against Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Padmaavat” and said it must be some “fake news” circulated by a “fake Karni Sena”.
He also said that his group has made the BJP pay – via its loss in the Rajasthan bypolls – for not respecting the sentiments of the protesting Rajputs.
“There are many fake Karni Senas emerging in India. At present there are eight such entities operating in the country with vested interests,” Kalvi told IANS.
The Rajput leader, whose group has been at the forefront of massive protests against “Padmaavat”, said there has been a “duplicacy” in matters pertaining to Karni Sena’s functioning.
He stressed that there was “only one Rajput Karni Sena operating in India and I proudly say that I am the founder of that organisation”.
He also asked people to “beware of such similarly named organisations functioning and operating in the market”.
The Shree Rajput Karni Sena has been protesting the Deepika Padukone starrer since its inception, claiming the film distorts history.
“We started the initial protests against the release of the film, which we still continue to do,” he said.
“However, the other duplicate Karni Senas are creating a dubious situation by releasing contradictory and fake news,” Kalvi added.
Speaking on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s loss in the Rajasthan bypolls, the Rajput leader said: “Around 17 organisations have joined hands and declared that they will make sure that BJP loses elections on each and every seat.”
“And we proved what we said. Congress won with a big margin while BJP was a loser on its home turf.”
“Jauhar ki jwala mein bahut kuchh jalega. Aur bhi bahut ghatnayen hongi (The fire of Jauhar will burn down many things, there is more to come). ‘Padmaavat’ will decide many things in future.”
Kalvi said: “We want the government to understand via political loss how it has hurt the sentiments of people here.”
“We have hit hard on notes as well as votes. Bhansali was expected to get Rs 500 crore return, however, we scuttled his dreams and cut the profit margin to Rs 150 crore.
“Similarly, the vote share of the BJP was reduced,” he added.
“I have met 21 Chief Ministers and am looking forward to meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi soon. I have got the call from PMO asking about my schedule and have given them my schedule.
“Will see when can I meet him and apprise him on the present situation,” Kalvi added.
The Rajput leader strongly denied having any political aspirations.
“None of us have any dream of floating a political party,” he said.
The Rajput Karni Sena on Friday had announced that it had decided to end the protests against Bhansali’s “Padmaavat” stating that the film “glorifies the valour of the Rajputs”.
Shree Rashtriya Rajput Karni Sena’s Mumbai leader, Yogendra Singh Kartar said that a few members of the outfit watched the film on the directions of the organisation’s national President Sukhdev Singh Gogamadi and found that the “film glorifies” the valour and sacrifice of Rajputs, and “every Rajput would feel proud” after watching it.
(Archana Sharma can be reached at arachana.g@gmail.com)
—IANS
