by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Mohit Dubey,
Lucknow : Uttar Pradesh was a parched land for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for 14 long years. Ever since the then Chief Minister Rajnath Singh lost the plot in the 2003 state assembly elections, the saffron party found itself on the sidelines of the country’s politically most crucial state.
In election after election, the BJP was battered by regional satraps like Samajwadi party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati. In 2017, its political “vanvaas” (exile) ended and the party romped home with its highest seat tally ever — 312 in a house of 403.
Building on the stunning victory of the 2014 Lok Sabha election, where the party won 73 of the 80 seats on offer, the BJP’s well-oiled organisation and a frenzied campaign by Prime Minister Narenda Modi, party President Amit Shah and many regional leaders ensured the end of the exile and a return home in style.
The party promised a dejected population the moon and swayed them in its favour. People, fed up with the BSP and the SP misrule, had little option. The development Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s brought was for all to see but apparently the electorate was miffed with the SP’s internal feud and the decision to join hands with Rahul Gandhi’s Congress.
The results were catastrophic for the SP and the Congress, the former slipping to its lowest-ever tally of 47 and the latter doing no better than its last showing.
The BJP’s “Dalit nahin Daulat ki beti” (Not a Dalit but the daughter of wealth) credo gained currency during the campaign and the BSP, which was largely being viewed by the media and political observers as a serious contender for the throne, was reduced to an abysmal 19 seats. The corruption charges stuck to Mayawati, already rattled by many desertions in the party.
Uttar Pradesh has always been the pivot of all politics that the saffron fold ever practised or preached. From a party of two members in the Lok Sabha to a centerstage challenger to the grand old Congress, the state has played an important role. It was here where the BJP’s biggest political asset and electoral ace — Ram Janmabhoomi — existed. But after reaping the harvest of the “Jai Shri Ram” wave in the late 1990, the BJP found itself mired in inner-party bickering in the early 2000s.
Its tallest leader in the state, a backward Lodh, Kalyan Singh, had rebelled against the party high command, then comprising Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, and had to be ultimately thrown out. His replacement, Ram Prakash Gupta, could neither hold the party together nor the government. His forgetfulness became the butt of many jokes in political and bureaucratic circles. Kalyan Singh would often ridicule him on how the “beginning of BJP’s end” was for all to see.
And, as Kalyan Singh plotted his next moves — not to win seats but to dent the BJP — from his Mall Avenue bungalow, which also housed his close associate Kusum Rai, who was a cause of consternation when he was the Chief Minister, the BJP high command saw the damage that the tall backward leader was causing to its foundations in the Hindi heartland. Gupta was soon replaced by Rajnath Singh, the shrewd Thakur leader from eastern Uttar Pradesh — but apparently that was too little too late.
Under Rajnath Singh, who was often accused by colleagues and opponents of promoting only Thakurs, the BJP’s citadel cracked and the party lost power, coming down to two digits in the state assembly. Mandarins in the party stitched up an alliance with the mercurial Mayawati despite stiff opposition from the Brahmins and the Thakur lobby, who were still smarting under her past slogans like “Tilak Tarazoo aur Talwaar, inko maro joote chaar”.
After a brief, 56-day spell of President’s rule, BJP-BSP thrashed out differences and Mayawati became the Chief Minister for the third time round. But the problems kept mounting and Mayawati resigned in August 2003, parting ways amid acrimony, to end one of the strangest alliances in Indian politics.
In August the same year, Mulayam Singh Yadav was sworn in as the Chief Minister with the support of BSP dissidents and ran the government until 2007. It is widely speculated that a group of BJP leaders convinced Vajpayee that Mulayam would help in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. This never happened but the SP made it to the Lok Sabha with its strongest contingent ever of 39.
Lawlessness and mis-governance led to Mulayam Singh’s loss at the hustings in 2007 and Mayawati returned with an absolute majority — and the BJP still remained on the fringes. In 2012, Mulayam Singh’s son Akhilesh Yadav led an impressive campaign and got a majority (for the first time) for his party.
The BJP, though looking upbeat yet again, did not move up in the electoral stocks. Its golden run started in 2014 when it peaked with 73 seats in the general election and, to its credit, it managed not only to maintain the lead in 2017 but also bettered it.
In March, however, when it picked firebrand monk-turned-politician Yogi Adityanath for the Chief Minister’s post, it left many amused — and many alarmed. Nine months down the line, though there have been no communal conflicts, Adityanath continues with his Hindutva agenda and the BJP continues to win elections — something most guess were things mandated from the head of the Gorakshnath Mutt.
(Mohit Dubey can be contacted at mohit.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Prashant Sood and Sidhartha Dutta,
New Delhi : Opposition parties face a daunting task to check the BJP’s rise and expansion under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the coming year presents them opportunities to do so in eight states that go to the polls. It will also test them for their ability to build up the momentum against the BJP in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha poll.
Much will depend on the Congress Party’s performance in these state polls, as also the initiatives that its new President, Rahul Gandhi, takes in reaching out to other opposition parties.
Elections will be held in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura and Mizoram in 2018 — and in the four big states it is almost a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress, while in Tripura the battle will be between the CPI-M and the BJP.
With the Congress losing several elections over the past over three years, there is already talk of “collective leadership” in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and suggestions against making it a presidential-style electoral contest against Modi.
The year saw 18 opposition parties coming together to put up common candidates for the presidential and vice presidential elections. But these parties, which included the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not come together for the Gujarat assembly polls which the Congress narrowly lost.
The 18 parties came together after the Uttar Pradesh elections that the BSP and the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance fought separately and lost badly to the BJP.
NCP leader Tariq Anwar said the Congress lost about 12 seats in Gujarat because it did not ally with his party and the BSP. “They should not repeat the same mistake in the states going to the polls next year. If the Congress does well in these states, it will be a big boost ahead of the 2019 elections,” he said.
Anwar said next year’s state elections will give a clear picture about what will happen in 2019. “The elections will be a big challenge for the Congress and the opposition parties,” he told IANS.
Opposition parties, specially in states with multi-polar contests, have competing interests and any proposal to put up common candidates against the BJP in 2019 elections will need a lot of accommodation and hard work.
The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party are seen as adversaries in Uttar Pradesh and the Left, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The Congress is an adversary of the Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana, of the Telanaga Rashtra Samiti in Telangana and of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha.
It is apparently in view of these contradictions and the lacklustre performance of the Congress since its debacle in 2014 that Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien called for a “collective leadership” to bring all opposition parties together against the BJP in each state.
He has said that that the opposition should play to its strengths and make the Lok Sabha elections a sum of state elections.
Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal, MP, said “it was compulsion for the opposition parties to come together before the Lok Sabha elections” and parties such as BJD and Aam Aadmi Party should be part of the larger grouping.
“We will try that all opposition parties come together before the Lok Sabha elections. When Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, a similar situation was before the country. All parties came together and she lost the election. History has to repeat itself,” Agrawal told IANS.
T.K.S. Elangovan, a leader of Tamil Nadu’s DMK, said Rahul Gandhi’s campaign during the Gujarat polls had boosted Congress morale and stressed that in the upcoming elections, preparations should start much earlier.
“All secular parties should come together to fight the communal forces. They are trying to force Hindutva upon us. They are also spreading hatred,” he said.
Elangovan also said that the Modi government has not delivered on its promises such as employment and improving the lives of the people. “We need to expose their propaganda,” he said.
The CPI-M’s Mohammed Salim said the secular parties “should discover an alternative narrative and strategy against the communal forces and they should be defeated”.
CPI leader D. Raja said social forces have also to be mobilised, besides political parties, in the fight against the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, the umbrella organisation of the BJP and its right wing affiliates.
“A new economic and social narrative has to be devised to counter these forces,” he said.
On the flip side, Janata Dal-United leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s return to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance earlier this year came as a blow to the opposition parties as he was seen as a leader who could emerge as a challenger to Modi.
RJD supremo Lalu Prasad’s conviction in a case relating to the multi-crore rupee fodder scam has also come as a blow to the efforts towards opposition unity.
But a comforting factor for the Congress and some other opposition parties has been the acquittal of all the accused in the 2G spectrum case, on which the BJP had launched a sustained campaign against Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.
There would be many more chapters to this tale and it would be interesting to see the outcome towards the end of 2018.
(Prashant Sood can be contacted at prashant.s@ians.in and Sidhartha Dutta at sidthartha.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
Only the naive will believe that deep concern for the welfare of Muslim “sisters” and for the maintenance of the “dignity of women” and “gender equality” persuaded the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to introduce the bill in parliament to ban the practice of triple talaq.
For a party whose founder in its previous incarnation, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, thought that only a civil war can solve the Hindu-Muslim problem, as Tripura’s Governor, Tathagata Roy of the BJP, reminded us recently, and a BJP candidate in the Gujarat elections sought a reduction in the numbers of “topi and dadhiwalas” (sartorial allusion to Muslims), it strains credulity to believe that it has been guided solely by laudable motives to put an end to an admittedly reprehensible custom.
The belief will persist, therefore, that it is a desire to “garner votes” which is behind the decision, notwithstanding Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s disavowal of such an intention.
Few will deny, of course, that the practice itself is highly condemnable, not least because it is illegal even in Islamic countries. For a secular country, therefore, to allow it to prevail points to a flawed outlook whose roots lie in political calculations.
It cannot be gainsaid that the BJP is outlawing triple talaq for gaining political mileage both from sections of Muslim women and from those Hindus who will see the proposed law, first, as an example of “brother” Modi’s distress over the sufferings of Muslim women and, secondly, as a message to Muslims in general that the days are gone when they were given excessive leeway by less assertive governments.
The “secular” rulers of the past, on the other hand, also thought that they will gain votes by pandering to the predilections of the obscurantists among the minorities.
The worst example of this regressive attitude was the Shah Bano episode when the Rajiv Gandhi government negated a Supreme Court verdict in favour alimony for a divorced Muslim woman on the advice of Muslim fundamentalists.
Since the BJP’s rise from the sidelines of politics to the mainstream can be traced to that event in the mid-1980s, the Congress will have to tread carefully in deciding on its stance on the bill which has followed the Supreme Court’s recent declaration of triple talaq as unconstitutional in a case involving the litigant, Shayara Bano.
The difficulty for the Congress is that it has given secularism a bad name by making the concept virtually synonymous with minority appeasement. While the BJP will not mind being closely associated with Hinduism, the Congress has been trying to shed the impression that it has become “mussalmanon ki party” or a party of Muslims, as the Congress leader, Ashok Gehlot, has said, ever since the 2014 defeat made it aware of this unwelcome image, as the A.K. Antony report pointed out.
The triple talaq bill gives it an opportunity to refurbish its reputation by articulating a rational position on drafting the law, aiming at protecting Muslim women from cruel and whimsical divorces and at the same time ensuring that the legislation does not lead to a police witch-hunt targeting men. Since the bill has still to pass through the Rajya Sabha, Parliament’s upper house, there is ample scope for fine-tuning it for smoothing out the rough edges, the most egregious of which is to introduce an element of criminality in a civil legal procedure.
If the Congress and other “secular” parties play a leading role in ensuring that the new law will unequivocally serve the ends of justice where no one — neither the women, nor the men, nor the children of divorced parents — will suffer, then these parties will be able to retrieve much of their lost reputation about cynical kowtowing to bigots in the Muslim community and reassure the country in general that politics can rise above partisan and opportunistic considerations.
From this standpoint, the bill provides a golden opportunity to the secular outfits even if the BJP runs away with much of the credit for introducing it.
Outside of politics, what is noteworthy is the failure of the Muslims to deal with the problem on their own. But ever since partition robbed the community of bold, educated leaders and self-confidence by inducing the minority complex of being forever under siege under the numerically superior Hindus — unlike other minorities like Sikhs and Parsis who have retained their poise and self-belief — the Muslims have come under the retrogressive influence of the mullahs with the result that they have remained stuck in the past.
Triple talaq is one manifestation of such backwardness along with polygamy and the veiling of women as they reinforce the age-old patriarchal norms. Only a small section of upper middle class women — film stars and sports personnel being prominent among them — has been able to extricate themselves from the grasp of medievalism and enter the modern world. But the majority of the poor and lower middle class women have been denied the opportunity of advancement by orthodox Muslim society.
The new law offers them a ray of hope.
(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 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, News, Politics
New Delhi : A Bill for setting up a National Medical Commission that seeks to replace the Medical Council of India (MCI) was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Friday by Health Minister J.P. Nadda.
The Bill would lead to the constitution of a National Medical Commission for development and regulation of all aspects relating to medical education, medical profession and medical institutions and a Medical Advisory Council to advise and make recommendations to the Commission.
As the Health Minister moved the Bill for introduction, opposition members said that the Bill should be sent to a Standing Committee.
Nadda, however, said that the Bill has been prepared based on the suggestions of a Parliamentary Committee, after which it was introduced.
The Bill would also lead to constitution of four Autonomous Boards.
These would include the Under-Graduate Medical Education Board to regulate medical education at undergraduate level.
The Post-Graduate Medical Education Board to regulate medical education at postgraduate level; the Medical Assessment and Rating Board to carry out inspections and to assess and rate the medical institutions.
Besides, the Ethics and Medical Registration Board to regulate professional conduct and promote medical ethics amongst medical practitioners and medical professionals.
It would also maintain a national register of all licensed medical practitioners and a national register of AYUSH practitioners, who have qualified the bridge course.
The Commission would also give recognition of medical qualifications granted by universities and medical institutions in India and outside India and qualifications granted by statutory and other bodies in India.
It would also hold a uniform National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for admission for undergraduate medical education and the National Licentiate Examination for admission for postgraduate medical education.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
COURTESY: TWITTER/J&K PDP
Jammu : Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s brother Tassaduq Hussain Mufti was sworn in on Thursday as a Minister in the PDP-BJP coalition government and given the important portfolio of Tourism.
The other Minister sworn in on Thursday, Javaid Mustafa Mir has been allotted relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction and floriculture portfolio.
Abdul Rehman Veeri, state Revenue Minister, has been given additional charge of Hajj and Auqaf department.
Hajj and Auqaf portfolio had fallen vacant after Farooq Andrabi, who held independent charge of the portfolio, resigned from the state council of Ministers to pave way for Tassaduq’s induction.
Earlier, Governor N.N. Vohra administered the oath of office to Tassaduq Mufti and Javaid Mustafa Mir at the Raj Bhawan’s lawn here. Both were sworn in as cabinet ministers.
Tassaduq Mufti, 45, is a trained cinematographer, who earned critical acclaim for his camera work in the Vishal Bhardwaj directorial “Omkara”.
When his father, former Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed passed away on January 7, 2016, Tassaduq came back to support his mother and sister.
He was earlier in-charge of the Chief Minister’s Grievance Cell. Prior to his nomination as a member of the upper house of the state’s bicameral legislature, Tassaduq Mufti resigned as head of the cell.
Mir, senior PDP leader and MLA from Chadoora constituency in Badgam district, earlier also served as a cabinet minister in 2015 under the senior Mufti.
He was dropped when Mehbooba Mufti took over the Chief Minister in April 2016.
The Tourism and Culture portfolio was earlier with Mehbooba.
—IANS
