by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Lucknow : Uttar Pradesh is committed to promoting religious tourism in the state, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said on Monday after undertaking a five-kilometre long ‘parikrama’ of the Kamadgiri temple at Chitrakoot.
On the second day of his visit to Chitrakoot, Adityanath took many by surprise when he decided to walk the entire five kilometre stretch around the temple called ‘Panchkosi Parikrama’.
Later, amending his scheduled programme, he went to meet holy men from the Nirmohi Akhada on the banks of Mandakini.
Refusing to take a seat specially kept for him, Adityanath sat on the floor, like other holy men, and said that he being a saintly person did not require VIP treatment.
The holy men handed over a memorandum to the Chief Minister, who said all their demands would be accepted by the government.
He said Mandakini was a holy river and efforts would be made to ensure it was kept pollution free.
He said the area would be a ‘no power cut zone’ and would get 24×7 electric supply.
The Chief Minister declared that the Madhya Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh border would be declared a free zone to make it easy for people to visit Chitrakoot.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : Countering the BJP’s attack on Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra and terming it a ‘witch hunt’, the Congress on Wednesday demanded to know who paid for over 100 trips Prime Minister Narendra Modi made by chartered plane across India and abroad when he was the Gujarat Chief Minister between 2003 and 2007.
The party also accused the BJP of trying to divert attention from allegations against BJP President Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah by raising the Vadra issue.
Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the estimated cost of these air travels was around Rs 16.56 crore.
“The nation wants to know, we want to know, as to who paid for these chartered plane travels by Modi. No information has been furnished till date in response to an RTI query made in 2007,” Singhvi said.
Defending Robert Vadra in a case of alleged favour he took from arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, Singhvi said the mails selectively leaked by the government prove nothing against the son-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi whereas details of Modi’s travels have been officially sought through the RTI.
Singhvi disclosed, based on RTI revelations, that Modi travelled to Switzerland (July 1, 2007), South Korea (June 16, 2007), Japan (April 15, 2007) and China (November 1, 2006) along with some well-known industrialists and business tycoons. “They are all by charter firm called Planet Aviation,” he said.
Waving a picture of Bhandari with Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju, Singhvi alleged that he was close to Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.
The Congress leader also demanded to know how Bhandari was allowed to flee abroad in December 2016 even though his passport had reportedly been impounded by the government in June that year.
“Who helped Bhandari fly out of the country much like Vijay Mallya? It was not our government in 2016.”
The BJP had on Tuesday asked the Congress to explain the alleged links between Vadra and arms dealer Bhandari.
Citing the documents which were received by Gujarat CLP leader Arjun Modhwadia on the travel of the then Chief Minister of Gujarat through RTI replies in 2007, Singhvi asked who paid for the 100 trips.
“Deafening silence continues, he has recrived no reply to his RTI. These trips, are clearly trips by a constitutional functionary, position holder, they are provided for by private persons and we do not have any accounts of them.
“We must have an accountability first,” he said.
Singhvi also said that of the amount Rs 16.5 crore (for the 100 trips), Rs 5 crore was for four foreign charters.
“The people accompanying these charters include industrialists like Sudhir Mehta of Torrent, Parimal Nathwani, Pankaj Patel of Cadila, Prasad Menon of Tata, Harishankaran of ILFS, Nikhil Meshwani of Reliance, Rajeev Jyoti of Bombay Rubber, Gautam Adani, H.K. Patel, B.K. Goenka,” said Singhvi.
He also said under the law, any constitutional position holder, cabinet Minister or Chief Minister – must declare a gift above Rs 500. “If the state government has not paid for these trips even partially, it is deemed to be a gift to that constitutional position holder,” said Singhvi.
“It is not a question of doing for Vibrant Gujarat or for Gujarat’s Industry’, it is the question of receiving a benefit from beneficiaries of Gujarat’s Industrial Policy because somebody has to pay,” he added.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday asked the Congress party to explain the alleged links between Vadra and Sanjay Bhandari.
Defending Vadra, Singhvi said: “The government could not find anything in 41 months. We have not heard of any conviction and no prosecution successful.
“Vadra’s lawyer had said in a written statement that he owns no such property and the emails are manufactured,” he added.
Singhiv also pointed out that Sitharaman selectively did not mention that the government had earlier proudly listed as their achievement the import of Swiss-made basic trainer aircraft Pilatus, which was completed in 2015. Bhandari’s company, Offset India Solution Private Limited, is under the scanner for alleged corruption in the Pilatus deal.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
BJP leader Sangeet Som
Noida : BJP leader Sangeet Som has triggered controversy by saying the Taj Mahal is a “blot” on Indian culture and misquoted history by saying that Shah Jahan, builder of the 17th century marble mausoleum, had jailed his father and wanted to wipe out Hindus from the country.
The remarks by the Sardhana MLA in Meerut came after the Uttar Pradesh government removed the Taj Mahal from the list of attractions in its tourism booklet.
“Many people were disappointed that the Taj Mahal was removed from the UP tourism booklet. What history are we talking about? Whose history?
“The creator of the Taj Mahal (Shah Jahan) imprisoned his father. He wanted to wipe out all Hindus from India. If these people are part of our history, then it is very unfortunate.
“I guarantee you that we will change this history,” Som was shown saying in an undated viral video, apparently addressing a public gathering.
TV reports said the BJP leader was addressing a gathering in Meerut.
Som wrongly quoted history saying Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan had jailed his father. It was Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb who had dethroned and jailed his father inside the Agra Fort.
The Taj, one of the Seven Wonders of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage site, was built by Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
How indistinguishable the Congress ideologically is from the BJP was the theme of the main edit page article written by French scholars Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers in the Indian Express on October 5.
The editor grasped the heart of the matter and gave it an apt headline: Congress and the BJP, “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”. The Jaffrelot-Verniers duo focused on Gujarat — on how principal leaders have repeatedly swung from one side to the other like trapeze artistes in a circus.
I suspect this is the beginning of a wider research because the Tweedledum-Tweedledee image is applicable to all regions wherever there is some Congress presence. In most places it looks like the BJP’s B team — and has conceded space to it for that very reason.
In recent decades there have been two distinct postures the Congress has struck towards the BJP. In Madhya Pradesh, under the leadership of Arjun Singh and Digvijay Singh, the party took the BJP head on. There was no other force to combat.
In Kerala, particularly under K. Karunakaran’s chief ministership, the party turned to the Sangh Parivar, whenever help was required for electoral battles with the Left Front. In fact, Karunakaran was a master at ambidextrous politics. On one occasion in Kozhikode, he maneuvred the Congress, BJP and Muslim League on the same side to defeat the CPI-M’s T.K. Hamza.
What has been the result of the Congress grappling with Hindutva in Bhopal or flirting with it in Thiruvananthapauram?
State and district-level Muslim Congress leaders I met last week in Indore, Dhar and Mandu painted a dismal picture of their circumstances. Their party’s high command in New Delhi or Bhopal took them for granted. “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) factor applies to us, Mohammad Kamran, a Youth Congress leader, lamented. When a Muslim majority village was gutted, no “senior” (for which read “Hindu”) Congress leader turned up.
Circumstances in Rajasthan are similar. When 10 Muslims were shot dead by policemen in Gopalgarh in 2011, an hour’s drive from Delhi, neither Rahul Gandhi nor the then Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, considered it worth their while to visit despite several delegations imploring them to do so. This was the first instance in the country of police firing inside a mosque.
In Kerala, the frequent Congress dependence on sectarian groups has had the effect of slowly opening the door just enough for Hindutva forces to make a bid for replacing the Congress. That this process has been slow is attributable to the state’s distinct and enlightened social structure.
This did not deter Karunakaran from his efforts to “Brahminise” Rajiv Gandhi who, in his perception, would not graduate from the ranks of the “Baba log” without persistent “ang pradarshan” or ritual prayers at the Krishna temple in Guruvayur. Whether Rajiv Gandhi transited to becoming a Brahmin or even a Hindu is less than clear. What is certain is that he developed a taste for Guruvayur’s famous rice and milk pudding and payasam, large quantities of which were made available for his extended family’s New Year celebrations at Lakshadweep.
Rajiv Gandhi’s unprecedented victory in the December 1984 elections (404 seats in a House of 514) was interpreted as Hindu consolidation in response to minority communalism which had resulted in Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Even the party treasurer, Sitaram Kesari, non-communal to his fingertips, interpreted the mandate in majoritarian terms.
In 1986, V.N. Gadgil, among the more enlightened general secretaries of the Congress, told me in great confidence: “The feeling is widespread among Hindus that Muslims were being appeased.”
This thinking guided subsequent Congress actions, making it just as indistinguishable from the BJP as Jeffrelot and Verniers found it in Gujarat. How “appeased” the Muslims were became clear in the Sachar Committee report on their social-economic conditions during 60 years of Congress rule. They had, in their social status, tumbled below the lowest Dalits.
The Justice Ranganath Misra Commission’s recommendations to help Muslims out of the plight described by the Sachar Committee was placed on the shelf where it gathers dust to this day.
The Srikrishna Commission, which named politicians directly involved in the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 in which 900 people (the majority of them Muslims) were killed and their shops and houses gutted, has remained a secret.
It would require amnesia of a very high order to heap all the credit for the brazen saffronisation at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s door. It would require magic or miracle to have advanced the Hindutva cause with such rapidity in three years. Frankly, the ground has been prepared over the past 70 years.
We must not forget, the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS, Akhil Bharatiya Ram Rajya Parishad and elements in the Congress were quite “indistinguishable” from the other all along.
The founder of the Hindu Mahasabha, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, was a four-time President of the Congress. His vision of India would not have been very different from that of the Banaras Hindu University, which he founded.
Rajeshwar Dayal, the first Home Secretary of UP, in his memoir, “A Life of Our Times”, mentions an astonishing story about Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, UP’s first Chief Minister, and RSS supremo Guru Golwalkar. The RSS chief was found with a trunk load of incriminating evidence of extensive plans for communal violence in Western UP. The Chief Minister, however, enabled him to escape.
It all leads to the inescapable conclusion, argued in my book “Being The Other: The Muslim in India”. Having accepted Mountbatten’s June 3, 1947, plan for the Partition of India, the Congress de facto accepted the Two-Nation theory while publicly arguing against it. Dissembling was essential to keep Kashmir. On August 15, 1947, India seamlessly glided from British Raj to Hindu Raj. It could have been named Hindustan (just as the other country was called Pakistan). With a Hindu at the helm, a more honest bargain on sharing power would have been possible. The painful process of a second distillation for a Hindu Rashtra could have been avoided.
(Saeed Naqvi is a commentator on political and diplomatic affairs. He can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
The reason why the UP election results in May were a showpiece for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was that they represented, in the party’s opinion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s continuing forward march.
Yet, the overblown nature of this self-congratulatory assessment will be evident if the outcome of the five elections which took place at the time are taken into consideration.
A more realistic picture will be available if all the results are taken together, for it will show that the original verdict was 3-2 in the Congress’s favour with an outright win in Punjab and emerging as the largest party in Goa and Manipur.
It is another matter that what the Congress won in the swings, it lost in the roundabouts because a nimble-footed BJP managed to lure away a sufficient number of MLAs to its side to rob the Congress of its No.1 position in the Goa and Manipur assemblies.
But if the BJP had been humble enough to look at the results in their entirety, then it might not have gloated over its success in UP. That election was one which the BJP could not but win because its principal opponent, the Samajwadi Party (SP), had shot itself in the foot via its internal factional battles.
It was the belief, however, that the BJP had decimated the opposition in the country’s largest state which apparently made the party commit what may turn out to be a fateful mistake by choosing one of the most hawkish of the hardliners to be the Chief Minister.
True, Yogi Adityanath has toned down some of his utterances in deference to Modi’s “development for all” rhetoric.
But it is as an administrator that his inadequacies have come to the fore, thereby showing that devotion to the saffron cause may give a leg-up while climbing the official ladder, but it doesn’t help in running the government.
Since law and order in UP has always been dismal, it will be unfair to blame the present government for its failures on this count. But what has attracted countrywide attention are the deaths of scores of children in the state’s hospitals.
Considering that UP once witnessed a Rs 9,000 crore (over $1 billion) scam in connection with a rural health programme when two Chief Medical Officers were killed and their deputy died in custody, the latest tragedy may appear to be a part of a dreadful pattern.
But its hurtful impact on the Chief Minister and his party cannot be denied.
To make matters worse, the upsurge of student demonstrations in Banaras Hindu University (BHU) over what the Vice Chancellor initially dismissed as an incident of eve-teasing has been seen as yet another evidence of dissatisfaction with the ruling dispensation.
The unrest in BHU has followed the defeat of the BJP’s affiliate, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), in student union elections in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Hyderabad University, Gauhati University and elsewhere.
The Vice Chancellor’s ouster has been sought by, among others, the National Commission for Women, but a BJP government can hardly be expected to remove someone with a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) background.
There is little doubt, however, that episodes such as these have deprived the BJP of much of the sheen of its victory in less than six months.
The party will be wary, therefore, of the reports that the rift in the SP between Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav has healed. It is the rupture between father and son which had contributed largely to the BJP’s success by undermining its biggest challenger.
But it isn’t only the reconciliation which will be of concern to Yogi Adityanath and Co. Of even greater worry will be the possibility of the SP under Akhilesh teaming up with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to take on the BJP.
Akhilesh has been talking of such an alliance for quite some time although his father is against it. But now that the son is fully in control of the party, a tie-up between the SP and the BSP is a distinct possibility, not least because the two know that the BJP cannot be unseated otherwise.
The SP-BSP combination’s advantage is that their combined vote share of 44 per cent in the last assembly election — the SP 21.8 and the BSP 22.2 — is higher than the BJP’s 39.7 per cent.
If the Congress’s 6.3 per cent is added to the SP-BSP’s 44, then the trio becomes a formidable force.
It was only to be expected, therefore, for Yogi Adityanath to turn to building a 100-metre tall statue of Lord Ram on the banks of the Saryu river to boost the BJP’s fortunes.
Since he appears incapable of providing efficient governance, recourse to religion to consolidate the Hindu vote is the only way out for the Chief Minister and his party.
There are also reports that he will be fielded by the BJP as a campaigner in the upcoming elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat to rev up the party’s position with a strong dose of Hindutva at a time when the economic slowdown has robbed Modi’s ‘vikas’ (development) slogan of much of its appeal.
The BJP has probably never felt the need for a saffron hawk more than at present.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
