by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, Corporate Reports, News, Politics
New Delhi : A day after the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking a probe into the Rafale deal, the political dogfight over the issue intensified with the Congress accusing the Narendra Modi government of “misleading” the apex court that resulted in “factual bloomers” in the judgment. The opposition party demanded that the Attorney General and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) be summoned by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament in this connection.
The Centre’s ruling BJP, which has been touting the verdict as a “clean chit”, hit back charging the Congress with trying to sabotage the country’s security preparedness by raking up the deal again and again.
The CAG report, relying on which the Supreme Court dismissed the petitions, turned out to be the latest flashpoint over the Modi government’s decision to buy 36 French built fighters.
While the Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi-led bench in the verdict said that the “pricing details have been shared with the CAG, and the report of the CAG has been examined by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)”, the Congress maintained that “no portion of the CAG report has been placed before Parliament or placed in the public domain”.
Keeping the pot boiling, PAC Chairman and senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said he will press for summoning the Attorney General and the CAG to ask them when was the public auditor’s report tabled and when did the PAC examine it.
“The government lied in the Court that the CAG report was presented in the House and in PAC. They also told the Court that the PAC has probed it. They claimed that the report was in the public domain. Where is it,” Kharge told the media here.
He said the CAG will be questioned as to when was the report presented, when was it accepted, when was it brought to PAC, when was the evidence taken and when was it presented in Parliament.
Subsequently addressing a media conference here, Congress leader and advocate Kapil Sibal said the Supreme Court verdict had “factual bloomers” for which the Modi-led Centre was responsible.
“There are factual bloomers in the judgment for which the government is responsible and not the court. If you give wrong facts to the court and on that basis, the court makes factual assertions, in that case it’s the government which is responsible,” said Sibal.
He also asserted that the apex court was neither the right forum to examine the corruption in the deal nor the verdict was a “clean chit” for the BJP-led Centre.
“The Supreme Court is not the appropriate forum because, it cannot examine all the file notings or examine witnesses on oath including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who needs to be questioned as also defence ministry officials.
“It is childish that the government and the BJP is claiming victory,” Sibal said ridiculing Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for their assertions that the verdict was a clean chit to the Modi government and accusing the Congress of jeopardising national security by politicising the defence deal.
“The court said that it cannot go into issues of pricing and matters relating to technical suitability of the jets, so how can the government claim that the deal is clean and there is no corruption. The court nowhere said that,” Sibal said iterating that only a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe can unearth the “corruption and crony capitalism” in the deal.
Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party continued its attack on the Congress saying the grand old party was trying to “sabotage India’s security preparedness by raking up the Rafale deal issue, despite the Supreme Court ruling that there was no need for a probe”.
“This is nothing but sabotage of our security preparedness. We have already said that (Congress President) Rahul Gandhi owes an apology to the nation, to the defence forces and Lok Sabha also,” Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar told the media in Panaji.
“The Supreme Court has clearly exposed the falsehood of Congress and also gave a clean chit to the deal by saying that no further enquiry was needed. Still if the Congress persists with the issue, the only conclusion is that it wants to stop the deal which will weaken the security preparedness of the country,” he added.
The Supreme Court on Friday junked the pleas seeking a court-monitored probe into the alleged financial and procedural “irregularities” in the Rafale deal, but the issue has continued to reverberate both inside and outside parliament.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
By Amit Kapoor & Manisha Kapoor,
The results of the much-awaited state elections are finally out. By all accounts, it was unexpected that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would be voted out of power in all the three Hindi heartland states. What makes the outcome all the more surprising is that the party has held power for a decade-and-a-half in two of the three states.
The party’s performance makes two questions extremely pertinent. First, do the results serve as a good predictor of the 2019 general elections? And second, what can the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) take away from these results?
Past trends indicate that the results of assembly elections of some states are not reflective of the mood of the voters across the country for the subsequent general elections.
In the 2004 general elections, the Congress party went on to become the majority party, despite losing Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh to the BJP in 2003. Similarly, in 2008, the Congress lost Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to the BJP, but went on to win the general elections in 2009.
The extrapolation of sentiments from state assembly to general elections does not work for two reasons. First, in the latest state assembly election, 14.86 crore citizens went to vote across five states. Equating those voices with those of 85 crore voters across India fails to take into account the fact that the aspirations of voters across 543 constituencies differ quite significantly.
Second, different dynamics are at work during assembly and general elections. Regional issues play a key role in state elections. In the state elections of northern states, the rural section of the society usually plays a decisive role as their economies are vastly agrarian. In the recent elections, the spiking costs of fertilisers, clubbed with declining agricultural commodity prices worked against the incumbent party. On the other hand, in the general elections, issues apart from farm distress will also come into play to determine voter behaviour.
Another argument that is made to support such electoral extrapolations is that these results can at least serve as bellwethers for the parliamentary seats from these states and not for the entire country as such. However, there are important inferences that can be drawn about the public perception of the ruling and opposition parties from these results.
The wins of the Congress party have brought it back in the reckoning as a major force in national politics. However, given the 30-year-old trend of voting out the incumbent government in assembly elections in Rajasthan, the result should have been more decisive in Congress’s favour. In Madhya Pradesh as well, despite the anti-incumbency feeling against a 15-year-old BJP incumbent, along with other major issues such as farmers’ discontent, the Congress couldn’t significantly impact the BJP’s vote share.
In fact, the BJP has managed to garner a marginally higher vote share of 41 per cent than the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, which ended up with a vote share of 40.9 per cent. Clearly, the Congress party was unable to capitalise the anti-incumbency by providing an alternative narrative. For the ruling party, these results seem to be a wake-up call, but it would be wrong to claim that BJP has lost ground in the Hindi heartland as they have put up a strong fight in both Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The support garnered by BJP shows that people have not completely rejected the Hindutva ideology and politics. The lack of public decisiveness and higher turnout on both sides may lead to further polarisation and social conflicts in the short run.
The other lesson is that voting behaviour will be highly motivated by prominent social and economic issues: Farm distress in the rural areas, unemployment in urban areas, and corruption. The opposition needs to work towards providing an alternative development model that will solve the citizens’ issues and address the institutional challenges that exist in the Indian system.
One thing that can be concluded from the results is that 2019 is going to be an interesting contest. Before these results, despite demonetisation and implementation of GST, the popular sentiment was still seen with the BJP and it was able to sweep away state elections in major states like Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. Now, the Congress party seems to be on the path to revival.
The 2019 elections will depend on how the two national parties position themselves politically and whether they are able to provide an alternative narrative to the voters.
(Amit Kapoor is chair, Institute for Competitiveness, India. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Manisha Kapoor is senior researcher with Institute for Competitiveness, India)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, News, Politics
New Delhi : The Congress on Friday accused the government of trying to hide its “theft” in the Rafale deal behind a court ruling that did not wish to intervene in a defence deal and persisted with its demand for a JPC inquiry into the purchase of fighter jets from France.
Talking to the media here, Congress leader in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, said that the government wanted to speak on the judgment when the House was not in order.
“They are trying to hide the theft under the guise” of PIL-triggered court judgement, he said.
The Congress was not allowed to seek clarifications after Home Minister Rajnath Singh made a statement in the Lok Sahha, he said.
“Our demand continues to be JPC (Joint Parliamentary Committee). They want to hide behind the judgement… We will not tolerate this, nor will the people of the country.”
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala also told reporters that there was corruption in the deal.
“There is multi-layered corruption in the deal. We know that the Supreme Court has no powers to look into all the aspects. So the Congress never went to the Supreme Court,” he said.
“I challenge (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi (to go) for a JPC probe. If you are not scared, why should there not be a JPC? The government will have to tell why price of aircraft — the rate per aircraft has gone up from Rs 526 crore to Rs 1,670 crore,” he said.
Surjewala said “half-baked” information about the deal was given by the government to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed four petitions seeking court-monitored probe into the purchase of 36 Rafale jet fighters in ready-to-fly conditions holding that the decision making process was not in doubt and it cannot go into the question of pricing and choice of offset Indian partner by the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
By Amulya Ganguli,
By setting in motion the process of undoing the pronounced pro-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tilt in Indian politics when the party secured a majority in the Lok Sabha and ruled at one time over 19 states, the voters of the three heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have sent out two unambiguous messages.
One is the old warning about pride preceding a fall. The hyperbole of the BJP president Amit Shah’s declaration that his party will rule for 50 years has been shown to be so much hot air as has been the observation of a loyal mandarin, national security adviser Ajit Doval, that the country needs a strong, stable government – obviously meaning Narendra Modi’s rule – for the next 10 years.
It was in keeping with these grandiose assertions that the BJP built the world’s tallest statue – of Congress stalwart Vallabhbhai Patel, whom the BJP can be said to have misappropriated from the Congress – and announced the plans for an almost equally large statue of Lord Ram.
But none of these achievements and claims have saved it from a 0-3 drubbing at the hustings. The lesson from this electoral whitewash of the three BJP-ruled states is that no mercy can be expected from the electorate for the Modi government’s failure to keep the promise of vikas or development. It is obvious that economic stagnation and agricultural distress have spelt doom for the BJP.
The second message from the results is that Rahul Gandhi has succeeded in exposing the falsity of the charges that had been levelled against him ever since he came into politics. Yet, neither being derisively called “Pappu” or an adolescent kid, or of being a “pathological liar”, to quote Arun Jaitley, had any effect on his emergence as a capable leader, who took the lead in addressing the media after the recent opposition conclave while veterans like Sharad Pawar and H.D. Deve Gowda remained in the background.
It is now obvious after the Congress’s success in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh that Rahul Gandhi will increasingly be in the forefront of the mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) efforts, especially when the other major convener of the alliance, Chandrababu Naidu, has suffered a setback because of his Telugu Desam Party’s poor showing in the Telangana elections.
The taking of centre-stage by the Congress president is likely to turn the 2019 general election into a presidential-style contest between him and Narendra Modi. Up until last Tuesday, the BJP would have looked forward to such an unequal fight, in its view, between Pappu and the party’s hero with his macho image.
But no longer. Now, it will be a confrontation between the youthful standard-bearer of a rejuvenated party and the aging leader of an organisation which is seen to be on a slippery slope because of failures on several fronts – economic, administrative as the disarray in the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Reserve Bank of India shows, and an “inability” – whether inadvertently or by design – to rein in the Hindutva storm-troopers.
It is possible that these Hindu militants were let loose with one of the BJP’s chief propagandists, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanah, instigating them with his venomous Ali-Bajrang Bali communal polasization because the party had been sensing for quite some time – presumably after its setbacks in Karnataka – that it was losing ground.
Seeing the receding mirage of the Hindu rashtra, which was thought by the saffron brotherhood to be within reach because of the BJP’s political clout, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), purportedly a “cultural” organization, jumped into the fray with its demand for the immediate enactment of a law for constructing the Ram temple.
Its calculation apparently was that the law would shore up the BJP’s sagging political fortunes by mobilising the Hindus behind the party. If BJP MP Subramanian Swamy is to be believed, it is the drive for Hindutva which enthuses the saffron cadres and brings in votes for the party, and not vikas.
But the ploy, which included a pledge by the RSS to revive the Ramjanmabhoomi movement of 1992-93 which led to the Babri masjid’s demolition, failed to check the Congress’s revival and the signs of erosion of the BJP’s base of support.
Now that a presidential-style contest is on the cards, it will be advisable for Rahul Gandhi to live up to the lesson which he says he has learnt from Modi’s mistake – that of a lack of humility because “arrogance is fatal for a politician”.
While the Prime Minister has tweeted his acceptance of the people’s “mandate”, some of the spokespersons of the BJP and the RSS have been describing the Congress’s success in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh as “accidental” because of the marginal difference in the vote share of the two parties.
In Rajasthan, the Congress received 39.3 per cent of the votes while the BJP got 38.8. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP’s percentage was higher at 41 compared to the Congress’s 40.9 per cent although the Congress won a larger number of seats.
The BJP is evidently unwilling to accept a result which has upended its dream of ushering in a Congress-mukt (free) India.
(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
Bhopal: Congress workers celebrate party
By Brajendra Nath Singh,
New Delhi : The results in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan came as a major shock for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has won all the major states barring Delhi, Bihar, Punjab and Karnataka in elections held after the sweeping 2014 Lok Sabha victory.
The BJP was routed in Chhattisgarh and defeated in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in closely-fought contests. The party mostly banked on the image of Chief Ministers Raman Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan to lift the party’s fortunes.
In Rajasthan, where opinion polls had written off the BJP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah put in extra efforts, besides banking on the hardcore Hindutva image of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, to take the battle to the Congress, but still lost.
The BJP, however, managed to open its account in Mizoram, where the Mizo National Front (MNF) ousted the ruling Congress partty, but saw its numbers fall from five to one in Telangana, where the Telangana Rashtra Samithi swept the polls.
The results of these five states, which were dubbed the semifinals ahead of the next general elections in April-May 2019, could be a factor in the battle between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Congress-led opposition.
The major issues raked up by Congress, specially the farm loan waiver amid an agrarian crisis across the country, employment and anger among upper caste, seems to have worked in its favour and could haunt the ruling dispensation if remedial measures are not taken.
The BJP is not ready, however, to accept the defeat as a referendum on the Modi government.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said issues in state elections are entirely different. The BJP won Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in 2003 but lost the Lok sabha elections next year, he pointed out.
The general elections in 2019, he added, would be fought around Modi’s performance, with people voting for a tried and tested leadership instead of a non-ideological opposition coalition which is bound to collapse sooner than later.
The Congress, which had a disastrous performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and suffered successive defeats in various Assembly elections, smiled for the first time after defeating the BJP in a direct contest in the three crucial states in north India.
Party president Rahul Gandhi, who campaigned vigorously, said the Assembly election results were a referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s non-performance on issues of unemployment, agrarian distress, corruption and negating the ill-effects of demonetisation.
Out of total 678 Assembly seats in the five states in the current round of elections, the Congress has won close to 300 seats while the BJP managed to win over 200 seats. In the 2013 Assembly polls, the BJP had won 377 seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram while the Congress had won only 122 seats in these states.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 62 out of total 83 Lok Sabha constituencies of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram. Now the three Hindi heartland states will be ruled by Congress and the its impact would definitely be felt in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
In the first instance of a party getting majority on its own in 30 years, BJP won 282 seats in Lok Sabha in 2014. The BJP-led NDA had won 336 seats out of 543.
Its allies include the Shiv Sena, which has been on the war path for a while. Similarly, N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) have walked out of the NDA.
Since 2014, BJP has managed to retain just six Lok Sabha seats in by-polls. It won Lakhimpur in Assam, Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh, Beed and Palghar in Maharashtra, Vadodara in Gujarat and Shimoga in Karnataka.
In the last four years, the party has lost Lok Sabha by polls in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, Gurdaspur in Punjab, Alwar and Ajmer in Rajasthan, Kairana, Phulpur and Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, Bhandara-Gondiya in Maharashtra and Bellary and Mandya constituencies in Karnataka.
The BJP, however, maintained the verdict was a mandate against the state governments and not against the Modi government.
“The results in five states clearly show there is no uniform trend across the country and local factors determined the outcome in each state. This is evident from the fact that even Congress suffered massive defeats in Mizoram and Telangana.
“Despite 15 years of anti-incumbancy in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP has put up a fight in Madhya Pradesh and has a major comeback in Rajasthan. The BJP’s and Congress’ vote share in both the states in Mandhya Pradesh and Rajasthan is almost tied which clearly show that the BJP has the potential to comeback with big victories in 2019 Lok Sabha polls,” BJP Spokeperson G.V. L. Narsimha Rao told IANS.
He also said whenever Congress has tied up with a regional party, it cost them votes.
(Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at brajendra.n@ians.in)
—IANS
