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 | News, Politics
Ghaziabad : Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers on Friday clashed with police in Ghaziabad over the marriage of a Hindu girl with a Muslim boy, which the activists described as a case of “love-jihad”.
The BJP workers, accompanied by the representatives of other Hindutva outfits including the Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and Jai Shiv Sena, staged a sit-in protest outside the house of the parents of the girl and disrupted traffic.
The girl’s father had organised a reception after the marriage at his house here.
Later, the police removed the protesters using force, saying they were trying to interfere with the private life of an individual.
Pushpendra Kumar, the father of the bride, told IANS: “I had been receiving phone calls for last two days to stop this marriage. But both are major and mature enough to know what’s wrong and what’s right.”
His daughter Nupur Singhal is a psychologist, who has done her Ph.D in Human Psychology, while her husband Mansoor Harhat Khan is an MBA and working with a private company. His family originally belongs to Aligarh, while his father Harhat Bashir Khan lives in Delhi and also owns a house in Noida.
“They have decided to live together, so they have registered their marriage under the Special Marriage Act in Ghaziabad. We had arranged a reception party today (Friday). I don’t see any love-jihad in their marriage,” Pushpendra Kumar said.
According to him, the boy even offered to marry as per Hindu rituals. “But neither the groom’s family nor ours put any conditions and left it to the girl and the boy, and they went for court marriage,” the father added.
They are in touch with the Noida SSP as they apprehend that on Saturday, “some mischief” could take place in Noida, at the house of the boy’s father.
The police said they used mild force to disperse the crowd. “How can the police allow people to barge into someone’s house? We got a distress call and we performed our duty,” said SSP H.N. Singh.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
The rise in the growth rate to the moderately satisfactory 6.3 per cent from the depressingly low 5.7 per cent is good news for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at a time when the Prime Minister reminded the audience at a function organised by a media house about former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s observation about the negativism which generally marked newspapers and magazines.
Narendra Modi’s case for a more positive outlook in the media and the country will seem more credible in the context of the latest growth figures if only because they highlight the mistake of those like former Finance Minister Yashwant Singh of the BJP, who have been lamenting (perhaps with a touch of schadenfreude) about the economy’s free fall.
As Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said, the country’s emergence from the recent slump means that it has got over the twin blows of demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which were expected by Modi’s critics to spell his doom.
The turn for the better in the economy has come at the right time for the BJP when its frenetic campaigning in Gujarat with Modi addressing 30 meetings in a fortnight and with as many as 40 cabinet ministers camping in the state, pointed to a measure of uneasiness in the party about its prospects in what is widely regarded as its bailiwick.
However, considering that the BJP’s success in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh is almost a foregone conclusion, one can say that the rise in the growth rate will not make much of a difference to the outcome. All that it can do is to dampen some of the ardour of the ruling party’s opponents.
Even then, the point remains that the BJP will face its real challenge not in Gujarat or Himachal Pradesh this month, but in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh next year. It is in those elections, where the BJP will encounter the anti-incumbency factor, that it will become clear whether the rise in the growth rate has helped the party or is of little consequence.
The reason for the doubts is that it is not clear to what extent the unemployment problem will be mitigated by the climbing growth rate in these days of automation and artificial intelligence.
Equally uncertain is the quantum of the impact on the BJP’s hopes as a result of the prevailing tension and uncertainty caused by the crime rate — and especially the safety of women and even children.
The effect of the rampaging Hindutva hardliners declaring bounties on the heads of actors and directors is another unknown factor whose effect will be known only after the votes are counted.
Up till now the BJP has been sitting pretty because its “vikas” (development) plank still has many takers even if it hasn’t made a perceptible dent on the unemployment scene. In addition, Modi’s personal popularity remains high because of his oratorical skills and the impression he conveys about the seriousness of his intent to take the country forward.
In contrast, his opponents lack an agenda which can have an inspiring effect and are bereft of leaders capable of drawing enthusiastic crowds although Rahul Gandhi is showing signs of the old Nehruvian appeal.
The opposition depends therefore on, first, the economy continuing to be sluggish and, secondly, on the Hindutva hotheads creating a ruckus. But such an approach is obviously a negative one, as is also banking on the anti-incumbency factor to undermine the BJP-run state governments. There is little hope, therefore, for the opposition if it cannot adopt a positive attitude with a clear projection of the kind of India which it envisages.
For the BJP, on the other hand, it is a tug-of-war between vikas and the hotheads. As long as the economy shows signs of buoyancy, it can expect to be home and dry. It is of the utmost importance for it, therefore, to ensure that the recovery doesn’t flag and that the country regains its status as the fastest-growing economy in the world.
At the same time, the party cannot allow the loonies in its ranks, who include ministers, to run amok. It does not reflect well on a government when the apex court has to direct the states to check cow vigilantes or tell senior politicians in the ruling dispensation to keep their mouths shut on yet-to-be released films lest they influence the censor board.
As it is, the impression persists that the government is not too comfortable with the autonomy of established institutions as could be seen from the official directive to the University Grants Commission (UGC) to ensure that students and teachers did not miss Modi’s “life changing” speech on the occasion of Deen Dayal Upadhyay’s centenary celebrations and Swami Vivekananda’s 125th birth anniversary last September.
If the government does not want the UGC, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and other autonomous bodies to become “caged parrots”, as the Supreme Court once called the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), then it has to desist from enforcing regimentation and stopping the saffron extremists from targeting artistes and all those who are not with the BJP. Otherwise, growth rate alone will not prevent the erosion of its popularity.
(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
For representational purpose only (google photo)
By Saeed Naqvi,
It is one of the great ironies of our times that Muslims are a problem for all political parties, except the BJP. In a totally different way, for Mamata too. Without Muslims as a foil, there would be no Hindutva gameplan. If, by some miracle, Indian Muslims were to vanish into thin air, the social edifice erected so far, around which politics is spun, would collapse. Communities and castes would splinter. A new adhesive would be required to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
For the Congress, Muslims are a squeezed lemon. It would be indiscreet for them to say so, but it is a fact they have internalised. Having been copiously used, the Muslim can now be discarded. The party may discard them but the far right, for its own reasons, can still allege a Congress collusion with minorities: “Look they are silent on Love Jihad, how our women are being exploited.”
Confronted with this “have you stopped beating your wife” question, the Congress looks the other way. The other day, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India expressed his exasperation with what he called the “Muslim question”. To navigate politics past communalism, it is important to set aside “the Muslim question”, he said. I suppose “setting aside” means ignoring the issue, not talking about it.
This is easier said than done. How do you set aside a community whose would be leaders pop up, like eager beavers, on the most aggressive channels only to be brutalised by the anchors? They may imagine their being willingly pummelled earns them brownie points with the Qaum and for their own next life, but in this life their rants only swell the ranks of the BJP. As a function of deep strategy, the Muslim must shut up.
That the BJP-led government has appointed an interlocutor for Kashmir is welcome because any talk is an advance on the jam in which Kashmir is. But anyone with minimal common sense knows that the interlocutor has not been appointed to proceed towards any resolution of the issue. That would require reaching out to Pakistan.
Such a scenario is unthinkable before the 2019 general election. And for a very simple reason. Indo-Pakistan talks would bring down the communal temperature. It would cause the saffron in the air to turn pale. National Anthem, Vande Mataram, lynching for the cow, Love Jihad, Ram Temple are all nudging the nation towards a crescendo, a climactic clashing of the cymbals. This carefully crafted backdrop would begin to fray if the interlocutor were to be infused with serious purpose.
In this national mood, with saffron as the dominant shade, political parties can quite sensibly avoid responding to issues the Hindutva tribe is tossing up to provoke Muslims, a sort of invitation for their most willing but least articulate spokesmen to rush to TV channels.
It is a toss-up whether these solo operators do more harm to the Muslim cause or the collective called the Muslim Personal Law Board. Both are self appointed and both, by the sheer quality of and frequency of their utterances, serve as multipliers for the Hindutva cause. A contrived feeling of pre-eminence in the wider community is so heady for this lot that it blinds them to the harm they do. It serves the Hindutva purpose to confer recognition on this growing multitude of spokesmen in the clerical mould, supremely identifiable as the “other”.
It is not that the Hindutva spokesmen on show are God’s gift to brilliant debates. They are quite as hopeless as the counterparts they have been set up to tease. Their job is to peg away at a nagging length on an issue in such a way as to invite bumbling responses and thereby add a few shades to the saffron already in the air.
If I am being carried away it is because the imagery in my mind derives largely from the Hindi belt, Maharashtra and Gujarat. There being no monolith in India, the communal interplay in the South, for instance, is different, except Telengana where memories from Nizam’s rule have faded but attitudes linger.
Communal politics in Kerala became possible because currents came together in the ’80s. The quadrupling of oil prices attracted labour from Malabar who returned with irritating new wealth, some of which went into the building of garish villas, the Dubai houses, quite out of character with Kerala’s austere skyline. Along with the nouveau riche came nouveau Islam, complete with hijab and other marks of assertion. The phenomena coincided with Nizam-e-Mustafa in Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan. The huge play given to the 1981 Meenakshipuram conversions in neighbouring Tamil Nadu was the final cherry on the communal cake.
The RSS has, therefore, gained — though only enough to break its duck in the Kerala Assembly. But it is making inroads through its undeclared B team, the Congress. The purpose of this configuration is to devour the CPI-M.
It is this RSS-Congress interplay — which peaked during K. Karunakaran’s chief ministership — that makes CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury’s proposed line for the 2019 elections so reckless. He sees Narendra Modi as the ogre which all democratic forces, primarily the Congress, must combine to crush. His heavyweight Politburo comrade Prakash Karat says “plague on both their houses”. How can the CPI-M support the Congress which it fights tooth and nail in Kerala? And you never know when they start playing toey toey with each other.
Yechury’s basic anxiety is to recover the Kingdom of West Bengal lost to Mamata Banerjee. For this reason, the CPI-M coordinated with the Congress for the 2016 Assembly elections and came a cropper.
Mamata has mobilised the state’s 30 per cent Muslims as the central column of her support. While Mamata, with cent percent Muslim support, is willing to stand on the secular democratic platform against Modi, Yechury sees Mamata as the main enemy.
To take advantage of the confusion, the BJP has rushed to pre-empt the opposition by announcing November 8, the first anniversary of demonetisation, as Anti-Black Money Day. The Congress, JD-U, RJD, DMK, SP, BSP, Trinamool, etc, have sworn to dwarf BJP with their very own “Day of Shame”. Why is the Left missing from this galaxy? Because the CPI-M is unwilling to stand on the same platform as Mamata.
Instead, the Left will have their own show — day of protest. Does this not weaken the opposition against Modi?
No, no, no, Yechury’s voice wafts across. We shall walk separately but strike together.
(Saeed Naqvi is a commentator on political and diplomatic affairs. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com)
—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
