by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Corporate, Corporate Governance, Events, News, Politics, Social Round-up
Santiniketan : The Prime Ministers of India and Bangladesh on Friday discussed a number of bilateral issues, including security and politics, in the sylvan surroundings of the Visva-Bharati University here founded by Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore – the composer of both countries’ national anthems.
The half-hour talks were preceded by two events – the 49th convocation of the university, as also the inauguration of the Bangladesh Bhawan on its campus by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina.
The two leaders, accompanied by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, spent over three hours at this campus housing the university and located in Birbhum sub-division of West Bengal’s Birbhum district, 160 km from Kolkata.
Modi set the tone for the talks during his address at the inauguration of the Bhawan, when he remarked that the two countries have scripted the golden chapter in their relations over the past few years.
He mentioned the Land Boundary Agreement and the resolution of the sea border dispute, saying “complex bilateral issues which seemed impossible to be resolved even some time back, have been solved now. In roads, rail, waterways, coastal shipping, we are moving fast in the areas of connectivity.”
On the other hand, Hasina paid glowing tributes to India, and its then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for its role during her Bangladesh’s liberation struggle, and the shelter that she provided to her after the assassination of her father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – the leader of the Bangladesh liberation war and first president of independent Bangladesh.
She also expressed happiness over the two countries implementing the LBA, after the Indian parliament “unanimously passed the bill concerned”, and thanked Modi and Banerjee.
Asked about the talks at the Bangladesh Bhawan after the inauguration ceremony, a Bangladesh minister said bilateral issues were discussed.
“I was not there when they held the talks. But, suffice to say bilateral issues, issues related to regional security and politics were discussed,” said Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Mohammed Shahriar Alam.
On Hasina seeking cooperation from everybody to put pressure on Myanmar to take back the 1.1 million Rohingya refugees, who have taken shelter in Bangladesh, he said his country was on the “same page” with India on the issue.
Alam referred to the assurances from Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj during her visit to Myanmar and said “she articulated India’s views so that the Rohingya refugees could return safely and in a dignified manner”.
He said track two dialogue was on regarding the Teesta water sharing issue.
Earlier, during her speech at the Bangladesh Bhawan, Hasina did not mention the contentious Teesta water sharing issue, but hoped that the two countries will be able to resolve all their problems amicably.
“We always want to walk together as neighbours. There can be issues between neighbouring countries,” she said in the presence of Banerjee, known for her firm opposition to the treaty.
“We have resolved many issues. Maybe there are a few left. I don’t want to raise the issue and spoil this beautiful function. But I do hope whatever the problem is, it can be solved amicably,” Hasina said.
Both Modi and Hasina repeatedly referred to the shared cultural ties between the two nations, with Tagore coming up repeatedly in their speeches.
Modi thanked Hasina for building the Bangladesh Bhavan here, and said India on its part was renovating the Kuthibari – the house of Tagore – in Kushthia district of Bangladesh.
Praising Hasina and the people of Bangladesh “from my heart”, Modi referred to the country launching its first satellite ‘Bangabandhu’.
He said India was now using space technology to improve the standard of living of the poor and introduce more transparency and exuded confidence the sector will open new vistas of cooperation with Bangladesh.
Averring that the constant connect between him and Hasina was giving a further momentum to the bilateral relations, Modi also referred to challenges like climate change.
“Climate change is before us, if the burning sun is a challenge for us it can also be of advantage to us. PM Hasina has come up with a vision of ‘power for all’ by 2021, while in India we have set up a target of electricity to every home by next year.”
Comparing the journey of development of the two countries to a beautiful garland with which both are attached, Modi said: “In the last few years the eternal truth emerged before us is that the friendship between India and Bangladesh is must for progress, prosperity, peace and stability, happiness and cooperation.”
Banerjee expressed her government’s desire to build a Bangabandhu Bhavan in the memory of Mujibur Rahman.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
The Calcutta High Court’s decision to suspend the panchayat poll process in West Bengal is a major blow to Mamata Banerjee, for it shows that her government has not been able to ensure even a routine administrative procedure like the peaceful conduct of an election campaign.
The failure is a blot on a government which is not only in power with a comfortable majority but also claims to be highly popular. What the judicial verdict has indicated, therefore, is that the government has been either unable or unwilling to act against the Trinamool Congress cadres who have been accused by the opposition parties of preventing them from filing the nomination papers.
To make matters worse, the State Election Commission has apparently been coerced by the government to withdraw an earlier decision to extend the time for filing nominations. From both the aspects of the rampaging cadres and the arm-twisting of a constitutional body, the government has emerged in extremely poor light.
By allowing the situation to deteriorate to such a level, Mamata Banerjee has done a disservice to her professed mission of leading the charge against the Narendra Modi government. Instead, the well-known street-fighting capabilities of the Trinamool Congress have again come to the fore.
Yet, given the general perception of the Chief Minister’s hold over the state, it can seem odd that the ruling party should have been so intent on cowing down its opponents. The party performed satisfactorily in the 2013 panchayat elections, winning 13 of the 17 zilla parishads and faring equally well in the gram panchayats, although there were also complaints about intimidation and rigging against the Trinamool Congress in that year, with 24 people dying in poll-related violence.
There is little doubt that the Trinamool Congress will have little difficulty in winning a majority of the seats this year as well. But its fear apparently is the extent of the gains which its latest adversary, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), may make.
As is known, the BJP has been steadily improving its position in West Bengal at the expense of the Left and the Congress. In the recent by-elections to the Uluberia Lok Sabha and Noapara assembly seats, the BJP came second to the Trinamool Congress, pushing the communists to the third position. The Congress was nowhere in the picture.
The general belief is that the BJP has been cashing in on Mamata Banerjee’s pro-Muslim image and has also been unabashedly displaying its aggressive Hindutva policies as during the Ram Navami celebrations when the saffron activists took to the streets carrying arms.
Although it is widely conceded that the BJP has a long way to go before it can pose a serious challenge to the Trinamool Congress, the latter is scared that a noticeable improvement in the BJP’s position in the panchayat elections will enable it to build a base which will prove handy to the party in 2019 when it hopes to add substantially to its tally of two Lok Sabha seats (out of 42) which it won in 2014.
For Mamata Banerjee, even a marginal setback is unacceptable because she belongs to a generation of Bengali politicians to whom the BJP is an outlier although its founder when the party was known as the Jan Sangh, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, was a Bengali.
However, the way in which her party cadres went about trying to stop the BJP in its tracks is damaging to her reputation because a leader who is thinking of putting together an alternative to the ruling dispensation at the Centre cannot afford, first, to appear unsure on her home turf and, secondly, of resorting to brawling tactics.
Such ploys make her stand out as a provincial immersed in local politics with its “tradition” of violence with which the communists were associated both when they were in the opposition and when they were in power. The Trinamool Congress appears to be continuing in that mode, presumably because it has coopted many of those who were earlier in the Communist Party of India-Marxist.
What the BJP’s opponents will have to remember is that one reason why the saffron outfit is believed to be losing ground in northern and western India is the lawlessness of some of its followers like the gau rakshaks or those who target courting couples belonging to different religions or threaten to bury alive filmmakers and actresses whose artistic works they do not like.
As Hamid Ansari said in his last interview as the Vice President, Muslims are among those who have been feeling insecure in the last few years because of the unruly conditions. The reason is the atmosphere of communal animosity for which the Hindutva storm-troopers are responsible.
Any party which wants to project itself as the core around which an opposition to the government at the Centre is expected to coalesce, as Mamata Banerjee wants to do, cannot go down the same path of intimidation and anarchy.
(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
By Amulya Ganguli,
Since there is no dominant leader with a countrywide appeal in the opposition camp at the moment, it is natural that the most energetic opponents of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will take the lead in trying to bring together the different parties to fight the ruling party at the Centre.
Not surprisingly, Mamata Banerjee is playing that part. Having singlehandedly ousted the Communists from West Bengal against what appeared at the time as insuperable odds, she has now taken on an even bigger challenge to evict the BJP from Delhi.
Prior to the 2004 general election, Sonia Gandhi assumed the role of a coordinator and succeeded in toppling the Atal Behari Vajpayee government, which was confident of a second term. It remains to be seen whether the West Bengal Chief Minister succeeds in her endeavour, which is not dissimilar to what happened in 2004.
Her formula is simple. Each party should fight where it is strong against the BJP (“Jo party jahan strong hai, wahan usko ladna chahiye”). This is the basis of her one-to-one confrontations with the saffron outfit. However, there will be a problem with this arrangement where two parties may claim to be equally “strong” in a state.
There may be no objections, for instance, to Trinamool Congress being the main challenger to the BJP in West Bengal, where the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the Congress have lost their earlier influence. But the scene is different in Kerala, where both the CPI-M and the Congress may claim to be equally strong.
Similarly, in Maharashtra, it will not be easy to choose between the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) for allotting the leading role unless there is an alliance between them. It will be interesting to find out if this particular problem was touched upon by Mamata Banerjee during her discussions with the NCP chief, Sharad Pawar, in Delhi, which set the ball rolling for her latest round of talks with various leaders.
However, the scene will be less cluttered in states like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Gujarat, Assam and Karnataka where the Congress can expect to be the main challenger to the BJP.
In Bihar, it will be the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), in Tamil Nadu the DMK, in Uttar Pradesh a Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance (if Mayawati doesn’t change her mind), in Andhra Pradesh the Telugu Desam (if Chandrababu Naidu remains opposed to the BJP till 2019), in Telangana K. Chandrashekar Rao and in Odisha Naveen Patnaik, who currently appears to be at a loss about the side to which he belongs.
It is in settling the rows between, say, the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka or between the Telugu Desam and the YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh that the ingenuity of the mediators will be tested. It is possible that several of these disputes will remain unresolved till polling day with the BJP playing an undercover role to egg on the malcontents to prevent a united front against it.
Even then, the one-to-one contests seem largely feasible. According to Arun Shourie, who is now quite openly in the non-BJP camp along with Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha, although none of them has formally left their parent organisation, the one-to-one formula will mean that the opposition will start with 69 per cent of the votes considering that the BJP secured 31 per cent at the height of its popularity in 2014.
But the elephant in the room is the leadership question. Among the probable claimants will be Mamata Banerjee herself as a reward for all the efforts that she is putting in; Sonia Gandhi as the leader of the 133-year-old party of Indian independence who expects to be more acceptable than her son, Rahul; and Sharad Pawar, who was at one time the country’s youngest chief minister although his political instincts have since let him down.
So far as the Congress is concerned, much will depend on how the party fares in the forthcoming assembly elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Success in three of the four states will give the party a momentum which will make the person nominated by it, either Sonia or Rahul, as the natural choice for leading the anti-BJP alliance.
In the push for assuming the leadership role, the Congress can expect to be backed by the RJD, the SP though may be not the BSP, the DMK, the NCP (perhaps) and the CPI-M if Sitaram Yechury manages to overcome Prakash Karat’s resistance. The Trinamool Congress may also chip in if the scales perceptibly tilt towards the Congress.
For the present, however, it will be best for these parties not to raise the leadership question at all, for it may queer the pitch for the unity efforts. As the saying goes, it will be better to cross that bridge when one comes to it.
(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
By Amulya Ganguli,
An indication as to how difficult it is going to be for the opposition at the national level to get its act together was available after K. Chandrashekar Rao met Mamata Banerjee in Kolkata to lay the foundation for a federal front.
However, even before the proposed alliance could get off the ground, the differences about its framework were visible. While the Telangana Chief Minister wanted it to be a non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), non-Congress group, his West Bengal counterpart kept her options open about including the Congress.
A feature of these alliances is that each of their constituents is guided by the ground realities in their own states which may be at variance with the political condition in some other state. For instance, the Congress may be a more formidable adversary for Chandrashekhar Rao in his state, but it isn’t so for Mamata Banerjee. So, while the Telangana Chief Minister wants to keep the 133-year-old Grand Old Party at arm’s length, Mamata Banerjee, a former Congress person, is more accommodative.
Similar conflicting perceptions are known even within one party such as the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) where the Kerala comrades are against any proximity to the Congress, obviously because the latter is a force to reckon with in the southern state, but the Marxists in West Bengal are keen on a tie-up with the Congress against the BJP since they no longer face any major threat from their old opponent in the state. Rahul Gandhi’s hope, therefore, of forming a “workable” anti-BJP alliance with other parties faces considerable roadblocks.
Yet, the BJP’s current vulnerability is obvious to its political enemies. At the same time, the non-BJP parties know that none of them is capable on its own of offering a serious challenge to the ruling party at the Centre. Banding them together is the only alternative. The egos of individual leaders are also a problem, for none of them will be willing to concede the role of a leader to another.
Difficulties of this nature have plagued earlier such formations. In the Janata Party (1977-80), the duel was between Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram. In the Janata Dal (1989-91), it was between V.P. Singh, Devi Lal and Chandrashekhar.
It was to overcome similar confrontations in the confused post-1996 scene that the name of then West Bengal Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, was proposed by United Front leaders like H.D. Deve Gowda, Mulayam Singh Yadav and others, but was rejected by the CPI-M. The BJP, on the other hand, has been fortunate in having an unchallenged leader like Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1996 and in Narendra Modi now.
Who can be the unchallenged leader in the non-BJP camp at present? Although the leaders in a federal front are highly influential in their home provinces, none of them measures up to the popular image of a Prime Minister who is a sober, sophisticated, well-educated, widely respected, trustworthy and unbiased person with a clearly identifiable vision.
To start with Sharad Pawar, who is among those who have shown an interest in leading the charge against the BJP, there has been a question mark over his reliability ever since his party was seemingly regarded by the BJP as a prop against the Shiv Sena’s machinations in Maharashtra. He is generally seen as too clever by half and too much of a deal-maker to be trusted as the guiding light for the nation.
His age — Pawar is 78 — is also against him. India appears to be coming around to accepting Modi’s view, as articulated by senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, that a politician is “brain dead” after 75.
Rahul Gandhi at 48 is safe in this regard as is Mamata Banerjee (63), whose case is being energetically pushed by one of her lieutenants in Delhi. But while the Congress president is still considered not “grown-up” enough, the West Bengal Chief Minister is too immersed in her own province to be seen as a national leader.
Akhilesh Yadav (45) and Mayawati (62) have the same disadvantage of being rooted in the Hindi belt with its concomitant of casteism. Though also from the same region, 67-year-old Nitish Kumar was once considered a possible Prime Minister “material” before he shot himself in the foot with his politics of perambulation, forever looking for green pastures.
The bare cupboard of PM hopefuls leaves only 72-year-old Sonia Gandhi, who has been engaged in dinner diplomacy to cobble together an anti-BJP formation, as a possible candidate. But her minus points are obvious.
For one, she does not appear to be in the pink of health. For another, any whiff about her aspirations will make the Hindu Right revive the “foreigner” debate with great gusto with Sushma Swaraj perhaps once again threatening to shave her head as in 2004. For a third, she may not be interested as she is seemingly intent on paving the way for her son’s elevation.
Yet, the former Congress president is possibly the only one with a much wider acceptability in the non-BJP camp than anyone else and also among the Dalits, backward castes and minorities as well as a section of the traditional Congress supporters in the upper caste though not among the middle class. In a way, she offers the best of a bad bargain with the resultant turmoil proving to be one of the worst in recent years.
(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
Darjeeling : Months after violence and tension erupted in the north West Bengal hills centering the Gorkhland movement, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday asked the political outfits in Darjeeling to maintain peace and ensure no form of violence returns to the region.
“Please give us peace, we will give you prosperity, that is our commitment. That is our assurance,” Banerjee said here after inaugurating the first ‘Hill Business Summit’, nearly six months after the longest ever shutdown in the Darjeeling hills was withdrawn.
“Please see Darjeeling is clean and green. Please ensure that there isn’t any violence. If there is violence, some political leaders might gain, but the people of Darjeeling won’t gain from it. The young generation would become more and more impatient,” she said.
The Chief Minister also announced that her government would provide Rs 100 crore for promotional development of job oriented industries in the region.
“Let’s first make a start. Our government is fully ready to help you. I can also assure you on behalf of the industrialists that they will give you full cooperation,” she said.
Banerjee said special focus would be given to agriculture, horticulture industries, food processing zones, nurturing of orchids and developing IT infrastructure in the region.
She also requested the industrialists present at the meeting as well as the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to prepare an action plan specially for Darjeeling where people are suffering from acute water problems.
“I think the youth of Darjeeling are skilled. They have a lot of potential. They can be used in different industrial sectors. Two IT parks would be set up in Kalimpong and Darjeeling. It can be done in Kurseong and Mirik too. IT has a lot of scope here,” she said.
Noting people from around the world want to come to Darjeeling because of its beauty, Banerjee said there is enough scope for the tourism and transport industry to thrive there.
“Let’s compete on the basis of development. I want the people of Darjeeling to be well,” she added.
—IANS
