by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Congress on Saturday said that the very basis of the polity is threatened by the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and their affiliates which have created an environment of distrust, fear and intimidation threatening to tear apart the country’s social unity and harmony.
It also accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government of being of being “intolerant” of any criticism and remaining in “arrogant denial”.
“In pursuit of its insidious and divisive agenda, they have inflamed communal passions and hyper nationalism,” said the political resolution adopted at the party’s two-day Plenary here.
“The RSS-BJP is misrepresenting, distorting and misusing religion to exploit the sentiments of the people and capture political power,” it said adding, “The toxic mix of religion and politics, poses a challenge to our pluralistic society and inclusive democracy.”
Slamming the RSS, it said, “RSS, which claims to be a social and cultural organisation, masquerades as sole representative of the Hindus.”
The resolution also claimed that the Indian tradition and the essence of Hinduism has been all encompassing, upholder of humane values and our composite culture. “It is distinct and must not be confused with Hindutva, which is essentially a political ideology.”
Attacking the BJP and the RSS for not participating in the national freedom struggle, the resolution said “The RSS and BJP, claim to be custodians of nationalism and patriotism. It is ironical since they are ideological descendants of the non participants of the freedom struggle,” it said.
“Congress – a Party, which led the freedom struggle with its leaders and workers making great sacrifices, therefore, needs no lessons from the RSS-BJP on nationalism and patriotism,” it said.
The Congress also called upon the people of the country to defend and uphold the spirit of ‘Sarva Dharma Sambhav’ and India’s ancient wisdom as encapsulated in ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam’.
The Congress resolution emphasised that forces of communalism and violence have no place in a civilized society.
“No cause can justify terror and violence against innocent civilians and no religion gives that sanction. Congress condemns communalism and terrorism in all its manifestations and reaffirms its resolve to fight such forces,” it said.
The Congress Plenary, unequivocally commits to defend the fabric of social unity, secularism and constitutional democracy.
The party accused BJP and RSS of misrepresenting and misusing religion to exploit the sentiments of the people and capture political power and said that it needs no lessons from them on “nationalism and patriotism”.
The political resolution expressed concern over the assault on foundation principles of the Constitution.
“India is confronted today by a systematic assault on the foundational principles of our Constitution and the values of Indian republic, by the outfits and organisations affiliated to the ruling RSS-BJP combine,” the resolution said.
It also said that the lifeline of Indian democracy is “inclusion and secularism”.
The Congress also charged the government with undermining established norms of governance and subversion of educational, cultural and historical institutions, facilitating their capture by BJP’s ideological affiliates.
“RSS infiltration of every Institution, administration and the universities, poses a threat to pluralism and Indian Democracy. The centralisation of authority, arbitrary and partisan decision making, has cast a dark shadow on Parliamentary democracy,” it said.
Accusing BJP of misusing the constitutional offices to acquire power, it said, “The BJP government, has brazenly misused the constitutional office of Governors and resorted to unethical means to destabilise elected Governments, hijack popular mandates and foisting governments by manufacturing majority.
“The BJP government is insensitive and disrespectful of the above. This calls for strong condemnation,” it said.
The Congress also condemned the BJP for brazen abuse of power and misuse of Central government agencies for targeted political vendetta to harass, humiliate and persecute its political opponents.
“The BJP governments in the states have unleashed persecution and atrocities against the Congress workers.
“The Congress Party warns the BJP and its government, that its undemocratic methods and acts to curtail liberty, freedom of expression and violation of fundamental rights of the citizens as enshrined in the Constitution will be strongly resisted,” it added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said the country, feeling tired under the Modi government, was seeking change in the 2019 general election and only his party can show the path forward.
In his presidental remarks at the party’s 84th Plenary here, Gandhi said the meeting was aimed at setting the future direction not only of the Congress but of the entire country.
Gandhi targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his governmnent, which will complete four years in office in May. He said the country was looking for a change in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
He accused the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) of dividing the society and said that only Congress can heal the divisions.
“Today anger is being spread in the country, the country is being divided and people are being made to fight each other. But our work is to bring people together.”
He said various sections, including youth and farmers, were feeling disenchanted under the BJP government.
“The crores of youth, who are feeling tired today, when they look towards Modi, they are unable to see a way forward.
“They do not know from where will they get employment, when will farmers get proper price for their crops. The country is in a way tired, is seeking a way out.
“And I say from my heart that only the Congress can show the path to the country,” Gandhi said to cheers from the gathering.
“The aim of plenary is to show the path forward to the Congress and the country. It is talking of the future, it is talking of change.”
The Congress President recalled contributions of leaders including his mother Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, Kartanataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram “in fighting the battle of the Congress” and “protecting its symbol”.
The Congress chief talked of the need for a balance between youth and experience in the party.
“In our tradition, there is change but we do not forget the past. There is talk of youth but I want to say from this stage that youth will take the Congress forward but cannot move ahead without the experienced leaders. My task is to connect the youth and the seniors,” he said.
Gandhi said his task was to show a new direction to the party.
“What is the difference between the Congress and our opposition. There is one big difference. They use anger. We use love, brotherhood. The country belongs to us all, is of every religion, every community and every citizen.
“And whatever the Congress does, it will do for every individual of the country and not leave any one behind,” he said.
Referring to the Congress’ symbol of hand, Gandhi said, “This is the symbol that can bring the country together, take it forward. And the power of this symbol is within you. The work of forging the unity will have to be done together by all of us and people of the country.”
The plenary, being held after eight years, has definitive stamp of Gandhi. Unlike the past, leaders are not seated on the dias. Workers and young leaders have been given more opportunity to speak on the resolutions.
The meeting is being attended by AICC members from all over the country besides office-bearers.A .
Elaborate arrangements have been made for the plenary which will conclude on Sunday.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
If one explanation has to be given for the BJP’s electoral ills in the Hindi heartland and nearby states, it is arrogance.
Even more than the Narendra Modi government’s failures on the employment and agricultural fronts, it is the party’s and the government’s haughtiness, reflected in the Vice-president M Venkaiah Naidu’s characterisation of Modi as “God’s gift to the nation”, which has been undermining the party’s standing.
Ever since the BJP came to power, it has been dismissive of everything that happened in the past and vowed to start on a clean slate after eradicating 1,200 years of slavery under the Muslims and the British.
The party also neatly divided the people into “Ramzade” (children of the Hindu god, Ram) and “haramzade” or illegitimate children, as the Union minister, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, so eloquently put it. Any opponent of the party was promptly placed in the anti-national or anti-Hindu category and told to go to Pakistan if he favoured the consumption of beef.
Tourism Minister K.J. Alphons advised visitors from abroad to eat all their beef before coming to India.
The reaction against the BJP’s hauteur was slow to take shape presumably because the people, especially youngsters, retained their faith in the Prime Minister’s “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” or development for all promise. It still works in states like Tripura which has seen little economic growth under prolonged communist rule.
But, elsewhere, the Modi magic has palpably started fading. The first sign was available in the Gujarat assembly elections where the BJP escaped defeat by a narrow margin. After that, the setbacks for the party in the Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh by-elections substantiated the anti-BJP mood.
Now, the Uttar Pradesh by-polls have provided resounding confirmation of the slide in the party’s fortunes in mainland India.
For Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to lose in his redoubt of Gorakhpur, where he is the head priest of the Gorakhnath temple, is far more indicative of the way the cookie is crumbling than the fall of the former chief minister Manik Sarkar’s government in Tripura, which was a cause of elation in saffron ranks.
For the BJP, the monk-politician’s electoral humiliation is stunning for two reasons. One is that the elevation of this saffron-robed votary of “love jehad” and fake encounters to the Chief Minister’s post was intended by the Modi dispensation to show how much is changing in India as it marches towards a Hindu rashtra.
Adityanath’s ascent was meant to be a kick in the teeth for the “secular” camp which could not believe that a Hindutva hawk would be made the Chief Minister of India’s largest state.
The other reason why the BJP would be stupefied is that it will now have to shelve its decision to field Adityanath as the third main campaigner for the party after Modi and party president Amit Shah. Till now, the Chief Minister had been deputed to election-bound states to boast about the “developments” that were taking place in Uttar Pradesh.
Now, he will be an “unstarred” campaigner as a Congress minister in Karnataka has mockingly said. It is not unlikely that Adityanath will be derided on the next occasion when he addresses an election rally. His admission that over-confidence led to the BJP’s defeats in Gorakhpur and Phulpur is only partially correct, for it was not so much self-assurance which undercut the party but supercilious pride of being saviours of the nation from its “enemies”.
This scornful outlook towards its political adversaries was starkly evident in Bihar where Union minister Giriraj Singh warned voters that Araria will become a “hub of terrorism” if the Muslim candidate was elected. This crude display of communalism did not deter the voters.
The three or four “captive” television channels of the BJP have also been ringing alarm bells about the caste-based combination of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), as well as the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), bringing down the “nationalist” BJP in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Even then, it is clear that the successes of these parties have sent out the message to the Congress and other opposition parties that the ground is ripe for unseating the BJP by a united front.
Till now, the BJP’s only hope of staying afloat was the disarray in opposition ranks. It may have also placed considerable faith in the machinations of cynical old-timers like Mulayam Singh Yadav to create fissures in the non-BJP ranks of the kind which enabled it to win big in Uttar Pradesh last year.
But the times are changing. Young leaders like Akhilesh Yadav have shown that it is possible to overcome the earlier two-decade-old enmity between the SP and the BSP to bring the BJP to heel. The RJD has also demonstrated that its M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) base of support has remained intact despite Laloo Prasad Yadav’s incarceration. Besides, the Bihar outcome has shown that the latter’s son, Tajeshwi, has found his political feet.
There are now several relatively young leaders — Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Tajeshwi, Jignesh Mewani — who are in the field. As Rahul Gandhi’s recent meeting with Sharad Pawar showed, they are now taking the initiative along with elders like Sonia Gandhi to bring the opposition parties together on a common platform. If they succeed, the BJP’s chances of repeating 2014 in the next general election are dim.
(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 | Economy, Finance, News, Politics
New Delhi : The introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST) has established India as one of the major economic markets in the world by removing uncertainties in the countrys tax system, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said here on Friday.
“Before 2014, India’s tax system was seen as unfriendly, unpredictable and non-transparent for the investors. But the situation is changing now. The GST has established India as one of the major economic markets in the world,” he said in his address at an event organised by the CNN-News18 TV network.
Modi said that In the last 3-4 years, India has lent strength to the world economic growth as well along with its own growth and pointed out that the country that is just three per cent of the world GDP is contributing “seven times more in the growth of world economy”.
“In the third quarter of 2017-18, India has achieved a growth rate of 7.2 per cent and economists say that this would further accelerate.
“India is performing well in all the macroeconomic parameters such as inflation, current account deficit, fiscal deficit, GDP growth, interest rates, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow etc. The rating agencies are revising India’s ratings upward,” he said.
The Prime Minister said that while India is among top three prospective host economies, in the FDI confidence index, it is being counted among top two emerging market performers.
In the last three years, the country has improved by 42 points in the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ index, he said.
Modi said that India has started getting membership of the bodies it had been seeking for decades such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), The Wassenaar Arrangement (on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies) and the Australia group.
India’s influence has been rising internationally and that in the last 3-4 years, his government has worked meticulously to achieve this, he said.
He said that India winning elections at the International Tribunal for Law of the Sea, the International Maritime Organization, UNESCO and the International Court of Justice shows India’s rising influence.
Modi said India has at various big international fora including the United Nations and the G-20 vehemently raised issues which affect the whole world such as climate change, terrorism and black money.
He said that India has given a new direction not just to its own development but also to that of the entire world. India is leading the world in solar energy revolution.
“In Yemen crisis, other nations also sought India’s help to evacuate their citizens. We safely evacuated nationals of 48 countries from Yemen along with our own citizens,” Modi said.
He said that the growing popularity of yoga and ayurveda across the world was also an extension of Rising India.
“My government is working with a holistic approach keeping in mind the aspirations of the poor, lower middle class and the middle class citizens,” the Prime Minister said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Frank F. Islam,
On Sunday, January 7, the New York Times ran a front page story titled “Rising Anxiety in India is Piercing Modi’s Aura of Invincibility”. The article discussed the decline in GDP, consumption and consumer confidence and its impact on India and Indians.
A little more than two weeks later, on January 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the opening address at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland. In that address, he declared: “According to the World Bank and IMF, our growth rate is going to be steady and high.”
The question becomes, as the end of the first quarter of 2018 approaches, whether the Times’ more pessimistic or Modi’s more optimistic perspective is correct. The answer from the most recent data and trends indicates that the optimistic view will most likely prevail.
Things are not quite as stunningly bright, as in 2014 right after Modi’s swearing-in as Prime Minister, when I wrote in an article for Foreign Policy magazine: “It is now Modi’s India. And, Modi’s India is a place of grand ambitions, great expectations and high hopes.” But, it looks like there is a lot more sunshine on the horizon than there are clouds in India’s economic future.
Part of the reason for this assessment is that the slowdown in the economy in India was self-induced. It was caused primarily by two governmental policies: demonetisation and the imposition of a Goods and Service Tax (GST).
Scholars and economists will argue whether these two actions were necessary or beneficial. I will leave that debate to them. Looking at where things stand today, it appears that the Indian economy is turning the corner and will continue to grow to position India as a world leader.
There are a few negative indicators such as the decline of the Nikkei India Services Business Activity Index to a seven-month low of 47.8 in February. This is however offset by the fact that India’s GDP growth for the last quarter of 2017 was 7.2 per cent — making it the fastest-growing economy in the world for that time period. Combine this with projected GDP growth for India in the 7 to 7.8 per cent range in the current and next fiscal years by various groups, and there is considerable cause for optimism.
That optimism is strengthened by three factors: Progress on the ground in India; the country’s global and regional economic appeal; and, the “defining partnership for the 21st century” between India and the United States.
Modi highlighted some of the economic accomplishments and plans developed during his tenure in his Davos WEF remarks. Most of them related to initiatives of the Make In India programme, including making India a manufacturing hub; the Skill India programme; and the opening of bank accounts for unbanked people.
At Davos, Modi also mentioned briefly that India is ranked third on the Global Trust Index list of the most trusted governments in the world. This accomplishment cannot be over-stressed. It is important and differentiating because we are living in an era when trust in government and democracy around the globe is in deep decline.
In his Davos speech, Modi also stressed the enormous opportunities that companies have to invest in “inclusive economic development” in India. By all accounts, business leaders from around the globe responded very favourably to his sales pitch. On a regional basis, the success of the India-Asean Summit held as part of this year’s Republic Day ceremonies and the potential of India’s “Act East” policy speak for themselves.
Finally, there is the “defining partnership” between the US and India. President Obama used this phrase during his first visit to India in 2009 and his administration worked assiduously to strengthen that partnership during his eight years as President.
This year has been a little more worrisome for the partnership. There were concerns about protectionism as President Donald Trump talked about import taxes in January. Then, on March 8 along came Trump’s tariffs on aluminium and steel imports and that upset the apple cart.
But probably not a lot, because the level of export of steel and aluminium products to the US is relatively low. The Indian media quoted industry leaders as saying “India will not be impacted much”.
There is another reason the impact will be low. That is because the Trump administration sees the chance and the need to increase US exports to India substantially going forward. Getting a fairer balance in the trading relationship was a primary topic of the 2017 US-India Bilateral Trade Policy Forum held in November. It can be expected this will be an area for negotiation moving forward
In summary, the Modi economy has many rays of sunshine. Those rays do not shine uniformly on all though.
There are also a few clouds. These include: An across-the-board need for empowerment of women and enhanced educational opportunities for minorities. As those rays get brighter, one must be brought to focus to dispel those clouds.
(Frank F. Islam is an entrepreneur, civic and thought leader based in Washington DC. The views expressed here are personal. He can be contacted at ffislam@verizon.net)
—IANS
