When the shoe is on the other foot…

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Much has been said and written about the shoe that was thrown by a Sikh journalist at P Chidambaram, India's Home Minister when he refused to address the concerns raised about the Congress Party nominating Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from Delhi: where in 1984, these two gents were alleged to have masterminded a state-supported pogrom which saw the death of over 10,000 Sikhs only because the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by a Sikh bodyguard. In this melee, history has been conveniently forgotten because in addition to what these two gents have supposedly been accused of, was also a statement by the slain Prime Minister's son, Rajiv Gandhi, that when a large tree falls, the ground shakes. One cannot accuse Rajiv Gandhi of being communal but then given the servility of India's political classes I would not....

Why election manifestos mean little

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The Indian election scenario has always been predictable. And despite the any changes that one sees with regard to the rise and rise of regional parties, some of the fundamentals never seem to change. There has been enormous brouhaha over the manner in which some candidates have been handing out cash in blatant violation of the election conduct but that too is explained away on the altar of tradition, What however intrigues me, election after election, is the manner in which almost every political party makes such a song and dance of its manifesto. There was however, a time when there were some discriminators in these manifestos but in these parity-driven ties, that too seems to have vanished and this is the biggest irony of the Indian political scenes. These are no longer manifestos with plans and shared vision but instead documents which highlight freebies that parties promise but never....