Why the UP results could take India back by 20 years

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With counting of votes round the corner, the Exit Polls are finally out. And if they are to come true, then Samajwadi Party could well be forming the next government in UP. Strangely, most people in Lucknow find this prospect scary and suddenly the common refrain seems to be: the party of the corrupt is still better than the party of the goons. There are various reasons why Samajwadi Party is feared. One, it's perhaps the most brazenly opportunistic regional party whose loyalty can be bought by UPA whenever the UPA chooses to. Two, the party can be shockingly inconsistent. So, while the party manifesto on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections in 2009 pledged to ban computers, this time around, the party has promised free laptops to poor students. Three, the party is just as ignorant. So this time around it has promised 18....

Rahul's 'Shah Bano' bend

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To Rahul, should go the credit of helping the Congress finally shed its façade of secularism. Rajiv Gandhi, India's youngest PM, had lots going for him until the Shah Bano case happened in 1986. The Congress party which had an absolute majority in Parliament at the time, passed an act called The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 that nullified the Supreme Court's ruling that Shah Bano, a poor widow be given maintenance money similar to alimony. The government's reaction in this case seemed mired in confusion. The same government which initially seemed prepared to defend the Supreme Court's secular judgment, when confronted with the prospect of antagonising the minority votes, did a volte face and instead went all out to appease regressive sentiments. Rajiv, sure, must have regretted his naivete, for in more ways than one, the Shah Bano case triggered....

Of Gita And the Hindu identity

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The recent controversy surrounding the banning of the Bhagwad Gita in Russia is an extension of various attempts in recent years to paint the Hindu religion in poor light. That said, things ought to be put in perspective here: it needs to be clarified that the present controversy is merely the fallout of a confrontation between the Russian Orthodox Church and Isckon. That the former should resort to seeking a ban, that too, on the grounds of the Gita preaching religious extremism, only exposes the illiteracy or the vindictiveness of the concerned Church. It's akin to me having a problem with a Church being constructed in my locality and so I file a case seeking a ban on the Bible. Gita preaches tolerance, reason and moral discernment. A society or individual who has a problem with these could be suffering from an acute personality disorder. ....

Uttar Pradesh: Divide to conquer

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History is replete with stories of kings conquering new territories to expand their kingdom. However, seldom would one have heard of a king vivisecting his vast kingdom into pieces. To that extent, Mayawati's decision to divide India's biggest state into four parts must be a first of its kind. The move has quite rightly taken people by surprise: why would someone in her right senses want to decimate her influence on national politics? After all, Mayawati has all along nursed the ambition of becoming India's first Dalit PM. Mayawati's move, thus, is a complex one and comprehending it will require a fair amount of conjecture. One would like to believe that Maywati's decision is borne out of a sense of desperation. In 2007, it was her deft social engineering that helped her win over the Brahmins and Dalits alike and which catapulted her to power. She knows that her....

The Rath Yatra Returns- Part 2

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LK Advani has completed another mammoth countrywide yatra. Even though the current yatra may not have generated the kind of consistent hype in the national media that surrounded some of his previous endeavours, Advani has scored many a point which can't be ignored by either his own party or his rivals. The most significant development during the last couple of weeks has been two of the senior BJP leaders - Rajnath Singh and Jaswant Singh - coming out openly in support of Advani as PM. And this might just signal a larger trend. None of the second rung leaders will be happy if one pips the other to be the PM candidate. And that would imply that by default, Advani becomes the PM candidate, even though he is as qualified for it on merit. The Yatra's concentrated focus on corruption perhaps restricted its success, for even....

The Rath Yatra Returns – Part 1

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21 years ago, in September 1990, when LK Advani embarked on his first 'rath yatra', little would he have known that 'yatras' would, over the years, become the hallmark of his politics. The first yatra will remain historically significant as it was instrumental in catapulting the BJP to a position where it could directly take on the might of the Congress. A second yatra called the "janadesh yatra' followed in 1993. Then in 1997, when India competed 50 years of her independence, Advani decided to pay homage to all the heroes and martyrs of the freedom struggle by visiting different places associated with them across the country. Advani subsequently took out a Bharat Uday Yatra in 2004, followed by a Bharat Suraksha Yatra in 2006 and finally the Jan Chetna Yatra which took off a Sitabdiara today. If one looks at the sheer length of these yatras, both in terms....

When hysteria dwarfs reason

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At the end of Narendra Modi's Sadbhawna fast, it is evident that Modi has taken a clear and decisive lead in pitching himself as BJP's PM candidate for the 2014 elections. However, Mr. Modi's journey to 2014 is fraught with numerous obstacles, some foreseen, others invisible, at this point. One, the moment you make your ambitions known, you make yourself vulnerable to conspirators. And in Modi's case, given the baggage he carries, there's never any dearth of people waiting to see his doom. One can thus expect newer and possibly graver allegations from Teesta Setalvad, Sanjiv Bhatt, Mallika Sarabhai, Mukul Srivastava and the ilk. Besides, the trial in the riot cases will obviously continue. Moreover, a section of Modi baiters have now realized that painting him as communal only works in his favor; hence they are shifting their focus to digging up instances of corruption and coercive acquisition of....

Communal Violence Bill: Nothing secular about it

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Three days after the Delhi bomb blast on 7 September, the PM convened a meeting of the National Integration Council. Surprisingly, combating terrorism was not on the agenda. Instead, what topped the agenda was a controversial proposed bill called Prevention of Communal Violence Bill, 2011. The drafting of this bill is amateurish. Moreover, the manipulative intent of the bill becomes clear if one goes through the definitions of "communal violence" and "group" outlined at the very start. "Communal and targeted violence" means and includes any act or series of acts, whether spontaneous or planned, resulting in injury or harm to the person and of property knowingly directed against any person by virtue of his or her membership of any group, which destroys the secular fabric of the nation. "Group" means a religious or linguistic minority, in any state in the Union of India, or Scheduled Castes....

The Good and the Bad of Anna's revolution

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Eight days after Anna Hazare started fasting, demanding that his team's Jan Lokpal Bill be tabled in Parliament, far from the 'revolution' (that's what I'd call Anna's present crusade) wearing out, there is every indication of it culminating towards a dangerous crescendo. As a concerned Indian who is determined not to let go of his objectivity in the midst of this heightened chaos and frenzy, my emotions are mixed. I can't blindly support every move of Anna, as some of them are outright naive. At the same time, I share the anguish of the masses against this government which by far is the most mediocre, ill-advised and spineless, in addition to being the most corrupt one in independent India. It therefore makes sense to put things in perspective and analyze the good and the bad of this unprecedented mass revolution. I would begin with the good. ....

Anna must enter politics

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It is strange how history seems to repeat itself all the time. Anna Hazare's arrest today is reminiscent of 1975 when the then Indira Gandhi-led government, afraid of JP Narayan's sway over the masses, started locking up opponents in jail. Thirty-six years later the same seems to be happening again, the crucial difference being that Anna is leading a purely non-political movement. I have in some of my previous articles maintained that Anna should turn his anti-corruption movement into a political movement. The main reason I say so is that the Government (until today's developments) was more or less indifferent to Anna as it knew that Anna would be eating into the Opposition pie. Moreover, Anna's well-known dislike towards politics had made this government complacent- the UPA knew that Anna or his team would not be around at the time of elections. At least the Congress spokesman....