Maharashtra Elections
We all are privy to the transition that the BJP is going through. This must have surely raised Congress’s hopes of electoral success in the upcoming assembly elections. The assembly elections in Maharashtra are crucial in this regard where the Democratic Front government has a dismal performance to defend. It may be right opportunity for an organized opposition to rest power from the ruling coalition, which is facing anti incumbency of two terms and is struggling with grassroots dissonance. It is also likely that the anti incumbency voters have realized who the actual beneficiaries are in case they vote for MNS and other smaller outfits. This should likely benefit the Saffron alliance.
Let us know what you think should be the issues this election and your expectations from a BJP-Shiv Sena government, if voted to power.
Haryana Elections
It is no surprise that the Hooda Government, following Congress’s super showing in the Lok Sabha elections, dissolved the legislature and called for an early election. The Congress is obviously confident of its good showing yet again in the assembly elections. While it is a fact that the Congress has traditionally felt the heat against strong alliance in Haryana, it faces no such formidable opposition this time. The BJP has walked out of alliance with INLD over seat sharing disagreement. Haryana elections are dominated by caste politics and the BJP’s appeal in the past has been restricted to urban and upper caste. This is perhaps an opportunity for the BJP to increase its support base amongst other sections of the society and evolve as a dominant player in times to come. This is something that the Friends of BJP would be delighted with. There is always a prospect of post poll alliance with the INLD. Importantly the political equation in the state will also depend on how Bhajan Lal’s Haryana Janhit Congress and the BSP perform.
Let us know the key issues BJP should raise in Haryana and what is the role that you would like it to play in State politics.
Sudheendra Kulkarni
by Vijay Vikram
I can’t say that I ever fully understood Mr Kulkarni. I have always found his columns and other public utterances abstruse and rather dense, thereby finding it difficult to get a handle on his political philosophy. A rare exception to this general rule was Kulkarni’s open letter to L.K. Advani that argued for a recasting of RSS-BJP relations in the aftermath of the original Jinnah controversy. Essentially, Mr Kulkarni wanted to free up the party from micromanagement by Sangh interlopers - an admirable sentiment. His abstruseness apart, Mr Kulkarni emerges as a thinking man who represented a sober nationalism that attracted many to the party in the first place.
Kulkarni is not by any stretch a political figure of comparable national prominence to Jaswant Singh. His departure though is at least as disturbing because it represents the growing flight of intellectual capital away from the party. The cerebral right-wing talent the BJP managed to attract in the NDA years that made it the natural party of governance is being gradually weeded out. Arun Shourie, a modern day polymath is a virtual pariah, Yashwant Sinha has quit all party posts and the Jaswant Singh brouhaha is still playing out. It does seem that the party is turning to a certain atavism after the defeat. Swapan Dasgupta has argued that the once broad church of the Bharatiya Janata Party - accommodating strident Hindu assertion with centre-right nationalism - is turning into a sect with the former emerging as the overriding paradigm. Perhaps then, it is time for the urban Indian with his newfound cosmopolitanism to resurrect that ill-fated nexus of Parsi free thinkers, conventional nationalism and free enterprise.
Effective Government Spending
by Sudipto Das
I might be sounding like a broken record when I always criticize the ‘popular’ schemes like “National Rural Employment Guarantee” or on-the-house loan waiving. Even a layman in economics understands that to keep the wheel of economy of a country rolling it’s very essential to keep the consumers alive. It’s often argued that, thanks to these popular schemes, India hasn’t seen the worst of the recession in the past one year. Well, I don’t accept that. That’s too short term a perspective. In reality the government has already made a deep hole in its pocket. We’ll see serious long term impacts if the government spending is not controlled.
The ongoing drama with the swine flu has shown how much vulnerable our government is when it comes to disaster management. Thank God, that the flu is still restricted to the affluent class mainly in tier one cities. Just imagine what would have happened if the flu had attacked the hinter lands of our country? Even in the few cities, the government is not capable of providing with the basic infrastructure like the testing equipment. Even the masks required as a precautionary measure are not available in the market. Government is in dire need of cash for buying the testing equipments. I know that the panic with swine flu is a little exaggerated, but still the point remains that the government is not able to spend money in the way it should have in order to tackle the situation.
India’s total sending on health is just around 5% of the GDP, out of which only one fifth is government spending. This is a ridiculous amount of money. It’s seems like a joke that Mahatma Gandhi had said, “Health is Wealth”. The demographic dividend, that every one is talking about now-a-days, would be a myth if we don’t have healthy children growing up to strong adults. Government has a great role to play.
Let’s see some statistics (Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/in-india/hea-health)
Access to sanitation 72% 77th
Drug access 0% 152nd
Hospital beds 0.9 59th
per 1,000 people
Physicians 0.6 19th
per 1,000 people
These are just a few statistics. There are many such terrible things that we need to improve and that require serious government expenditure. I’m very sure that anyone, irrespective of his or her level of intelligence and financial background, would value the settting up of an efficient health center in his or her village than anything else. I just wonder what the government has been doing in all these aspects.
We are all Hindus now: Newsweek column
From Newsweek:
America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.
…here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we’re burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. “I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection,” agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard.
Of Jinnah, Jaswant and Hanuman…
by Vijay Vikram
It is no secret that the BJP high-command has avoided any attempt at genuine reflection on the reasons for defeat in the 2009 General Elections. In fact, the emerging consensus within India’s miniscule right-wing intelligentsia is that the BJP never quite recovered from the defeat in 2004 and continued on with the 2009 campaign on autopilot. Admittedly, the media strategy in 2009 was excellent: The clever subversion of the Congress’ triumphalist ‘Jai Ho’ with the sober ‘Bhay Ho’ jingle and the inclusion of young, IT-savvy talent for LK Advani’s personal image boosting initiative are cases in point. All this however, could not hide the rot at the base of the party. This defeat was a political defeat. It was not about image management. It was not about re-packaging Hindutva in more modern prose. The electorate rejected India’s version of a conservative party wholeheartedly.
Rajnath Singh and his ilk realise this. They realise that if the party sat down and did some actual chintan at the Chintan Baithak, their variety of conservatism would be declared an electoral liability in newly aspirational India. The resulting restructuring of the BJP would inevitably cut short the political careers of certain sections of the party. Like any political animal, this group’s primary impulse is to survive in the face of looming obscurity. It is in this context that the shock expulsion of Jaswant Singh must be viewed.
While Jaswant Singh’s sacking may not be a case of calculated news management as Vinod Mehta of Outlook suggested on a current affairs programme, it definitely hints at a totalitarian impulse aimed at homogenising the party and smothering legitimate intellectual expression.
As it happens, the period of history that this political controversy has thrown up is equally fascinating. Jaswant Singh has propounded a contrarian reading of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s political philosophy. He is by no means the first to interpret Jinnah as a calm, secular politician. But, Mr Singh’s public role ensures that the book and the arguments contained therein receive an inordinate amount of media attention as compared to any other piece of scholarly work. The crux of his thesis, as I am given to understand is that history has been unfair to Jinnah. In a sense, Jinnah’s complicity in the Partition of India has been exaggerated and that of Nehru’s Congress has been underplayed - perhaps in order to make for a more comfortable nationalism for the Indian masses to subscribe to.
The pork-eating, cigar-smoking Jinnah clearly does not make for a very good poster boy for the Two Nation Theory and Pakistani nationalism. Jaswant Singh’s argument is that Jinnah’s mutation from secular nationalist to communal scaremonger was caused by his desire to carve out a space in Indian politics that he could call his own in the face of increasing Nehruvian hegemony. Jinnah then, crafted a constituency that evolved into Pakistan. He reserved his antipathy for Nehru and the Congress, not the Hindus. The idea of Pakistan, which germinated in the brain of Cambridge student Choudhary Rahmat Ali in 1932 become a potent political weapon in the hands of Jinnah.
Perhaps it was a tad indiscreet for a practicing politician of national prominence to indulge in revisionist accounts of the founder of Pakistan whilst he remained a serving member of a political party. Winston Churchill for example, waited till his retirement from active public life before publishing his account of the Second World War. This abrupt expulsion however, smacks of an increasingly insecure leadership in the BJP that is keen to preserve the status quo and prolong its spell in power. The party is likely to lurch from one controversy to the other till the time a new generation of charismatic leadership is allowed to emerge. Jaswant Singh in the meantime has all the time in the world to write.
What is the Nation we want to be? (Part 2)
by Amit Malviya
Possible Solution
Dr Subramanian Swamy on 19Jul09 speaking in Darmouth, Mass in US, advocated the concept of Brihad Virat Hindutava and argued its relevance to bring about a renaissance in the current secular India’s value system and thus create a unified patriotic and spiritual society. At present, he said, the Indian nation is slowly but surely sliding into a crass one-dimensional society of material pursuits which can lead to the nation’s Balkanisation.
Dr. Swamy was delivering the Special Public Lecture as guest of honour, to the delegates of the 18th International Congress on Vedanta held for three days at the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dr. Swamy said that Hindu civilization has lasted so long, in fact the longest, is because it was a society that had found a blend and harmonization of material pursuits with spiritual values.
He further elaborated : “In the 19th century, Swami Vivekananda had propagated the concept of Brihad{Greater} Hindutva, while Sri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar who had spoken from different perspectives, advocated a Virat[virile] Hindutva. All these revelations were made to the people in pre-political de-colonised India. But unfortunately after becoming free, the academia and political power went into the hands of Marxists and Macaulayists who were determined to reduce the Hinduness of Indians to a minimum of acceptability labeling it as obscurantist and politically chauvinist, or communal and fundamentalist, and make out the concept as a danger to secularism. He said that the history of Hinduism disproves these charges, but the slander continues. Now to end the current moral degeneration in a democratic dispensation in India, he would advocate propagating a synthesis of Vedanta, Brihad and Virat concepts.
Dr. Swamy declared that time has come to confront the Marxist and Macaulayists and challenge them to a debate a new synthesis of Brihad Virat Hindutva if they dare to debate.
Challenges
This is essentially a great concept but the challenge lies in implementing it without being perceived as exclusive and pro Hindu. The pseudo secular-communal divide in the country is so mis-propagated and wide that being pro nationalist and cultural is invariably seen as pro Hindu and hence not secular. This debate has gone on for far too long and is ingrained in people’s psyche now. The challenge is to overcome this and instill cultural pride and feeling of patriotism in the people of India and build an inclusive spiritual society. The concept also needs to be articulated in simpler terms so that the common man can understand and relate it to his daily life. Unlike most ideologies it should be contemporary and progressive. This is easier said than done !
It would be great to hear what you think.
What is the Nation we want to be? – Food for Thought
by Amit Malviya
A friend recently wrote a very poignant observation on the US society. Several questions were inherent in his comments. I am taking the liberty of producing the content of the mail here.
Quote
One very significant aspect of the US society that we noticed here was the absence of strong bonding in society, even at the nuclear level.
Though the country might have progressed economically and technologically, there seems to be a void in the social sphere. Also people seem to be driven by rules of society but with little passion, there seems to be an underlying sense of resentment, which is very subtle and may even be invisible to them.
This is a great country which promotes freedom of speech and has a good non-discriminatory judicial and religious system but there is so much emphasis on being independent and protecting one’s personal space that people are living lives of isolation even though functioning according to the rules of society. So they are resorting to alternate means to satisfy their longing for being cared for, but none of it is giving them the happiness that they seek. The proponents of their religion are also not helping much since they seem to be ill equipped to understand the root cause of the malaise, themselves being a product of the same system.
The reason I mention this is because I see a turn for the worse in our Indian society as well. Embracing capitalism in all its glory seems to be draining the life forces from our social ecosystem as well. Material possessions are increasingly being projected as the means to a happier life.
It makes us marvel at the great insight which the creators of our religion had. It is so relevant for anyone practicing it and goes beyond barriers of Time, Space and Community. A lot of organizations are leading a resurgence of such a society and doing great work but I am not sure if they are being able to keep pace with the change. There seems to be an inherent though hidden aspect of capitalism which promotes greed and leads to deterioration of values. Not sure about other countries, but Japan seems to have been able to balance a strong family oriented culture yet promoting capitalism.
I feel it is better to have sanity in our social structure than aim for economic prosperity at the cost of our social balance.
Unquote
The question that we need to ask ourselves is - What is the Nation we want to be ? Do let us know what you think ?
Tomorrow: Possible solution and challenges
Didigiri
by Sudipto Das
Mamta Banerjee has provoked the media to coin a new term - didigiri. It’s not that we didn’t have fiery didis or behens in the past. Margaret Elizabeth Noble, christened ‘Sister’ Nivedita by Rabindranath, was no doubt a fiery didi or behen. Generally Rani Lakshmibai is not thought as a didi, nevertheless, she was indeed a fiery lady. History will point us to so many fiery didis. But still the term ‘didigiri’ was never used for any of them. It seems to have been reserved forever for Mamta-didi. That’s indeed an achievement for our beloved Didi, but I can’t say if it’s a great or ‘un’great one!!
Didi’s recent surprise victory in West Bengal is being perceived by her as the attestation of her electorate to her fiery opposition, often quite irrational, to land acquisition by the government for private companies. Her oppsotion has cost West Bengal the prestigious Nano factory from the Tatas. It’s true that the way West Bengal government has handled the entire issue of land acquisition was indeed very undemocratical and heinous. Some credit surely goes to Didi for bringing the Left front government in West Bengal at task. Without her opposition the nation won’t have known the atrocities and the corruptions that the Left has been indulging in over the past three decades in Bengal and elsewhere. But at the same time it’s also of utomost interest to make sure that the path towards industrialization of rural India is not met with such blockages. It’s here that BJP has to play a great role as opposition in the center.
It’s beyond doubt that to provide the growing population of India with effective employment (not the type of NREGS) industrialization is the only way. Agriculture doesn’t generate enough revenue compared to the people employed in it. The much needed employment and keeping pace with the high GDP growth need extensive industrialization. China’s is a very good example how industrialization can impact GDP and overall economy. It’s not recommended to follow everything that a communist and closely guarded China did. Nevertheless, there are several things that are worth following. For industrialization, the foremost thing that government has to do is setup an efficient policy for procurement of land that not only has a human face but also makes proper business sense. It’s here that the opposition can play a great role in bridging the gaps between UPA & Didi and help the country in a big way.
Land acquisition is a double edged sword which has to be handled with lot of care and prudence. The people who can be negatively impacted immediately are the ones whose lands are acquired. But in the long run the same people would be benefited in several ways once the industries are setup. It’s the role of the political parties to work at the grass root levels and explain the long term benefits of industrialization. Also at the same time the land deals should be very transparent and financially viable both parties - those whose lands are being acquired and the industries. The Left did really a very shoddy job in making the dealings transparent. But what Mamta did was actually throwing the baby along with the bath water.
I’m sure with the increased focus on industrialization, the issue of land acquisition would crop up in several states and one of the most important things that the government has to finalize is a good and efficient policy for it. I’d like to see BJP doing a really great job here to counter Didigiri!!
Shame at Sharm Al Sheikh
by Amit Malviya
It is often said that diplomacy is an art. It is evidently clear by now that both Dr Singh and Mr Krishna are inept at handling high level diplomacy. This has been reinforced by the way we as a Nation have responded to less than fair treatment being meted out to Indian students in Australia, concessions given away to US in the End User Monitoring Agreement compromising India’s security and sovereignty, accepting caps on emissions at the Climate Change summit, avoidable faux pass when Hillary Clinton (remember Krishna got a lesson from Hillary on how to exchange dossiers) visited India and most recently the sell out to Pakistan at Sharm al Sheikh.
It is no coincidence that the opposition, media, intelligentsia, opinion makers and even a section of the Government is seeing India’s strategic position being compromised in the understandings / agreements recently entered into by the Government.
It is without doubt that the joint statement issued by India and Pakistan at Sharm al Sheikh has severely compromised India’s position. It has a) accused India of fomenting trouble in Baluchistan and b) delinked the composite dialogue from action on terror. Inclusion of these references in the joint statement violates India’s stand against Pakistan. Never in the past has India ever given such concessions to Pakistan. Following the joint statement, a report has appeared in Dawn saying that Pakistan has handed a dossier to India highlighting its role in Baluchistan and attack on Srilankan players in Lahore. Not that one should loose sleep over the Dawn report, we also can’t deny the fact that we have handed over the advantage to Pakistan.
PM, the nice man he is, has defended this joint statement by saying that India has nothing to hide. This is a nice statement if it came from a political novice and not from the head of a State. The MoS in the External Affair Ministry, Shashi Tharoor, has a completely different take on the joint statement. He said that such joint statements are not legally valid and therefore should not be a matter of concern. Was he trying to imply that the document that the PM has signed is not even worth the piece of paper it is printed on or does he not know that in 1965 we handed over the Haji Pir Pass (critical to dominate the LoC) despite the military objections as part of one such joint agreement or including the words “outstanding issues” in the 1972 Shimla Agreement allowed Pakistan to revive the Kashmir issue all over again.
I am sure he is a smart man to realize the blunder but he obviously sees himself more as a politician than a former diplomat. While a statement like this could have cost him his job in UN, he is only ensuring that he is furthering his political career by defending the PM.
The Foreign Secretary has gone on record saying that it is a case of bad drafting (I hope that is indeed the case). Former diplomats have pointed out that the joint statement should include only what both the countries agree on. If there is a point of disagreement, then it should not find its way to the joint statement. But still the Government and Congress Party continue to defend the joint statement, at least in the public domain. Their compulsion is understandable.
As the PM rises in the House today to clarify the statement, it is likely that he will not have anything credible to say beyond what we already know. Nevertheless the country has the right to know why is the Congress led Government gambling with India’s pride ? Is it that Mr Singh realizes that he has very little time in office and wants to make a mark for himself in history ? While Dr Manmohan Singh will be remembered as the Regent who stood guard till the crown prince was ready to take over, he is clearly getting ambitious. This was evident in the way he defended the Nuclear deal and now his attempts to script a new chapter in Indo-Pak diplomacy. While I wish him luck, I only hope he will not compromise India’s interest. This I hope is not much to ask.
I also wonder sometime, purely based on how we as a Nation come across on global stage, that we have lost sense of pride, the realization that we are a power house and have a dominant role to play in the region. We dismiss trouble, which could potentially destabilize us, in neighbouring states as “their internal matter”. Assault on Indian students is a mere Law and Order problem of Australia. Can you imagine US reacting to injustice against their countrymen in another country in the same vein ? How do we explain our tolerance to repeated terrorist attacks on India ? Are we too resilient or perhaps don’t like confrontation to the extent that we are ok even if we appear weak and timid ?
It is time that we got up and faced the world as a self assured Nation capable of dominating world politics. Aspiring to be a super power is also about behaving like one !