EVENT IN KOLKATTA

April 30, 2009 | Filed Under Events | 11 Comments 

BJP is My Choice This Election

by DJ Phukan

The main theme of the Indian general election of 2009 is whether India will get a stable government or will be governed by a disastrous “Chutney” government by the purely opportunistic third of fourth (af)front formations.  Any stable government can only coalesce around either the BJP (NDA) or that of the Congress (UPA).  Many people have speculated that the Congress and BJP have similar economic policies so that voting one or the other is the same. However, I disagree and will also lay out why I prefer the BJP over the Congress.

Governance Track Record:- The Congress’s 50-60 year track record gave the infamous “Hindu Rate of Growth of a pure 2-3%”, vacuous slogans of “Garibi Hatao”, Emergency, supporting Bhindranwale, causing unrest in Assam, J&K and North East for short sighted political gains. Two of its leaders Indira and Rajiv Gandhi perished as the Frankenstein tiger that they mounted for political gain ate them alive. The BJP led NDA proved in its 6 years that it could govern a pluralistic nation (despite mistakes like the Gujarat riots, Kandahar). It provided excellent economic growth.  It pushed Pakistan back from Kargil, removed our nuclear ambiguity and kicked of the greatest infrastructure program of late-the Highways and Power project ( which alas the UPA Government has let languish) and also laid foundations for a new relationship with the West. Most of all, the BJP led NDA ably showed that the TINA ( There is No Alternative) to Congress was a myth.

Small States and Administrative Reform:- The BJP is the only major party that has pushed for devolution of  power from the Center. It thus won regional allies like the AGP, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena, INLD, JD(U) and until recently the Telegu Desam and BJD.  BJP led NDA led to the formation of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttaranchal.  It may be well worthwhile to create smaller states  from Uttar Pradesh as well as Bengal ( North Bengal into Kamtapur and Gorkhaland), Andhra Pradesh ( Telangana) and Maharashtra ( Vidarbha).  The Congress after 1967 has not been amenable to meet people’s aspirations..  Its track record on Administrative Reform has been abysmal as its tendency is to centralize power in Delhi to dish out the loaves and fish of office.

Cadre Based versus Opportunity Based:– The BJP and the Left are the two of the major cadre based political parties ( BSP may be the third formation in the near future). Cadre based parties have deeper support, connect better with their voters and drive change more effectively due to their grass roots structure.  Congress today is largely an opportunistic legacy of what was once India’s Grand Old Party held together by the Gandhi family name.  If the “Gandhi” ceases to bring votes and power, the party will likely whither.

Liberalization/Free Economics:- The Congress claim that Manmohan Singh and Rajiv Gandhi kicked of the liberalization.  However, Morarji Desai tried to open the economy up in the short lived Janata Government (undone by Charan Singh and the Congress) way back in 1979.  If that liberalization had been done then, India would be on world stage where China is today.  Mrs. Gandhi promptly undid any liberalization back in 1980 with her socialism slogans.  The Congress leadership including Manmohan Singh was socialist economists .  The only reason they opened up the economy was Narsimha Rao ( arguably the best Congress PM, we had) believed it was the only way to go back in 1992.  When the liberalization succeeded, Congress promptly morphed opportunistically into Free Market economists.  The BJP due to its trader, Jana Sangh and Swatantra Party roots has always been largely a Free market ( with a few protectionists in its midst no doubt) party.

Given these differences, I support the BJP led NDA in the 2009 election.

DJ Phukan is a North American based NRI. These are his personal views.

April 30, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 7 Comments 

How Congress Wrecks Institutions

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in Indian Express (Apr 29) in an op-ed entitled “Battering ram”:

…Another explanation [for why the Congress is struggling, despite ostensibly favourable circumstances] is that the Congress carries unsavoury baggage: its capacity to wreck institutions. The Congress lost credibility because Indira Gandhi went about destroying institutions, from the judiciary to her own party. As the recent reports in this paper of the government’s interference with the CBI suggest, this propensity has not gone away. Not just the CBI, but the authority and credibility of independent constitutional offices have been consistently undermined. The quality and partisan conduct of some of the governors appointed under the UPA did not reflect well on the office. The appointment of Navin Chawla to the Election Commission did not do much for the credibility of that institution.

…It is said that in infrastructure the Congress cannot be accused of dropping the ball since it never picked it up. In institutions, it has a history of picking up the ball, and then using it to batter them.

April 30, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 1 Comment 

Cong, Beware the Switch

by Swapan Dasgupta

When the ruling party believes it is time to identify the genealogical imprint of Indira Gandhi on Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, you can be sure of two things. First, that Indian politics has scaled new heights of intellectual bankruptcy; and, second, that the natural instinct of the 124-year-old Indian National Congress is to fall back on dynastic adulation.

The idea that Indians should vote for the Congress because of Priyanka’s nose is baffling. But perhaps not half as baffling as some of the other issues the Congress and Friends of the Congress have introduced into the campaign: Priyanka’s views on Rahul’s post-poll alignments (should she be foreign or Indian?); the views of Robert Vadra (who he?) on Priyanka’s perception of her future; and Barkha Dutt’s enchantment that Priyanka speaks such good Hindi (must PLUs speak the ‘vernacular’ badly?)

The trend is intriguing. At this rate voters may be compelled to consider the views of Ottavio Quattrocchi (remember him?) on LK Advani’s plans to raid offshore tax havens.

The wicked people in town have equated the Track-II Congress campaign to a “family melodrama”— with even Race Course Road chipping in with a performance. They are only partly right. It is not merely the Congress that is anxious to avoid any meaningful stocktaking of the past five years — the Prime Minister promises an economic recovery in the next 100 days when he has not thought fit to appoint a Finance Minister in the past 100 days. The UPA constituents, too, are engaged in competitive tomfoolery.

Sharad Pawar and Lalu Yadav excelled themselves last Thursday. Even as voters were queuing in the scorching sun, these two were busy positioning themselves as uncrowned kings and king-makers. Not for a moment were they concerned with the challenging electoral battles in the constituencies. For them the war was as good as won. Both took it for granted that the UPA (including the Fourth Front of RJD, LJP and SP) would not be able to cobble together a majority and would need the support of the Left.

Pawar and Lalu were interested in settling scores with an arrogant Congress; the NCP leader is bitter over the Congress’ vengeful attitude towards the IPL and Lalu is unlikely to forget Pranab Mukherjee’s threat (since retracted) to exclude him from a future Congress-led Government. But neither paused to take into account a very simple fact: That their future plans will depend on how people vote in the first place. Both were guilty of taking the voters for granted. Lalu was explicit that the NDA had been decimated from Kurukshetra to Jharkhand and Pawar was not factoring in the possible outcome in Maharashtra.

In the age of coalitions, parties are prone to futures trading. However, the extent to which they can trade depends on the number of people they can get elected to the Lok Sabha. To win the battle of the ballot is the first priority of politicians; from this flows their shy at power. Pawar and Lalu have begun counting their chickens even before they have been hatched.

I may be over-reacting but I get the sense that voters may construe their premature pronouncements as nothing but arrogance. And there is nothing voters enjoy more than cutting politicians down to size, especially if they are perceived to be either haughty or shifty. The BJP was guilty of smug complacency in 2004 and came crashing down to size. This time it may happen to the UPA. Caught up in the thrilling headiness of Government formation, its constituents appear to have overlooked the importance of winning the election first.

When the election campaign began, the pundits took it for granted that the Congress would emerge as the largest party and the truncated UPA the largest pre-poll formation. The deficit, it was also assumed, would be made up by wooing either a chastened Left or sceptical constituents of the NDA. It was this sensing of oozing over-confidence that prompted the Congress into rejecting any national alliance and even declaring Manmohan Singh as the Prime Ministerial candidate.

After the second round of polling, the Congress’ calculations seem a little less credible. Ground reports suggest that the Congress has not performed all that well in Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, isn’t likely to make gains in Maharashtra and won’t be able to pin the BJP down in Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. There is now a definite question mark over its ability to emerge as the largest party in the 15th Lok Sabha. Equally, the prospects of the Fourth Front don’t look too good in Uttar Pradesh and appear distinctly bleak in Bihar.

Worse, in the battle with the Left, the Congress has blinked. The Prime Minister and Pranab Mukherjee have affirmed their non-hostility to the Left, thereby suggesting nervousness over the outcome.

To what extent the BJP-led NDA will be able to step into this void is still a matter of conjecture. However, there are encouraging signs for the BJP. First, it has made the Congress respond to its agenda rather be led by the Bharat Nirman-type rubbish that was dished out in the early stages of the ruling party’s campaign.

The Congress has meandered from Jai Ho to “weak leader” to dynasty. Second, none of the NDA partners have scored major self-goals in the past three weeks. Contrast this with the public civil war in the UPA. Finally, the BJP and Advani have been cast in the role of an underdog and have, therefore, escaped the problems of media over-exposure.

There are no published exit polls to estimate the outcome in the two phases. But if the bush telegraph is any guide, the underdog and the favourite may have switched places. Maybe, that is why the Congress needs someone with the right nose for politics.

(This article was first published in The Pioneer on April 26, 2009.)

April 30, 2009 | Filed Under Swapan Dasgupta | 6 Comments 

EVENT IN CHENNAI

April 29, 2009 | Filed Under Events | 25 Comments 

Friends of BJP Event: My Experience

by Anish Tripathi

It was my first meeting of the Friends of BJP when I attended the Mumbai event on 26th March 2009 at Bandra, the one where Arun Jaitley spoke on “Why BJP” and Kiron Kher formally joined the party. What was immediately remarkable was the quality of the crowd that had collected to listen to one of the sharpest political observers of our times, and guess what, the meeting started on time (well almost - it was just five minutes late, and the organizers apologized for even that delay).

After the initial introductions and speeches, Arun Jaitley started on his clinical analysis of the current political environment and how the BJP-led NDA had differentiated itself and how the current PM (good person that he is), is really one of the weakest PM that this country has ever seen in this country (weaker than even Deve Gowda). The two arguments that really clinched it for me were the following:

1. When asked to comment by a TV channel in one sentence on how the BJP was fundamentally different from the Congress for the youth of India to look at, Arun had said that anyone could join the BJP, work towards its goals and objectives, and depending on performance, and irrespective of caste or religion could aspire to be declared the Prime Ministerial candidate of the BJP. If one were to join the Congress, you could rise to be a Central minister, but unless your surname was “Gandhi”, by birth or marriage, you cannot aspire for the top job! That in essence was the difference! Touche!

2. The second telling comment was on the so-called economic dream team (ostensibly of the PM, Chidambaram and Montek). When the PM claims that he will solve the economic slowdown problem within 100 days if allowed to come to power once again, what was this dream team doing that it could not even give us a full-time Finance Minister, for over 150 days, when we are passing through this worst financial crisis in the history of independent India. No one is in charge right now and its best that we get this dream team out, as it is only sleeping on the job, and hence dreaming!

He gave a very interesting analysis of the national collapse of the UPA and how weak it had become.

One suggestion for the organizers is to allow for some Q&A, as that is really what voters want, a chance to interact with and question our political leaders. We need to learn this from the American political system, the PM refusing to debate with Advaniji notwithstanding.

One of the questions I definitely want to ask Arun is that the loss of Delhi and Rajasthan cost the BJP heavily in terms of momentum. If he had agreed to take on the mantle of leading the BJP charge in Delhi, there are many like me who believe that there would have been a BJP-ruled state government in Delhi. Does he accept this and regret not taking up the mantle?

Let’s hope and pray for the best, that the NDA is able to return to power and we need to get the lethargic voters of Mumbai out on polling day which is now just two days away !

April 29, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 2 Comments 

An Ode to Advani - Great Leader, Team Player and an Inspiration to the Youth

by Rajat Mahajan


Lal Krishan Advani is the NDA’s Prime Ministerial candidate not just because he is the tallest leader in BJP but also because he is revered by his allies.

Who ever works closely with Advaniji gets to know his personality and becomes a close ally, friend and follower. And the BJP’s allies, who have got to know the leader during the last 11 years, are no exception to this rule,

A potent example of this is the comments made by The All Parties Hurriyat Conference leaders after meeting the BJP stalwart in January, 2004.

After meeting with Advani for more than two hours, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Moulvi Abbas Ansari told a news website he had confidence in the leader.

“Advani showed great sincerity during his talks with our delegation,” Mr Ansari said. “He wants to solve the Kashmir issue and create conditions favourable to carry on a dialogue.”

Further, they went on record to say that they had misconception about Advaniji’s personality.

This misconception is created by the media and to some extent by the political parties who lack ideology, vision and character to match this man’s stature.

I wish to analyze an important virtue of a person - Being a leader as well as a great team player.

One of the attributes which make Advani a great leader is his belief in the democratic process.

This is signified by his ability to respect the wishes of the majority, even while disagreeing with the decision at times.

Whenever he was assigned any task, he made his mark by taking landmark decisions and effective actions. During his many stints as the BJP party President he delivered exceptional results which made the organization stronger.

Advani is a strategic thinker who groomed a second line of leadership with an eye to the future as well as managed to increase the party’s seats in the parliament.

His vision and skills as an administrator were highlighted during his tenure as the Information and Broadcasting Minister in Morarji Desai’s 1976 Government, as Home Minister in 2004 and Deputy Prime Minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Government in 2002.

Advani was the architect of the party’s resounding victory in 1998 & 1999; it was only after his Somnath-Ayodhya Rath Yatra that the BJP became a National Party.

History will remember the more than five decades relationship of Atal-Advani as a one off example of a long association of two leaders of almost equal stature.

One was initially more popular among masses the other was effective in organizing. There are no other such examples in Indian politics.

But for the media speculation fueled by opposition parties, none of the two leaders ever spoke a word against each other. In fact, Advani ji became PM candidate only after Vajpayee ji retired from active politics.

Their style of functioning and their way of thinking was different, yet both are nationalist leaders with deep rooted Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh values.

Their solidarity is an example of how two people, with completely different personalities, can complement each other to work for the nation.

The example set by the BJP top duo is an inspiration for the second line of party leadership and Indian political parties who are currently involved in a tug-of-war for the Prime Minister’s job.

The Atal-Advani relationship is a unique example to the youth in political parties as well corporate organizations to work together for a larger cause without indulging in personal ambitions.

This spirit is what makes the Bhartiya Janta Party, a Nation First Party !!

April 29, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 3 Comments 

Event in Delhi

April 28, 2009 | Filed Under Events | 8 Comments 

The Congress Quartet’s Political Morality

by Sudheendra Kulkarni

The kid-glove treatment that much of the media reserves for the Nehru dynasty and its nominated Prime Minister is one of the many troubling lessons in what is wrong with our democracy. First, for almost the entire stretch of the UPA government’s five years, the press was rarely given an opportunity to question Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or Dr Manmohan Singh on relevant issues. Did you read or watch a single probing, hard-hitting interview with any of them?

But has the situation really changed even after compulsions of the election campaign have forced the trio to be more accessible to the media? I should say ‘quartet’ instead of ‘trio’, because another scion of the dynasty, Priyanka Vadra, has suddenly become the Congress party’s star campaigner. Her campaign is confined to only two constituencies. Yet, a fawning section of the media has elevated her to the status of a national campaigner, giving her more time on TV and more space in print than veterans in her own party. The moot question is: Has the Congress quartet been asked a single uncomfortable question so far? For example, has Sonia Gandhi been asked to explain what is undoubtedly the most outrageous statement in the current election campaign-namely, her assertion that “some people inside our country calling themselves desh premis” (an indirect reference to the BJP) are more dangerous than “foreign terrorists entering India”? Since all four in the quartet have raised the Kandahar issue, has the media questioned any of them what the UPA government would have done if it had faced a Kandahar-like crisis?

India’s self-styled First Family believes in the Orwellian adage that although all families are equal, some families are more equal than others. Its attitude towards mediapersons is: “Don’t forget that we are doing you a favour by letting you talk to us.” No wonder, most journalists are happy doing feel-good interviews, designed to protect the carefully cultivated super-celebrity status of Sonia Gandhi and her children. To these journalists, I can only commend the exhortation, in a celebrated poem, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the greatest poets to have sung the virtues of freedom, democracy and equality:

Bol, ki lab aazad hain tere/Bol, zaban ab tak teri hai… /Bol, ki sach zinda hai ab tak/Bol, jo kuch kehna hai kehle.

(Speak, your lips are free. Speak, it is your own tongue… Speak, because the truth is not dead yet. Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.)

The one question the media was duty-bound to ask, and the Congress leadership was duty-bound to answer, was about the shocker of a statement last week by Dr. M. Karunanidhi, the DMK chief and a key Congress ally. In a TV interview, he called V Prabhakaran “my friend” and said he did not see the LTTE chief as a terrorist. His partial backtracking the next day (”No one can forget the gruesome killing of Rajiv Gandhi”) did nothing to hide his pro-LTTE sympathies. Yet, the Congress party did not dare criticize the Tamil Nadu chief minister, much less severe its ties with his party. Its spokesman’s lame response was: “These are Karunanidhi’s personal views.”

Contrast this with the way the Congress had trained its guns on the DMK in 1997, when it pulled down the seven-month-old I.K. Gujral’s United Front government. The Justice Milap Chand Jain Commission, appointed by the Narasimha Rao government in August 1991 to probe the “larger conspiracy” behind Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, submitted its interim report in August 1997. It indicted the DMK for having patronised the LTTE in Tamil Nadu, where the party was in power at the time of the crime in May 1991. The Congress hastily withdrew its support to the UF government, when Gujral refused to sack three DMK ministers in his cabinet on the plea that the Jain commission had only submitted its interim report and that the final report was yet to come.

Ironically, the same Congress party that destabilised Gujral’s government on the ground that its demand for sacking DMK ministers was not met, had no qualms about including DMK ministers in Dr Manmohan Singh’s government! Its record of political immorality does not end here. In February 2004, when the Congress entered into a poll alliance with the DMK, a courageous journalist asked Sonia Gandhi about her party’s withdrawal of support to Gujral’s government on the DMK issue. Her reply: “There were no negative comments in the final report. Since the final Jain report had exonerated him (Karunanidhi), how could the interim report stand?”

True, the Jain Commission’s final report did not indict the DMK. But till date Sonia Gandhi has not been asked why her party withdrew support to Gujral’s government on the basis of only an interim report.

Her silence on another related development is also eloquent. The NDA government tabled the Jain Commission’s final report in Parliament in July 1998, along with an Action Taken Report (ATR) on its findings. The Congress MPs created a furore saying the final report and the ATR were not acceptable to them. Accordingly, the NDA government agreed to set up a Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) under the CBI to continue the probe into the “wider conspiracy” and also bring the accused, including Prabhakaran, to trial.

Three weeks later, the Congress party further upped the ante on the DMK. On August 19, 1998, a delegation of Congress leaders, including Dr Manmohan Singh, Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee, met the then Home Minister L.K. Advani and complained that they were not happy with the Jain Commission’s final report, “especially as regards the probe into the role of Dr Karunanidhi”. In a detailed seven-page letter, they demanded: “The Congress insists that the agency (MDMA) be directed by the government to investigate all matters relating to Mr M. Karunanidhi as adverted by the Commission and proceed against him in a court of law, if warranted by the evidence which will be uncovered.”

Two conclusions flow from the above facts. Firstly, the Congress party could not have submitted this memorandum without a green signal from Sonia Gandhi, just as Gujral’s government could not have been pulled down on the DMK issue without her approval. Secondly, and more importantly, the Congress leadership continued to suspect the DMK’s role in the plot behind Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination even after the final report of the Jain panel had cleared Karunanidhi and his party.

The Congress leadership suspended its suspicion as soon as it smelled an electoral opportunity in allying with the DMK in 2004. Five years later, its political immorality over the Rajiv assassination issue is even more glaring. But so is the fact that the Congress quartet is under no pressure to answer uncomfortable questions from the media.

(This article was first published in the Indian Express on April 26, 2009.)

April 28, 2009 | Filed Under Sudheendra Kulkarni | 28 Comments 

My Tryst with BJP - Part I

by Sudipto Das

I don’t remember properly when first I was attracted towards BJP. It must be sometime in 1991 when I was doing my higher secondary at a residential college near Calcutta run by Ramakrishna Mission. There was one guy, a year senior to me, who used to follow Advani’s Ratha Yatras very closely and discuss the same among others.

To be very frank names like Advani or Vajpayee or BJP were rarely heard of in CPM dominated Bengal prior to that. Ever since I had sense I’ve heard of Jyoti Basu and the CPM. By the time I became an adult I already knew that there might not be any other party in Bengal during my lifetime. The educated class had already started feeling depressed and suffocated in Bengal, more because neither we saw any hope to get rid of CPM nor we saw any good alternative. The Congress seemed to be a good alternative till a few years back but by 1990 even that perception seemed to change. People were already getting exposed to the large scale corruption charges against Congress. V P Singh also didn’t seem to provide a good alternative. At that time of serious crisis in Indian political sphere Advani’s aggression did attract many young people like me.

That was the first time when we, at least in Bengal, got to know about people like Advani, Vajpayee and many others. It’s ironical that apart from a major road being named after Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in Calcutta, young people of our generation knew quite little of him. We had rather known much more about his illustrious father Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee as the fiery orator and uncompromising Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University. Knowing about Advani - his long history of selfless dedication and honesty - was indeed a very refreshing and inspiring thing to many of us.  More interesting was to see how he was gradually garnering support across India. Though the issue on which he was propagandizing was not of much interest for many of us, still somewhere we saw a conviction, a sort of aggression and decisiveness that was a new thing for teen agers like us.

Some where the educated middle class saw some fresh hopes in Advani. Gradually with days passing by I found many more people of my age taking more and more interest in BJP and Advani. By the time I was in engineering in early nineties there were no dearth of supporters for BJP among my friend circle.  That remains true even now - educated middle class are always supporters of BJP as the viable alternative.

April 28, 2009 | Filed Under Sudipto Das | 8 Comments 

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