Posts Tagged ‘BJP’
America and India
Posted on: August 25, 2023
America
Reuter reports Donald Trump’s mug shot was released on Thursday evening after he was booked at an Atlanta jail on more than a dozen felony charges as part of a wide-ranging criminal case stemming from the former U.S. president’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia. Inmate no. P01135809.
India
Varanasi, one of the holiest of the cities, shot into limelight in the beginning of this year for reasons other than religious or spiritual. BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi had announced his decision to contest for Lok Sabha from Varanasi constituency. That catapulted Varanasi into the most watched city, by politicians, by the media, by professionals, by common people and, most importantly, by Election Commission of India (ECI).
As was expected, Varanasi witnessed a high-pitched electoral battle. Modi was declared elected by a margin of 3,71,784 votes over his nearest rival Arvind Kejriwal of AAP. The Congress candidate came third followed by that of BSP. Modi’s party, with as well as without its electoral allies, won a majority of the seats in Lok Sabha. Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister on May 26.
As a routine revision of the voters’ lists was held this month, it came out that 3,11,057 fake voters had cast their votes in the May Lok Sabha polling in Varanasi. This figure had come out at the initial stage itself. The district administration expected the number of fake voters to go up to 6,47,085 by the time the revision of the entire constituency was completed. This is quite a mind boggling figure. Even three lakh fake voters in a single high-profile constituency is exceptionable.
Election Commission had of late been trying hard to gain greater credibility. But the Sampath-Brahma-Zaidi trio has reversed the process. A question mark now hangs over its credibility after the discovery of lakhs of fake voters in Prime Minister Modi’s constituency. Forgery of such a gigantic magnitude could not have been possible without the complicity of the Election Commission machinery. One should be excused for presuming that only the touts and pimps were assigned the duty as observers and micro-observers in Varanasi.
The people’s faith in the integrity of the Election Commission of India has been badly shaken, though it is difficult to say at this stage in which form it will manifest.
- In: Crime | Government | Fascism
- Leave a Comment
A big scam in India always generates heat, more heat and still more heat —– and then everything dies down. BJP, with its trained cadre, makes deafening noises when it finds some bigwig of Congress associated with the scam, however remotely or vaguely. Congress does not have the manpower to create that type of noise when some BJP boss is involved but its sustained campaign does hit the target without creating the BJP-type frenzy in the country. As the Congress has been much longer than BJP at the helm of affairs of the country, naturally, more scams are linked with Congress. As the current Augusta-Westland now.
Beginning of the Augusta-Westland deal was made during the NDA government of Atal Behari Vajpayee but it moved towards culmination during Manmohan Singh’s Congress regime. The past relationship of the two major political parties – Congress and BJP – does not suggest that the NDA government led by Narendra Modi will work for sending any senior Congress leader to jail even if found involved without an iota of doubt. The noise will in all probability die down after making a deal with Congress on some crucial issue. The nature of the deal will depend on the strength of the evidence found against Congress leaders.
What goes on between the two parties is not always in the public domain. For instance, we don’t know why the Congress never made in a sustained manner an issue of the Godhra massacre. Even after the Railway Ministry had issued a statement saying that on that day a total of 59 passengers had made reservations, most of these were made from Lucknow and Kanpur. Three of them had cancelled their bookings. The Railway Ministry had ‘after comprehensive investigation’ found that out of the 56 persons who had their reservations in the Coach, four were killed, nine were injured and seven were still missing’. The Railway Ministry further said that its investigation found that ’32 of them were alive and safe’ and that the remaining passengers who had perished in the burning coach ‘appear to have boarded the Coach without reservation’. The Congress never asked Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi how he had identified 58 Kar Sevaks who he claimed had perished in S-6 coach fire. The report of the Forensic Laboratory of Ahmedabad had also discounted the Modi government’s claim that petrol was poured into S-6 coach from outside. Similarly, Vyapam scam of Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh is perhaps the biggest scam in the country which affected careers of hundreds of thousands of young girls and boys. Congress has not launched a sustained campaign; it makes noises only now and then. Understanding at some level?
The fate of two major scams will give an idea of how the two major political parties work in tandem. One is the Bofors scam which was the biggest scam of that period though much, much bigger scams have taken place after that. The Bofors scam saw ignominious defeat of Congress led by Rajiv Gandhi in Lok Sabha elections and later threatened to create problems for Sonia Gandhi who had shakily accepted presidentship of Congress. The other is what is known as coffin scam which had not only threatened the NDA government of Vajpayee but political ambitions of many a leader of BJP and allied parties also.
Tehelka had exposed coffin scam along with other defence scandals of George Fernandes who was Defence Minister in Vajpayee’s NDA government. Sonia Gandhi, who had become Congress president a few years earlier, took up the defence scams, mainly the coffin scam. She asked her party men to collect signatures all over the country on a petition to the President seeking an inquiry by a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) into the scams. The Congressmen worked with a missionary zeal and were reported to have collected around 6.25 crore signatures in a three-month-long countrywide drive.
Such a massive mobilisation of the Congress party on an issue of vital public interest had not been witnessed in the past several decades. The top NDA leaders went into panic. Defence Minister George Fernandes lost his sleep, and with that, part of his sanity also. He went on threatening to file sedition cases against Sonia Gandhi if she did not desist from what he said was demoralising the armed forces. “Agar us Mahila ne apana muhn band nahin kiya to kanooni kararvai karenge” (if that woman does not shut her mouth, we’ll take legal action against her), he told a press conference in Bhopal, adding that “it will not be limited to defamation, but may be sedition also”. Sonia Gandhi had, in spite of her linguistic handicaps and “lack of experience” in politics, caught the imagination of the masses. It was claimed that Sonia, accompanied by all PCC presidents, would hand over the signatures to President K R Narayanan and seek action.
Then ‘something’ happened. A deal was reported to have been struck between the two sides and Sonia Gandhi accepted Prime Minister Vajpayee’s offer to head the Indian delegation to the United States for the UN’s special session on AIDS. Instead of seeking a fresh date from President Narayanan for submission of the signatures, she gave instructions to some AICC functionaries to take the truckloads of the bundles of signatures to the Rashtrapati Bhavan and present these to the President. The 11-member delegation of the Congress that called on the President included Pranab Mukherjee, N D Tiwari, Motilal Vora, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni and Mukul Vasnik. On the whole, it was a miserably low-key affair and ended in a chaffy anti-climax. In contrast to the wide publicity that Sonia’s call for collecting signatures had attracted across the country, the actual submission of the signatures to the President turned out to be a non-event, with a paragraph or two appearing on inside pages of only a few newspapers. PCC chiefs, who had worked hard to collect the signatures and seen it as a new beginning in the party, felt cheated.
Perhaps as part of the ‘understanding’ with the BJP leaders, Sonia also got some alterations made in the petition submitted to the President. While the original petition, on which the signatures were collected, had categorically demanded a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the entire gamut of affairs exposed by the Tehelka website, including the coffin scam, the petition that was actually submitted to the President did call for the JPC probe but left it up to the President as ‘the protector of the Constitution’ to decide ‘how to save the people of India from this impervious government’ of NDA which ‘has lost the moral right to rule.’
Once Sonia fulfilled her part of the ‘understanding’, the BJP pushed into the background not only Quattrocchi but also the Bofors gun deal and Fernandes stopped threatening her with sedition cases. What was more, Vajpayee, who had been much offended by Sonia’s speech in Lok Sabha, became an admirer of her to the puzzlement of some of his own party leaders. With the good work done by then Law Minister Arun Jaitley, the Delhi High Court cleared Rajiv Gandhi of involvement in the Bofors kickbacks scandal. As Quattrocchi’s involvement was more complicated mainly because of his refusal to come to India, the machinery was set in motion to ease his ordeal also. Sometime later, two of his accounts in London banks containing 3 million euros and one million US dollars were defreezed.
- In: Corruption | Government | Politics
- 1 Comment
“We, the people of India”, adopted a Constitution to ensure Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity to all citizens of the country. But in the past, “the people” have been pushed aside by the “we”, a small percentage of persons who have the resources and have mastered the art of grabbing power by hook or by crook. The country has no doubt made tremendous progress in the past six decades but the fruits of the progress have been cornered by the this small percentage of people with crumbs occasionally thrown to “the people”. If a provision of the Constitution came in the way, this small group did not hesitate in changing the provision. The Constitution has been amended more than 100 times and most of these amendments have been made to protect the interests of this elite group.
The amendment pertaining to the election to Rajya Sabha makes the dishonest designs of this small group clear. Rajya Sabha, as the name suggests, is a body of representatives of the States. Rajya Sabha is not subject to disso lution. One-third of its members retire every two years and the vacancies are filled by fresh elections. The members of the legislature of the State form the Electoral College for electing members of Rajya Sabha from that State. Each State has been provided the number of members it can send to Rajya Sabha.
Section 3 of the Representation of People Act had ordained that a candidate seeking a seat in Rajya Sabha should primarily be resident of the State from which he/she was trying to get elected. The idea was to make use, in the highest law-making body of the country, of the learning, intelligence and experience of such persons who, for some reason, could not or would not contest the election to the House of the People or Lok Sabha but who the members of the State legislature in their collective wisdom considered as eminently suitable to represent the State in Parliament.
All went well for about two decades. Then this institution, too, fell prey to the manipulations of the power brokers. The political parties, having requisite number of members in a State legislature, started sending to Rajya Sabha people for reasons other than their intelligence or commitment to public service and even persons from other States. The domicile clause was flouted by manipulating the law — prospective candidate would register himself or herself as a voter in the State or buy or rent a House there. This was a clear violation of the law.
Frequent Violations
When these violations became frequent, some public-spirited persons like Kuldip Nayar sought judicial intervention to put an end to this malpractice. As the things started getting hot for the beneficiaries of the malpractices, and they included top leaders of political parties, they, in their “collective wisdom”, decided to legitimise the malpractices by amending the Constitution and the Representation of People Act. It was done by the NDA government in August 2003 with the whole-hearted cooperation of the Congress. The amended Act made the contest for Rajya Sabha open for a person of any State from any state.
Eminent jurist Fali S. Nariman, while arguing in the Supreme Court against the amendment, had felt that the amendment would open the floodgates to big money bag owners and power brokers to descend upon the people of the small States and get elected to the Upper House. The amendment was, however, upheld by a constitution bench of Supreme Court; two of the judges on the bench later became controversial for indulging in corrupt practices.
The use of money power did not remain confined to getting elected to Rajya Sabha. It is so much evident in elections to Lok Sabha and Assemblies also. It has now percolated to even lower levels; the panchayat and municipality elections. Those who lose elections start crying about the use of money power and electoral malpractices; but when they win they completely forget this. The Bharatiya Janata Party is a pathetic example of this. Lal Krishna Advani, as the BJP president, was always vociferously demanding electoral reforms and a change in the 150-year-old Police Act. When he got the opportunity as the Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for six years, he not even once remembered these things because the same corrupt electoral system and the anti-people attitude of the police had then suited him and his party. How present Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Congress party had used money power to win the trust vote in Lok Sabha is only history.
This article by Mahua Moitra, member of Lok Sabha from the Trinamool Congress, appeared in The New York Times on May 5. It is being reproduced here without editing for its topicality.
I am a member of the Indian Parliament, and on Sunday, the political party I belong to, the All India Trinamool Congress, defeated the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in elections for the West Bengal State legislature. Our party and my leader, Mamata Banerjee, the only female chief minister of a state in India today, showed what it takes to defeat Mr. Modi’s divisive, misogynist politics.
Out of the 292 seats in West Bengal’s state legislature, Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party won 77. We won 213 seats. But we weren’t simply fighting to form a state government. We were fighting to stop Mr. Modi’s centralizing, authoritarian juggernaut, which seeks to destroy India’s federalism and its secular character, and transform our country into an autocratic Hindu state.
Mr. Modi and Amit Shah, India’s home minister, have systematically hollowed out the institutions that India held sacred and trusted. During the course of the West Bengal election, I witnessed how they reduced the once-respected Election Commission of India, a supposedly independent body that conducts state and national elections, to an errand boy serving their political agenda.
On Feb. 26, when the second wave of Covid-19 was rising in India, the commission announced that elections in West Bengal would be conducted in eight phases staggered from March 27 to April 29. Four other Indian states were also going to polls, but the commission restricted them to one or two phases.
By scheduling the West Bengal election in this way, the commission made it possible for Mr. Modi to campaign extensively in West Bengal. Indian elections are energetic, festive and crowded affairs. Our party protested and petitioned the commission to limit the election to fewer phases, as a dangerous second wave of Covid-19 had set in. The commission refused to listen.
Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah, whose ministry is responsible for disaster management in the country, held numerous public meetings in West Bengal. Both men often appeared unmasked in the public rallies, setting a terrible example for the tens of thousands who attended and the millions who watched the widely televised events.
Mr. Modi’s government did absolutely nothing to prevent religious gatherings such as the Kumbh Mela, a festival in Haridwar in the northern state of Uttarakhand, where millions of Hindus gathered for a dip in the Ganges River.
On April 17, when India was reporting more than 250,000 new Covid-19 cases, Mr. Modi made a mild and vague appeal to the pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela, asking them to consider going home, and suggested that the festival should be “symbolic.” Yet by late afternoon on that day, Mr. Modi attended a public meeting of over 50,000 people in West Bengal. “Wherever I look, I just see people,” he gloated.
The election was turning out to be a super spreader of coronavirus infections. The commission continued ignoring us while the second wave was battering India’s health care systems. The craven dereliction of duty compelled the Madras High Court to remark that the commission “should be put up on murder charges probably!”
Mr. Modi prioritized pursuit of political power above Indian lives. The vital first three weeks of April, when the prime minister and his cabinet should have been working on ramping up critical health infrastructure and coordinating with state governments to prevent our catastrophic situation, were lost.
India’s women will also remember Mr. Modi’s campaign in West Bengal for its brazen misogyny and toxic masculinity. On April 1, while at a public rally at Uluberia, a city in the state’s Howrah district, Mr. Modi referred to Ms. Banerjee, the leader of my party and the chief minister of West Bengal known affectionately as Didi, as “Didi Ooo Didi!” — to stupendous applause from crowds of men. He continued using that tone and phrase in other public rallies.
To my ears, the tone and phrase were ominously close to what a neighborhood cat-caller may call out to girls walking past. To the Bengali middle class, the prospect of handing over the reins of the state to someone who openly endorsed a practice so much at odds with their sensibilities was frightening. Female voters in West Bengal, who make up 49.1 percent of the state’s electorate, cringed. A majority of women voted for our party. They did not allow such misogynist politics to win the day.
And culture matters. Mr. Modi and his B.J.P. hoped they would win by equating Bengali identity with Hindu culture. They failed to understand that Bengali culture is not a monolith; it combines secularism with non-vegetarianism and a strong contrarian instinct.
We joke that laid-back middle-class Bengalis are content with three things: educating our children, the matinee on Saturday (“shoni bar e matinee”) and a mutton curry on Sunday (“robi baar e mangsho”).
At the very least, the Bengalis reject anyone who wants to control what we eat, whom we love and what we wear.
The Bengal experience has demonstrated that the B.J.P. is not invincible, that all Indians are not attracted to the idea of a majoritarian Hindu state and that Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah are not the master election strategists they are made out to be. Despite their huge financial resources, their misuse of federal investigative agencies to target opponents and accusations that they have been buying off opposition politicians, the B.J.P. can still be defeated by a focused regional party that stays true to its grass roots and a secular, inclusive ideology.
It took a catastrophic pandemic for even Mr. Modi’s supporters to see they need oxygen cylinders more than they need a Hindu state. And it took the Bengal election for the rest of India to realize they don’t need toxic machismo. What India needs in a leader is a heart and a spine.
Cross-voting by a BJP MLA in the June 19 Rajya Sabha polls in Madhya Pradesh has placed the party in an ugly situation. BJP always prides itself on discipline in the party but it had not initiated any action against the errant MLA even two days later. Rather, it is trying to pose as if it was an insignificant incident and not worth taking note of. There are reasons why the party wants to give a quiet burial to the incident.
The MLA in question has been identified as Gopilal Jatav who represents Guna (SC) constituency in the Assembly. This is supposed to be the area of influence of Jyotiraditya Scindia who had defected from Congress to BJP in March this year. Along with him, 22 MLAs (21 of them belonging to the Congress and one independent) had also resigned from the Assembly and joined BJP. Now all of them are aspirants for the BJP ticket for the by-elections to fill the vacancies and this has caused heart-burning among the BJP leaders and workers in these constituencies.
Besides, the BJP workers in the Gwalior-Chambal region have for decades played their politics on the anti-Scindia plank. Now suddenly they are being asked to accept Jyotiraditya Scindia as their leader. While several BJP leaders were reported to have conveyed to the party leadership their reservations about accepting Scindia as their leader, Gopilal Jatav apparently decided to express his disapproval of Scindia’s leadership by voting for the Congress candidate rather than for Scindia who was the BJP nominee. He had won from Ashoknagar Assembly constituency in 2013 and Guna constituency in 2018 on a strong anti-Scindia rhetoric. Both the Assembly constituencies (reserved for SC) are part of Scindia’s traditional Lok Sabha constituency of Guna, though he was defeated from there in last year’s general elections.
Cross-voting by a veteran party MLA has shaken the BJP from Bhopal to Delhi and the leaders are said to be hashing out as how best to deal with the situation. Some party leaders are said to be in favour of not taking any disciplinary action, at least for the time being. There is a fear that any action against Jatav may make the anti-Scindia sentiment come out in the open and that may be joined by others who are afraid of being displaced from their traditional constituencies by the 22 defectors from the Congress.
The by-elections to the 24 constituencies (one MLA each of BJP and Congress had died earlier) may be held any time in the next two few months. As many as 16 of these constituencies are in the Gwalior-Chambal region, half a dozen being reserved constituencies. The region has a substantial number of SC population. Action against Gopilal Jatav, an SC MLA, may not only accentuate anti-Scindia sentiments but also antagonise the SC voters. It is, therefore, generally felt that Jatav may escape any disciplinary action from the party.
Release of Laxmikant Sharma from jail may mean trouble for Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. As one of the main accused in the Vyapam scam, he was kept in jail for over 18 months without trial. Probably it was feared that if he was allowed to be freed on bail, he might say something that might not be in the interest of the chief minister and his family members. That was till the Chouhan-appointed Special Task Force (STF) was in charge of the scam investigation.
Vyapam or Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal (Professional Examinations Board – PEB) is entrusted with the task of conducting technical/professional examinations. Manipulations to recruit undeserving candidates in place of meritorious ones started in the Vyapam at some stage. It was during Laxmikant Sharma’s tenure as Minister of Technical Education that Vyapam scam was fully ‘institutionalised’. Sharma was then considered close to the chief minister.
Recruitment to some other departments was also brought under the control of Vyapam. The scam had taken epidemic proportions. Thousands of intelligent and hardworking young boys and girls were denied their due and the relatives of those in power or whoever could pay hefty sums were declared successful, instead.
As stray complaints were made to the police at different places, Chouhan constituted STF under a senior IPS officer ostensibly to investigate the scam but actually to ensure that Chouhan, his family members and some other top leaders were protected.
Top officials of Vyapam, along with many others, were arrested and kept in jail without trial. Laxmikant Sharma, too, was booked in seven scam-related cases and arrested in June last year.
The things changed after the CBI took over the scam investigation from the STF on orders of the Supreme Court. It is not that the officers in the CBI are less dishonest than those manning the STF. But the CBI working is being supervised by the Supreme Court and that gives some hope.
Sharma was the last of the important Vyapam scam accused to come out of jail on bail granted by the High Court on December 20. The only important BJP leader to hail his release was party’s national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya who also said that Sharma is innocent.
A former MP minister, Vijayvargiya had never been able reconcile to Chouhan’s being the chief minister. After coming out of jail, Sharma said that he would say in court whatever he has to say. What he is planning to say and what Chouhan would like him to say and how Vijayvargiya plays his politics might enormously affect the ruling party and government in the State.
‘Put an end to hatemongering’
Posted on: November 10, 2015
Reproduced here is an editorial in The New York Times of November 10,2015 published under the heading ‘A Rebuke to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’
During a national election in India last year, Narendra Modi promised “development for all.” As prime minister, he has yet to deliver big economic improvements, but in the meantime, members of his government and political party have shredded his promise of inclusion by inflaming sectarian tensions. Now, voters in the country’s third most populous state have sent Mr. Modi a message: Put an end to the hatemongering.
Poisoning politics with religious hatred is bound to squander the country’s economic potential at a time when India should be playing a bigger and more constructive role in South Asia and the world. India’s history is filled with examples of religious and caste-based violence that set the country back. Those conflicts subsided during India’s rapid economic growth, but many Indians now fear a resurgence.
On Sunday, Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party lost a legislative election in the northern state of Bihar, which has a population of more than 100 million. A “grand alliance” of secular parties united by their antipathy to the Hindu nationalist B.J.P. won 178 constituencies in the 243-member legislative assembly to the B.J.P.’s 53. Many political analysts see the loss as a repudiation of Mr. Modi because he and his top aides campaigned vigorously in the state and many ads carried his image, rather than photos of local politicians.
In the months leading up to the Bihar election, hard-liners in the B.J.P. and organizations affiliated with the party stoked India’s long-simmering sectarian tensions. The party’s lawmakers pushed for beef bans around the country ostensibly to protect the cow, which many Hindus consider holy, but really as a ploy to divide Hindus and Muslims, some of whom eat beef.
Anti-beef crusade
Mobs riled by the anti-beef crusade have killed four Muslims suspected of slaughtering, stealing or smuggling cows in the last seven weeks. And in August, unidentified attackers shot and killed Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, a scholar and vocal critic of Hindu idolatry. Hundreds of writers, filmmakers and academics have protested the growing intolerance by returning awards they received from the government-supported bodies.
Mr. Modi has not forcefully condemned the beef-related killings, despite pleas by Muslims and other minorities. He has tolerated hateful and insensitive remarks by his ministers and by B.J.P. officials.
During a campaign stop in Bihar, Mr. Modi tried to exploit sectarian divisions by telling voters that the secular alliance would reduce affirmative action benefits for lower-caste Hindus and tribes in favor of “a particular community” — an apparent reference to Muslims. And the president of the B.J.P., Amit Shah, one of Mr. Modi’s closest advisers, told voters that a victory for the alliance would be celebrated in Pakistan, the Muslim-majority neighbor that has fought several wars with India since 1947.
Voters in Bihar saw through the B.J.P.’s attempts to divide them. They, like most Indians, are looking for leaders who will improve their standard of living. Bihar is one of the poorest states in India but has grown fast in the last 10 years under the leadership of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who is credited for cracking down on crime, building roads and increasing the enrollment of girls in schools.
Mr. Modi and the B.J.P. secured a majority in the lower house of Parliament last year with promises of economic reforms. Now, to push through those reforms, the party needs to win the control of the upper house, which is elected by state assemblies. It won’t win those elections unless Mr. Modi gets rid of the officials in his government and party who are fueling sectarian culture wars.
Meanwhile, there are things Mr. Modi could do administratively to improve the economy, like investing in education and health care and building infrastructure. Voters in Bihar have sent the B.J.P. a clear message. Mr. Modi should heed it.
Musings on Bihar outcome
Posted on: November 9, 2015
A major cause, among various others, of BJP’s humiliating performance in the Bihar Assembly elections may be Amit Shah’s inability to enroll fake voters in large numbers as he was believed to have done in Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency from where Narendra Modi had announced his decision to contest. Later the attempt to rig the Delhi Assembly polls was thwarted by the vigilant Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leadership.
Modi was elected from Varanasi in 2014 with a margin of three lakh and odd votes. When the Election Commission later undertook the task of revision of electoral rolls in Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency, over six lakh forgeries in the electoral rolls were discovered.
Perhaps sensing the manipulations in Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency, AAP and Congress Party leaders complained to the Election Commission about the bogus entries in the voters’ lists before the Delhi Assembly elections but the Election Commission did not pay attention to their complaints. The matter was then raised before the Delhi High Court which pulled up the Election Commission and asked it what action it had taken on the allegation about the presence of a large number of bogus voters in various Assembly constituencies of the national capital.
Only then the Election Commission made a move and detected over 1.2 lakh bogus voters in the electoral lists of Delhi. Narendra Modi’s party, which had done ‘so well’ in the ok Sabha elections only a few months earlier, suffered the worst ever imaginable defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections.
The atmosphere of insecurity among the minorities created on the eve of the Bihar Assembly elections might also have alienated a large sections of the peace-loving people of all castes and creeds from the BJP. The abusive language used by several BJP leaders, most notably by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah also militated against the chances of the BJP. To say that those who would vote against the BJP would be trying to please Pakistan betrayed only mental sickness of BJP president Amit Shah.
An offshoot of the Bihar Assembly elections is the new lease of political life given to discredited Lalu Prasad Yadav by the most absurdly handled poll campaign by the BJP leaders. The alliance of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav turned out to be a deadly combination for the BJP leaders to handle. Soft-spoken Nitish Kumar enjoys the confidence of the majority of the people for his simplicity and his zeal to do something for the common man. He could not be expected to stand up to Narendra Modi’s mostly irrelevant jibes. It was left to Lalu to reply to Modi in his own boorish language which the Yadav leader did brilliantly.
Totally irrelevant, Mr Jaitley!
Posted on: November 27, 2014
What Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on black money in Parliament was TOTALLY irrelevant. The issue was not what the government is, or is not, doing. The point under discussion was Narendra Modi’s promise.
Before the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had formally declared Narendra Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate — the first time a party in India had done so. Modi iterated and reiterated dozens of times during the election campaign that if his party was voted to power, he would bring back the entire black money stashed in foreign banks within 100 days.
The BJP was voted to power and Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. Nearly 200 days have elapsed since. Modi has not only failed to bring back the black money from foreign banks but has also stopped even talking about that. The people of the country have the right to seek answers to certain pertinent questions arising from this situation.
When Modi was repeatedly making the promise to bring back black money within 100 days, was he doing so with definitive information which he had and others apparently did not have or did not want to disclose? Or was he taking the people of the country for a ride with the intention of luring them into voting for the BJP?
If he did have some information, the people who have voted for his party need to be taken into confidence and told about it and also the nature of difficulties that have arisen preventing him from fulfilling his 100-day deadline promise. This should better be explained by Modi himself. Even Arun Jaitley did not touch upon these issues but continued to harp on clichés so often heard in Parliament during the ‘corrupt’ UPA regime of Manmohan Singh. That is a dead horse now. Why does Jaitley continue to flog it to hide his own government’s failures?
If Modi’s 100-day deadline promise was based on nothing substantial, he should stand up as a man and apologise to the people of the country for making a fool of them. This cannot be left to others like Arun Jaitley.
In the late eighties’, Vishwanath Pratap Singh had sought – and got – power by promising to book the culprits of the Bofors within 30 days. That turned out to be as big a hoax as Modi’s 100-day deadline to bring back black money. The people felt cheated as they are feeling now. Some mechanism needs to be developed to take to task such unconscionable demagogues for taking the people for granted for their selfish ends. Then only the country can have a healthy democracy.
ndsharma's blog 
House light construction site is one of the best site if anyone interested on construction j have to must visit…
[…] MP: police turn collaborators in crimes against women […]
Reblogged this on ndsharma's blog.
Reblogged this on ndsharma's blog.
Reblogged this on ndsharma's blog.