Archive for the 'Indian elections 2009' Category

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Why the Indian general elections are without historical parallel

Published on April 15, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009, Politics and Society. 0 Comments Tags: Indian election 2009.

Andre Beteille, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and National Research Professor, in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

The general elections in India attract attention throughout the world. If India enjoys the reputation of being the largest democracy in the world, it is due in no small measure to the fact that it is able to hold regular elections to its Parliament and its assemblies that are reasonably free and fair. When the first general elections were held in 1951-52, not everyone believed that the exercise would be successful or sustainable. But the sceptics have been confounded, and the country is getting ready for a new round of elections.

In their scope and scale, India’s general elections are without historical parallel. The sheer size and diversity of the population make the task of planning, organizing and conducting the elections a daunting exercise. The Indian electorate is not only very large and diverse, but it is also highly dispersed, and no section of the population, no matter how remote or inaccessible, can be left out of the electoral process. The Election Commission has been rightly commended for undertaking and accomplishing successfully a monumental exercise with remarkable skill, ingenuity and stamina, while ensuring that the process remains open and transparent. Some praise is due also to the voters who have braved inclement weather and threats of violence in order to exercise their franchise.

No English (or computers) please. We’re an Indian party

Published on April 12, 2009 in Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Mulayam Singh Yadav, Samajwadi Party.

The Samajwadi party is a key player in Indian politics. The party’s manifesto for the coming Parliament elections says it is against English education and the use of computers. “The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines,” the party’s leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, said at a press conference.

From The Times of India:

Mulayam Singh said he was against “the compulsory use of English language in education, administration and judiciary”. He said SP favoured the national language, Hindi, and regional languages. To give his anti-top grade education a populist spin, he said his party was in favour of free education for girls until graduation.

On computers, Mulayam said their use was leading to unemployment. He added that wherever work can be done by hand, computers would be abolished. As everything was done by hand until the advent of computers, the step, if taken to its logical conclusion, could lead to the scrapping of almost all computers.

Bollywood’s election porn

Published on April 10, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Aamir Khan, Bollywood stars in Indian election, Election awareness ad campaign, Prasoon Joshi.

Vrinda Gopinath in The Indian Express:

Why does adult franchise suddenly sound like election porn today? Because Bollywood buddies Karan Johar , Aamir Khan, Rakyesh Mehra, Prasoon Joshi and others now want to make you believe that casting your vote is the most arousing political act for all consenting young adults over 18 years, of cerebral machismo and hardihood.

On the eve of general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha, as the gigantic, electoral machine rolls out yet another great drama of mass democracy, out leaps Aamir Khan -- self-conscious superstar (not to be confused with conscience) from your television screen, poking his head at you, and tch-tching for not prudently exercising your franchise.

The three-part series shows a fresh-faced, clean-shaven un-Gajini Aamir testily asking parents if they would hand over their daughters to grooms without crosschecking every detail of the suitor’s background.

Here’s the ilnk to the website of Association for Democratic Rights

Lofty heights to thorny tip, not a sashay for Shashi

Published on April 10, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Kerala politics, Shashi Tharoor.

Manini Chatterjee goes to Kerala to witness diplomat-writer-politician Shashi Tharoor’s election campaign. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Yet, as he traverses through the hilly terrain of this picturesque town by the Arabian Sea – waving and addressing knots of townsfolk and villagers in a day that begins at 7am and ends close to midnight – the cockiness of yore is entirely missing. Not without reason.

The capital of India’s most literate and politically conscious state, after all, is not an extension of St. Stephen’s College (where he became the students’ union president on the strength of that slogan).

Compared to the complexity of caste and communal and intra-party politics, the machinations of international diplomacy, Tharoor is beginning to realise, were a babalog’s picnic.

With just a week to go before polling day on April 16, therefore, the new slogan – if it were to be coined – is a more modest “Shashi Tharoor, likely to scrape through.”

And in The Indian Express, a report on the Tharoor roadshow through the villages of his constituency:

First stop Pazhayakada, 9.15 am: Less than a dozen Congress workers and a couple of taxi drivers hang around the junction. A recorded song, seeking votes for Tharoor, blares from a campaign vehicle. As he alights from his Innova, locals make political predictions in a tea stall. “If Tharoor wins the election and the Congress forms the government, he’ll definitely be made a minister. He has enough clout with the Congress high command,” says shop owner F Suresh, echoing what a number of voters here believe. Tharoor, meanwhile, approaches a gaggle of taxi drivers. “I am Shashi Tharoor. I am a candidate here. Please tell your passengers to vote for me,” he says. He repeats essentially the same statement when he is handed the mike at the pulpit, abruptly ending his speech: “I have come to seek your votes. Please help me. I do not want to say anything more.” He makes his way to his election rath, a specially designed vehicle, with an open podium. He will be travelling in it to the remaining 50 destinations on his itinerary. More:

India’s youth vote rises from ashes of Mumbai attacks

Published on April 8, 2009 in India and Indian elections 2009. 0 Comments Tags: Attacks on Mumbai, Kaizad Bhamgara, Rise Up Mumbai! Rise Up India!, youth.

Emily Wax in The Washington Post:

Mumbai: Before the November terrorist attacks on this city left three of his friends dead, Kaizad Bhamgara, 19, spent his evenings jamming with his hipster goth-rock band or chilling on the wave-sprayed boulders along the high-rise-ringed shoreline.

But the pain of his loss and his frustration over the ineptitude of the government’s response to the attacks moved Bhamgara to put down his drumsticks and pick up his laptop.

He set up a Facebook page called “Rise Up Mumbai! Rise Up India!” It soon expanded into a Web site, a YouTube channel and a blog, all devoted to encouraging his peers to vote in India’s national elections, which will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13.

Shoe attack on Indian minister

Published on April 7, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Jagdish Tytler, P Chidambaram.

Taking a cue from the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush last year, a Sikh journalist in New Delhi hurled a shoe at home minister P Chidambaram during a press conference in protest against the acquittal of a senior Congress politician accused of leading anti-Sikh riots in 1984.

The shoe narrowly missed the minister, who calmly told his guards to “Take him away, gently,” and added, “the emotional outburst of one man should not hijack a press conference.”

The journalist, Jarnail Singh, who works with a leading Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, was later released by the police. “I just wanted to ask him how justice will be done, but he was not interested in answering the questions,” Singh told CNN-IBN. “I don’t think it was the right way, what I have done, but the issue is right.”

Singh was angry at the acquittal of senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, accused of leading attacks on Sikhs following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. More than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in riots in Delhi.

Jagdish Tytler is currently campaigning for re-election to Parliament.

Master Faustus?

Published on April 5, 2009 in India and Indian elections 2009. 0 Comments Tags: Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Pilibhit, Sanjay Gahdhi.

What changed Varun Gandhi from a solitary reader into a frothing demagogue? Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:

For all that, everyone who knew Varun as a boy remembers a quiet, solitary child – polite, affectionate – prone to read more than socialise. (His mother apparently made him read Nehru’s autobiography, Discovery of India, when he was eight, grooming his loss.) Sent to boarding school at Rishi Valley for a few years, Varun was apparently asked to leave in Class VIII for “irresponsible behaviour”. His peers remember him being “a nice guy, but a bit maladjusted”. Back in Delhi though, he seems to have settled down. Mrs Prabhu, former principal of the British School, remembers his stint there as “smooth”. “He was intelligent and stood out in his class. He showed a potential for leadership because he always put forward his views in an interesting way,” says she. After school, Varun went to England for a few years, returning with a passion for history, a mediocre book of poetry, The Other Side of Silence, and masters’ degrees from the London School of Economics and SOAS, London University – both now shamefully exposed as lies. Varun, it appears, was never enrolled full time in LSE, and withdrew from his M(Phil) course at SOAS.

[Photo Vijay Pandey / Tehelka]

Pappu Raj satire illustrates corruption of Indian politics

Published on April 4, 2009 in Indian elections 2009. 0 Comments Tags: corruption in Indian politics, Pappu Raj.

[Image from Pappu Raj's website]

From The Times, UK:

With just two weeks to go until the world’s largest democracy goes to the polls, India has been confronted with a political campaign so brazen in its championing of corruption that it has stunned many voters.

With his spotless white homespun outfit, Nehru cap and slightly loopy grin, Pappu Raj looks every inch the archetypal Indian politician.

His manifesto, however, has marked him out as singularly indiscreet, including as it does a pledge to license bribery, a promise to teach acolytes “420 ways to pocket other people’s money”, and an appeal to voters not to take part in the upcoming general elections – lest they block his path to power.

Why Varun Gandhi believes in his own defence

Published on April 2, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Maneka Gandhi, Varun Gandhi.

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph:

In Varun Gandhi’s mind, English-speaking India is a kind of off-shore tax haven, a place removed from the rowdy, no-holds-barred reality of the rest of the country. Anglophones, in this view, don’t live in the real India but in a sanitized mall. Now Varun shops in the same mall, but his justification is that he has to step outside it to do the real-world work of politics. In the mall we can all celebrate liberalism and secularism, but these ideas have no traction in Bharat-that-is-India. In that world, Varun Gandhi’s apologists would have us believe, the only legal tender, the only political currency is the polarizing rhetoric of caste and community.

It’s a rhetoric that both mother and son do very well. After Varun Gandhi’s arrest in Pilibhit, Maneka Gandhi accused a Muslim policeman of instigating violence at the time of the arrest. Even by the non-exacting standards of Indian electoral politics, this was a nakedly inflammatory allegation, but for Maneka and Varun Gandhi there is a Chinese wall between the metropolitan India that they live in and the provincial world in which they campaign, so nothing they say in the latter can be allowed to disturb their persona in the former.

Cricketer Azharuddin bats for Congress

Published on April 2, 2009 in Cricket, India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Andhra Pradesh, Congress Party, cricketer in politics.

From The Indian Express:

The morning after his first public rally, a tired Mohammad Azharuddin was fast asleep in Rampur. An hour and a half away, hidden between two shops in a busy, local market, the Moradabad District Congress Committee office was still recovering from the hangover of the previous afternoon.

In this modest establishment, the walls are adorned with posters of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul, and in one corner – gleaming in all its newness – is a picture of Azharuddin in a sharp, pin-striped suit. “We would have preferred kurta pyjama but we couldn’t get any other suitable picture from the Internet. Even Bhabhi ji (Azhar’s wife Sangeeta Bijlani) was in that photo but we had to erase her on the computer,” says a smiling party worker handing out sugary tea. “This time we will win by 1 lakh votes,” he adds, with a flourish. More:

Shashi Tharoor, the candidate from Kerala

Published on March 30, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Congress Party candidate, Shashi Tharoor.

Shashi Tharoor, author and former UN diplomat, is running for Indian Parliament as a Congress party candidate from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala state. The graphic above is from Tharoor’s new campaign site, ShashiTharoor.in, which is different from his personal/books site, ShashiTharor.com.

“Walking on the hot streets of Thiruvananthapuram (as many still refer to the Kerala capital) is a lot more exciting than sitting in an air-conditioned room,” Tharoor told IANS. Click here to read the story.

The Indian Express says Tharoor is the richest among the candidates in Kerala: “As per the affidavit submitted along with the nomination, Tharoor has assets worth Rs 21.45 crore (one crore = 10 million), comprising land, deposit, shares and buildings spread over India and several foreign countries. The deposit in financial institutions in various nations would come to Rs 15 crore. Unlike other Kerala candidates, Tharoor has no gold or insurance as investment.” More here:

Can manly Advani match weakling Manmohan?

Published on March 29, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009, Leaders and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Manmohan Singh vs Advani.

Aakar Patel in The News:

The BJP says Manmohan Singh is weak and no match for their strongman Advani.

Is that true? Let us examine their qualifications.

Born in 1932, Manmohan Singh graduated in economics from Punjab University, read for his tripos (first class honours) from St John’s College, Cambridge University, where he won the Wright’s Prize in 1955 and the Adam Smith prize in 1956. He got his DPhil from Nuffield College, Oxford University, in 1962.

His thesis was on “India’s Export Trends and Prospects for Self- Sustained Growth”. By age 30, he understood that Nehru’s inward- looking economic policy was misplaced.

He has worked at the United Nations, served as governor of the Reserve Bank, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and chairman of the University Grants Commission. He has taught at Punjab University and Delhi School of Economics.

Assessing Manmohan Singh

Published on March 28, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Leaders. 0 Comments Tags: Congress Party, Indo-US nuclear deal, Manmohan Singh's five years.

As Indian heads for an election, Tehelka in a special issue analyses five years of Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister:

The Shadow Warrior by Tarun J. Tejpal, Editor of Tehelka:

The simple way for history to read the unusual Sikh is to say the Bible was right. The meek will inherit the earth – and sometimes the meek will also be decent and efficient. There can be no dispute about that – his decency and efficiency. Yet, laudable traits as they are, they are also routinely found in army officers, film technicians and swayamsewaks. In the leader of a billion people you may want to look for more. Vision, inspiration, courage, will, statecraft – the ability to articulate the soul of a people, to bend the arc of history to a higher note. Execution and implementation are indispensably wonderful things, but there are sound men to do that, bureaucrats and technocrats, economists and social workers – all of them excellent masons and carpenters constructing the edifice the architect has ordained. More:

The Turnaround Man by Sanjaya Baru who was Manmohan Singh’s media advisor:

Consider the facts. In 1991, India was on the verge of economic bankruptcy, and one of its key strategic allies, the Soviet Union, had just disappeared. There was domestic political turmoil, with the Indian National Congress forced to form a minority government after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. This came barely six years after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. No analyst would have regarded India a ‘rising power’ of the 21st century. Yet, presenting his first Budget to Parliament in July 1991, Manmohan Singh dared to predict that the idea of India as a rising economic power was “an idea whose time had come”. The rest, as they say, is history. More:

The Professor’s Empty Class, in which Swapan Dasgupta provides the view from the Right:

Any assessment of Manmohan’s stint must proceed with the recognition that India’s most non-political Prime Minister succeeded in the most politically daunting challenge before him: he carried his bat through the entire innings. It is conceivable that he succeeded precisely because he never deviated from his contrived unconcern with day-to-day politics. He was careful to never pose any threat to the politicians, and they, in turn, were happy to leave him undisturbed. Had he developed political ambitions midway – and it is so easy to acquire delusions of grandeur in a rarefied environment – he would undoubtedly have been a member of the other club of Prime Ministers who left prematurely. More:

Click here for other pieces:

Purification rites

Published on March 28, 2009 in Culture, India, Indian elections 2009 and Leaders. 0 Comments Tags: Demagogues, Fascism, Gujarat riots, Hindu fundamentalism, Israel, Mayaben Kodnani, Narendra Modi.

With nationalist demagogues rising to power in both India and Israel, Pankaj Mishra examines the parallel histories of violent partition, ethnic cleansing and militant patriotism that have led both countries into a moral wilderness. From The National:

Narendra Modi

My grandfather had no interest in Judaism, or in any of India’s many faiths. Like many Hindu nationalists and Zionists, he was a secularist, impatient with religion’s unworldliness. He admired Israel for its proud and clear national identity – for the sharply defined religious and cultural ideology of Zionism and the patriotism it inculcated in Israel’s citizens. Israel, which was building a new nation in splendid isolation, surrounded by Arab enemies, knew what India did not: how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood, that of force and more force.

India, by comparison, was a pitiably incoherent and timid nation-state, its claims to democracy, socialism and secularism compromised by a corrupt government’s appeasement of minorities (mainly Muslim) and neglect of Hindu heritage.

Hindu nationalism was much less about venerating Hinduism – most nationalists were not religious – than about constructing a strong, culturally homogenous nation state of the kind that had begun to emerge in post-Enlightenment Europe in the 19th century. Like many Hindu nationalists, past and present, my grandfather was led by his obsession with national cohesion into an admiration for Nazi Germany.

Gujarat ‘riot minister’ resigns

Mayaben Kodnani, minister for women and child development in the Narendra Modi cabinet, has been arrested in connection with the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002 in which more than 1,000 people were killed. Kodnani is alleged to have led mobs that attacked Muslims in at least two areas where at least 106 people were killed.

Hindu mobs rampaged through Muslim neighbourhoods in Gujarat between February and May 2002 after Muslims were blamed for a fire on a train that killed 60 Hindu pilgrims.

A special investigating team appointed by the Supreme Court of India to investigate Gujarat riot cases in Gujarat says more than a dozen witnesses saw an armed Kodnani leading the rioters.

More here. And read her profile, The rise and fall of Maya Kodnani, in The Indian Express:

Banker offers to be Mumbai’s CEO

Published on March 26, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: ABN Amro, Meera H Sanyal, Mumbai, Terror attack on Mumbai.

From The Indian Express:

Meera H Sanyal, chairperson and country executive, ABN Amro, is on leave till May 15. The reason behind the leave application: she will be “contesting for the most important job” – that of running the country. This Malabar Hill resident will soon be filing nomination papers as an Independent candidate from the Mumbai South Lok Sabha constituency.

After 25 successful years in banking, Sanyal’s move can’t be seen as a mere itch for a career switch. Instead, it’s an alert and bright citizen’s response to the call of making a difference. “Politics was not considered to be a dirty world when India got Independence. The best and brightest minds were in this field,” says the daughter of a Naval officer. “For long, Mumbai has wanted a CEO to take care of its affairs, here is one for them,” she says.

The fall and fall of India’s political leviathans

Published on March 23, 2009 in Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: BJP, Congress, H D Deve Gowda, Indian elections 2009, L.K. Advani, Mahesh Rangarajan, Manmohan Singh, Mayawati, N Chandrababu Naidu, Third Front.

As India braces for another fractured verdict in the forthcoming general elections, analyst Mahesh Rangarajan looks at the decline of the country’s national parties in BBC

Neither of the premier parties, Congress or the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is confident of leading their respective alliances to full power.

India is completing a decade in which coalitions dominated by one or the other have held power.

After five years at the helm, the alliance headed by Dr Manmohan Singh has much to smile about. For four of these years, growth rates were well over 8% and even now, amid a global slump, India will be the world’s second fastest growing economy.

(Image attributed to Bryce Edwards’ photostream under the Creative Commons license)

Hindutva: waning in politics, rising in society

Published on March 22, 2009 in Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Bajrang Dal, BJP, BJP infighting, Christophe Jaffrelot, elections 2009, Hindu nationalism, Hindu Rashtra, Hindutva, L.K. Advani, VHP.

In The Times of India, Paris-based sociologist Christophe Jaffrelot on the disarray in the BJP and why it has lost the plot despite the fact that there has been a formidable expansion in Hindu nationalism with the BJP ruling in nine states.

Has the BJP already lost the elections? The party has looked shaky since 2008 when it could not win Delhi and lost Rajasthan. The setback showed that the security plank the party had tried to use post 26/11 had misfired. Add to this the nagging headache of factionalism and allegations of corruption. It’s clear the BJP has lost for good its image of “a party with a difference”.

L K Advani, who turned 81 in November, suddenly seems to lack the qualities India expects from a leader these days. And he is definitely not in a position to play the same role as A B Vajpayee in 1999. Last but not least, the Nagpur meeting showed that the BJP was trying to revive the Ayodhya issue, whereas the India of 2009 is not likely to follow the Hindutva agenda of 1989.

[pic: Bryce Edwards' photostream, under the Creative Commons license]

Mayawati: A player who makes her own rules

Published on March 22, 2009 in Indian elections 2009 and Leaders. 0 Comments Tags: Bahujan Samaj Party, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Mayawati, Third Front.

Posted by Namita Bhandare: My column in Hindustan Times tries to understand why India’s chattering classes don’t like BSP leader Mayawati especially when all the charges levelled against her (corrupt, arrogant, fickle, casteist, etc) can be used against at least a dozen other leading politicians. Is it because she’s a player who makes her own rules or is it because she just doesn’t give a damn about what the Delhi drawing rooms think about her?

There’s a story, most likely apocryphal, relating to Mayawati’s visit to a posh beauty parlour at a five-star hotel. There, the Bahujan Samaj Party boss spied a glamorous politician’s wife having her weekly pedicure. Mayawati is said to have turned to the hair-dresser attending to her: “Mujhe aise hi latein chahiye (I want my hair to look like those).”

The story, when I heard it sometime in the mid nineties, was accompanied by much tittering in that particular Delhi drawing room. But the subtext was clear: the one-time school teacher daughter of a lowly clerk might have made her mark on the Uttar Pradesh scene but as far as New Delhi was concerned she was still an arriviste.

Fronts and friendships

Published on March 21, 2009 in India, Indian elections 2009, Leaders and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: Indian politics, L.K. Advani, NDA, Sonia Gandhi, UPA.

The Indian political party is just a vehicle on its way to Delhi. Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in The Telegraph:

Despite Disraeli’s belief that parliamentary government is impossible without parties, the current campaign suggests that the principal – often only – purpose of a party is to further the ambitions of an individual. Parties presuppose ideas if not ideology. A great deal of time, effort, expense and anguish might be avoided if this pretence were dropped.

It has in practice. There’s anxious heartburning when Sitaram Yechury calls on Sharad Yadav or any other party leader not because he might convert them to revolution but because he keeps the headcount in the quinquennial Gentlemen vs Politicians race for the prime ministership. As for the other half, Mayavati and Jayalalithaa probably regard themselves as the only men in clusters of old women. But does that make them Gentlemen? When Barbara Castle lamented in the Commons that the English bulldog (Churchill) had become America’s lapdog, a Tory MP yelled, “You are not, of course, a dog!” He didn’t need to spell out the alternative for sedate members even on his own side to express shock.

The other Gandhi

Published on March 20, 2009 in Indian elections 2009. 0 Comments Tags: Bal Thackeray, BJP, communal speech, Maneka Gandhi, Pilibhit, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sanjay Gandhi, Varun Gandhi.

With his communal speech-making in Pilibhit, Varun Gandhi is trying to carve out an identity as Hindutva’s new poster boy and strike out as a Gandhi in his own right, writes Rajdeep Sardesai in the Hindustan Times.

In the backlanes of Uttar Pradesh, Varun Feroze Gandhi is referred to as the ‘BJP ka Gandhi’. It’s a reference that is indicative of what’s been perhaps the 29-year-old poet-politician’s central dilemma in life so far: the struggle to carve an independent identity for himself outside of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy. His cousin, Rahul, has been bequeathed the keys to the family business. His aunt Sonia is the Supreme Leader of the Indian National Congress. Varun, and his mother, Maneka, have always been the ‘outsiders’, blessed with the surname of India’s most powerful political family but without any of the privileges.

Which is why the ‘other Gandhis’ have been forced to look for other career options. Maneka has found her niche in the world of animal rights activism. Varun too, judging from the content of his speeches in Pilibhit, now appears to have found his feet as the BJP’s new Hindutva posterboy.

Previously on AW:

Varun Gandhi’s hate speech

Everyone loves a slumdog

Published on March 20, 2009 in Fashion, India, Indian elections 2009 and Movies. 0 Comments Tags: Ashima and Leena Singh, Azhardhuddin Mohammad Ismail Shaikh, Rubina Ali Quereshi, Slumdog Millionaire kids, Sonia Gandhi meets Slumdog kids, Wills India Lifestyle Fashion.

Their parents cannot afford the expensive outfits Rubina Ali Quereshi and Azharhuddin Mohammed Ismail Shaikh strutted on the ramp for designers Ashima-Leena Singh at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. The farmhouse they were whisked away to may as well have been on another planet. And but for the Oscar success of Slumdog Millionnaire their photo op with Congress president Sonia Gandhi would never have happened and they would have been just two of the millions of kids growing up in slums.

Yet, Delhi clearly couldn’t get enough of the ‘cute’ slumdog kids with the buzz in political circles that they could even be roped in for the Congress campaign.

Meanwhile, what is it that the kids themselves want? According to reports, they’ve asked Sonia Gandhi for better housing.

Are the kids being explotied or are they being presented with a rare opportunity? Do send us your feedback.
To read more reports click here, here and here.

Hate speech by Varun Gandhi

Published on March 18, 2009 in Indian elections 2009 and Politics. 1 Comment Tags: Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, Varun Gandhi.

A police complaint has been filed against Varun Gandhi, a grandson of the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for allegedly inciting inciting hatred against Muslims at an election campaign rally. Varun Gandhi is a member of the opposition BJP.

The Indian Express carries excerpts of Varun Gandhi’s inflammatory speeches earlier this month in Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh, from where he is contesting the election:

Yeh panja nahi hai, yeh kamal ka haath hai. Yeh kat** ke galey ko kaat dega chunaav ke baad. Jai Shri Ram! Ram ji ki jai! Varun Gandhi kaat daalega! Kaat denge us haath ko, kaat denge, kaat daalega!

[This is not the (Congress symbol) ‘hand', this is the hand of the ‘lotus'. It will cut the throat of the (derogatory reference to a Muslim) after the elections... Varun Gandhi will cut... Cut that hand, cut it, cut it.]

Varun Gandhi, 29, said the video footage of him at the rally had been doctored, and that he was a victim of a political conspiracy. At the same time he was also unapologetic. “I am proud of my faith, and am not apologising for it,” he told reporters. More:

A new Dalit social contract

Published on March 16, 2009 in Indian elections 2009. 2 Comments Tags: Bahujan Samaj Party, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit, empowerment of Dalits, Indian elections 2009, Mayawati, Social justice.

The new government — regardless of who forms it — must focus on integrating Dalit entrepreneurs and Dalit employees into the mainstream. The solutions are fairly easy, writes Chandra Bhan Prakash, a leading thinker on Dalit issues, in Mint

A consensus on issues of national concern can sometimes be hard to reach, particularly in a democracy of more than a billion people, and one that has countless social markers. In India, there seems to be a consensus of an exceptional order on the question of economic reforms. The country’s two main political blocs—the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance—are closer to each other on economic reforms than not. Even the Left-ruled West Bengal is embracing economic reform despite its ideological pretensions. At the same time, however, there are a few dissenting voices that question the process—as well as benefits—of the economic reforms that were initiated in 1991 by then finance minister and current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.