News and Views

Six months after the PDP-BJP coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and Governor’s Rule was imposed in the state, the baton for running the government has now passed on to the President of India.

President’s Rule doesn’t really change anything on the ground in terms of the administrative arrangements or political control, because the governor continues to run the affairs of the state with the backing of the central government.

It is therefore, only a constitutional transition to the next stage – elections to the state assembly – before an elected government is back in office.

Rahul Gandhi can justifiably claim credit for the Congress’s 3-0 victory over the BJP in the Hindi heartland, in the just concluded round of assembly polls. After all, if he could be blamed, derided and mocked as “Pappu’’ for all the electoral losses since the humiliating defeat of 2014, then surely he must be lauded now for the turnaround in his party’s fortunes.

In June 2016, I wrote a piece about the hounding of Raghuram Rajan. At that time, Rajan was still at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). However, it was clear that he was unwanted. Sure enough, he left soon thereafter.

Little did I realise then that I would be writing about the departure of Rajan’s successor, under even worse circumstances. While Urjit Patel’s statement cites “personal” reasons for his decision to quit, the “effective immediately” timeline speaks volumes. The Governor’s decision is no personal matter.

The 2018 Mizoram Legislative Assembly Elections saw a clear-cut majority of 26 seats won by the Mizo National Front (MNF) Party. The landslide victory of the MNF was slightly unprecedented as news reports were bracing for a hung parliament in Mizoram with the two major parties – INC and MNF, running close to each other but neither managing a clear majority.

In the summer of 2012, while interviewing Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, I had asked him about the dwindling allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

I queried that, not only had the number of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners shrunk since 2004, when the alliance failed in its bid for re-election, several of its alliance partners – most famously Nitish Kumar – were personally antagonistic towards him.

I had posed this question before the United Progressive Alliance went into a tail-spin and building alliances was seen as essential to acquiring power.

Modi, back then, was far from being accepted as the party's electoral mascot. So, what did he propose to overcome this handicap?

The outcome of the 2018 assembly elections in the Hindi heartland reinforces one major aspect of the electoral journey of BJP under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah: the duo has not been able to retain a single state, with Gujarat as a reluctant exception and Goa was not exactly a victory.

We were warned by sympathisers about the charisma of Narendra Modi and the management skills of Amit Shah. But several myths have been blown away. The myth of the invincibility of the so-called brand Modi lies in tatters. That elections can be delivered solely through management and machinery, is another urban legend that has come crashing down.

Libia Lobo is ninety-five years old.

During Goa’s liberation movement, Lobo used to run an underground radio service called “Voz de Liberdade” in Portuguese, ‘Goenche Sadvonecho Awaz’ in Konkani and the “Voice of Freedom” in English. Tune in!

He came, they congregated. He spoke, they cheered.

It was hysteria for a while, and then ennui. This sums up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election rally in Jodhpur on 3 December, to garner support for his party’s candidates ahead of the assembly polls.

As the campaign for the Rajasthan assembly elections ends on Wednesday evening (5 December), candidates have started settling into their constituencies for the final salvo, and the star campaigners are making their final bid to persuade voters.

There was time, not very long ago, when the RSS and its political front, the BJP, were against the very idea of ‘reservations’. Indeed, most of the Non-Resident Indians/Maharashtrians (NRI-M) used to say that they left India because “in India, merit did not matter, caste mattered”.

The Sangh Parivar was against the Mandalisation of our politics.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States of America, who passed away last night at the age of 94, was the most internationalist of US Presidents – arguably the last one whose Presidency was driven more by considerations of global geopolitics than domestic politics.

India never quite warmed to George H.W. Bush. Partly this was because, with so many big-ticket global headline issues on his agenda, India never loomed large among his concerns. Partly, it may have been due to the fact that he lacked the charisma of his youthful successor, Bill Clinton, whose visit to New Delhi in 2000 is credited with constituting the first major breakthrough in Indo-US relations.