Passionate About India

It has been quite sometime since Barack Obama was elected the President of USA and his iconic speech of “Change we believe in” left the whole world enthralled. The fact that the Western world and many in the rapidly developing economies like India and China could relate to his speech and felt that such changes would benefit their countries too was not something new. But I shouldn’t be surprised if many in some other parts of the world, which are not conventionally considered to be open minded or liberal, too were watching with intent and hoping for change in their countries as well. Over the last few months, as the Obama administration settled down with work and the rest of the world forgot much of them, at least some of the real changes have started showing their presence. No, I am not talking about the initiatives being taken by Obama to bail out loss making American companies; and neither am I referring to the restrictions on outsourcing that are being imposed by him. On the contrar...

economically growing Indians are the envy of the recession-struck developed world! Before we talk about the jaundiced racist attacks on Indians in Australia, we have got to go to some basics. And unfortunately, the basics lie in India's enviable growth story of late. As long as the western world was growing, India's provocative growth story made great news. After all, the altruistic western media had to look charitable and benevolent to their lower ranked earth mates. The problem, however, began as their economies started getting into recession – something that was of their own doing. Instead of looking at going full throttle to develop markets in lesser developed regions like Latin America, India, China etc, Europeans and Americans kept capriciously selling to their own citizens through artificial means like luring non-creditworthy people into taking loans – in the process making their people dehumanized materialistic consumer dustbins. The delinquent process bombed, their ban...

If anyone has destroyed CPM, it is the CPM itself. I can personally bet that most workers of Trinamool Congress are also communists at heart because in Bengal, most hearts beat for the masses. The revolutionary fervour is a part of Bengali blood stream. It’s no wonder they tolerated a rotting communist party for so many years rather than vote for anyone else. The amazing thing is that even in these elections, out of a total population of 5.73 crores who voted in Bengal, Trinamool Congress got only five lakh votes more than the communists. Of course, rigging happened in many, many places where the communists won – from people not being allowed to leave their homes in the first place (something that can be never caught by the CRPF personnel who were posted) to threats at the voting booths, every trick in the book was rampantly used. But then, there are people who voted for CPM without coercion too. From people who actually benefitted from their regime, to their grassroots party supporter...

LTTE is finished! Prabhakaran has been killed!! Perhaps Sri Lanka was left with no other choice. And perhaps it’s good for their future. However, the debate is not so simple. Successive Indian governments, from the time of our late Prime Minister Nehru, have had an important role to play. Not in any good manner but in a very spineless negative manner. History is testimony to the fact that after Independence, we have always played a pathetic role when it has come to managing our neighbours, thus allowing a very negatively aggressive China the upper hand. We gave away Tibet to China – though historically Tibet was always a part of India – thereby allowing China to come literally next to our borders and create continuous nonsense. We have failed miserably in handling even a country like Bhutan, which used to shield ULFA terrorists against us. We gave away Bangladesh very gallantly, but despite that, we failed to manage relations with the Bangladeshis; and speaking about Pakistan is next t...

The election results are out! We were not into any prediction games, but tried to base our prediction in the last issue on what others tried to predict! And it seems apart from Total TV and Live India, there was no one else who could make the right prediction about the election results! But I’m excited. Excited, because though no massive change in governance or the corruption index is likely with our current breed of rulers, the voters are exerting their powers in their own way; and that means that although very slowly, in another twenty years from now, these voters will elect the right people to power finally. The signals this time were clearer perhaps than ever before. Firstly, anti-incumbency is more or less out – only your performance matters! Although the mandate nationwide was clearly against BJP, in the states where they have been doing creditable work, they still have won more seats. Even in the Assembly elections, it has been the same scenario. In Delhi, Sheila Dixit led the C...

There isn’t any doubt with the fact that over the years, the percentage of electorate turning out to exercise their franchise has been falling at an increasing rate. And no one other than the political class needs to be blamed as to why such a large proportion of the electorate stands politically disengaged. And this trend, which in itself is not so encouraging, is most visible in urban India. Rightly so, for the informed and empowered urban India realizes how the political class has been continuously defeating the entire purpose of elections. But then, this has not been true for rural India! It is rightly said that the rural heartland is actually the heart of political India. Therefore, anybody willing to make it big in his/her political career would have to necessarily make it big in the rural heartland. And that is the reason most of the political class routinely marches towards rural India, albeit only during elections. While the rest of the time, not many would be much interested ...

Midway through this election, I would not be surprised if some insider reports state that at least some of the national parties, if not all, have already started working for the next election. And by this I mean the next Union election, which in any case would be much sooner than expected. For if one were to believe the exit polls results by most media houses, then I have no doubt in saying that we are heading for a terribly fractured mandate. And probably given the economic environment, there could not have been a more damaging news than this for the overall economy. With economic slowdown plaguing the whole world, it has been witnessed that the governments of most of the economies worth talking about, have been extremely involved in finding ways to tackle this recession; and if possible, to arrest its mayhem as much possible. And what we are observing in India is just the contrary, with possible election outcomes just adding to it! In today’s India, political alliances are mostly bas...