August 2009

In our so called democracy, it does not matter how many votes you have got but what matters is how many seats you have got by hook or crook. In nutshell this is the outcome in the 2009 Andhra Pradesh elections.
The Congress party is lucky, particularly Y.S. Rajashekar Reddy, for the simultaneous elections for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly in April 2009. Analysts say that these were the most expensive elections in the history of AP and India. It is alleged that each Assembly candidate (…)

The monumental blunder committed by India at Sharm-el-Sheikh is likely to weigh it down in all future Indo-Pak negotiations.
“A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed,” says Ibsen. Notwithstanding the fact that Islamabad has so far failed to match its words with deeds by not bringing the 26/11 culprits to book, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has surprised many by meekly agreeing to the Pakistani demand for delinking the talks from terrorism. As a matter of fact (…)

What a pathetic plight Air-India has reached. It’s become the first government-owned company that is unable to pay salaries. The unions blame the government and insist on their privileges. Which means the irresistible force of business economics is in head-on collision with the immovable object of employee resistance. Disaster beckons.
Public sympathy is unlikely to be with Air-India. For one thing, it has been unpopular with passengers for many years. The reasons range from unreliable (…)

The recent battle between Mayawati and Rita Bahuguna Joshi seems to be over and one hopes permanently. However, it does raise a very basic question: is money the right compensation for rape? Can the victim’s feelings be assuaged by giving her money? If so, then why not give it to all victims of rape? At the moment compensation is paid if the victim belongs to either a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe and the rapist does not. The law does not specify what happens if the woman is from a (…)

This was the week, fiftytwo years ago, that marked the parting of ways between the Communists and the Congress. It was the Communist opposition to the ‘Quit India’ resolution at the historic AICC session in August 1942 that ultimately led to the expulsion of the Communists from the Congress organisations in 1946. Incidentally, the eviction of the Communists from the Congress marked the beginning of the process of transformation of the Congress from an all-embracing national platform to the (…)

The latest U-turn by Pakistan on sentencing the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack is indeed an important wake-up call for India. The way the Pakistani judiciary is handling the trial gives ample proof that judges are not applying their judicial minds but are following the dictums of the government. The arrest and subsquent release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Sayeed and regular postphoning of the trial of the other five accused is a pointer in this direction. It is strange that despite (…)

Of late, the RSS has been accusing the BJP of inconsistency and also of failure to convey the real meaning of Hindutva. The BJP has certainly been inconsistent. It has been in two minds because like the Congress, it, too, is preoccupied, not with any principle or any concern for correct ideation, but with the slogan that can help it capture power. But on the question of the real meaning of Hindutva, is the RSS itself clear and consistent? It has a very large and committed cadre. Why does it (…)

Just a week ago it was written in these columns that while one cannot deny the turmoil the India-Pakistan Joint Statement following the meeting between the two PMs, Manmohan Singh and Yusuf Raza Gilani, on the sidelines of the 15th NAM Summit in Egypt has caused in the country at large and even the ruling Congress,
a dispassionate analysis of what has been agreed upon at Sharm el-Sheikh on July 16 makes it abundantly clear that the overall outcome of the Manmohan-Gilani talks has been (…)

The 15th NAM Summit concluded at Sharm el-Sheikh on July 16 with a five-page Declaration that, while agreeing to engage constructively with “concrete actions” of the nuclear weapon states towards disarmament as also the recent positive pronouncements of US President Barack Obama and others to work towards a nuclear weapons-free world, embodied a powerful endorsement of the need to strive for a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East based on the Arab Peace Initiative in its entirety. (…)

The recent violence in Xinjiang or former East Turkmenistan, which has left more than 150 dead, is just the tip of the iceberg as to what is happening inside China. China is a country which survives under the iron curtain where the press and free thought processes are censored. People are not allowed to assemble together in social groups. No one is allowed to speak against the government’s policies. The conditions of the ethnic minorities, whether Tibetans, Manchus, Mongols or the Uighurs, (…)