2015

How many brigands have raided our country, how many times? Ravaging village after village, piling up cruelties, crimes! How many bulbuls have ravished our grains, Mothers have crooned of tyrannical reigns, In spite of it all the proud spirit remains Of the people forever! The peasant, the potter, the fisher, the blacksmith, the boatman, the weaver! The soul is immortal in this immortal country of mine, And hence out of Death’s deep mouth comes music adamantine, Here on the margin of (…)

Have Faith in the People’s Faith The people’s barricades are up in sixty-seven zones the juggernaut of the Ashvamedha horse has been bridled and stopped and for once the cries of the last man and woman from the rotten and stinking gutters of the underbelly of Delhi have been heard. It is a wake-up call to the believers of the Idea of India. Have faith in the people’s faith in democracy! Have faith in the people’s faith in the Republic!
February 10, 2015 Suhas Borker
[Suhas (…)

The Aam Admi Party won, the Bharatiya Janata Party got the drubbing of its life, the Indian National Congress drew a blank, as did the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Indian National Lok Dal. And Mr Arvind Kejriwal won hearts embracing his Income Tax official wife, Sunita, in a public display of affection not seen since the first figurines were made in Vrindavan-Mathura many a yug ago.
Delhi, as the National Capital Territory, sends seven members to the Lok Sabha and three to the Rajya Sabha. (…)

Muscular arms spread wide on either side of the lectern, self-love dripping from a habitually cocksure visage, the mighty one thundered thus at one of his several election rallies in the national Capital: “They say how lucky Modi is; he becomes Prime Minister and global oil prices crash by a whopping half; well then, I say to you, why vote for the unlucky, vote for the lucky one.”
Not so lucky, after all. While the great man thundered thus in complete self-assurance, like Eliot’s Bradford (…)

The AAP’s thumping victory was a token of the fulfilment the people of Delhi preserved for themselves. As an eloquent newscaster described the electoral landslide, it approximated the symbol of affection and goodwill conveyed to a loved one on the martyrdom of a 3rd century Roman saint, his name also tagged to the vigour and vitality associated with the youth. If the statements of the AAP’s prominent leaders were to be heeded, the party was the aam aadmi’s vehicle for realising his/her (…)

The AAP’s historic win in Delhi is, above all, a victory for democracy. What the humble but great Indian voters have shown once again is that when most crucial issues like secularism and democracy are at stake, then they assert themselves against all odds for the protection of our most cherished values. Secondly, the way in which money power has been defeated is another important part of this victory of democracy. There is no doubt that massive funds were used by the BJP in legal and illegal (…)

by Vivek Kumar Srivastava
The Delhi election results may come as a surprise to many including the BJP and PM Modi but the decline for the BJP was set in the UP by-elections. Several plausible explanations will be offered by the political pundits but many others, which tilted the balance against the BJP, can be found in the Lok Sabha election victory of the BJP.
The Lok Sabha poll victory was analysed as the Modi wave. True, it was; but it was never comprehensively analysed to bring out (…)

by Irfan Engineer
A controversy was generated over the Republic Day advertisement of the Union Government, wherein the facsimile of the Preamble of the Constitution was shown. The words “Socialist” and “Secular” were missing therein. The BJP leaders’ defence was that it was the facsimile of the original Constitution and therein the words “Socialist” and “Secular” were not mentioned. It is a fact that the words “Socialist” and “Secular” were added in the year 1976 by virtue of the 42nd (…)

The only good thing Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did in her repressive rule during the Emergency was to include the words, Secularism and Socialism, in the Preamble of the Constitution. Morarji Desai, who succeeded her, had all the changes she made in the Constitution deleted, but retained the amendment to the Preamble.
The Jana Sangh, the earlier incarnation of the BJP that had merged with the Janata Party, raised no objection. Both L.K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Jana Sangh (…)

An unimaginable crisis is gripping our country. Only a straightforward clear declaration by the Prime Minister can clear it. I am referring to the advertisement issued by Government of India’s I & B Ministry on Republic Day carrying in the background a watermark of the Preamble to the Constitution. But a devious interloping was done by publishing the Preamble as it was in 1950, thus deliberately omitting the words “Socialist” and “Secular” from the Preamble which are in the existing (…)