2016

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The polling and campaign for the State Assembly elections are in full swing. Even though the States where elections are being held do not have any strong presence of the ruling party at the Centre, the BJP is making a desperate bid to wrest power in Assam, the key North-East State in the poll-fray.
However, the latest news from Assam is not that hopeful from the BJP’s standpoint. Its full-throated campaign for communal polarisation alongwith calls to seal the (…)

by Navneet Sharma and Pradeep Nair
Trident (Trishul)is a symbol of Hindu religion and not a weapon.... its distribution is a movement to realise our goal of [the] Hindu Rashtra. —A Hindu fanatic leader
The mobilisation of people on communal lines has been the oldest trick in the politics of the world and nations. In Hindu mythology ‘trishul’ is wielded by Shiva and Durga. Trishul is a polyvalent (trifold or having multiple usage) symbol. The trishul wielder symbolises a virulent and (…)

One key debate in the Indian Constituent Assembly was on the appointment of Governors. Many argued that a State’s High Court Chief Justice could fulfil the ornamental role when required. Equally fierce was the demand that a Governor should be elected, not appointed. In a democratic polity, a head of the state should be a person who is directly returned by the people. This was the argument.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru intervened to state that an elected Governor would become a parallel (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
In just about a year’s time, we shall be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence when power was transferred from the unwilling hands of the British rulers to the leaders of our freedom struggle. And it is exactly fifty years now that in the last general election under colonial rule, in 1946, the leader of the Indian National Congress toured the length and breadth of this vast land promising the public that once the power was transferred, he (…)

IMPRESSIONS
For the first time in history a woman of colourful reputation, backed by a jail term, has become the fulcrum of power in the State, holding the Chief Minister, several Ministers, MLAs and police bosses to ransom. To understand the enormity of this achievement, we must remember that the present Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy, is the shrewdest political manipulator Kerala has ever seen. He plotted the ouster of the influential K. Karuna-karan and of the popular A.K. Antony from (…)

The following two articles reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. There are now being published before the Kerala Assembly elections.
Reading the Triumph of the Left in Kerala and Apprehensions for the Future
by Suresh Jnaneswaran
The triumph of the Left in Kerala at the local body elections comes with many charms. The campaign at the hustings was led from the front by a ninetytwo-year-old Communist revolutionary, unparalleled in (…)

by Velayutham Saravanan
Last three months, Tamil Nadu politics was sailing on floods that occurred in the Chennai city. Interestingly enough, the main reason for the Chennai floods was opening-up the Chembarambakkam tank and not the heavy downpour. In other words, man-made disasters were to be held responsible for the Chennai floods rather than the torrential rain. However, such man-made factors like encroaching the path of natural water courses and water bodies resulted in floods. In (…)

by Aparupa Bhattacherjee
Despite the opposition from those parliamen-tarains closer to the Establishment, the new parliament in Myanmar has passed a bill providing a new position for Suu Kyi. With the NLD majority within the parliament taking a conscious decision not to upset the existing power structure that prohibits Suu Kyi from becoming the President, the move by the National League for Democracy (NLD) is a compromise and acceptance of the reality. This really augurs well for the (…)

India should warm up to Aung San Suu Kyi. The democratically elected government in Myanmar, that took over power on March 30, has received its first foreign dignitary on official visit—Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Both in symbolism and content, this is significant. Myanmar’s perceived ‘pivot’ to the West seems an exaggeration or a contrived misperception. (SCMP)
Equally, the alacrity with which Beijing has adjusted itself to the advent of democracy in Myanmar takes one’s breath away. (…)

April 14, 2015 marks Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary. The following article is being published on that occasion.
Sometime in April 2003 a Bengali engineer of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), posted somewhere near the Jharkhand-West Bengal border, met me at Patna with the request to address a seminar to mark the Ambedkar birth anni-versary celebrations organised by their employees’ association. I enquired from him if he could relate the leader anyway with the (…)