2017

Pakistan is finding itself between the rock and a hard place with the announcement by the Russian Foreign Ministry on March 10, 2017 that the Afghan National Security Advisor, Mohammad Hanif Atmar, was heading for Moscow for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on March 17. The Russian announcement said that the two officials will discuss “the security situation and prospects for promoting national reconciliation in Afgha-nistan, as well as ways to develop multilateral (…)

She is in her early playing teens,
uprooted from the scenic setting
of her village home nestling against
a huge sheltering mango grove,
then transplanted on the top floor
of a big building of iron, concrete
towering into the grey city sky.
She has a job to do meticulously:
ostensibly to look after a child.
But there are also endless errands
she virtually slogs to carry out
from morning till late at night,
moving like a household robot
at the beck and call of (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
In the backdrop of the BJP’s resounding success in the Assembly polls, and the elections in UP in particular, we are reproducing the editorial the founder of this journal wrote following Indira Gandhi’s spectacular return to power in January 1980 for the benefit of our readers.
The ground-swell in the Lok Sabha election has been a phenomenon that nobody could even remotedly foresee. Not only the political commentators, including the present one, are made to eat (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
by Archna Katoch
While celebrating the International Women’s Day on March 8, 2017, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “The truth is that north and south, east and west [...] everywhere, we still have a male-dominated culture”, and emphasised the need to protect women’s rights as human rights and empower women and girls. (UN Daily News, 2017)
It has been 69 years since India won its independence from British rule but even today, it can be found that (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The outcome of the elections to the five State Assemblies has confounded everyone—the victor and the vanquished alike. Exit polls indicated the BJP was ahead of others in UP, but the actual result—the BJP and its allies winning 324 out of 403 seats—took everyone by surprise. BJP President Amit Shah himself said the magnitude of the BJP victory in UP was ‘unexpected’. In Uttarakhand also the BJP won hands down. But the Congress victory in Punjab was comprehensive and (…)

The shocking victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the North Indian State of Uttar Pradesh with over three-fourths of the seats in the Assembly elections appears too one-sided to be true. I had predicted a victory for Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). It remains a mystery that without a wave in their favour how the BJP almost swept the elections and Mayawati ended at the third spot behind the Samajwadi Party.
Leader of the BJP Narendra Modi has given a slogan: ‘With (…)

by L.K. Sharma
A foreign correspondent who came to India to cover the State elections must stay on to report on this land of miracles. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being called the Magic Man after he won the largest State of Uttar Pradesh (UP) for his Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
The voters gave an overwhelming mandate to Modi who was not a candidate. He was elected to Parliament in the 2014 elections from UP’s world-famous temple town of Varanasi but he did not leave this (…)

by Shahira Naim
The following report appeared in The Tribune (Chandigarh) on March 12, 2017. It is being reproduced with due acknowledgement.
Lucknow, March 11: Ending a 14 year ‘vanvaas’ in Uttar Pradesh the BJP juggernaut has stormed the heartland on the ‘parivartan’ plank winning 325 seats with alliance partners virtually fulfilling the prophesy of a Samajwadi-BSP-Congress-mukt Uttar Pradesh—as together these parties mustered barely 74 seats.
The BJP on its own won 312 seats and (…)

by Arup Kumar Sen
The BJP’s landslide victory, winning 325 seats in the 403-member Assembly in the 2017 elections in UP has opened up a new chapter in the political history of India. We are yet to get micro-analysis of the voting pattern in the different constituencies in terms of castes and communities. None can predict with certainty what will be the broad policy of the new BJP Government regarding the UP Muslims.
But, some alarming developments have been reported in the national (…)

IMPRESSIONS
This is a loner’s lament when more than half the country is rejoicing over the BJP’s overwhelming triumph in UP. The party and its leaders deserve the best of compliments. But the victory and the defeat of those who lost need to be assessed in the overall context of democracy’s growth in our country. That is when a note of caution becomes necessary.
Six decades of anarchic democracy has taught us many things. The stand-out lesson is that winning elections is the be-all and (…)