2019

EDITORIAL
Less than seven days after the results of the 17th Lok Sabha elections came out handing PM Narendra Modi a handsome victory at the hustings and enabling him to embark on a second term as the head of the Union Government, he and his Cabinet as well as Council of Ministers have been sworn in by President Ram Nath Kovind at the forecourt of the imposing Rashtrapati Bhavan this evening. The new entrant in the Cabinet is, of course, BJP President Amit Shah who is all set to get a plum (…)

The world does not need another national populist leader who pursues a pro-business agenda while trading in fake news and treating minorities as second-class citizens.
The biggest election in history has just been won by one man: Narendra Modi. Mr Modi has become the first Indian Prime Minister since 1971 to secure a single-party majority twice in a row. In 2014 the Bharatiya Janata Party won an absolute majority in the Lower House of Parliament for the first time in its history after the (…)

by Samyak Ghosh
Prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi wants you to believe that the biggest story in the general election of 2019 is ‘inclusiveness’. While following the election result trends from the Press Club of India in New Delhi, I heard several commentators mourn the surge of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s vote-share as a mandate for religious polarisation of the worst kind. And, in the streets of New Delhi, people told me that the big story is ‘Modi’.
All of these are true to a (…)

23.05.2019 will be remembered as a black day. It was the day democracy in India was gagged to death. In line with a new bhakti A demagogue became god and dictatorship was reinstated.
In a country that boasted of unity in diversity Hate came to be normalised Murder came to be justified Bigots became rulers once again.
Jobs became endangered species. Education became a luxury. Economy crashed. Media and institutions became puppets.
It was not a festival of democracy It was a pogrom (…)

The humiliating defeat the Congress suffered in the latest Lok Sabha elections has faced it with an existential crisis. The truth is that as a parliamentary party trying to come to power through elections, it stands nowhere before the combined might of the BJP, RSS and other organisations of the Sangh Parivar. The challenge is not just political. It is also ideological. During the past five years, the Sangh Parivar has been successful in polarising Hindu votes on communal lines.
As the (…)

by L.K. Sharma
Narendra Modi’s stunning victory in the parliamentary elections speaks volumes about the transformed India and an India keen to be transformed further. He defied the incumbency handicap to be crowned as India’s Prime Minister for a second term. He got the most impressive mandate despite his government’s dismal economic record, his unkept promises, mendacity, an unprecedented rise in bigotry and sustained low-level communal violence during the past five years.
Elections are (…)

Many literate and not so literate men and women of my generation grew up with stipulations about a “New India” that derived from the ideals of the freedom movement.
As is well-known, those ideals came then to be codified in the provisions of the Indian Constitution.
In a broad brush of recapitulation, these provisions comprised the guarantee of a citizenship that would transcend religious, cultural and gender identities; the right of franchise to every adult Indian; equality before law (…)

Through the looking glass of a staunchly ‘secular-minded’ Malayali—a dirty word in the current idiom when triumphalist cultural nationalism is on the march—the Indian election results evoke mixed feelings.
On the one hand, there is the wave of fear, anxiety, despair raging in the mind as one surveys the dismal national scene—mixed in no small measure with anger and sheer disgust at the unfairness of it all, as outlined brilliantly by S. Varadarajan in The Wire—and viewed from the heights (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
In the wake of PM Narendra Modi’s tremendous success at the hustings by securing a second term in office, it is worthwhile reading the following lines written after Rajiv Gandhi’s massive electoral victory recorded in an India orphaned by Indira Gandhi’s tragic assassination in October 1984.
Nineteen-Eightyfive has begun in this country with a New Look government formed after a phenomenal victory of the Congress under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi. With the (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Everyone knows that this election is a game- changer. It is becoming clear that it is a convention-breaker as well. Things that were a no-no in electioneering are now accepted norms. Things to which T.N. Seshan said “out” are now “in”. The founding fathers of America said that, even at their best, governments were a necessary evil. Ditto with post-Seshan elections.
That a judicial ruling should contribute to this feeling is disturbing. Bangalore city civil court issued a (…)