Indian elections are a marvel to behold. The rules stipulate that no citizen should have to travel more than 2km to vote. So the state goes to the voters. Carrying oxygen tanks, election officials scaled the Himalayas to erect a voting booth in a village in Ladakh, 4,500 metres above sea level. In western India, a polling station was set up for the lone human inhabitant of a wildlife sanctuary. In eastern India, officials trekked for an entire day to reach the sole registered voter, an elderly woman, in a remote village. By the time voting closed on Sunday, some 600 million people had cast their ballots, 10 million of them for the first time.
In 2019, the world’s biggest election was much more than a ritual of democracy. It was the most consequential vote in the lifetime of a majority of Indians alive today. India under Narendra Modi has undergone the most total transformation since 1991. This election has, in effect, been a referendum on whether the republic retains its founding ideals or, if Modi wins another term – and exit polls released on Sunday show him winning with a comfortable majority – it leaps to a place of sectarianism from which return may be close to impossible.
Five more years of Narendra Modi will take India to a dark place
Is this election where the angry Bharat finally dispatches his ailing Mother India?
Fwiw I know Kapil Komireddi from a lifetime ago (a decade when I was young, eager and in my early 20’s).
I hosted and moderated a debate about Indo-Pak relations and Kapil was one of the guests. To a full house Kapil demanded that Pakistan apologise for the genocide in Bangladesh and for some reason our friendship never recovered after that.
So Kapil is definitely not one of those Pakistani-loving liberals but from what I remember he is South Indian (albeit from Karanataka, the Southern Saffronista).
“To a full house Kapil demanded that Pakistan apologise for the genocide in Bangladesh and for some reason our friendship never recovered after that.”
LOL, what could be the reason 😛
“So Kapil is definitely not one of those Pakistani-loving liberals but from what I remember he is South Indian”
Nowadays before you read any article on India, you can read the author surname and make out his religion/caste/region (North vs South-East) and be 90 percent sure on what it will say about India (and Modi)
Since the names Gandhi and Godse have been brought up frequently during the recently concluded election campaign.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi-bjp-are-not-god-ke-lovers-but-godse-lovers-2039254
The following article provides another perspective.
Father of the Nation is too Big a Crown for Him (Mohandas Gandhi)
http://indiafacts.org/father-of-the-nation-is-too-big-a-crown-for-him/
“Millions of Indians are waking up to the fact that Gandhi was not quite the apostle of peace he’s made out to be but rather a misguided man who caused untold harm to India.”
“So basically, the man who would go on to lead India’s freedom movement was denying the same freedom to the Dutch Boers.”
“However, there is plenty of indirect evidence that Gandhi was serving Britain more than he was serving India’s cause.”
“It is clear that Gandhi, who apparently wanted freedom for Indians, did not care about freedom for the millions of Arabs who were seething under Ottoman rule.
““I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.”
“He wrote about the Fuehrer(Hitler): “I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.”
“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.”And he offered a shocking piece of advice, asking the Jews to “pray for Hitler”.
““I (Gandhi) do not believe that inter-dining and inter-caste marriage are necessary to national unity.”
This is irrelevant.
Do you condemn the Hindu-right’s celebration of Godse and other Hindu-terrorists like him, or do you not?
Tbh, most of the reasonably intelligent Hindu nationalist commentators I follow think Sadhvi is a tard, and do condemn the celebration of Godse.
Godse has something of a cult following in parts of the Cowbelt, and that might have been what Sadhvi was aiming at (assuming this was a political maneuver rather than Sadhvi being a true believer, which she probably is.) But Gandhi is a truly civilizational figure beloved by multitudes, and the dominant voice in the BJP, as expressed by Modi, is to celebrate him.
It is the Congress Party which has miserably failed India and the Indian people . The party which led India to independence and had a galaxy of great leaders is moribund due to it’s addiction with the Dynasty for the last 30 years. Even now it has a wealth of middle level leaders and only The Family loyalists and bootlickers are given career advancement in the congress party. It has lost morale and direction completely. If it can enthuse it’s cadres , it can give a solid run for the money to the BJP in all states.
Modi has quite literally taken India out of a dark place. His was the first government that made it a priority to make sure the entire country was electrified, a promise he has delivered on.
What has the Congress given India? When Nehru took over the country, it was vastly illiterate, lacking in infrastructure, poor, and starving. What did he do? He went around the world lecturing people on the “Non-Aligned Movement”, envisioning himself as some great global leader.
In America, everyone had public lighting in 25 years of the light bulb being invented. Closer to home, countries that were arguably worse off than India post-WWII rapidly achieved human development goals like literacy, sanitation, etc. in a generation. From what I’ve read, street shitting hardly happens anywhere in the world including the Sub-Sahara and even the nearby countries of South Asia. Yet in Congress ruled India it was practically a civil right. Modi was the first one to speak out against it and do something about it.
It’s not just electricity and sanitation, but broadly economic growth, literacy, law & order, women’s issues (read the Bloomberg article on the Aajeevika scheme), these have all been delivered on during the Modi administration. Trucks hauling goods from Bombay to Calcutta used to take weeks to make the journey because at each state border, they had to stop, wait in line for days, pay each state’s tax (and bribes) before moving forward. With new tax laws (GST), this journey on truck now takes a few days. Whereas before, it was customary for the latest consumer goods to go to the metros first, the second tier cities 10 years later, and the rural areas perhaps never, now everyone can get the latest consumer goods.
“The refrain from Hindu voters has been identical: Modi has failed us, yes, but he’s at least put Muslims in their place”
The press are liars and will always find someone to say something suitably negative to support agenda. 99% of BJP voters are not going to the polls with the Muslims in mind.
But let’s take that comment above at face value. In India’s cow belt, do you have any idea the extent to which Muslim gangsters (with the blessing of their Yadav political allies) brutalize the Hindu population? If you want to know real horror, turn off the scary movies and Google the criminal Shahabuddin sometime, who has been committing mass murder in broad daylight for decades with the blessing of Lalu Yadav (the chief ally of the Congress party). And yet the Congress justifies its alliance with these people by calling it “secularism”. Do people not have a right to security?
made it a priority to make sure the entire country was electrified, a promise he has delivered on
Do you believe that?
Here’s an article that provides a different point of view: https://scroll.in/article/913185/the-modi-years-do-more-indians-have-access-to-electricity
Personally, I have no connection with rural India and I haven’t been doing the rounds of villages, so I have no way of verifying these reports. I live in Bangalore (not a village), and we have random power cuts, 10-15 each day ballpark. Most don’t last long, but sometimes the power can be gone for hours. Make of that what you will.
As for sanitation (aka Swachh Bharat), you’ll have to point me to places where progress has been made. To my eye, the parts of Bharat I’ve lived in or visited are no more Swachh now than they were 5 years ago.
On the gangsterism and shady characters (many Muslim) in the cow belt, I’ll second you. Our non-BJP parties have no moral authority to point fingers at the BJP when it selects (now and then) its own set of creeps.
On vikaas and the infrastructure though, I remain skeptical. BJP’s actions are symbolic, just like their various predecessors’ were.
Well i am from M.P. & i have lived in 12 hour power outrages when state got bifurcated into M.P. & Chattisgarh during Congress regime, i have seen cleanliness improvements in my state for e.g. Indore, Bhopal & other important cities of the state, I have seen roads development in Madhya Pradesh & marked improvement in them from Congress periods. I have lived in periods when going to Indore Ujjain trip could take 90 minutes to 120 mins. & now with multi lane roads the time requirement is under 60 minutes mark.
I despise BJP’s extremist elements even more than left wingers & if it were upto me i would ban their extremist elements but they get legitimacy because of local politics of so called “secular” parties who use Hooliganism & minorities to do the ‘dirty work’ aka extremist work. It was the strongmen phenomenon that Congress & it’s secular allies perpetrated which has resulted in Hindus doing religious politics.
Criminals in Indian politics –
https://in.reuters.com/article/india-election-criminal-candidates/lawbreakers-to-lawmakers-the-criminal-candidates-standing-in-indias-election-idINKCN1SO01F
So after analyzing everything the conclusion people get is BJP is ‘doer’ even if it is messy whereas Congress has been exploiting the regions it has as it’s bastions by not developing the poor but rather keep asking for votes in the name of poor.
Here is 10 yr old article talking about Malnutrition in Guna {Royal Sindhiya Family – Congress constituency} & the latest article again mentions the same problem in the same region.
https://www.livemint.com/Politics/4hg08vxgpcFBAnpyWvQ0TK/Malnourishment-prevalent-but-not-an-issue-for-this-year82.html
https://scroll.in/article/917492/malnutrition-in-india-narendra-modi-and-rahul-gandhis-constituencies-are-among-the-worst-affected
Here is the mess with regards to electricity Congress created after bifurcating M.P. & Chattisgarh –
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/states/story/20010108-creation-of-chhattisgarh-results-in-squabbles-over-sharing-of-people-and-resources-776026-2001-01-08
The reasons why you feel surprised about govt. policies & it’s impact more in Norther states than South because the State govt.’s have been able to do the same on their own while Norther states are more in control of ‘Central govt’ & reliant on it’s policies.
The reason for above phenomenon i.e. Northern states being reliant upon central govt. can be understood by looking at what followed in India after independence in terms of economy. After India’s freedom Northern states suffered immensely due to policies like – Freight equalisation policy & ‘License Raj’ prevented their industrialization till 1991’s Economic bust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freight_equalisation_policy
These states were rich in natural raw material with large tribal populations, what Indian govt. did was setup industries in border regions, mine the central regions and transport raw material to these industries at subsidized rats & deprive them of any benefits they could have made from ‘Natural resources’ hence Naxalite & Left-wing extremism problems, at the same time the border regions like Gujrat, Maharashtra, Punjab & South were given prominence in national policies & became developed at the cost of keeping so called ‘Cow belt’ deprived of modernity.
“From what I’ve read, street shitting hardly happens anywhere in the world including the Sub-Sahara and even the nearby countries of South Asia.”
Going by World Bank data, this isn’t really true…open defecation is an issue throughout the developing world. It is true though that India is an outlier in terms of how prevalent it is. And yeah, good on Modi for speaking up and doing something about it.
For political experts or just followers of political happenings I will repeat one question which they may overlooked. Can some speculate about the reasons for PM’s act?
Why India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2003 stopped the World Jat Aryan Foundation Congress in Belgrade?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jat_Aryan_Foundation
If any significance (maybe not) Vajpayee was a leader of the same BJ Party as Modi is.
Any takers, there is no right or wrong answer?
A small detail for all those crediting/discrediting Modi for electrification (or lack thereof) of India.
Electrification is a state subject. That is why we have state electricity boards. Modi really didn’t have much to do with it.
I don’t think that’s entirely the case. There is a scheme named after Rajiv Ghandhi focused on rural electrification. Why? Because the states have failed to deliver on electrifying each home.
Even in the U.S., there were challenges with the physics and economics of rural electrification so the FDR administration supported a rural electrification act, which I believe remains in force to this day.
Regarding the Rajiv Ghandhi rural electrification scheme, from what I understand it did bring power lines to most villages, but there was still a failure to bring the power to the villagers homes (last mile). So rural electrification as a metric is separate from total household electrification. Part of this is that the villagers are bastards and don’t want to pay for the electricity (even though they get it at subsidized rates compared to businesses and urban households), so they resort to stealing it. The politicians encourage this behavior and bully the state electric utilities not to collect. This then leads to transmission losses and financial peril for the state electric utilities.
From what I’ve read, the Modi administration tackled these challenges head on, making sure the last mile challenges were resolved. They also set strict guidelines for the state power utilities to make sure they collect on power sold and enhance their finances. The coal allocations were also a total mess under the UPA, which the NDA has fixed. The figures that I’ve seen from Bihar do show annually massive increases in rural household electric customers as well as power availability which went from 1000 MW during Lalu’s time after the Jharkhand bifurfcation to 4000 MW 15 years later. There’s also an increase in the quality of electricity available. Of course, credit to the state government for improving the electric supply with new plants and purchase agreements and also to the NDA for its efforts as well, to make sure the last mile challenges were resolved and the state electric utilities have the political support to make sure they can collect on power they sell.
This writeup is a perfect match to what Kabir mentioned in reply to one of my replies to a blog here related to the lack of representation of muslims in the Indian bureaucracy where he was advocating a quota system (against merit) between the lines as a solution. Quite interestingly he ended up saying if I think that muslims were not intelligent enough. Its ironic and I didn’t want to prolong the discussion, but he answered his own question. This writeup is also a self fulfilling prophecy.