Our Funarena!

  After riding on a palpable anti-incumbency wave and the predictions of clear victory by all of the exit polls the ultimate narrow defeat of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) in the Bihar Assembly Elections-2020 is bound to cause huge disappointment and bitterness. Unable to accept defeat the leaders of the RJD first started attacking the Election Commission on a variety of alleged anomalies in counting, and then picked out the main alliance partner, the Indian National Congress (INC), for letting them down. A prominent RJD leader attacked Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi for their alleged callousness towards the election. The leader further alleged that they did not come for the election campaigns attending a very few rallies, but were only interested in having picnics. He also questioned the internal management of the INC and its lack of introspection.   Having said that, we must examine the underlying factors. The RJD under the leade

As I cool my heels in my native city Guwahati make no frills about all the thrills of politicking in the meantime. Starting with the Bill or rather the Ordinance to protect convicted politicians the Prime Minister of India returned from the US and, as anticipated widely, decided to kill the Bill in his Cabinet meeting thanks to Rahul Gandhi's vitriolics. All got seemingly well between the head of the Government and the Vice President of the party that leads the Government. As an immediate casualty of the killed bill Bihar veteran Lalu Prasad Yadav got convicted for stealing food from the animals and sentenced five years in jail. At the moment the politician is having sleepless nights thanks to the jail mosquitoes and insects that do not discriminate. Some other about to be convicted criminal politicians are fast losing hope in their own system. And today Assembly Elections are declared for five states starting November 11 to December 4 with the date of counting fixed

The Supreme Court of India gave a historic judgment today. The public litigation petition demanding the Right to Reject for voters had been pending for last nine years and Anna Hazare during his Movement against Corruption in 2011-12 made a lot of hue and cry for this too. Today the Supreme Court put its seal of approval on this. Now voters can reject all the candidates in his constituency if s/he thinks all of them are crooks and useless.   There will be a new option in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), ‘None Of The Above’, so that all candidates of all parties could thereby be rejected by the voter. Exactly when the EVMs are going to be adjusted or the date of effect to this decision is a matter of pure speculation at the moment. This is basically a negative vote, but the apathetic voters now need not sit at home and abstain from their constitutional duty. They can go to the polling booths and exercise their Right to Reject by voting for the new option. Maybe Voters

Article first published as Politics of the Beg Word on Technorati. Politics has  myriad shades and colors. Just now in India it has achieved another unique dimension—the politics of begging! Rahul Gandhi, the youthful general secretary of the Congress party who has commanded tremendous youth following all over the country of late, was in Uttar Pradesh to kickstart the party’s campaign for the forthcoming assembly elections of the state. He lambasted the ruling party there for total lack of economic development and for resembling almost a mafia rule. He went on with his diatribe by saying that had there been some developmental progress the people there would not have been forced to migrate to other states and beg for work. There was an inherent truth in what he said about the state and it had to be analyzed in the context of an opposition party leader addressing an election rally. But all hell broke loose because of just one word ‘beg’! Rahul Gandhi must have said