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During the UPA years, 2004 to 2014, Narendra Modi, CM of Gujarat, led the brigade of States on each and every issue that he felt militated against the federal structure of the Constitution. Thus, when he was elected prime minister of India in 2014, we had naturally expected him to strengthen the rights of states and were certain that he would take away several controversially acquired powers of the Centre.
In 1967, when I was just 15 years old, I was attracted to Ram Manohar Lohia’s brand of desi socialism that targeted the nexus between caste and class in India. The Congress had been in power for 20 years and appeared quite invincible. But socialist leaders such as George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye, Rabi Ray and Kishen Pattanayak believed that the mighty Congress could be dislodged.
Narendra Modi has begun his third term in 2024 with the inglorious distinction of leading the “least productive parliament session” – the just-concluded monsoon-cum-budget session. Conversely, his first session after his second innings in 2019 was proudly declared by the Speaker as the “most productive” one since 1952. Along with the Rajya Sabha, it had passed a record 36 bills – demonstrating, in no uncertain terms, the cocky spirit of that phase.
I remember the tremendous tension that I went through as SDO nd Magistrate in charge of “Muharram” at Loha Gate in Agarpara in 1978 — as oceans of frenzied humans went all around me, lashing and bleeding themselves with whips, chains and fighting dangerously swords — crying "Ya Hasan, Ya Husain"! It continued through the evening and night. Though there were grievous and other (self-inflicted) injuries, I could report early in the morning, that it was “peaceful” and “law and order under control”.
The INDIA front, that Narendra Modi and his acolytes had scornfully dismissed as divided and doomed, had managed to give the Bharatiya Janata Party a real fright, with its 237 seats so perilously close to the BJP’s 240.
When a short, lanky 22-year-old Malayali lad from Ernakulam got off the Madras Mail at Howrah Station, he could never have imagined that he would become famous as the “barefoot historian of Old Calcutta”.
Many people in Kolkata, which includes my wife and I, are shattered to learn that our dear P.T. – P. Thankappan Nair – the barefoot historian of Kolkata, is no more. He was 91 and died in his home in Aluva, Kerala.
The 4th of June will be remembered in the history of stock markets in India for the biggest single-day fall in share prices in 4 years. The benchmark stock indexes, Sensex and Nifty, crashed by almost 6 per cent on this day when the election results to the 18th Lok Sabha started revealing that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may not be headed towards an absolute majority on its own.
As I switched on the TV for a brief while to watch Narendra Modi’s third swearing-in ceremony, my mind flashed back to his first, in 2014. I was a bit nervous as I was sure to be the fall guy, as the CEO of Prasar Bharati, if any glitch occurred in the television and radio coverage. A few days earlier, he had alleged that Prasar Bharati had mischievously cut off parts of his last interview on Doordarshan.
History will look back at the 2024 elections to the 18th Lok Sabha as an exciting landmark— somewhat like 1967 or 1977 or even 2014. There is no doubt that it marks the beginning of the end of the Modi era, though one cannot predict how badly he may react to the writing on the wall or how or viciously he may tighten his stranglehold over a battered democracy. It is a major blow to Narendra Modi’s ego and his hold over his flock that he has fallen 32 seats short of the absolute majority figure of 272 seats.
What started as a completely one-sided election has slowly but surely turned into an interesting one, with all sorts of possibilities. Liberals, rationalists, pluralists, democratic, leftists and all others who have not accepted a regime that is openly opposed to these values enshrined in the Indian constitution have suffered repeated defeat, demoralisation and humiliation for 10 long years.
I am sad that while every major city of India has a proper public-sponsored art gallery, Kolkata does not. Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore have great facilities called the National Galleries of Modern Art (NGMAs),
Today, as we celebrate the Mahavira Jayanti, I am reminded of his association with the western tract of Bengal, known since ancient times as the Rarh or Radh. When I served as the Additional District Magistrate of the Asansol-Durgapur belt of Burdwan (now known as Paschim Barddhaman district) in 1980-81, I had visited the ruins of a famous Jain temple at Punchra.
When Narendra Modi attacked Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav recently for violating the ‘strict norm’ of vegetarianism during the Ram Navami period, he was directly inciting voters in the northern Hindi belt, and of course, in adjunct areas like Gujarat.
Nothing could sum up better the transactional relationship between big capital and authoritarian rule than these words of William E. Scheuerman, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in the ‘Boston Review’, under the catchy title Why Do Authoritarians Win?
In the last three years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced and carried through, with lightning speed and his brute majority in parliament, a series of legislations that choke or restrict our freedom of expression, information, data and their transmission. We have reasons to believe that the apparatus of a surveillance state has been grafted, stealthily but surely,
Just a couple of days after the sad death of the one and only Ameen Sayani, I stumbled upon a photo with him, taken by his son at the NCPA, Mumbai. ‘August 2019’ was scrawled on it and I had gone there to deliver the Jamshed Bhaba Memorial Talk on Indian Culture. I was his great admirer and came to know him well from the time I headed All India Radio and Doordarshan, as CEO, Prasar Bharati.
Just a couple of days after the sad death of the one and only Ameen Sayani, I stumbled upon a photo with him, taken by his son at the NCPA, Mumbai. ‘August 2019’ was scrawled on it and I had gone there to deliver the Jamshed Bhabha Memorial Talk on Indian Culture. I was his great admirer. And came to know him well from the time I headed All India Radio and Doordarshan, as CEO, Prasar Bharati.
The roots of the celebrations on the 26th of January as our Republic Day actually go back to a very significant development in our Independence struggle. Till 1929, Gandhiji and the mainstream of the Indian National Congress could not decide whether to demand complete independence from the British Empire.
As a normal human being who prefers not to jog or climb unless compelled to, it was rather foolhardy to agree to my wife’s persuasion to visit Amaranth. Once trapped, I did a bit of reading and panicked when I learnt that it is one of the most strenuous treks, with unnecessary exertions.
When PM Narendra Modi sent out his closest bureaucrat, Nripendra Misra, from the PMO to Ayodhya to head the Shri Ram Mandir Construction Committee in February 2020, he was clearly signalling that Ram Mandir was his highest priority.