Published date: 15th Jun 1982
My first overseas reporting trip was to Iran nearly half a century ago. Coincidentally it was also my first overseas trip. I have the Iraqis to thank for it. I was a reporter with New Delhi magazine (which shut shop in 1981) in its namesake city. In 1979, soon after the Islamic revolution toppled Shah…
Published date: 15th Apr 1982
Published date: 15th Feb 1982
The only blood that sub-inspector Kabir Singh Limbo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limbo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie police outpost for a year-and-a-half. During monsoons, Limbo says, parts of the highway linking Assam’s Goalpara…
Two weeks into 1977, the Ear is again put to the Ground, and monitors the subterranean noises of the Ten Approaching Bestsellers of the New Year: • PAWS: Peter Benchley will follow up The Deep with this blood-curdling story of a giant Royal Bengal Tiger that stalks the outskirts of Calcutta, gobbling up little Bengali…
Our Staff Reporter A French hotel firm is collaborating in the construction and marketing of the latest five star hotel that is being built in the Capital in the private sector by Congress-I MP Charanjit Singh. A three per cent royalty on the basis of room revenue will be siphoned off by the French collaborators,…
Express News ServiceNEW DELHI, July 24:The Works and Housing Ministry and the New Delhi Municipal Committee came under sharp attack from opposition members of Parliament on Friday for allotting plots on instalments to Communist leaders and Congress(I) men on preferential terms to individuals close to the ruling party. The Minister for Works and Housing, Mr…
The Assam agitators have taken a lot of inspiration from the RSS, reports Chaitanya Kalbag The RSS’s position on the North-East has been enunciated very clearly in a 104-page book titled What ails India’s North-East? written by Bhanu Pratap Shukla and published by Suruchi Sahitya, the Sangh’s propaganda wing. In a preface titled As I…
Almost everyone who saw Sholay liked the ‘Mehbooba’ dance number immensely. Apart from Jalal Agha singing in R. D. Burman’s voice, there was Helen-swooping, whirling, and twirling all those scarves. I thought she looked every inch a gipsy dancer. And Mani Rabadi thinks so too. Mani designed Helen’s costume for that song. Her telephone’s busy…
India’s Public Sector Steel Industry “Our steel industry is gigantic, but still not large enough for our needs. Steel plays a very vital and little understood role in our lives and in our economy. What is steel? How is steel made? Where is it made? Is one steel plant exactly like another? Is the technology…
OBSCENITY. Vulgar display. Indecent exposure. Suggestive gestures. We’ve been hearing a lot of such phrases, ever since the Cinematograph (Censorship) Act was passed in 1952. Even today, they look back with nostalgia to the days when there were kissing scenes in Hindi films, and Himansu Rai is an often-mentioned name. Ever since 1952, the audience…
Government pushes for monetary easing despite central bank doubts While India swelters in record high June temperatures, senior officials in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government are sweating for another reason. The heat is coming from a debate over whether the country is poised for a V-shaped recovery after last November’s shock demonetization or if it…
When CHAITANYA KALBAG arrived for this pre-arranged interview at Janata General Secretary RABI RAY’s residence at 12, Safdarjung Lane, New Delhi, an assistant of the latter’s informed him that he had been summoned urgently by the President, Mr Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Half an hour later Mr Ray returned, to inform our correspondent…
NEW DELHI — India’s economy is doing well despite slower growth in the first quarter of fiscal 2016-17, but moribund private investment and a mushroom cloud of huge bad loans over banks are worries, according to the chief economic adviser to the Indian government. “In the short run, our biggest challenges are private investment and…
By Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — India’s northeastern border state of Assam is waiting with trepidation for the results of a citizenship census that could have major political, sectarian and diplomatic consequences just months before the country’s next general election. The National Register of Citizens, which will identify mostly Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh…
It was a pleasure to attend the Ninth Upendra Vajpeyi Memorial Lecture on April 1, 2016, delivered by Balmiki Prasad Singh, who is a respected administrator, scholar, author and thinker. Mr Singh, a former Governor of Sikkim, is familiar with the absence of peace – he was a senior official in Assam when the anti-foreigner…
The Sai Baba controversy is utterly irrelevant and merely proves that Indian newspapers and magazine are hard put to finding topic worthy of discussion. An article on the occasion if Satya Sai Baba’s 50th birthday which was celebrated on November 23. “I Wonder,” remarked a Professor of Political Science at an American university when I…
Government must create jobs, not just offer cash: renowned Indian economist Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing Writer NEW DELHI — Narendra Modi’s government unveiled an ambitious budget last week with huge handouts for India’s poor, a move that could certainly win him votes in the upcoming elections but will do little to alleviate poverty in the long…
Indian bank governance is in the spotlight amid the ballooning $2.1 billion fraudulent-loan scandal at Punjab National Bank. © Reuters NEW DELHI – The crisis in India’s state-owned banking sector is deepening, but the government may be preparing to give a key oversight body, set up two years ago to improve governance at bank boards,…
From the Editor Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have noted the gold-plating stage yet, but we certainly know…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we storytellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine—our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page views. Our…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT–YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
Imphal — A minister in the northeast Indian state of Manipur was sacked this month because he went to a polo match. The minister was not dismissed for taking time off but because he went with only two bodyguards instead of his usual jeep-load of machine-gun carrying policemen. “We are fighting against insurgents in Manipur,”…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters New Delhi -Ten months after the army stormed the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has run up against his toughest domestic challenge so far in Punjab state. Gandhi has pledged to give top priority to the Punjab problem. Eight leaders of the main Sikh party, the…
By Chaitanya Kalbag Bhopal: Hundreds of people stand outside the drab white bungalow, clutching yellow X-ray folders and medical prescriptions in a line stretching down the driveway and into nearby bushes. A chorus of dry coughs punctuates the slow progress of emaciated men, ragged children and ghost-like Muslim women covered head-to-toe in veils and black…
India, a land where personality cults spring up overnight, is struggling to find a pedestal on which to put its assassinated leader Indira Gandhi. In the year since her murder last Oct. 31, the woman once portrayed by a leading painter as a Goddess has become mainly a face looking out from old election posters. …
The troops and the refugees are two knots in a tangle Indira Gandhi’s son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, must unravel before peace returns to Punjab state. TWO streets from the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, a soldier in olive green uniform stands atop a t a tall building, his binoculars trained on the clusters…
The RBI governor refuses to be drawn into the game of popularity stakes Well, I think we’ve still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying, ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We’re a little bit that way. We feel things are turning to the…
NEW DELHI,— Thurs. Indian security forces rounded. up nearly 300 Sikh extremist suspects today in a race against time to break the back of the extremist movement before elections in Punjab State. Security chiefs, on the defensive after the murder yesterday of Arjun Dass, a top political supporter of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Also announced…
New Delhi— Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has vowed to take tough action to conquer what he sees as India’a political and social ills after basking in a year-long glow of triumph for hauling the country back from the brink of widespread unrest. Cracks have started appearing in the national euphoria swirling around the former airline…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters Bhopal — The poison gas leak that killed 2,500 people last December in this central Indian city has left the future of tens of thousands of people in doubt. The biggest question-mark hangs over the lives of about 125,000 people severely injured in the leak, which occurred at a pesticide factory owned…
By Chaitanya Kalbag of Reuters through NZPA Bhopal—The poison gas leak that. killed 2500 people last December in this central Indian city has left the future of tens of thousands of people in doubt. The biggest question mark hangs over the lives of about 125,000 people severely injured in the leak, which occurred at a…
In New Delhi India, a land where personality cults spring up overnight, is struggling to find a pedestal on which to put its assassinated leader Indira Gandhi. In the year since her murder last October 31, the woman once portrayed by a leading painter as a goddess has become mainly a face looking out from…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters New Delhi, June 1: Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh said on Tuesday there would be “no relenting” on air and ground operations in Kashmir, and accused Pakistan’s military of connivance with “armed intruders.” “There will be no relenting on any ground operations or air operations until status quo ante is restored,” Mr.…
Chaitanya Kalbag New Delhi, Reuter: The Soviet Union has tightened its grip on the Indian arms market by offering an array of sophisticated weapons to a government worried about growing U.S. military aid to Pakistan, defense analysts said here last week. Indian officials said that under an agreement reached during the visit of Soviet Defense…
Perhaps the most accurate indicator of how civilised a particular society really is, is the way it treats its social rejects—particularly those who have abandoned their grip on reality and crossed the threshold into the twilight world of the mentally unbalanced. In a poor country like India, which boasts of one of the oldest civilisations…
The Constitution will survive another 600 years The first draft of India’s Constitution was prepared by the Constituent Assembly sixty years ago. As India heads into the second decade of the 21st Century, globalisation, the spread of terrorism, rapid economic growth and the winners and losers it has produced, and the individual’s liberty pose the…
“The Constitution is evolving constantly” As we near completion of sixty years of formation of the Indian Republic, it is crucial to review the workings of the Indian Constitution and analyse how the definitions, principles and guidelines enshrined in the Constitution have evolved in the present context. Former Attorney General for India Ashok H. Desai…
Budget 2012 is the final opportunity for the UPA to set the economy on as next years’ exercise will be influenced by the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Five experts on the economy joined Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag to discuss Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee’s options as he finalises the forthcoming Union Budget. Yashwant Sinha,…
Ajit Gulabchand was delighted that his second grandson was born on his own 64th birthday. He had just come away from a meeting with a minister and other CEOs who were in the business of building highways. He has spent close to three decades at the helm of the HCC Group, which builds roads, bridges,…
Debu Bhattacharya, Managing Director, Hindalco, discusses the CBI case against his company. By Chaitanya Kalbag Hindalco Industries Ltd.’s Managing Director, Debu Bhattacharya, says that had he known how complex and fraught the process would be to set up an alumina plant and a smelter in Orissa, he would have never put it up. “I really don’t understand where we…
Innovation in India is not just about patents filed but about affordable, scalable solutions. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum held in Mumbai last fortnight, Business Today gathered an eclectic collection of thinkers to brainstorm about one topic: How important is innovation in the emerging world order? The hour-long discussion saw Gururaj Deshpande, serial entrepreneur;…
A day after his half-yearly monetary policy review, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Duvvuri Subbarao met with Chaitanya Kalbag and Anand Adhikari to explain the intent of the bank’s policy actions. He also spoke about the growth-inflation debate and the perceived differences between the central bank and the finance ministry. Edited excerpts: What has…
“You don’t have to be a ‘sting journalist’ to spy on somebody. Camera photographs and video are now ubiquitous, We never know who is recording what we are saying. Every email we send is ‘discoverable’ and we should be prepared to see anything we wrote splashed across a blog or a chatroom.” The audacious hacking…
Where responsibility for troubled histories can be clearly defined, other countries have tried to make amends. Germany has apologised for the horrors of the Holocaust… How far can you reach back in time if you want to right wrongs, real or perceived? Look back through history and nearly every nation can point to traumatic events…
Three warnings from history on the perils of popularity In November 1937, an extraordinary essay titled, ‘The Rashtrapati’, appeared in a respected Calcutta journal. Written under the pseudonym Chanakya, it soon became known that the author was, in fact, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had just led the Congress to victory in elections in a majority of…
You have to be tall to apologise, and taller still to atone The 2019 election campaign was set to be the biggest, costliest, and dirtiest in our democratic history. In this dog-eat-dog atmosphere, no politician can afford to indulge in humility or ask voters to forgive their past sins. Remorse and contrition make you look…
This Parliament should improve its last track record The dust has settled, and a new government will take oath this evening. We have just elected the 17th Lok Sabha. Can we expect a more dynamic Parliament as we head towards New India? There are some encouraging signs: the average age of the 542 newly elected…
The Dalai Lama is the face of a complex refugee problem The Dalai Lama, who completed 60 years of exile in India in March, is usually humorous and candid. Last weekend, however, shortly after World Refugee Day, the Tibetan spiritual leader drew attention for his maladroitness in an interview with the BBC. “European countries should…
Election Commission needs more rope to get to the bottom of it Money is making Election 2019 go around. Currency with the public totalled ₹20.64 trillion on March 15, five days after the elections were announced. This compared with ₹12.48 trillion on March 7, 2014, two days after the previous Lok Sabha election was announced. …
The 48-year-old challenger is flat on his back on the canvas. The crowd is cheering on the champion, who is 20 years older but lighter on his feet. Is the challenger out for the count, or will he go another round? Can Rahul Gandhi breathe life back into his shattered organization? Three weeks after the…
A $5 trillion economy is a stretch. Do we have the running legs? In 2018, India’s per-capita GDP was $2,015.60, according to the World Bank. This makes sense — our economy is currently sized at $2.7 trillion, and our population is around 1.35 billion. This is considerably behind the US ($62,641), and not even a…
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth…’ —Alice’s Adventures in Wales (1865), Lewis Carroll Today marks the first day of the world’s biggest social media Election.…
India is walking into a middle-income trap with its eyes wide open The good news is that every. body — the IMF was the latest to fall in line on Tuesday — agrees with the RBI that India’s GDP growth rate will be a modest 7% in 2019-20. The 0.3 percentage point reduction in its…
How to create a state of suspended animation On August 5, the Indian government declared that Jammu and Kashmir is no longer an exception. On August 5, the Indian government decided to make Kashmir an exception. Why am I saying contradictory things about the same event? Because they are both facts. Bear with me. Removing…
Does this festive season herald fireworks or damp squibs? It is amazing how things come around. I was listening to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Houston speech. After speaking in several Indian languages, Modi said, “Maine itna hi kaha hai: Everything is fine.” Suddenly, I remembered the theme song from 3 Idiots. Eight years have gone…
One week before Phase 1, the votes still hold the cards Loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it. -Mark Twain After five years of ‘achhe din’, you would think we’d be gazing with happy expectation at the bright lights of even better days, looking forward to a…
How do Naga peace and Article 371A of the Constitution belong together? The abrogation of Article 370 and the five-week-old lockdown in Srinagar have triggered tremors 3,000 km away in Nagaland. Home minister Amit Shah repeated over the weekend at a meeting of the North Eastern Council that Article 371, which bestows special status on…
Nobody speaks in the language of the masses Remarkably, after seven decades of spirited democracy, India has produced only three leaders, who have enjoyed nationwide popularity — Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi. I am not considering Lal Bahadur Shastri or Rajiv Gandhi (whose only electoral win was on the rebound from his mother’s…
The name ‘Ram’ rolls easily off the tongue, whichever corner of India you come from, whichever Indian language your mother taught you. Although Rama and Krishna are the best-known gods in human form in our mythology, Rama is recognised across swathes of Southeast Asia. I have watched Ramayana ballets on Bali island, wayang shadow puppet…
Will the amended Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act happen just before the polls? We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. -Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare…
Modi has been handed a blank cheque. He must ensure it doesn’t bounce Narendra Modi’s pulverising victory has wiped out every semblance of opposition in Parliament’s lower house. The Congress’ humiliation is so total that it will fail to be recognised as the main Opposition party in the Lok Sabha for the second time in…
India has crossed just one battle line, but many more lie ahead Political power grows out of the barrel of gun. More precisely, it grows from the air-to-air missiles mounted on an upgraded, but aging, MiG-21 Bison interceptor flown by the intrepid Wing Commander Abhimandan Vardhaman, who took on US-made Pakistani F16s on February 27.…
Stop taking CRPF for granted & get real about how we police our nation Chalte Raho Pyare Fauj. That is what the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is fondly called in police parlance. Cynics would call them cannon fodder. The CRPF is the dogsbody of India’s internal security. They are sent to the aid of…
The government is performing a risky high-wire balancing act Let me put it simply: the government is performing two balancing acts simultaneously. In order to get to this perilous position, it has time and again turned precedent on its head, laying it open for the next administration to also throw caution to the winds. This…
The truth is, India isn’t rich enough to be a welfare state William Safire must be turning in his grave. The language maven and Richard Nixon speechwriter came up with the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism” phrase that US Vice- President Spiro Agnew used in a 1970 speech. Finance minister Arun Jaitley first used ‘nawabs of…
If you are of a certain age, and not one of the millennial Indians who will turn 18 this year and be eligible to vote, you might remember watching The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a cybersecurity expert who gets into a whole lot of trouble with cyberterrorists, who erase her identity…
Be Careful what you digest from the result of the assembly elections I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a…
Will India ever learn to speak loudly— and carry a small stick? Earlier this month, the United Nations issued its first set of ‘diya’ postage stamps to mark Diwali and the triumph of good over evil. It was a nice gesture – and I possess a sheet of the stamps – but a reminder of…
There is more than one way to skin a cat. We will be travelling to the outer reaches of credulity as election fever rises over the next six months, fuelled by hundreds of millions of users of social media. Misinformation can take any shape and is very hard to pin down. We can already hear…
In all chatter on defence spend & Rafales, it’s the IAF that’s losing out Nobody with even a rudimentary interest in national security will dispute that the Indian Air Force (IAF) needs more firepower. Currently, it has 600 combat aircraft and 33 active squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 44. We face two implacable foes…
The smartest thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi did was to hitch the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) to the aura of Mahatma Gandhi. From its official launch at Raj Ghat on Gandhi Jayanti 2014, the Clean India message has been omnipresent and relentless. Like Gandhi’s mantra of swarajya, Modi has turned Swachh Bharat into a mass…
Will Ayushman Bharat do better that its predecessor schemes? Sometime over the next few weeks — most likely in his Independence Day speech — Prime Minister Narendra Modi will formally launch what has already been billed as the world’s biggest public healthcare programme, Ayushman Bharat, or the National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM). The scheme…
Better healthcare makes economic sense. Does it make political sense? Next week, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes his fifth Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, he might want to remind us that in 2022, the New India he has promised will arrive in more ways than one. Just four years from now, the…
Will the NPA black hole suck in the country’s entire banking universe? With barely nine months to go before the Lok Sabha election, how serious is the crisis in our banking system? Put simply, it is not going to be resolved any time soon, although Gol is scrambling to force more medicine into the patient…
Politics was reduced to raucous pandering: if Modi’s speech was short of a clearer vision of New India, Rahul did not lay out a blueprint for a transfer of power either It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign…
This government’s been raising expectations, not the economy The government’s ‘Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas’ (Clean Intent, Right Development) campaign is expectation management in an election year. Nineteen months after demonetisation, we still do not have a final count for the total volume of banned currency notes returned to the nation’s banks. Are we really a…
The PM has adopted legacy programmes and run them better They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing.…
Four years ago, I wrote in my first Needle’s Eye column that predictions about caste not dominating the 2014 elections were all hogwash. If you still believe that four years of this government have whipped up a centripetal force of development and transformation, you need to notify the I&B Ministry that you are being misled…
In business, especially in human-resource management, appraisers are cautioned to evaluate an individual’s or department’s performance over a sustained period and not let ‘recency’, the most recent events (especially the turbulent ones) colour their judgment. I was reminded of this axiom by the Narendra Modi government’s current stint in Trishanku’s heaven. For those of us…
In the summer of 1982, I travelled to Sidhi district in Madhya Pradesh to report on a fascinating archaeological expedition for India Today. An Indo-US team excavating in the Son Valley was sifting through stone artefacts from the Upper Paleolithic period (between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago) when they came across a rough circular sandstone…
What goes around, comes around. Two interesting things happened earlier this month, both concerning the Supreme Court. Starting February 6, Chief Justice Dipak Misra appeared to offer a truce in the stand off with his four most senior colleagues when, as “Master of the Roster’, he set up a new system of allocating cases by…
Here is my poll prediction: if, and only if, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wins power in Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will roll out his biggest-bang reforms. He will recover his political capital, dented by the things that did not go well with demonetisation, and gather the courage to attempt to amend election…
As we chatted over our morning cups of tea, glancing at the dailies and their dose of grim news, and trying to balance the latest perfidies visited upon us by pondering over the good things happening in our lives as well, my wife uttered one of her bon mots: “Isn’t it interesting how we Indians…
“Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”-Voltaire Absurdity was piled atop absurdity as seven weeks of vitriol ended in a splash on Tuesday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a seaplane ride. When this prime minister, arguably the most powerful mass leader we have had in a generation, breaks security rules,…
While waiting for the 10,400 policemen who were deployed this week to guard Ivanka Trump in Hyderabad to go back to their regular duties of guarding lesser VIPs, I pondered over the eternal “Where are we in history?” question. Ms. Trump’s speechwriters were savvy enough to avoid comment on the hordes of beggars who had…
On Tuesday came news that India’s exports contracted for the first time in 13 months in October: Our trade deficit has widened to a near three-year high of $86 billion. Ready-made garment exports in October shrank 39% from a year earlier to $829.44 million. Apparel exports in April-October 2017 totalled $10 billion, rising just two…
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the mess in our education system. It is good to keep in mind, though, that there are many passionate people, both within and outside the government-school system, trying to put things right. The government seems incapable of doing so by itself. Inspiring good-news stories are dotted around our…
The Puranas say it took the gods and demons a thousand years, with some help from Vishnu who took on the form of a tortoise, to churn the Milky Ocean before it yielded the divine nectar (amrit). The samudra manthan also produced a deadly poison, halahala, which Shiva obligingly consumed. The churning of India’s education…
In the spirit of Diwali and new beginnings, I started this column determined to find good news stories in our school education system, because that is the foundation of a New India. I set out to explore, hoping that we are steadily building on a strong foundation for hundreds of millions of our children to…
In his book ‘How the BJP Wins’, Prashant Jha describes how Narendra Modi has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to near-invincibility by transmogrifying himself again and again over the past decade and a half. “If he was a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) from 2002, Modi carefully transitioned into a vikas purush, the…
Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly…
Cabinet reshuffles seem to generate more excitement than the announcement of cricket teams. So we know what the best game in town is. We knew weeks earlier that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to re-order his squad after the end of parliament’s monsoon session. By Saturday, everybody and her sister knew exactly who was…
“Tis the season for chest-thumping. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unquestionably on top of the heap. But what a heap it is. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of nasty triumphalism has been on display. Such eruptions need a trigger, and a handy one was provided by the departing remarks of…
“August is the month of revolution,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his monthly radio talk a few days ago. Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Quit India movement against British colonial rule, and Modi talked about the five-year journey from sankalp (intention) to siddhi (achievement) to independence in August 1947. …
In early June, a few weeks before the launch of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an informal meeting with a group of senior bureaucrats at which, according to a government press release, he exhorted them to rise above the “administrative mechanisms of earlier centuries”. He urged them to seize…
Right now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions The more you study India’s history the more you have to marvel at our infinite capacity to fight among ourselves. Ashoka, the last of the great Mauryan emperors, fought the…
In China, our difficult and, to many of us, menacing neighbour, they say “If you speak a lot you are more likely to say something wrong; if you speak less you are less likely to say something wrong; and if you do not speak at all, you will not say anything wrong. In Confucian thought,…
This ‘epoch-making’ transformation in indirect taxes has been anything but rapid. Modi & Jaitley are standing on shoulders of several PM-FM pairs of reformers Midnight has an eerie and slightly occult hold on our imaginations. It is the hour when magic is supposed to take place, when the old falls away and a new day…
How many different kinds of evidence do we need to convince ourselves that the economy is slowing dramatically? Consumer price index (CPI) inflation fell to 2.2% in May, but that was put down by facile analysis to plunging food prices and a good monsoon. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) base year has been moved…
It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play They’ve be been going in and out of style but they guaranteed to raise a smile …
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain April started with dairy farmer Pehlu Khan’s lynching on a national highway not far from New Delhi, and ended with the killings of two alleged cow thieves by a lynch mob in Assam’s…
Can you imagine Pope Francis being named the president of Brazil, which has the world’s largest Roman Catholic population (and the same number of people as Uttar Pradesh)? That is not going to happen, because the ‘Western’ way of thinking says there ought to be a separation of the temporal and the spiritual, the church…
As our all-too-brief winter slips into a warm spring, we are headed-once again-for another Judgement Day in our interminable elections. But, just as we start to weary of the burdens of democracy, it is useful to remember the meaning of that word: “power of the people”. Time and again we are reminded of the power…
The longer the course of a long-drawn election, the coarser the language gets. The strain is starting to tell in Uttar Pradesh. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah have certainly raised the pitch. Shah said hooligans (presumably from the ruling Samajwadi Party) would be hanged by their feet.…
There are some remarkable similarities—and dissimilarities—between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Both men ran insurgent presidential campaigns that upended conventional political structures (I use ‘presidential’ advisedly for Modi; does the Bharatiya Janata Party matter any longer to our prime minister, when all around us people refer to his government as ‘Modi sarkar’?). Both men were…
Brushing up on some history, I read about how powerful dynasties in the 8th and 9th centuries fought themselves into exhaustion over the kingdom of Kannauj in north India, oblivious to the first Arab invaders who conquered Sindh in 712CE. Today, the prize of Uttar Pradesh is being fought over by three modern armies: Prime…
President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union speech at 9 pm in Washington and New York on Tuesday. That is the same prime time every evening when we Indians endure multiple SOTUs emanating in hot gusts from our television screens. Americans are luckier. They get to hear a SOTU oration just once…
Aa no bhadraha Krikava yantu vishwataha (Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides). It seems fitting to look ahead at 2017 with this 3,500-year-old invocation from the Rig Veda as we try to see beyond the seismic waves of change that came at us over the past twelve months. Terrorism. Syria. Aleppo. Brexit.…
Most of us ordinary mortals who work for scant rewards and only wish to enjoy, undisturbed, the fruits of our labour, are caught up in a war that we do not even realise had been declared on our behalf. This war is ideological and political, although it wears the sheep’s clothing of fighting for India’s…
Ernest Hemingway wrote more than once for the Toronto Daily Star on the absurdity and tragedy of German hype-rinflation after the Treaty of Versailles sealed Germany’s defeat in World War I. In a September 1922 report, he described how he and his wife exchanged 90 US cents for 670 marks on a visit to the…
It was ironical but fitting, with the rising belligerence around us, that the best thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi could do for India was the electric-shock treatment he administered on the evening of November 8. You could not have asked for a better drill in disaster preparedness. People rushed out late that night to fill…
In the preface to his 1995 book ‘How Good People Make Tough Choices’, ethicist Rushworth M. Kidder wrote that when he interviewed twenty-two leading thinkers around the world about the challenges, they saw looming in the 21st century, six themes stood out. Five of them were not surprising: the nuclear threat, environmental degradation, the North-South…
Early this week I attended a talk on Nation Branding by David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School. Nation branding is the perception people have of a country, whether they visit it, buy from it, or invest in it. For their 2016 Best Countries report, Reibstein and his associates surveyed 16,200 business…
Chaitanya Kalbag On September 18, a young racehorse won a scorching victory at the Sha Tin racecourse in Hong Kong. After loitering the entire race, the horse rocketed through the final 400 meters in 21.44 seconds, the fastest time in 7,000 races. He made his rags-to-riches owner, Kerm Din, famous. The name of the…
As usual, after a major terrorist attack, we have had a few days of jingoism. One journalist tweeted that “this India’ has moved on from strategic restraint. Television anchors burst a few blood vessels, urging retaliatory attacks after Uri ”and’ surgical strikes’ across the Line of Control. A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functionary recasts…
I woke up before dawn today to an email from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. It listed his major activities over the previous week. He had been typically busy: just before he left for Hangzhou, where he chaired a special BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi granted a soft-focus television interview…
Spain has embraced and subsumed its Islamic past, and this holds lessons for India, where we are debasing our historical sites- a few month ago the Taj Mahal was seen turning green literally… History is fascinating. It always circles around. A lot of history is about culture and knowledge. It is also about the gaining…
Maybe I’m starting to see ghosts in dark corners. Why else do we have Mahant Avaidyanath, the late head of the Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, being celebrated every time an election in the Hindi heartland is round the corner? It does not take an anniversary for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to celebrate the…
And time yet for a hundred indecisions. And for a hundred visions and revisions—TS Eliot And time yet to revel in a plentiful monsoon, never mind that food prices continue to rise, and tomatoes now cost more than Rs 100 a kilo. There have been several good government decisions in the past few weeks. Reforms…
A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of…
Modi can smoothly segue from pugnacious to presidential, and after two years of his ubiquitousness he can even appear statesmanlike in comparison with U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, the president-elect of the Philippines. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 8, he will…
Why the regional thoroughbreds are the real winners in the assembly election sweepstakes The scene for India’s regional politics was scripted by Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai in 1967. The screenwriter and playwright led his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to victory in Tamil Nadu (then Madras state), riding to power on resurgent Tamil nationalism and an anti-Hindi agitation. …
While we listlessly wait in century-high temperatures for the slightly delayed monsoon, listening to Minister X or Bureaucrat Y talking up the numbers, the question again is: Who are you trying to impress? Life’s but a walking shadow,a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is…
Twice in the past two and a half years, the Supreme Court has ruled with a 19th-century mindset on vital 21st-century issues affecting personal freedom using criminal and penal codification that was enacted by India’s British rulers. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 was first drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1837, and its enactment…
It says something for the Congress that Sonia Gandhi has been its president for nearly 18 years, a longer, unbroken stretch than anybody in the family she married into. Night after night on our TV screens, the usual suspects, aging Congress leaders, pick apart the chicken entrails of this middleman’s diary entry or that arms…
Why is Maharashtra in such a mess? It has been written many a times about the abysmal state of agriculture in India. There is no doubt at all that vote-bank manipulation, corruption and the callous indifference of generations of politicians have severely crippled the farm sector. Maharashtra is the prize exhibit A train carrying 2.5…
Chaitanya Kalbag Our farmers don’t have time to debate patriotism. Rural distress triggers migration, farmers’ suicides. Angry farmers are bound to hit Modi where it hurts him most – at the ballot box. If agriculture does not look up soon, the BJP will have a tough time winning the make-or-break state of UP. The squat…
The only thing going for Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi is his longevity in electoral politics Voter turnout in the first phase of Assam’s election on Monday was very high. By the time polls closed it had hit 78%. Assam’s voters usually turn out in large numbers, but this time the numbers bode ill for the…
Of the 5 million illegal immigrants in Assam, only 2,442 had been expelled between 1985 and 2012 The issue of citizenship in India has been rendered very complex by a thicket of laws, rules and executive fiats. Article 6 of the Constitution says anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19,…
The only blood that Sub-Inspector Kabir Singh Limboo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limboo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie Police Outpost for a year and a half. During the monsoons, Limboo says, parts of the…
Three years of Abenomics and nationalism have not put any vim or vigour into the Japanese economy. Nor are Nationalism and loyalty preventing the Chinese economy’s slide. XI, like Modi, also want too root out corruption. “In trust we God” was emblazoned on the back of a truck roaring past us on an Indian highway.…
The last time I checked, most of JNU’s 8000-plus students were boning up for exams that will land them top bureaucratic and police jobs. Armed with a good education, they will soon turn law-abiding taxpayers themselves, and start to pay for those monumental flags. Every time Indians feel the hot and heavy breath of their…
In March 2014, two months before PM Modi was swept to power, the previous Congress govt pressed both the caste and patriotism buttons. It charged 10 Kashmiri students with sedition for shouting pro-Pak slogans in a Meerut varsity. The same month, it said Jats would be included in OBC quotas Most of us ordinary mortals…
The sheer size of our population will continue to power domestic demand for some time, but India cannot hope to be a heavyweight global player without taking ever-bigger bites of the world trade pie. Sadly, alongside falling two-way trade, India has turned increasingly protectionist The world around us grows more uneasy by the day about…
Education and urbanisation sharply narrow the economic gap between the lower and upper castes. In bigger cities and towns, if you have a good job, your caste is not a badge of shame or pride. You might even be considered an equal Every few weeks, India heaves with episodic rage. Communal unrest, ghar wapsi, Hindutva,…
To be truly remembered in history books, Narendra Modi will have to parlay his interpersonal skill to work his way through his bucket list I don’t know how many people noticed this tweet from the Prime Minister’s Office on November 19: “External Affairs Minister@ Sushma Swaraj ji is present at Delhi airport to receive PM…
I am nagged by a disturbing question: how will historians compile the “collected works of Narendra Modi” when so many of his thoughts are so, well, instant? What better setting to join Instagram than Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s new capital, back-dropped by visuals of spectacular pagodas, with thousands of swooning followers now able to follow…
I should have titled this column “The Audacity of Hype”. Reading some of the speeches made at and around the Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, it almost sounded like a lovefest around joint action and joint reaction with the exception of Vladimir Putin, who was clearly the black sheep because of Russia’s incursions into…
One of the more uncomfortable experiences I have had in reporting across the world was in March 2006 when I got a rare Pakistani visa stamped in my passport and travelled to that country on business. One day in Lahore, with some time on my hands, I visited Gurdwara Nankana Sahib, which marks the birthplace…
The two men were born fourteen years and fourteen days apart. They died fourteen years apart, one just three years after independence. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were both London-educated lawyers. They both worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the long fight for independence. Both went to prison several times. Both were involved in…
Five years ago the Centennial Group and the Asian Development Bank issued an interesting report titled “India 2039: An Affluent Society”. There is a lot to read there; the Congress party had just been re-elected, and it seemed to have been handed a decisive second chance that would enable it to get out of the…
Just over two weeks ago the world’s nations agreed they have averted cataclysmic global warming. Close on the heels of Chennai’s submersion, we have news that the North Pole is going to be warmer than Southern California, a severe winter storm is battering the north-easter rib United States, and northern England has been hit by…
“When the old mother received the body of her child, which the neighbours had brought back to her, she did not cry, but she stayed there for a long time motionless, watching him. Then, stretching her wrinkled hand over the body, she promised him a vendetta.” So run these chilling words from a 19th-century story…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is at his best when he is talking. He has been in office for 555 days and I wager that he has made at least three times that number of speeches, give or take the time that he spends travelling on Air India One. Modi’s personal website and that of the…
When our prime minister rode on horseback to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu last week, one swooning supporter could not contain himself and tweeted: “When I saw Modi on a white horse on way Maa Vaishno Devi the avatara of Kaliki (sic) flashed my mind. What a leadership”. Devout Hindus believe that we are…
Eight hundred and forty-five years ago, Henry II of England, chafing under a long and abrading rivalry with Thomas Becket, his former friend and the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally burst out in anger: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of Henry’s courtiers rushed out, accosted the archbishop in his cathedral, and…
About 1,000 authors and teachers marched through the streets of the capital on Tuesday, asserting their right to free speech. Did you miss this event in Delhi? Actually, it happened in Dhaka, where four bloggers and a publisher have been killed so far this year, and civil society believes free speech is being throttled in…
I was chatting with my barber in Gurgaon when I realised that Narendra Modi and the hundreds of other politicians campaigning in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections were not uttering the P word. Salman, the young hair-cutter, said he was the second of nine children of a sepoy in the Indian Army — the…
Chaitanya Kalbag Thousands of grumpy bureaucrats are being forced to sacrifice a long weekend — there are too many of them anyway this year in India — and clean toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Movement) by wielding a broom himself in a Delhi…
“On an October evening, two young men met at a paan shop.” So, starts ‘Hatyaare’ (Assassins), a disturbing and dystopian Hindi short story by Amarkant. It was published in 1964, and faintly echoed ‘A Clockwork Orange’, that classic 1962 tale by Anthony Burgess of a darkly futuristic England blighted by extremely violent youths. Assassins is…
Twice in the past four months, Narendra Modi has spoken with unalloyed pride and excitement as he stood among our super-achieving space scientists — at Sriharikota on June 30, and on Wednesday when the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrated the success of our Mars orbiter Mangalyaan. “History has been created today You have dared to…
Sometimes, when the late monsoon clouds hover low, India can be spied through the gloom, as if by happen-stance. So many geographies, languages, foods, cultures — and religions — thrown together higgledy-piggledy and powered by a sputtering nationalism that makes us want to be counted among the great powers of the world, rich, strong, and…
Over the past week, I have been struck by the helplessness of the men leading the world’s two biggest democracies. There is a major difference, though: President Barack Obama has tried, and failed, to change America’s gun control laws as one mass shooting is followed closely by another. After last week’s massacre at an Oregon…
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” said Yogi Berra, the legendary catcher for the New York Yankees, who died on Tuesday Funny that may be, but not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he flies to New York at the start of a week-long visit to both U.S. coasts. Modi…
Narendra Modi is a follower of Yogi Adityanath. On Twitter, that is. But the Mahant from Gorakhpur has no qualms about setting a tone that neither Modi nor his senior colleagues can publicly take. Why, while Modi basks in the afterglow of a series of foreign-policy successes, the yogi has seen fit to broadcast his…
“The agenda focused on measures to correct the current account deficit, counter rupee depreciation and its impact on trade and industry, improve skill development and focus on developing industrial corridors,” one newspaper said about the prime minister’s brainstorming meeting. “The overall sentiment was to convert decisions to action and take back the country to a…
I marked one hundred days of the Narendra Modi government by meeting four women called Usha Chaumar, Guddi Athwal, Annu Tamole and Sunita Chawaria who have travelled in just over a decade from the lowest rung of India’s caste ladder to a future that holds hope and optimism. Their lives and their stories were more…
What can we be sure of as we head into the last four months of this year? Unless you live in one of those havens of do-nothingness, like Jhumri Talaiya in eastern India or Peoria in the middle of the United States, chances are that you are uneasy worried about the future, not sure that…
In a striking exposition of what could be termed the Modi Doctrine, NSA Doval said if you are not able to exercise the power you possess because you don’t have the will, that is as good as not having it It is difficult to discern if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is beginning to lose his…
Or how much telecom spectrum? Or iron ore? Or how many ports and airports? How many zeros must be added to a long string before a billionaire is sated? In Leo Tolstoy’s riveting 1886 short story “How much land does a man need?” a poor Russian peasant named Pahom vows to own some land after…
In his 2011 book ‘Target 3 billion’, APJ Abdul Kalam wrote about returning across the Rajasthan desert after India’s Pokhran nuclear tests in May 1998. The temperature was around 50° C. A fellow scientist suggested they stop at a village called Badariya. There, Kalam was astonished to find a lush and green ashram. The head…
It is amusing, and not entirely surprising, that anybody sounding less than flattering of the Narendra Modi government is instantly suspected to be a member of a left-liberal pseudo-secular club of automated naysayers. There is, too, a newer class of dissidents, consisting either of frustrated right-wingers dismayed at either not partaking of the loaves and…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
Did Narendra Modi just experience his Sharm el-Sheikh moment? The joint India-Pakistan statement issued in the Russian city of Ufa last Friday, after Modi initiated a meeting with Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif, has been all but repudiated by Sharif’s National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz. Aziz said no talks with India can be held without Kashmir…
At times like this, with the air heavier, hotter and wetter than in a sauna, we Bhadravasis long for the cool breeze of reason to blow in soothing gusts across our stressed landscape. It is a good time to dip our toes in the scriptures. Let me start with the Bhagavad Gita, that treasure trove…
This weekend Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Nepal on his third foreign trip in ten weeks. By the end of September he will also have taken in Japan and the United States. Looming large on his itinerary will be China, which he visited four times as Gujarat’s chief minister in his quest for…
When he won power 13 months ago, Narendra Modi promised he would reel out a governance thriller that was high on quality, aesthetics, story line, dialogues and soothing background music. He would give his jaded audience something to applaud for its sheer integrity, performance and lasting impact. Sadly, over the past ten days the government…
Perhaps it is because every tremor registers as an earthquake on social media, but we seem besieged by one ‘not again’ moment after another. Whether it is suspect instant noodles or larvae-infested baby food or lecherous taxi drivers, is India simply predisposed towards badness, or are we just too much of a glass-half-empty nation? Let’s…
Somewhere, through the unbearable din of television and anti-social media this week, I saw one tweet that plaintively asked why we were hearing so much from everybody but not enough from Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit in Brazil. Our prime minister met the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, but coverage back…
When a little girl named Topsy is asked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if she knew who made her, she says, “I expect I grow’d.” Today, Arun Jaitley will declare financial independence when he unveils Budget 2014 without the Planning Commission (PC) breathing down his neck. True, the Budget drafters in the Prime Minister’s Office and…
Our members of parliament sowed the wind in the 15th Lok Sabha and are reaping the whirlwind in the 16th Lok Sabha. The last Lok Sabha worked only for 61% of its scheduled time, the worst in the past half-century. The Bharatiya Janata Party was in very aggressive opposition to the United Progressive Alliance. There…
Round about this time, we ought to have been chilling our champagne and getting ready to exult in, and celebrate, a year of dramatic and positive change under the inspiring leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vision, vim, vigour, and vitality should have been the keywords for Year One of the Modi Era. Yet the…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
The Indian ryot, or peasant cultivator, has always been a political football. When we think of a farmer most of us think, this man is getting subsidised water, electricity, seeds, fertilizer. The government buys his harvest. The government is keen to gift him a bank account under the Jan Dhan Yojana, even if he has…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
One year ago, as voting got underway in our national elections, I titled my first column in this newspaper A Witch’s Brew’. That referred to the choices India’s voters had. Now we know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had to quaff quite a potent concoction since he rode to power. In equal parts, he…
The Narendra Modi government has been taking a few hard knocks. It learned that sweet talk in Maharashtra’s sugar belt, or at a gaudy wedding celebration in a dusty town in the Uttar Pradesh bad lands, is just that: in politics, your friends always have one eye cocked at a higher seat of power. Your…
There is a new sense of purposefulness in government. Many of the early steps Modi has taken reflect his Chief Executive Officer style in Gujarat. He does not believe in endless meetings and buck-passing. It seemed like the rhyming slogans, the election jingles, and the grandiloquence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto were all that…
Damyata, datta, dayadhvam. “This very thing the heavenly voice of thunder repeats da, da, da, that is, control yourselves, give, be compassionate.” In the ancient Hindu text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Prajapati or the creator is asked by his three-fold progeny — gods, men and demons —for advice, and he utters the syllable da three times. Self-control,…
The PMO website is taking on the busyness of Modi’s own website. Within hours of Munde’s death, the list of cabinet ministers was updated with a blank space next to the ministries of rural development… If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of…
Arvind Kejriwal is the India Rubber Man. A Leo in politics if there is one, charismatic, mercurial, impetuous and likeable despite his foibles, he has re-invented himself time and again and rebounded into a new avatar. IIT trained engineer, IRS tax officer, Right to Information activist, anti-corruption crusader, and sidekick to Anna Hazare, Kejriwal couldn’t…
I felt a deep sadness as I listened to the hysteria over the suspicious donations that went into the Aam Aadmi Party’s coffers ten months ago. The shouting was all about campaign financing. It broke out five days before voting in the Delhi assembly election, and it completely drowned out all talk about what the…
Modi went part-way towards BJP’s muscular defence strategy with the appointment of former Intelligence Bureau chief Ajit Doval as his National Security Advisor The Rajyabhishek in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt was a sight for sore eyes, and understandably some of us went ape even if we were not among the 4,000 people attending Narendra…
Long, long ago, before they invented news in 140 characters and we could remember our lives only through social media timelines, some of us believed it was possible to have our leaders display lofty politics and selfless diplomacy That is not true, of course. Politics and diplomacy both involve winning people over; in the end,…
Just as I sat down to write this column came news that those Indians who can afford them are going to be paying a lot more this summer for Alphonso mangoes. The European Union has lifted its ban on Indian mango imports, and upwards of 16 million mangoes will flood British supermarkets alone. The Indians…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
On New Year’s Eve I attended the ‘The Book of Mormon’ at the Eugene O’Neill Theater on Broadway and as the rollicking, raunchy musical unfolded on stage, marveled again at America’s ability to laugh at itself and its idols. The play has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic since it premiered four years…
The end of campaigning in Amethi in a cacophony of anger, derogation, and obloquy was briefly leavened by “Twitter joining Rajinikanth.” The Superstar’s followers piled up at the rate of 20,000 an hour. Not even Narendra Modi, one of the Thalaivar’s first followers, could have matched that. Fantasy had trumped politics. As if in affirmation,…
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.- Julius Caesar, Act 1 By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
“There are two kinds of people—Greeks, and everyone else who wish they was Greek.” Gus Portokalos in ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ I couldn’t stop laughing every time the father of the bride in this comedy which I watched (not for the first time) with my family a few days ago, claims every word in…
Several moons ago a car driver in Chennai told me the fascinating story of a young man whom he drove around in Coimbatore during the 2009 general elections. At every stop, the driver said, the young man would return with a bulging sack that he would stuff into the boot. The young man was collecting…
This column will be published exactly ten months after Narendra Modi took office in the South Block. It is as good a time as any to think of Lee Kuan Yew, whose funeral Modi will attend next Sunday, and of Singapore and India and their fates and futures. Lee was a strongman in every sense…
First election since 1984 where a national party is looking like sure-fire winner Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the…
Which party will you vote for? It is a bit like England’s witch trials in the Middle Ages. You were dunked in water as a test; if you did not drown, you were pronounced a sorceress and burnt at the stake. Whichever government you elect, the choice is not clear, clean, or comforting. By…
More than once in the past couple of weeks, before he climbed into his plane to fly off to more island nations, Narendra Modi was at his histrionic, chest-thumping best in Parliament. His voice rose and fell as he spoke, now in a shouted challenge and then dropping to a whisper. MPs, and a larger…
It is a wonder that we Indians find the time to accomplish all that we do. Huge chunks of our working days are swallowed up by totally unproductive toing, froing, talking, shouting, negotiating, and surviving. It is also a wonder that we aim to accomplish all that we want to. There is no scarcity of…
In the late 15th century, an anonymous playwright wrote Everyman, widely billed as the world’s greatest morality play of all time, in which the gentle aam admi, visited by sinister Death, is saved only by his Good Deeds after his Pride, Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five Wits have all deserted him. What Good Deeds…
It has been a rather bewildering week, with things not what they seem to be. The two Rohtak sisters who beat up their molesters on a bus: did the incident really happen? The Uber cab rape allegation: should all web based taxi services be banned in India or should we strengthen our technology, our telecommunications,…
The good news is that everybody– the International Monetary Fund was the latest to fall in line on Tuesday– agrees with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate will be a modest 7% in 2019-20. The 0.3 percentage point reduction in its forecast is because of “a weaker-than-expected…
Bhopal (Reuter) -Investigators probing the world’s worst industrial disaster have uncovered the steel tank from which poisonous gas leaked last December, killing 2.500 people, police said yesterday. Excavation work began last week and the tank has been freed of its casing of concrete, sand and charcoal, police in this central Indian city said. On December…
IF IT’S THE ONLY WAY OUT Feel the need to shout. Hurl your hurt at me; Let anger tinkle in sparkling shards If it must To my feet, to my toes that redden, My blood a curious rust. Grow roots into my stone perch. Come, hang your rage, Festoon my granite arms. Don’t let this…
SHYAM BENEGAL Shyam Benegal grew up in the shadow of the Charminar at Hyderabad. Perhaps that childhood gave him two important outlooks the first of the quintessentially rural Andhra, the second of a more polished, Urduised, Hyderabad. Whatever the reason, Shyam decided, at a very early age, to grow up and make movies. In this…
Former Chief Justice of India, Justice PN Bhagwati, underlines the shortcomings in the arbitration system in India, in a discussion with Publishing Director Chaitanya Kalbag. He stresses the need to make arbitration cheap and speedy through the combined efforts of lawyers and arbitrators and moots legislation, if need be, in order to make it an…
(Chaitanya Kalbag has been a journalist, editor and manager for over 33 years. In his most recent assignment as Editor in Chief of Hindustan Times, India’s second-largest English newspaper, Kalbag headed a team of more than 700 journalists across eight editions. He was responsible for reinforcing professional standards and embedding strong standards of accountability and…
The Puranas say it took the gods and demons a thousand years, with some help from Vishnu who took on the form of a tortoise, to churn the Milky Ocean before it yielded the divine nectar (amrit). The samudra manthan also produced a deadly poison, halahala, which Shiva obligingly consumed. The churning of India’s education…
If you are of a certain age, and not one of the millennial Indians who will turn 18 this year and be eligible to vote, you might remember watching The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a cybersecurity expert who gets into a whole lot of trouble with cyberterrorists, who erase her identity…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing: what about implementation? Over the past four years, the Bharatiya Janata…
The government’s ‘Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas’ (Clean Intent, Right Development) campaign is expectation management in an election year. Nineteen months after demonetisation, we still do not have a final count for the total volume of banned currency notes returned to the nation’s banks. Are we really a less-cash economy now? Authorities had to scramble to…
Nobody with even a rudimentary interest in national security will dispute that the Indian Air Force (IAF) needs more firepower. Currently, it has 600 combat aircraft, and 33 active squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 44. We face two implacable foes, on our western and northern borders. India’s 2018-19 defence budget totalled Rs 2.82 trillion,…
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Male-dominated. Super-hierarchical. Forgiving. Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper listed…
Earlier this month the United Nations issued its first set of ‘diya’ postage stamps to mark Diwali and the triumph of good over evil. It was a nice gesture (and I possess a sheet of the stamps) but a reminder of the continuing conundrum of why India punches far below its weight in the world’s…
Let me put it simply: the government is performing two balancing acts simultaneously. In order to get to this perilous position, it has time and again turned precedent on its head, laying it open for the next administration to also throw caution to the winds. This is not good for a country of our size.…
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. More precisely, it grows from the air-to-air missiles mounted on an upgraded but ageing MiG 21 Bison fighter-interceptor flown by the intrepid Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who took on U.S.-made Pakistani F-16s on Feb 27. Around the time the young pilot was repatriated to India…
Greta Thunberg’s emotional speech at the UN Climate Action Summit on Sept 23 was followed by Donald Trump’s mocking tweet: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” But we all know that the 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl-activist is right. The warnings are crowding in, fast and ominous.…
In 2018, India’s per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $2015.60, according to the World Bank. This makes sense– our economy is currently sized at $2.7 trillion, and our population is around 1.35 billion. This is considerably behind the United States ($62,641) and not even a fourth of China’s $9,770.80. The Bank’s data show that India’s…
It is amazing how things come around. I was listening to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Houston speech. After speaking in several Indian languages, Modi said: “Maine itna hi kaha hai: Everything is fine.” Suddenly, I remembered the theme song from 3 Idiots. Eight years have gone by and the lyrics could have been written today.…
Money is making Election 2019 go around. Currency with the public totalled Rs. 20.64 trillion on March 15, five days after the elections were announced. This compared with Rs. 12.48 trillion on March 7, 2014, two days after the previous Lok Sabha election was announced. Where is the less-cash economy that demonetisation was supposed to…
Islamabad’s response to request for cooperation on Mumbai blasts will test the commitment given in Havana Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday that Pakistan would have to prove that it was serious about joining hands with India in cracking down on terrorism, and the first test was the Mumbai train explosion findings. “How else…
It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign ministry announced his visit to Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa. He will be away during the first full week of the monsoon session, which could be the last of the 16th…
Sometime over the next few weeks, most likely in his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will formally launch what has already been billed as the world’s biggest public healthcare programme, Ayushman Bharat, or the National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM). The scheme was announced in the 2018-19 Budget and approved by the Cabinet in…
I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
Public memory is all too amnesic., and the Bhagalpur blinding’s which sickened and shocked the nation when they were exposed in November 1980 have almost become history. Even the dogged legal battle for justice by the blinded has virtually disappeared from newspaper columns, lowering a ‘curtain of silence on one of the most shameful episodes…
Family planning in India has always been dogged by a debilitating combination of moral, sociological, superstitious and even political complexes. Post-1977, however, while the nation’s population control effort has acquired the coy appellation of ‘family welfare’, encouraging work has been done towards adopting newer and safer techniques of birth control. Last fortnight Dr Badri Nath…
Not since Brutus has there been such a stab in such a back. No wonder Indira Gandhi was so “absolutely livid” and her daughter-in-law Maneka so studiously low-key. The culprit: Maneka’s mother Amiteshwar Anand, who fetched Mrs Gandhi a resounding snub by selling her chintzy. down-at-heel magazine Surya India and its Hindi counterpart to two…
ALL GOOD Hindus hope to reincarnate as better Hindus, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be celebrating its second birthday on April 5 with the conviction that it is well on the way to establishing itself as a “nation alternative”. More than anything else, a strident section in the party is anxious to shed…
For centuries, cranes have been held up as auspicious birds in many countries, serving as symbols of long life and happiness. Ironically, however, the graceful Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus) is in grave danger of being reduced to total extinction only around 250 of these birds exist world-wide today. The crane family, Gruidae, itself is the…
Chaitanya Kalbag New Delhi (Reuter)—Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s peace pact to end three years of sectarian turmoil in Punjab has won wide support but analysts say he still faces obstacles in curbing Sikh unrest. Gandhi, a former airline pilot with five years in politics and eight months in power, confounded critics Wednesday by defusing…
By Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI (Reuter): India’s new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, yet to win his spurs in government, has to quickly take a series of tough political decisions to consolidate his power. He must end squabbles inside his ruling Congress (I) Party, decide by the end of this month on holding general elections…
Leader’s slaying could trigger worst crisis since India gained independence By CHAITANYA KALBAG Reuters News Service NEW DELHI, India – Indira Gandhi’s assassination Wednesday threatened to plunge India into the worst crisis in its 37 years of independence. The prime minister fell riddled with bullets by her own Sikh bodyguards just two months before the…
New Delhi—For the grey-bearded Sikh sitting in a cosy academic study India’s Punjab crisis is no longer a series of grim newspaper headlines. Last week he had to abandon plans to drive through his home state because he feared attacks by angry crowds of Hindu militants roaming the highways. As communal violence continues in Punjab…
By CHAITANYA KALBAG Bhopal, Dec 18—Some of the 250,000 people who fled the central Indian city of Bhopal fearing a fresh leak of poison gas started returning to their homes today but over 12,000 remained in camps set up by the Government. Their return was apparently prompted by the successful neutralization of more of…
By CHAITANYA KALBAG New Delhi, Dec 11. India’s ruling Congress (I) Party, which celebrates its centenary next year, is fighting for political survival as much as a parliamentary majority in national elections in two weeks’ time. After years of unchallenged supremacy as India’s dominant political force, the party is being rocked by an internal debate…
Uneasy ties with neighbours By Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, (Reuter): Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s massive victory in the Indian general election has given him new freedom to tackle his country’s un-easy relations with its neighbours, especially Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Rajiv, armed with a huge parliamentary majority, declared immediately after the election that good relations…
by Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuter, in Bhopal Hundreds of people stand outside the drab white bungalow, clutching yellow X-ray folders and medical prescriptions in a line stretching down the driveway flanked by dry, leafless bushes. A chorus of dry coughs punctuates the slow progress of emaciated men, ragged children and ghost-like Muslim women covered head-to-toe in…
Govt’s fiscal profligacy has made a mockery of the FRBM Act Pranab Mukherjee sounded pleased earlier this week when he told a TV interviewer that India’s projected fiscal deficit of 6.8 per cent of GDP in 2009-10 was still better than the 11 per cent projected in the United States. He did not mention the…
“Curiouser and curiouser” sums up India’s economy. There is little or no credit, tepid business and consumer confidence, exports are struggling, and yet gross domestic product (GDP) grew by a healthy 7.7 percent in the January-March quarter, and is seen rising by 7.4 percent in fiscal 2018-19. If you read the Reserve Bank of India’s…
The sub-text to the debate on simultaneous elections is that BJP wants to further centralise power. In 2012, watching Manmohan Singh struggling with a disorderly coalition, an obstreperous cabinet, and a host of powerful state chief ministers, I wrote that he was the lone prime minister in a nation of presidents. In 2014, on the…
One of the smartest things Prime Minister Narendra Modi did after coming to power four years ago was to appoint diehard loyalists as state governors. They were either beholden to him or to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When the Congress was on top of the heap, it routinely…
Can momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha, state assemblies be achieved in one fell swoop? The momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies is growing, but can this be achieved in one fell swoop? If it is done in stages, it may take until 2024 at least to…
India boasts some of the best strategic brains in the world. But have we come up with a national consensus on how to tackle terror? Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack…
Perhaps Kinsey would have an exhilarating time if he were to conduct a survey among young Indian men on their sexual fears and phobias. We have a long way to go before we attain the permissiveness of the West, say some wise men. But what strikes any observer is the fact that. more than thirty…
This week CHAITANYA KALBAG takes off on Sasthi Brata’s best-selling novel “Confessions of an Indian Woman-Eater”. Vrata is one of those typical Indians who have followed in Nirad Chaudhuri’s footsteps: the man who lives off dishwashing in some seedy Gulf restaurant while writing home about the cushy job he’s got, working in pile-carpeted comfort. …
Fortnightly Take off on Bestsellers A short, spicy travelogue-cum-novel, “Train To Uzbekhistan” is replete with descriptions of the locomotive that hauls the assortion of bogies, one of which holds Dukhwant Singh. The author has drawn obvious inspiration from Agatha Christie and we find him attempting half-heartedly to describe the distribution of the compartments, just like…
Hovel is another masterpiece in analytical fiction by Bailey, whose previous successes included Hangar Zero Nine and Tyres. The book measures 11 cms by 18 cms, is printed on glazed 20 Ibs paper and is set in Monotype Garamond. The blurb on the jacket tells you that Bailey is a master at looking into…
I’ve been seeing too many Hindi movies. Talk about the bus system, or the weather, or your television set, and I prefer to opt out. But initiate a debate on the Relative Physiques Of Hindi Heroines, and I can walk away with the Dale Carnegie plaque. Which is why a lot of friends advised me,…
The Buns of Camerone is MacFat’s sixth book. The dust-jacket says it’s a thriller in the true Fleming Le Carre tradition. I would prefer to call it a thriller. it combines the preposterousness of a thriller with the eleventh-hour look of a filler. If you are ignorant of what ‘filler’ means, ask the nearest journalist. …
Take a dash of Proust and add a few drops of Sartre. Mix with a tablespoon of Ezekiel and set mixture in front of Vrinda Nabar on TV screen. When half-baked, sprinkle some grated poetry and simmer at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Garnish with scraps of leftist doctrines and dress with chopped Charminars. Add Nirad…
Our fourth bestseller take-off this fortnight is the controversial ‘Freedom at Midnight’, a book that sold the maximum hardcover editions in India in the past ten years. SLAVERY AT NOON by Harry Rollins and Feminique Rapierre. Published by Lucas. 555 pages, Rs. 55. The authors attempt to present fiction as pulp history. Rollins and…
Gone are the days of traffic jams on Thursday evenings when everyone rushed home to see Chhaya Geet. Gone also are the days when Kamleshwar spent hours telling us why the trains were not back on the tracks. Now it’s only affluent sons who buy TV sets so their parents can spend the evenings at…
One evening twenty years ago in Puttaparti, a village in Andhra Pradesh, a 60 year old man lay close to death. As his wife and daughter looked on anxiously his breathing became erratic and he went into a coma. An hour later, his body began to turn cold and the relatives clustered around his bedside,…
Nothing seems to work right in Manipur, and a combination of corruption, misgovernment, and unemployment, compounded by the continuing presence of the Army and various paramilitary forces, is fuelling the people’s frustration and aiding their drift towards rebellion. At first sight, Imphal is cloaked in quietude. It looks more like a small town than the…
The violence and the passions that have unleashed a caste war in Gujarat have found sympathetic onlookers in Tamil Nadu. These onlookers may not remain passive: they are already contemplating demonstrations of support for the anti-reservationists in Gujarat. “If it’s necessary, we’ll all go to Gujarat and join the agitation,” bursts out Mrs. Bagalakumari…
Not because it wants to solve the foreigners issue In Assam, a Chief Minister who is unpopular in her own party is being kept on, a minority government is being propped up, and the powers that be seem uninterested in solving the foreigners issue. In Manipur, the Assembly has been suspended while the Congress(I) works…
Chaitanya Kalbag The ‘poverty line’ is assumed to be consumption of Rs 65 per capita per month in rural areas and Rs 75 in urban areas at 1977-78 prices. On this basis in 1977-78, 306 million people in India were living below the ‘poverty line’, of whom 249 million were in rural areas and 57…
The first spark flew on 6 June. A Bengali shopkeeper at Lembucchara, 8 km from Agartala, lent a tribal friend of his a dao (sickle) to cut a pineapple with. Joking about the sickle’s blunt edge, the tribal tossed it back to the shopkeeper. It hit another tribal standing close by, wounding him negligibly. But…
The kisans got a free ride, and helped give the Congress(l) a lift Never had so many people gained so little from so heralded an event as the Kisan Rally in Delhi on 16 February. Estimates of the crowd gathered on the Rajpath lawns ranged from 2.5 million by Delhi Police Commissioner PS Bhinder to…
Poorly paid, snowed under by a huge backlog of pending cases, buffeted by the government’s attempts to manipulate judicial processes and appointments, our judiciary has not been able to preserve its independence. At the same time, our Constitution has been considerably tampered with by the legislature. What are the causes of this state of ,…
The ten-week-old agitation against reservations in Gujarat which has so far claimed 30 lives, is the second most serious agitation of its kind in the country since the Constitution was adopted in 1950. The first was in Bihar in 1978; it took 30 lives. Tamil Nadu is preparing to launch a similar agitation soon. While…
Four and a half years after it was struck by a terrible accident in which 375 miners died, the Chasnalla colliery is nowhere near being re-opened. Nor are the dead miners’ families in sight of a lasting solution for their problems. The road to Chasnalla is not an easily forgettable experience. The geography is that…
Rehabilitating the Chasnalla victims families has proved to be an on-going task. The Indian Iron and Steel Company’s welfare officers at Chasnalla wear a perpetually harassed look. Every day their offices are mobbed by complainants: relatives who allege desertion by widows who allege cheating by their dead husbands relatives; it is a noisy scene. fuelled…
“Chasnalla was unique”, said a civil servant in Patna. “The government moved very fast in rehabilitating the victims’ families. There were few delays, little red tape.” Had the government .set up a cell to monitor rehabilitation, to take follow-up action? “No,” said the civil servant, crestfallen. In Ranchi we met the legendary KB Saxena…
The next time you are talking about Indian films, don’t let your tongue slip into saying “the Bombay film industry” No longer is Bombay India’s film capital. In 1979, less Hindi films were produced than in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The Censors in Madras can barely keep up with the rush: last year, they had…
What is the current state of youth politics? Every youth organisation is dominated by the parent party and suffers from the prejudices of old politicians. Every youth organisation is dormant most of the time but takes to street warfare when roused. Youth politics are only a youthful version of the rot that has eaten into…
Has anything changed in the two Bihar villages that hit the headlınes? Six kilometres from Harnaut, the jeep broke down in the mud. The slipper-shod lady decided to continue her journey on elephant-back. Perched dangerously behind her and the mahout was another lady, a member of Parliament. It took the elephant three hours to reach…
By Chaitanya Kalbag ‘One hears the echoes of the movement for an independent Bangladesh in Assam today’, said a Dacca newspaper recently. The situation in Assam and the north-east is as difficult as it is complex. Although decades of political and economic indifference have pushed the Assamese into their present agitation, the movement has already…
Three documents seem to indicate that the Assam problem is not about to be easily solved. Intractable and increasingly aggressive, the Assam agitation last fortnight edged closer to ugly confrontation. The deadline for a Central government decision on the foreigners issue set by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Gana Sangram Parishad (GSP)…
There is some spectacular courting in this unique hotel in Delhi Western Court, an official hostelry in the heart of New Delhi, epitomises the decay of our political .system. It has become a classic symbol of everything that is corrupt, debauched and venal in our political life. Gossip about Western Court exploded into lurid fact…
It could have been a coincidence, but on 18 October Dr Basanti Dulal Nag Chaudhuri, ex-vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, was in Geneva; Dr Vidya Prakash Dutt, former pro-vice-chancellor of Delhi University and presently a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha and head of the department of Chinese and Japanese studies at Delhi University, was…
A thriller is the sort of book that you take to bed with you and then read on through the night, impatient that the pages aren’t turning fast enough. The sort of book whose ending you are tempted to read in the beginning just so that the agony of not knowing what happens or whodunit…
A line was crossed this Dussehra when Doordarshan broadcast the Vijaya Dashami speech by Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat, the Sarsanghachalak of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). That line divided the state and religion in India. We do not have a state religion, and we are not a religious state like Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran.…
Oh, what a glorious thing democracy is! If you add the number of festivals, weekends, hours spent in bad traffic, and election days in a typical working-age Indian’s life, chances are that she or he is beavering away for less than half the year. If we just had elections to all our state assemblies and…
It is difficult to judge Indian writing in English, saturated as it often is with the smells, sights and sounds of the ethos it springs from. Punjabi writing in English is a case in point. It carries strong overtones of the earthiness and directness of the people of that region. But if the writing is…
Just as a man casts off his old clothes only to wear new ones, says the Bhagvadgita, so does a man die only to be reborn. Somewhat the same kind of samsara was prescribed for this magazine, New Delhi. It was born in September 1978 and had six issues published. Though it did not die,…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
For prime minister Narendra Modi, 2015 has been an annus horribilis, bracketed by the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) waiting loss in the Delhi elections in February, and now the even more humiliating and momentous loss in Bihar. Bihar has been bruited about, mainly by the BJP, as a referendum on Modi’s popularity. Modi heavily invested…
Says the self-opinionated master. But he is also first-rate. By Chaitanya Kalbag I’m a very well known painter. I don’t care for those stultified art critics. It’s you ‘unknowledgeables’ – who can reach out on our behalf.” The ego behind that ‘well known painter’ remark is evident as is Biren De’s scorn for things conventional,…
High stakes gamble to change behavior Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing Writer NEW DELHI — Of all Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaigns, none, perhaps, is more consequential than the renewed push for his Swachh Bharat — or Clean India — Mission launched in October 2014. At first glance SBM was a mere rehash of…
Arvind Subramanian weighs impact of demonetization, GST and Air India sell-off Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — Political stability in India paved the way for root-and-branch reforms such as demonetization and the new Goods and Services Tax. But as one of the country’s key economic advisers acknowledged, they came at a cost: subdued growth…
Will Modi carry out fundamental reforms or continue to tinker? Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement Monday of a $2.5 billion program to take electricity to 40 million of India’s poorest households bore all the hallmarks of his recent economic policies. Two-thirds of the way into his five-year term,…
Despite apparent success, trouble spots range from growing corporate debt to sluggish job creation Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates his third anniversary in power on May 26, India’s economy seems to be firing on all cylinders. The country’s stock markets rose to record highs earlier in May. Exports have been…
Key state Uttar Pradesh is a political lynchpin: it sends the maximum number of representatives (80) to parliament’s lower house. It was home to nine of India’s 15 prime ministers. Modi, who forsook his own western state of Gujarat to win a parliamentary seat from Uttar Pradesh’s Hindu holy city of Varanasi in 2014, said…
Startup reaches for the moon in global competition Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — Just after Christmas this year, the spindly Team Indus Spacecraft, weighing 210 kg, will be shot into lunar orbit atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The rocket will blast off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s range on Srihari Kota…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes taking big steps and does not shy away from wagering his political capital. But he squandered quite a bit of it with his November demonetization measures, which banned 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes. Modi was widely expected to unveil bold new steps when…
No ‘big bang’ reforms but budget tries to be all things to all people Speaking after the budget was tabled in parliament, Modi said it took solid steps to fulfil the dreams of the poor. He coined a new acronym, FUTURE (farmers, underprivileged, transparency, urban rejuvenation, rural development and employment generation) to explain his goals. …
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer Indian markets, already skittish over Britain’s Brexit referendum, now must deal with the surprise announcement on June 18 by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan that he is stepping down when his three-year term ends on September 4. Tough, uncompromising and outspoken, Rajan, 53, appeared to be doing…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer Urjit Patel’s first press conference as governor of the Reserve Bank of India on Oct. 4 was notable for several reasons. The new keeper of India’s monetary flame, just shy of his 53rd birthday, was ill at ease. Very clearly the antithesis of his loquacious predecessor Raghuram Rajan, Patel’s “media interaction”…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer Every Indian bank note carries two reassuring messages: “Guaranteed by the central government,” and above the signature of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the words: “I promise to pay the bearer the sum of … rupees.” At midnight on Nov. 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used…
The past few weeks in India have been like drinking from a fire hose. Full-page newspaper advertisements, huge rallies and hosannas from giddy supporters have poured forth as the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party celebrates two years in power. There has also been a deluge of interviews You might also like with senior government ministers, a…
Modi’s war on black money has hit India’s economy. Is the price worth paying? Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer One month after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetization of 500 and 1,000-rupee banknotes in his battle against black money, policymakers in New Delhi are finally starting to acknowledge that the shock move has caused…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer Not surprisingly for a country obsessed with politics and gossip, the appointment of India’s new central bank chief has already spawned reams of newsprint and hours of television talk-time on what makes Urjit Ravindra Patel tick. Two words sum up Patel: low key. Unlike other deputy governors of the Reserve Bank…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI – Although his three-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India was one of the shortest in the last 25 years, Raghuram Rajan will leave a pair of very large shoes to fill after his departure on Sept. 4. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is taking…
Dozens of olympiads and years of discussion and disappointments later, India is still athletically a huge zero, says Chaitanya Kalbag. 1976 promises to be a year to remember: with five Sundays in February, America’s Bicentennial, and the Olympics in Montreal. Right now, July’s looming up on the horizon. The Olympic Games are scheduled to begin…
You’re a member of the Hindi film audience. You see most of the films in town. You listen to the songs regularly on the radio. And you try humming a few bars in your bathroom. How long do you actually remember the words, or the music, of a Hindi film song? Agreed there are…
Authoritarianism may have professedly ended with the Emergency, but it continues to afflict many walks of our life. It has raised its ugly head, from time to time, in the country’s premier educational institutions. Young people, supposedly “tomorrow’s leaders”, are systematically subjected to stifling control, unenlightened concepts of discipline, and any protests they raise are…
Fourteen years younger than VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and was educated in Trinidad and Oxford. He began writing in college, and his short stories were accepted for Penguin Modern Stories 4. His first novel, Fireflies, was published at the end of 1971. and his second, The Chip-Chip Gatherers,…
He points out the challenges awaiting his successor Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI Although his three-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India was one of the shortest in the last 25 years, Raghuram Rajan will leave a pair of very large shoes to fill after his departure on Sept. 4. The…
Modi has one job: Get India’s lazy tiger of an economy to roar Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley will have two tough acts to follow when he stands in a few hours to present India’s budget for 2015-16. The first: On Feb. 26, railway minister Suresh Prabhu did a rousing, clackety-clack rendition of the railway…
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), it is a make-or-break election in Assam. Of the four states and one union territory going to the polls in April and May, Assam is the only one where the BJP–having suffered defeats in Delhi and Bihar–stands a decent chance of snatching power. Except in…
The issue of citizenship in India has been rendered very complex by a thicket of laws, rules, and executive fiats. Article 6 of the Constitution says anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19, 1948, must apply for citizenship. It is also governed by the Foreigners Act of 1946, the Passport…
The badmen in films only make good punching-bags for the heroes and fight-composers, says CHAITANYA KALBAG. Picture Little Red Riding Hood, seated in a cinema house looking at a Hindi movie. When the drums growl and the shadows lengthen, when the script says it’s time for evil, when the hoi polloi shift to the edge of…
Zaherra is one of those unfortunates who are jinxed from the word ‘go’. Sometime back she said, “What’s not in a name?” and changed the ‘I’ in Zahirra to an ‘e’. But Zaherra is still lost in the wilderness. She does not even have a Russian fiancé like Katy (Cypher) Mirza, to console herself with,…
Chaitanya Kalbag “I’m what some people call a teenage star. But really. I think I’ve just been lucky. I’m told that I was born on the night of December 28. 1951, precisely at the moment the first star appeared in the sky over Bombay. If so, that star was a good omen because many wonderful,…
Nine Film Personalities Discuss Their Dream Schemes! “India” said James Shepherd in a recent issue of TIME, “stamps out movies like cookies – and most are just as durable.” At once, our film critics, the tribe that revels in dissecting and deprecating nine out of every ten Hindi films that are churned out by our…
Chaitanya Kalbag The traffic noise from the flyover outside the window was deafening and I could barely hear what Baljit Singh Brar was saying. Brar edits Jalandhar’s Aaj Di Awaz newspaper, aptly named, amid the din. “Where is Bhindranwale’s son?” I had to shout. He pointed at the man sitting quietly at the corner of…
It took me eight months to discover that I was living next door to a film person. And that too, because the chap appeared in a “daring, all-clothes-barred” gatefold In a girlie mag. Yes. My neighbour was there in B & W. in all his hairy, slightly paunchy evidence. Undressed. In disabille. There was a…
By Chaitanya Kalbag On four Rock evenings beginning Christmas Eve, a few hundred Bombayites filled the Bhulabhai Desai auditorium to watch, and to listen to, the Theatre Group weave two and odd hours of phantasmagoric GODSPELL. The musical presentation of the Gospel according to St. Mathew was produced and directed by Pearl Padamsee. GODSPELL, conceived…
Has the media lost the plot in the more wired world of today? It was a year bracketed by the Delhi gangrape and the Tehelka train wreck, and you would be hard put to find another period since our colonial masters departed when journalism was in worse odor in India. It is not just the…
A really good film should not be concerned so much with its plot, as with its characters and the interplay of those characters. Though the characters, the intelligent filmmaker aims at establishing in the consciousness of the spectators the elements that would lead them to the idea he wants to communicate; he attempts to place…
By Chaitanya Kalbag Kem Chho, Chandra Bhai? Fine, I see. Thought I’d discover what makes you tick. Tell me what’s doing. Chandra Barot does not answer at once. He’s busy buttoning his cuff. And then: I’m directing Don. And this is keeping me on my toes right now. It’s a fun experience, shooting…
Russell’s films on composers deal with subjects very neurotic and with personal disorders. If they were not neurotic, Russell feels, they would not have written their music. Their obsession endows them with a different kind of vision. Making a biographical film 100 minutes long is quite a tough proposition, Especially when it’s on the…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team have had a lot of time to polish the report card on their year in power. I woke up on Anniversary Day determined, like Norman Vincent Peale, to feel The Power of Positive Thinking. Whatever the opinion polls or the trolls on Twitter said, we had to be…
An American who acts in Hindi movies? And who’s Indian except for his fair skin and blond hair? “I don’t believe it” was the reaction of most people who met Tom Alter at the recent screening of diploma films arranged by Mr. Girish Karnad, the Director of the Film and Television of India, at Bombay.…
Mr. Girish Karnad, the Director of the Film and Television Institute of India, Poona, arranged a screening of the Diploma Films 1974, on the 1st and 2nd September in Bombay. In his brief introduction Mr. Karnad said the Diploma films were characterised by two points: students made films on subjects which they would not normally…
Rajika Kirpalani did not believe in gods of any kind. Yet she must have been beloved of them, for she died young— too young for those who knew her. While speaking on the telephone on the 1st of February, 1974, she was struck down by a massive cerebral haemorrhage. She was just 24. A year…
Chaitanya Kalbag Pandit Giriraj is one of the few virtuosos of the “gayaki” school of sitar music in India. He recently completed a two-and-a-half month tour of European cities in mid-November. This tour followed close on the heels of another extensive West German tour of his in early 1974. Giriraj’s winter musical itinerary mostly covered…
Chaitanya Kalbag If you’re the sort of person who expects value for every paisa you spend, go see Sholay, 23 reels and three and a half hours later, you’ll stagger out of the auditorium and gulp in the sweet air outside. Your ears will have been assailed by stereophonic sound (If the theatre had facilities…
Chaitanya Kalbag The Goan Institute presented its maiden theatrical production on the 25th of August at the St. Xavier’s School Auditorium. Written and directed by Derek Antao, the play, REQUIEM FOR A PROFESSOR, had a plot which sagged so much that the seams were discernible at times. Lloyd D’Mello, as the ageing Professor Joe Varella,…
Which party will you vote for? It is a bit like England’s witch trials in the middle ages. You were dunked in water as a test; if you did not drown you were pronounced a sorceress and burnt at the stake. Whichever government you elect, the choice is not clear, clean, and comforting. By now…
Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the choices facing the nation. They were exercised by the epic corruption and mis-governance,…
Several moons ago, a car driver in Chennai told me the fascinating story of a young man whom he drove around in Coimbatore during the 2009 general elections. At every stop, the driver said, the young man would return with a bulging sack that he would stuff into the boot. The young man was collecting…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who will wield power over us for the next five years. Many of us believe that these elections will be decided…
The end of campaigning in Amethi in a cacophony of anger, derogation, and obloquy was briefly leavened by “Twitter joining Rajinikanth.” The Superstar’s followers piled up at the rate of 20,000 an hour. Not even Narendra Modi, one of the Thalaivar’s first followers, could have matched that. Fantasy had trumped politics. As if in affirmation,…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning, most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
I was hard put on Wednesday to find an advertisement remembering Rajiv Gandhi on the anniversary of his assassination. It was a telling contrast with a few months ago when the newspapers were flooded, just before the elections were announced, with ads extolling UPA II’s achievements. Political parties do suffer huge losses, but nothing has…
The Rajyabhishek in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt was a sight for sore eyes, and understandably some of us went ape even if we were not among the 4,000 people attending Narendra Modi’s oathtaking. It was still a modest event compared with the 1.8 million people who attended Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration. Talking about…
If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of independence (I have Amitabh Bachchan to thank for this nugget). The movie “Great Expectations” was also launched in 1947. That fits in with the sentiment nationwide. The expectations are scary because we have dug ourselves…
It seemed like the rhyming slogans, the election jingles, and the grandiloquence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto were all that we needed to shake us out of our psychic numbing during the past few years. Alliteration hit you everywhere you turned. Narendra Modi told a small audience last Sunday that we needed to ramp…
Three weeks and counting, and besides a bit of soft power-mongering there is no flurry of executive actions to take away one’s breath. Our impatience is understandable, but then the new dispensation is taking its lumps. Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned party workers in Goa that we will have to swallow bitter medicine if we…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
Our members of Parliament sowed the wind in the 15th Lok Sabha and are reaping the whirlwind in the 16th Lok Sabha. The last Lok Sabha worked only for 61 per cent of its scheduled time, the worst in the past half-century. The Bharatiya Janata Party was in very aggressive opposition to the United Progressive…
When a little girl named Topsy is asked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if she knew who made her, she says “I expect I grow’d.” This Thursday, July 10, Arun Jaitley will declare financial independence when he unveils the Union Budget for 2014/15 without the Planning Commission breathing down his neck. True, the budget drafters in…
Change comes stealing in on padded feet in the Narendra Modi government, and change is starting to happen in the offices of his ministers. One of them told me that when he took office, at least eight officials had to sign off on any file that came to him for approval; he has cut that…
This weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Nepal on his third foreign trip in ten weeks. By the end of September, he will also have visited Japan and the United States. Looming large on his itinerary will be China, which he visited four times as Gujarat’s chief minister in his quest for investments.…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
It was a very Hindu week, starting with Raksha Bandhan and ending with Janmashthami, and midway through we were treated to fireworks by Yogi Adityanath, the bold new face of the Bharatiya Janata Party. A five-time member of the Lok Sabha from Gorakhpur, he was just 26 when he won his first parliamentary seat in…
Somewhere, through the unbearable din of television and anti-social media this week, I saw one tweet that plaintively asked why we were hearing so much from everybody but not enough from Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit in Brazil. Our prime minister met the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, but coverage back…
It is a war without end, a no-win situation in which nobody can provide answers to some questions: How long will this go on? Which side will eventually prevail? What is the cost to the nation in money, matériel, men?
This was has no name. It is more an endless series of skirmishes than a sustained military confrontation. Yet, this war has been raging intermittently for 26 years in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram.
New Delhi, May 13 (Reuters) – Pakistan’s test launch of its longest-range missile last month triggered this week’s series of underground nuclear tests by India, a senior Indian official said on Wednesday.
In a briefing for Western news agencies hours after India stunned the world with two more underground nuclear blasts, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, set forth the rationale for the tests in unambiguous terms.
“No more tests are planned,” he said.
Calcutta, India, June 15 (Reuters) – The leader of the world’s oldest democratically elected communist government looked back on his 20 years in power, and said he was proud of his achievements in a “capitalist feudalist” society. Jyoti Basu, the 82-year-old chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, told Reuters in an interview late on Saturday…
New Delhi, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s Gujarat state aims to be a primary focus for foreign investors, particularly in infrastructure like ports, power and roads, the leader of the west coast province said on Monday. “The word industrialization is humming in Gujarat’s air. Above all the government is investor-friendly,” Chief Minister Dilip Parikh told…
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin the ride into the city, you will be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of them. Your car or taxicab will plough into the slow crowds like some tropical icebreaker. The…
INFORMATION & BROADCASTING MINISTER L.K. ADVANI
‘I Am Not Happy with The Pattern of Newspaper Ownership’
Transindia: Mr. Advani, many people feel today that the Janata Government’s image is quite clean, and that it is innately decent, but that its performance has been quite poor. Would you comment on that?
L.K. Advani: This impression is erroneous, though if people hold that impression, I wouldn’t blame them because we came into office in a situation in which the people expect- ed wonders from us.
Transindia: Mr. Chandra Shekhar, do you think you have one of the most thankless jobs in the country today, what with having to build up a party composed of such varied components as the Janata is?
Chandra Shekhar: I agree that we have had to create a party from scratch. But I would not say that my job is thankless. There are certain advantages which one cannot ignore and there are many difficulties, too.
It took me some time to discover Rasipuram Krishna Swami Narayan’s house. Yadavagiri, the suburb of Mysore City, where Narayan stays, is an incredibly quiet area, with long, neat streets, tree-shaded bungalows lining them. It was late afternoon, and the neighborhood was just emerging from its siesta. “R. K. Narayan?” asked the passerby I stopped,…
‘One has to learn new competencies’ Few of us know that KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, produced the critically acclaimed Hindi movie Black. Or that he has taken up pistol shooting as a hobby. Or that his teenage son is a keen photographer, but he knows a thing or two about…
Is Drinking A Ritual? Then I Think It Is Better to Close Our Diplomatic Missions! The appointment is at 1 pm at the Prime Minister’s Office in South Block. These imposing stone buildings, a few hundred yards away from Rashtrapati Bhavan, contain the offices of most of India’s government leaders. A surprisingly courteous Reception Officer enters…
The Government Is Helping Create A Privileged Class!’ Professor C.N. Vakil, eminent economist, formerly Director, School of Economics and Sociology, University of Bombay, and Director, Central Board, Reserve Bank of India: “The Janata government was suddenly thrust into power, and there was hardly any coherence between the various constituents of the Party. So decisions were…
‘My view has always been I don’t care about the topline’ Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy has seen it all: bootstrapping an enterprise with what is loose change today, going on sales calls riding pillion on a Vespa scooter, walking away from a GE deal because it was leaving little profit on the table, setting…
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that have passed since Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister…
Chaitanya Kalbag Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The…
Eighteen hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in the Chandigarh Raj Bhavan’s large reception hall. “This is Haryana!” yelled apoplectic Lok Dal MLAs, eyes blood-shot, neck veins bulging, pressing around the diminutive Tapase in a knee-touching, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.…
Been away from India for some years? Planning to go back this year, family in tow, for a long vacation? If the answer is ‘Yes’ to both questions chances are you’d like to meet old friends, and relatives; to visit remembered places; most of all, you’d love to ‘do the country’—a trans-subcontinental jaunt to catch…
CONGRESS PARTY PRESIDENT- BRAHMANANDA REDDY “We Will Return to Power Soon” Transindia: Mr. Reddy, many people feel that the Congress Party has had a great past, but does not have a great future. Would you like to comment on that? Brahmananda Reddy: That the Congress Party had a great and glorious past is accepted by…
“Going in quest there of, one of our Soldiers, a Youth, killed a Tigre-Royal; it was brought home by 30 or 40 Combies (Koonbee), the Body tied to a long Bamboo, the Tail extended…it was a Tigre of the Biggest and Noblest Kind, Five Feet in Length beside the Tail, Three and a Half in…
Violence is an unfortunate fact of life in Delhi University. That was bloodily emphasized on February 16 when Dilip Simeon, 32, history lecturer at Ramjas College, was savagely beaten up by six men on his way to work. The lecturer’s multiple fractures came as the flash-point of an acrimonious feud between college Principal Dr. Kartar…
Union Home Minister Prakash Chand Sethi has elevated the art of governance to a fine degree of pettifoggery. Political interference in the bureaucracy is not unusual, but Sethi is exhibited a penchant for intervention in personnel promotions. In the process, he has heightened the siege mentality of the Central Secretariat Service (CSS), which is constantly…
“I have said that we will never take to nuclear weapons even if this country is going to be destroyed in the absence of (such weapons). I will not take to it, even if the whole world takes to it.” …
Optimism is good, but let’s not be foolhardy. Chaitanya Kalbag It is good that we are feeling bucked up at the beginning OF 2018. Major economies expect growth in tandem for the first time since the global financial crisis of 2008. World trade is seen growing at a decent clip after two slow years. Commodity prices…
13 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 13 (Reuters) – The resemblance to Indira Gandhi is eerie—the sari draped over the head, the dark glasses, the high-pitched oratory, the imperious wave of the hand. Even her signature “Jai Hind!” (Victory to India) at the end of every campaign…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Feb 14 (Reuters) – The leader of India’s main opposition party said on Saturday he was the target of a series of car bomb blasts that killed at least 31 people, wounded up to 100, and triggered rioting and arson in the city of Coimbatore. The violence was the worst…
15 February 1998 The Washington Post A30 Copyright 1998, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved The leader of India’s main opposition party said today he was the target of a series of car-bomb blasts that killed 32 people, wounded as many as 100 and triggered rioting and arson in the city of Coimbatore. The…
16 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Indian voters queued up early on Monday to cast their votes as the world’s largest democracy launched the first phase of a mid-term election that is widely predicted to return another hung parliament. At least 250 million adults are…
22 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 22 (Reuters) – “Watch this space.” The website of India’s 112-year-old Congress party promises to introduce the “most popular, most charismatic and most dynamic political figures” in India—but there are no names. “This section will be up soon,” the page says limply.…
1 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 1 (Reuters) – Indians waited uneasily on Sunday for official results from a drawn-out election that looks set to confirm their worst fears of more political instability in a hung parliament. State television Doordarshan forecast large gains for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya…
3 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 3 (Reuters) – India’s Bharatiya Janata Party appeared tantalisingly close on Tuesday to realising its dream of ruling this vast nation, but its leaders were not rapturous. With results in for 504 of the 545 seats in parliament’s lower house, the…
10 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 10 (Reuters) – India was set on Tuesday for a new coalition government led by Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee. Vajpayee, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was invited by President K.R. Narayanan to form a new federal government, ending…
15 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 15 (Reuters) – Atal Behari Vajpayee received the green light on Sunday to form India’s next government, but his coalition is likely to be even more shaky than the one it replaced. Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will take power…
19 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 19 (Reuters) – Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee took office on Thursday as India’s new prime minister at the head of a minority coalition government. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and over a dozen regional allies will have to face a…
3 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 3 (Reuters) – India’s defence minister said on Sunday China had built a sophisticated electronic surveillance base in Myanmar’s Coco Islands and was beefing up airfields in Tibet to take supersonic fighters. “China has installed sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment in the Coco…
11 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 11 (Reuters) – India’s three underground nuclear tests on Monday were heralded by plentiful portents and a steady rise in the political temperature on the subcontinent. One day before he took power in March, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee served notice…
11 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 12 (Reuters) – India prepared on Tuesday to face the world’s shock and dismay over its three underground nuclear tests, and its faltering government appeared to have won sweeping domestic backing for its bold and defiant step. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya…
12 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 12 (Reuters) – India was engulfed by waves of international anger and revulsion on Tuesday, but its leaders dug in their heels and appeared ready to pay the price for audaciously stepping over the nuclear threshold. Monday’s stunning trio of underground nuclear…
14 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 14 (Reuters) – India woke up on Thursday to the first full day of biting sanctions ordered by a furious United States after a series of underground nuclear tests provoked outrage from around the world. Global condemnation continued to rain down on…
17 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 17 (Reuters) – “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One…I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” These words from the Hindu…
27 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – India’s nuclear tests alone will not make the country a major power unless twinned with rapid economic development, Defence Minister George Fernandes said on Wednesday. “I believe that India has remained a very soft state, soft in every sense…
27 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – In June 1976, after a year in hiding, George Fernandes was arrested on Charges of waging war against the state and paraded in manacles before the cameras. The firebrand chairman of India’s Socialist Party was accused of being a…
29 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – The Indian government reacted calmly on Thursday to news of Pakistan’s tit-for-tat nuclear tests and said Islamabad had forced New Delhi to embark on the road to nuclear deterrence. “India is ready to meet any challenge,” Prime Minister Atal…
29 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – India’s defence minister said on Thursday he did not think nuclear deterrence would help resolve the dispute over Kashmir and dismissed Pakistan’s nuclear tests as “ping-pong balls”. Asked if “equal deterrence” would pave the way for India and Pakistan…
29 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 29 (Reuters) – India and Pakistan must now sit down and talk peace seriously, Indian analysts said on Friday, adding they saw little chance of a new Cold War on the volatile subcontinent after Pakistan’s nuclear tests. “Deterrence” and “nuclear arms race”…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, June 2 (Reuters) – India’s Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha put up a spirited defence of his “investor-friendly” budget on Tuesday and said he was not unduly worried about inflation so long as the economy grew strongly. In an interview with Reuters Television a day after he unveiled the federal budget for…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, June 3 (Reuters) – India’s fiscal targets for the current year are not just a “hope and a prayer” even if there is a trade-off between growth and Inflation, the government’s chief economic adviser said on Wednesday. Shankar Acharya told Reuters he did not agree with critics who had labelled Finance…
7 August 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited SRINAGAR, India, Aug 6 (Reuters) – A who’s who of Indian Kashmiris turned out in their finest on Thursday to cheer as the state’s leading politician urged the poor of this violence-scarred city to forget their woes and go see a movie. Eight years after…
31 July 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 31 (Reuters) – The collapse of efforts to revive peace talks between India and Pakistan was inevitable, and the stalemate will endure but with a dangerous new dimension given the neighbours’ nuclear status, analysts said on Friday. “The stalemate will continue,” said…
1 May 1988 Reuters News English (c) 1988 Reuters Limited MANILA, May 1, Reuter – India is loosening controls on industry, investment and imports but liberalisation must take account of existing conditions, Finance Minister Narain Dutt Tiwari told Reuters in an interview. Tiwari, in Manila for the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank, denied…
6 August 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited SRINAGAR, India, Aug 6 (Reuters) – The general commanding Indian troops in the tinderbox Kashmir valley said on Thursday he did not think cross-border artillery duels with Pakistan would escalate into a nuclear exchange. “There is no linkage between the nuclear tests and the situation…
Chaitanya Kalbag SRINAGAR, India, Aug 7 (Reuters) – India and Pakistan could wage nuclear war over the disputed territory of Kashmir, the leader of the separatists in Indian-controlled Kashmir said. “The situation is going from bad to worse… Kashmir is the root cause of the tension between India and Pakistan. If the problem is not…
Chaitanya Kalbag BARAMULLA, India, Aug 9 (Reuters) – Mahendra Kumar is a typical “sepoy”, the lowest rank in the Indian Army. After 14 years in uniform, the native of the impoverished northern state of Bihar is paid about 5,000 rupees ($117) a month. On paper, he gets two months’ vacation every year, and otherwise is…
29 November 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party swept to electoral victory in three key states on Sunday, raising the prospect of a power struggle with the Hindu nationalist-led central government. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi said she was in no hurry to oust the…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s wounded Bharatiya Janata Party should ram through an agenda of bold economic reform in the aftermath of its humbling in three key provincial elections, a senior official of the rival Congress party said on Sunday. Voters spoke with their wallets and delivered a stinging rebuff to…
1 December 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Mercedes-Benz India Ltd is bullish about the Indian car market despite the nation’s “feel bad” economy, managing director Till Becker de Freitas said. “There is a ‘feel bad” factor which is not reflected in reality. I know a lot…
10 December 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 10 (Reuters) – BankAmerica Corp will sell its retail banking business in India but remains committed to its wholesale banking business in the country, a senior bank official said on Thursday. “The bank will continue its wholesale banking business in India,” Josephine…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, March 29 (Reuters) – At least nine people died in two north Indian towns hit by a severe cluster of earthquakes early on Monday, police said, and more casualties were expected as news trickled in from the remote mountainous region. The first powerful earthquake measured 6.8 on the open-ended Richter scale,…
25 April 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, April 25 (Reuters) – What do a former housewife who speaks Italian-accented Hindi, a former movie glamour girl now dubbed a “Revolutionary Leader”, and the world’s longest serving elected communist leader have in common? All three unlikely partners have struggled over the…
18 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 17 (Reuters) – Sonia Gandhi spent 16 years observing India’s most consummate political chess player – her mother-in-law – and on Monday showed she knew a gambit or two. Faced with a revolt by three veteran colleagues, the Italian-born Sonia handed…
26 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 25 (Reuters) – Afghan mercenaries, likely commanded by Pakistani army officers, have dug themselves into high positions on India’s side of a ceasefire line dividing Kashmir, a senior Indian defence official said on Tuesday. Three weeks of sharp skirmishing has raised temperatures…
24 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 24 (Reuters) – Japan is keen on expanding investment in India but finds its bureaucracy extremely inflexible, a senior Japanese official said on Thursday. Nobuaki Tanaka, deputy director-general in Japan’s Foreign Ministry, said India accounts for a minuscule 0.25 percent of Japan’s…
28 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 28 (Reuters) – India’s Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral has caused anger and confusion in both his country and neighboring Pakistan with an apparent about-face on talks with Muslim militants in Kashmir. Gujral stunned friends and foes alike on Saturday by announcing during…
26 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 26 (Reuters) – India on Wednesday launched its first peacetime air strikes in Kashmir and warned Pakistan not to interfere as New Delhi used force to dislodge guerrillas. The raids marked the worst turn in ties with Pakistan since the neighbours tested…
27 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – India was on a roll on Wednesday. It unleashed a stunning series of air strikes against Muslim guerrillas holed up in the hostile heights of Kashmir. It successfully test-fired a naval version of its short-range surface-to-air Trishul missile, joined…
28 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – India suffered a sharp reverse on Thursday in its air strikes against high-altitude intruders in Kashmir but lashed out angrily at Pakistan for its “hostile and provocative” act of downing two Indian jet fighters. The bitter foes stood close…
27 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 26 (Reuters) – India unleashed two waves of air strikes on Wednesday to flush out guerrillas dug in on its side of a Kashmir ceasefire line, sharply raising temperatures on the nuclear-armed subcontinent. The use of air power was India’s first…
29 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – India suffered a second setback on Friday in its air campaign to root out infiltrators from its part of Kashmir when guerrillas brought down an attack helicopter with a Stinger missile, killing all four crewmen. The use of the…
29 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – India suffered a second setback on Friday in an air campaign to root out infiltrators from its part of Kashmir when guerrillas brought down an attack helicopter with a Stinger missile, killing all four crewmen. The use of the…
30 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 30 (Reuters) – A top Indian official said on Sunday it was up to Pakistan to “undo what it has done” in Kashmir if the nuclear-armed neighbours were to step back from a growing confrontation over the Himalayan territory. “When other…
20 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, NOV 20, Reuters – Whoever wins this week’s Indian elections will face some knotty economic problems, but analysts believe the nation will continue to open up to the world. “Liberalisation will have to continue whichever government comes in. This is economic reality,” said…
1 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 1 (Reuters) – India will not halt its air and ground assault against “infiltrators” in Kashmir even if Pakistan’s foreign minister arrives in New Delhi for talks on the crisis, senior Indian officials said on Tuesday. “There is no pre-condition” for the…
21 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 21, Reuters – The leader of an increasingly powerful rightwing Hindu party said on Tuesday that India faces instability if the opposition alliance he backs wins this week’s elections. Lal Krishna Advani of the revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was harsh in…
2 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 1 (Reuters) – India’s External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said on Tuesday there would be “no relenting” on air and ground operations in Kashmir, and accused Pakistan’s military of connivance with “armed intruders”. “There will be no relenting on any ground operations…
21 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited Calcutta, Nov 21, Reuters – The six Bengalis splashing around a fire hydrant inches from cursing bus-drivers in the evening traffic are worried about their daily bath. “Election? What election? I have a holiday on polling day and plan to visit my mother,” says Barun…
13 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 13 (Reuters) – India and Pakistan, daggers drawn in Kashmir, held a dialogue of the deaf on Saturday. The stand-off set some Indian newspapers speculating whether they were on the path to a wider war. India is waging a costly air and…
22 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, NOV 22, Reuter – Political instability likely to result from this week’s elections could dangerously slow India’s economic growth, economic analysts said. They said the new government could also face a resource crisis brought on by plunging foreign exchange reserves, unbridled domestic demand…
17 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 17 (Reuters) – India’s Finance Secretary Vijay Kelkar said on Thursday the economy was on a high growth path and was expected to grow at over six percent in 1999/2000 (April-March). “The economy is now on a higher growth path. In 1999/2000,…
22 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Reuter – Political instability likely to result from this week’s elections could slow India’s growth dangerously, analysts said on Wednesday. They said the new government would also face a resource crisis brought on by plunging foreign exchange reserves, unbridled domestic demand and a…
29 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 29 (Reuters) – Consumer electronics firm Philips India Ltd has shed nearly a third of its staff over the past five years, but is still not slim enough to achieve optimum shareholder value, its chief said. Asked if Philips India, 51 percent-owned…
Chaitanya Kalbag CHAMKAUR SAHIB, India, Nov 23, Reuter – Long before Bimal Kaur Khalsa’s motorcade churns into dusty view across the Punjab countryside, the waiting crowds are chanting militant Sikh slogans. Khalsa, widow of one of prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassins, has come to symbolise the anger and alienation that have plunged the north Indian…
4 July 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 4 (Reuters) – India’s commanders are fighting with “one arm tied behind them” as they contain battles in Kashmir within Indian territory and resist the temptation to widen the theatre of combat, senior defence officials say. In conversations over the weekend with…
24 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited LUDHIANA, India, Nov 24, Reuter – At least 26 people were killed on Friday on the second day of India’s general election, taking the death toll in the three-stage poll in the world’s largest democracy to 60. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi meanwhile brought his campaign…
8 July 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 8 (Reuters) – India’s army has recaptured key points in Kashmir and eased the pressure on a strategic highway, but there are still more than 1,000 infiltrators clinging to high ridges, a senior defence official said on Thursday. Painting a detailed picture…
Chaitanya Kalbag LUDHIANA, India, Nov 24, Reuters – Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi wound up an exhausting election campaign on Friday, addressing a sparse crowd standing up to its ankles in mud. Chief rival Vishwanath Pratap Singh ended his campaign jubilant. “Congress will be routed,” Singh told an impromptu roadside news conference in Uttar Pradesh…
18 July 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 18 (Reuters) – Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh on Sunday urged Pakistan to endorse the “inviolability” of a military control line in Kashmir and halt support for Islamic militants in Indian territory. “Inherent in the inviolability aspect of the LOC is certainly…
Chaitanya Kalbag CHANDIGARH, India, Nov 26, Reuters – India’s bloody general election entered its final stage on Sunday with an exit poll from earlier voting predicting that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi faces major losses. The survey, conducted by the independent India Today magazine, forecast neither Gandhi nor the opposition National Front alliance would get a…
27 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 27, Reuter – A giant petrochemical project could hold a clue to whether India’s main communist party will throw its weight behind Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as he heads towards an election defeat. Gandhi’s Congress party appeared on Monday to be…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, NOV 28, Reuters – Political instability in India may be in prospect after inconclusive national elections, but industrialists and economists said they expected business to carry on as usual. They said industry’s energetic growth over the past five years had generated its own momentum. “This country, fortunately, is not run by…
27 August 1991 Reuters News English (c) 1991 Reuters Limited TOKYO, Reuters – India hopes to receive substantial financial aid from a consortium of donors next month, Finance Secretary Sriranga Shukla said on Tuesday. Shukla, in Tokyo for talks ahead of the September 19-20 meeting in Paris, said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World…
Chaitanya Kalbag TOKYO, Reuters – India intends to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for more contingency funds, although foreign reserves are at a very comfortable level, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh said. Singh, who has spearheaded a series of sweeping reforms that have turned India’s socialist economic policies on their head, was interviewed by Reuters…
6 August 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NAMBLA, India, Aug 6 (Reuters) – The people of Nambla are sitting ducks in the world’s deadliest game of target practice, and their fear hangs in the air, thick with the smell of cordite. At least 500 Pakistani shells have landed in this once idyllic…
8 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 8 (Reuters) – India rejects fears by “yesterday’s imperialists or today’s new imperialists” that it may not be able to handle its nuclear arsenal, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said on Saturday. Asked to comment on Western fears that India and Pakistan lacked…
31 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 31 (Reuters) – India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes said on Monday he had “irrefutable evidence” that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had been kept in the dark by his military commanders about the Kashmir infiltration. But Fernandes, speaking to Reuters in an…
31 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 31 (Reuters) – India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes said on Monday he was sure Pakistan’s military chiefs would not resort to the use of nuclear weapons against India because they would “liquidate” their own country In the process. Asked if the Kashmir…
13 July 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 13 (Reuters) – Watching vanquished Islamic guerrillas retreat to Pakistan, India’s top general fears they will return as Islamabad reverts to running a “proxy war” in Kashmir. Chief of Army Staff General Ved Prakash Malik said comments by Pakistan’s political leaders in…
18 July 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 18 (Reuters) – India’s military intelligence chief said on Sunday that Pakistan’s foray in disputed Kashmir had been “tactically ambitious, but strategically a disaster”. But India would have to keep troops in the area to fend off future attacks, Lieutenant-General R.K. Sawhney…
5 September 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Little more than half of 166 million eligible voters took part in the first round of India’s general election on Sunday in a poll widely predicted to deliver the first majority government in 15 years. Five people died in…
22 April 1993 Reuters News English (c) 1993 Reuters Limited TOKYO, April 22, Reuters – One of the architects of India’s radical economic reforms said on Thursday the changes sweeping the country were irreversible despite recent religious and political strife. “Now there is no doubt about the permanence and irreversibility of reform. You cannot re-erect…
15 April 2003 Reuters News English (c) 2003 Reuters Limited ISLAMABAD, April 15 (Reuters) – Pakistan’s foreign minister on Tuesday warned India of massive retaliation if it tried to launch a pre-emptive strike on his country, arguing that Islamabad had a more advanced missile programme than New Delhi. Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri described as “irresponsible”…
Chaitanya Kalbag TOKYO, Sept 21 (Reuters) – India’s new telecommunications policy will open the domestic market to foreign firms, end a century-old state monopoly and aim to provide 60 telephones for every 1,000 people by 2000, a minister said on Wednesday. India now has 9.64 telephones per 1,000, one of the lowest densities in the…
6 February 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 6 (Reuters) – The leader of India’s Kashmir region said on Thursday he did not think a nuclear war would erupt on the subcontinent over the disputed territory. “I think India has never thought of using a nuclear option, and Pakistan would…
26 March 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 26 (Reuters) – Salman Haidar will be an immovable object facing a resistible force when he sits down this Friday for India’s first talks with Pakistan in three years. Haidar, India’s Foreign Secretary or seniormost diplomat, inspires strong feelings, not all warm,…
27 May 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – India is determined to grant autonomy to state-controlled television and radio, Information and Broadcasting Minister Jaipal Reddy said. Reddy, a leader of the Janata Dal, the largest group in India’s ruling centre-left coalition, told Reuters in an interview late…
15 June 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited CALCUTTA, India, June 15 (Reuters) – India is not likely to see a return to one-party rule, a leader of the current ruling coalition said. Jyoti Basu said his Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), which has made a success of multi-party politics, had valuable…
Chaitanya Kalbag BOMBAY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – India’s largest truck and bus maker Tata, riding a dramatic return to profits and fuelled by new global ambitions, expects to see explosive growth starting in 2006, a senior executive said on Tuesday. Ravi Kant, executive director of the commercial vehicle unit of Tata Motors, said robust domestic…
9 December 2003 Reuters News English (c) 2003 Reuters Limited BOMBAY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – Hindalco Industries, a leading Indian maker of non-ferrous metals, aims to expand its aluminium and copper capacity through expansion and acquisitions to attain global reach, its managing director said on Tuesday. Hindalco is the flagship of India’s third-largest conglomerate by…
28 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 28 (Reuter) – India’s Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral performed one more of his apparent policy flip-flops over the weekend, this time over the sensitive issue of Kashmir. Gujral stunned friends and foes alike on Saturday by holding out an olive branch…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Dec 11 (Reuters) – India hopes to reduce its dependence on imported crude to half its requirement in seven years from 70 percent as a result of new domestic oil and gas discoveries, Oil Minister Ram Naik told Reuters on Thursday. “This is my anticipation. It may take six to…
14 August 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Aug 15 (Reuters) – India’s leaders gathered in their parliament’s majestic Central Hall on Thursday night to relive their nation’s “tryst with destiny” a half-century ago. The vast domed chamber, its thick warm air stirred ineffectually by ancient fans, was packed with lawmakers…
15 August 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Aug 15 (Reuters) – India put on a dazzling show of fireworks, laser beams and parades capped early on Friday by a solemn ceremony in parliament that relived the moment 50 years ago when the subcontinent won independence. Thousands of people led by…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Sept 6 (Reuters) – An Indian bureaucrat who wrote two biographies of Mother Teresa remembers her as a woman with a mischievous sense of humour who wielded formidable administrative skill to control her worldwide organisation. “It was a very special morning,” Navin Chawla said, looking back at the day in 1975…
29 August 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Aug 29 (Reuters) – Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said the rupee’s volatility had subsided and the policy of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was to intervene to prevent volatility and speculative activity in the market. “The value of the rupee will be…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Queen Elizabeth’s visit to India was hit by fresh controversy on Wednesday after an apparent misunderstanding over the protocol of her giving a speech in a provincial capital. British officials told reporters the Indian government had cancelled the speech the queen was to have delivered in the…
16 September 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Sept 16 (Reuter) – India’s government, clearly alarmed by a fiscal deficit that was threatening to soar out of control, moved on Tuesday to boost revenues with a host of steps including a jump in import tariffs and a cut in federal spending. …
20 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 20 (Reuters) – India faced the prospect of fresh elections on Thursday as the country was convulsed by a frenzy of political gamesmanship. The only real question appeared to be when, not whether, the new polls would be held. “It may happen…
30 September 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Sept 30 (Reuters) – A militant group in Kashmir on Tuesday said an exhumed body was that of the group’s leader and not one of four missing Western hostages as suspected. The chief of police in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state said forensic…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Oct 19 (Reuters) – India looked back in frustration on Sunday at a visit by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth that read like a “how not to” catalogue of perceived insults and diplomatic missteps. The state visit, to mark India’s 50th year of freedom from British colonial rule, quickly turned a warm celebration…
16 October 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Oct 16 (Reuters) – Queen Elizabeth’s tour of India slid deeper into controversy on Thursday with sources close to the Indian government charging that Britain’s ruling Labour Party had a “hidden agenda” to create an independent Kashmir region. Even as British officials scrambled…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” DuPont Chair & CEO ELLEN KULLMAN in conversation with CHAITANYA KALBAG. Edited excerpts: Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral…
In a spirited panel discussion moderated by Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag, Yashwant Sinha, MP and former finance minister, M. Damodaran, former SEBI chairman, Satya Poddar, Partner, Ernst & Young, Samiran Chakraborty, Regional Head of Research, Standard Chartered Bank and Nilesh Shah, President, Corporate Finance, Axis Bank, shared their views. Edited excerpts Chaitanya Kalbag: All…
27 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 27 (Reuters) – “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.” That benediction has been called down upon generations of Hindu brides in India, but the country’s junior health minister Renuka Chowdhury has a new mantra: “One is fun.” Some demographers…
29 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India woke up on Saturday to a lame-duck government and a political crisis that only deepened after Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s resignation. Newspapers were cynical about what lay ahead and ran banner headlines like “Experiment Coalition: Abort, Fail,…
The Janata Party will soon split. The Janata Party has always been a loose coalition. The Janata Party’s constituents have view-points and ambitions that differ too widely. The Janata Party was a short-lived experiment in democracy. Opinions like these began to rotate slowly in the air when hardly a few months had passed after the…
“Goodness is something to be chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” …
Suddenly that unsporting term, Race, reared its colored head above the British horizon towards mid-1976. 19-year-old Dinesh Chaudhuri, and a Palestinian friend, were stabbed to death in London’s Woodford area on May 21. Gurdip Singh Chaggar, another teenaged Sikh youth, was killed on June 4 in Southall. On June 12, a white youth was murdered…
This mid-December afternoon, the Ear detects the rumble of Old Man 76 gasping through his last lap, and the first stirrings of Childe 77. Here are some optimistic predictions for the twelvemonth ahead disregarding the doomsday projections of Malthusian midwives who expect 1977 to be stillborn: The Labor Party in Britain will label Margaret “Thatcher…
In his first media interaction since The Walt Disney Company took over UTV, RONNIE SCREWVALA, now turned employee, tells CHAITANYA KALBAG and AJITA SHASHIDHAR how he intends to take the company to greater heights. How difficult was it to transition from a successful entrepreneur-driven company to being a part of a large global company? UTV…
‘I have to follow capitalism’ It is like being thrown about in an ideological cocktail shaker. You get off a gleaming passenger jet and drive over a soaring expressway to the 227-year-old Writers’ Buildings in Kolkata to meet a very capitalist communist politician. West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee says there is no place for…
Despite the crisis, a clear message must be sent to the investor community that India is open for business Glenn Levine/ As told to Chaitanya Kalbag There was an initial spurt of excitement after the new Reserve Bank of India governor was announced. Professor (Raghuram) Rajan is obviously highly accomplished. But there is only a…
“I use the word ‘blue collar’ purposefully at Xerox. It is the heart and soul of most economies” URSULA BURNS is the first African-American woman Chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company and she wears that badge with some pride. Her logic for that is simple: she needs to inspire others-and get some mileage…
Chaitanya Kalbag India’s economy is barrelling along at a growth rate of over 9 per cent, savings rates are up, investments are up, more jobs are being created, and inflation appears to be under control. So have we hit our stride? Have we chanced upon the right development model for the huge, tumultuous democracy that…
India must construct an enlightened climate change policy ‘Food Prices set to rise as floods ruin crops’. ‘Prime Minister promises aid to flood victims’. Does that sound like a recent edition of the Hindustan Times? Wait a minute. These headlines are from a British newspaper. A week ago, I was walking through a huge tropical…
The Civil Services still remain a big draw Fresh out of South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi made a particularly strong speech in Benares in February. He was gloomy about Indians earning the right to self-governance. He said a British member of the “much-abused” Indian Civil Service (ICS) had asked him to put in a good word…
UPON MY WORD: Reading the bar code Strange how time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and fifty-one years ago, Siraj-ud-Daulah demonstrated what an overcrowded prison can do to human beings with the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Figure to yourself, my friend, if possible, the situation of 146 wretches, exhausted by…
The old city is giving way to a new bright-eyed metropolis Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!” Outside, Ambassador taxis were inching along the flooded street. The electricity would go the moment you hung up your…
The utter oddity of 21st century India still dancing to the tune of caste With this kind of rebellious example, how will fair play and righteousness prevail? Won’t the lower castes get out of hand? In this decadent age, common men follow the right paths out of fear if that were destroyed, where could we…
19 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 19 (Reuters) – India’s lack of “grit” in pursuing its costly military foray into northern Sri Lanka may have led to Rajiv Gandhi’s 1991 murder by a suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber, New Delhi’s former envoy to Colombo said on Wednesday. “If…
28 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party switched off the life support system of the minority government on Friday, but in the process may have hastened its own death throes. Twice in the past 13 years Congress has ridden to power on a…
3 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Software firm Infosys Technologies Ltd is poised to become the first Indian firm to raise new capital through American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), chairman and managing director N.R. Narayana Murthy said on Wednesday. The blue-chip Infosys announced on Tuesday that…
7 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The word “pundit” is Sanskrit for “learned man,” and in India they were busy at the weekend trying to divine what lay ahead for the world’s most populous democracy. This much was clear — no single party was likely…
7 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The speaker of India’s parliament said on Sunday democracy had taken deep root in his country a half-century after independence, and all parties would speak the language of economic reform will go ahead,” Purno Sangma, speaker of the Lok…
8 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s main opposition group will block the full convertibility of the rupee, favour foreign investment only if it goes into infrastructure and shake out state firms if it wins power, its chief planner said on Monday. Jay Dubashi, chief…
8 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) – Global investors cannot afford to ignore India, but Indian companies need to prove that they can compete in developed markets, Fred Steingraber, chief executive officer of A.T. Kearney Inc., said on Monday. “I don’t think anybody is prepared to…
9 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 9 (Reuters) – India will accelerate its drive to increase electricity generation and is looking for huge funds to meet the nation’s power deficit, Power Minister Yoginder Alagh said on Tuesday. “Between now and March it will be faster and not slower,”…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, May 18 (Reuters) – India is looking to become a major oil products exporter while it aggressively chases foreign petroleum assets and sharply boosts imports of gas, the “fuel of the 21st Century”, its oil minister said on Wednesday. Mani Shankar Aiyar also told Reuters the United States was not putting…
Song sung blue Everybody knows one Song sung blue Every garden grows one If you are of a certain vintage, you will have been moved by these Neil Diamond lines, sung on a hot August night almost exactly 40 years ago. This steamy August, India has been convulsed by the sudden expelling of decades of…
The day this issue of Business Today went to press, IBM Corporation completed one hundred years. What started as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, manufacturing computing scales, time clocks, and even coffee grinders, quickly grew into Big Blue, a vast global presence in computing under Tom Watson. Senior and Junior, building its power on the mainframe. Like…
Reuter News Agency 18 December 1984 BHOPAL, India (Reuter) – More than half the poison chemical remaining at a Union Carbide plant has been neutralized, but thousands of city residents refuse to return home to the site of the world’s worst industrial disaster. Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh State, told reporters yesterday that…
Reuter News Agency 9 March 1986 The Toronto Star SRINAGAR, INDIA — “The large-scale arson, pillage, plunder and desecration of our temples in last month’s attacks was aimed at creating conditions for the mass exodus of Hindus,” says Hindu Action Committee leader Bal Krishna Handoo. “If we quit Kashmir we will be handing it on…
I remember back in the 1970s, when a new India was just over a quarter of a century old, Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his foreword to his “Calcutta” wrote: “The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended. is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea…
They say nothing sharpens our minds as much as high danger or a threat to our survival. We are prepared to stand and fight when we are cornered. Twenty-two years ago, when we were staring into the abyss, we pulled a reformist rabbit out of our socialist hat. But it took just about five years…
From the Editor These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that we Indians seem…
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and It is all moving…
Although commerce is older even than the thirty pieces of silver that persuaded Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus Christ, it took humans a long time to start to formally teach, and learn, the elements of business. The oldest business school in the world, ESCP Europe, was set up in Paris in 1819, a pipsqueak in…
From the Editor When I stepped into this role in mid-2010, it seemed India was unstoppable. Gross Domestic Product growth had averaged 8.5 per cent since 2004, when the United Progressive Alliance won power. The financial markets in the United States and Europe were in disarray after the US sub-prime crisis laid down a napalm…
From the Managing Editor An early breakfast is something that most journalists don’t care for. Most of my tribe skip it and among those who don’t, very few sip their coffee before 10 am. Like Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, we finish our days late and start them late, you see. It was, therefore, unusual for…
From the Editor Raghuram Govind Rajan is a lucky man. Two weeks into his new job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India his friend Ben Bernanke, who he calls “cautious and nuanced” in his book Fault Lines, handed him a big gift- a delay in the “taper” in the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative…
From the Editor Once every year, we pay obeisance to the best and strongest companies in India. It is not grudging admiration. Our corporate icons deserve every bit of their applause. No management school, or case study, or how-to hardback that you pick up at an airport bookstore can teach you how to plot a…
At Business Today we write about companies all the time. Often, it is a top-down view. We meet the Chief Executive Officer, the senior members of the management team, the stock-market analysts whose job it is to keep a gimlet eye on their wards, the suppliers, the competitors, the regulators. But it is very important,…
Exactly two years ago we ran a cover story on India’s skills crisis. This was just after Subramanian Ramadorai was named Adviser to the Prime Minister in the National Council on Skill Development. How quickly have we moved down the skilling highway? Glacially slow, and frighteningly so. For a nation where tens of millions of…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
Sometimes India’s economy resembles a rambunctious teenager brought up short by a finger-wagging headmaster. Our finance minister can now recite with his eyes closed a string of figures that seek to prove that India has not done badly at all in comparison with the rest of the developing- and indeed the developed- world. P. Chidambaram…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
From the Editor I remember sticking an aluminium one-yen coin and a copper one-US-cent coin to my computer screen in Tokyo around the mid-1990s and watching in fascination Las they became equal in value, with the yen appreciating to 100 to the dollar. It was nice for frequent travellers like me- when I paid my…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
From the Editor Within the space of a week, I met N.R. Narayana Murthy for a long and friendly conversation at his airy venture-capital office in Bangalore’s Jayanagar suburb and then conducted telephone interviews with the company’s Chairman, K.V. Kamath, who was in Mumbai and its CEO, S.D. Shibulal, who was attending the World Economic…
From the Editor Companies and human beings are surprisingly similar. Over a long period of time we build an intricate geodesic dome of habits, rules. principles, emotions, likes and dislikes. Changing ourselves is very. very difficult, even when we know that our future well-being, prosperity and happiness depend on how we change and adapt. Similarly,…
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will be held in March, has created ripples of amazement the world over. All detained Opposition leaders have been released, and press censorship has been lifted. What do these developments portend?…
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too, it is she who is the real issue. Her challengers’ election manifestos say hardly anything new, except that they vow to ‘wipe out’ the ‘scourges’ of the Emergency. 320 million…
From the Editor When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be …
From the Editor Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a dacoit. “In the ravines (of Chambal) you will find rebels. The dacoits are in Parliament,” the actor growls. It is probably coincidental that the movie was made…
From the Editor “I am a tiny speck in a sea of brands, buffeted by colour, geometry and neon, a homo brandus furiously rowing his flimsy coracle as it is carried inexorably towards the lethal rapids of consumerism. “Brand” has interesting etymology. We say something “brands itself on our consciousness” or that our latest purchase…
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political forecaster. In a hurricane sweep, it snuffed out thirty years of uninterrupted Congress rule in independent India, and sent Premier Indira Gandhi, and her feared lieutenants, into sudden oblivion. The…
From the Editor Why did god create stock-market analysts? To make weather forecasters look good, runs the rather puerile joke. But seriously, company analysis is an earnest business-in much of the world, that is, except India. I remember in my wire-service days we used to have lively debates on how to report stock price movements…
The economy is whirling around in a populist spiral Pranab Mukherjee is starting to look worryingly like a feckless heir squandering his generous inheritance while his fretful guardian in the person of Duvvuri Subbarao tries to board up the door and keep the wolves at bay with a nail here and a nail there. The…
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the struggle within “We are all like a family and there is bound to be dissent in a democratic party.” The trouble with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 55, is he is too transparent. A rotund, dhoti-cad orator given to over- heated rhetoric, his misfortune is that he heads a party consisting in…
From the Editor “There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one,” said Baltasar Gracian, a 17th Century Spanish Jesuit monk. More of us could benefit by learning to speak little and be heard when we do speak characteristics of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Kumar Mangalam Birla. Both were born with…
From the Editor Pity the modern banker, who is described in one of the stories in this issue as “pin-striped”. In India, of course, some of the most powerful bankers sport bandhinis, ikats and kanthas. But you have to feel sorry for our bankers. We don’t have anarchists waving their fists at bank CEOS’ pay…
If you look down from a helicopter at any of India’s teeming cities you will see millions of people scurrying around using every known form of locomotion as they move between structures, many of them once described as skyscrapers when we were more down to earth, all busily engaged in every imaginable type of commerce,…
From the Editor India’s Parliament House does not resemble a ziggurat, but it does remind me of the Tower of Babel and how God descended to earth to check things out. He was so alarmed by what seemed achievable by all humans speaking one language, we are told, that he decided to scatter them and…
From the Editor I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet, in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools. However, I made abundance of things, even without tools; and some with no more…
From the Editor Do you know what a “dominant undertaking” is? Suresh Krishna does. The Chairman and Managing Director of Sundram Fasteners lived every day with the provisions of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices, or MRTP, Act. Every month in the ’70s and ’80s. Krishna would travel to Delhi to pace the corridors at…
From The Editor “Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up— very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle…
From the Editor I remember my first car with great fondness. It was a Fiat 1100D, and I crashed it barely a month after my wife and I bought it. There was another crash a little later; we were the third owners of the car, but it held up well. Three years later we sold…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
Senior Editor of this newspaper were about to sit down for their evening news-planning meeting when the smoke alarms started jangling. Within moments the first floor newsrooms filled with thick billowing smoke. Journalist for both the Hindustan Times and its sister Hindi newspaper, Hindustan, began to file out and down the stairs There was no…
Hindustan Times on Saturday was launched on June 3 last year. It was a unique product and an unqualified success. Unique, because no other newspaper published a bespoke Saturday edition. Unqualified, because readers have been lured to it in huge numbers, and have stayed for the weekend. HT on Saturday acknowledges the 21st-century urban Indian…
I experienced my epiphany about consumer media a couple of years ago on a Tokyo subway. When I lived in Japan in the mid-1990s, commuters would be bent earnestly over their little pulp paper backs or Manga comics. Now, just over a decade later, everyone’s fingers are flying over buttons on little machines that are…
New Age Guru peps up India story believers “When you were five years old, you were happy nearly all the time. Somebody had to make you unhappy Now you are 30-plus and have achieved your dreams, and you are unhappy all the time. Somebody has to make you happy” Delegates at the India Economic Summit…
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a group of senior Indian and South African businessmen on Monday that he was confident India can accelerate economic growth to the eight-to-ten per cent range. “We have been able to register an economic growth rate of eight per cent for four years in a row. Most analysts now believe…
Pretoria gets New Delhi’s support for Security Council seat The Leader of India and South Africa made a strategic trade off on Monday India decisively said it would support South Africa’s bid to occupy a permanent African seat in a reformed United Nations Security Council, and Pretoria in turn said it would support New Delhi’s…
The guns are yet to fall silent in the North-east but in places where development has made an inroad, peace has prevailed. Only by bringing all stakeholders on board can the government hope to end the region’s alienation. “… we have no social affinities with the Hindus or Mussalmans. We are looked down upon by…
Inscrutable are the ways of public-sector trade unions. The Federation of the State Trading Corporation Employees’ Unions (FSTCEU) lived up to this image when it resorted to an eight-day strike last fortnight over a peculiarly non-economic issue: the shifting of the corporation’s Delhi branch office from its location on the arterial Janpath to Malcha Marg…
It began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of Gwalior, and her only son, ex-Maharaja Madhavrao. Over the years, this essentially political fight spilt out of the Gwalior palace into national attention. Today, it includes all the ingredients of…
Visually, the scene was vintage Bergman. A low canopy of sullen clouds scudded over a landscape whipped by icy winds. Despair seemed to be wrung out of every muscle of the ragged bunch of men stumbling down the village’s main dirt street. There were 15 of them, all walking with the collapsing gait of acute…
Of all the functions of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), there is one routine task crucial to the health of the economy: incinerating the mounds of soiled currency notes well past their prime and providing the commercial banks with mint-fresh replacements. Last month, in an effort to clear the backlog of ‘non-issuable notes’-inevitable when…
Delhi University is one of the few in the country to possess a full-fledged faculty of music. But for years now, the Music Department has been rocked by a clash between the shastrakars (grammarians) and the kalavidhs (performers). At the root of the controversy lies the dilemma of whether university teachers of music ought to…
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The campaign against the Bihar Press Bill is almost four months old now, but the Government has only indulged in a lot of double-talk—swearing by press freedom in one breath, and…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Tyres are one essential commodity over which the Government seems to exert no control whatsoever. In the last six months prices have risen twice. And this is despite the fact that the last decade has seen a sudden burgeoning in the number of tyre-manufacturing units, which caused worries last year that there would be a…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been selected to lead a ministry that had obtained one of india’s largest-ever majorities-91 seats out of 109. But the mandate had come drenched in blood, and ridden on an abysmally…
All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union home minister, and currently he is at the centre of a storm that is battering at the doors of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Central Secretariat Service…
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man of diamond-hard loyalty to the ruling family. catapulted into a devalued presidency; the freckle faced widow in rebellious flow, queen of the mimics and endowed with a hard nose; the…
For all those journalists who think they belong to a thankless and poorly-paid profession, there is hope on the horizon. It comes from the latest impresario to champion the “welfare and relief” of India’s toiling journalists: Jinendra Kumar Jain, 42. From obscure beginnings as a small-time publisher, Jain has used every ‘journalistic’ rung to hop…
Lush vegetation in the Thar? Groves of jamun trees? Mighty rivers the size of the Ganga and Indus? Seasons of monsoon-like rainfall? None of this is the fantasy it might appear at first sight. It was true in the distant past of the vast, inhospitable expanse of the Thar desert known to be one of…
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and belligerence to arrive, on election eve, at the explosive. Gauhati has become unrecognisable. Once the citadel of lahe lahe, the Assamese philosophy of languor and peaceability, the capital now rumbles…
There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from his experience, a vision of a funny world. The difference, of course, is that everybody is talking about three old men-charan Singh, 79, Morarji Desai, 86, and Jagjivan Ram, 74,…
Events In Mizoram seems to be moving inexorably towards a resumption of insurgency. The cease-fire agreement, which came into effect at midnight on July 31 last year, has never seemed more fragile than it is now. As the indecisive talks with Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga near the end of their sixth year, the…
Pranab Mukherjee’s first budget, at first glance so redolent of status quo, is peppered with little booby traps. Two paragraphs in his speech have caused heartburn amidst tyre manufacturers—who are dismayed about a stiff excise hike—and soft drink bottlers, who are cut up because Mukherjee has cracked down on soft drink franchises’ excise exemptions. The…
It was a browser’s dream come true – kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For eleven days last fortnight, Delhi’s Pragati Maidan became a meeting-place of minds. From a distance. as the Fifth World Book Fair moved to its finish in a welter of…
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone over the Arabian Sea on November 5, 1,200 km to the south-west of Goa. Forty-eight hours later it was just 600 km to the south-west of Bombay, and heading rapidly…
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a few deaths on February 2; during the next three weeks, it rose every day with dreadful ferocity: a dozen at Cha maria on the 12th, a hundred at Gohpur on…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then by the postponement of the Dussehra break. On October 29, as Justice Vidyaranya Dattatreya Tulzapurkar of the Supreme Court finally faced an invited audience at the Symbiosis Law College in…
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous occasion for Indian music. In the two years since, Bel and Arnold have together embarked on an ambitious research of Hindustani classical music’s vast oral tradition along mathematical lines. Never…
Not for nothing has Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga acquired a reputation for being a cool and calculating man. Towards the end of 1981, however, his smooth phrases took on a jagged edge, as his talks with the prime minister’s special envoy G. Parthasarathi entered the final lap. Mizoram-watchers were not surprised, therefore, when…
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC) ended at 6 a.m. on January 20. two things stood out clearly: the effects of the strike were either negligible or tremendous, depending on which side of the fence the…
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court’s decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious. So unpredictable have the thought-processes of the nation’s highest court become. A three-judge bench consisting of Chief Justice…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most from constantly rising costs of living is the large, amorphous mass of the nation’s pensioners. Bereft of a common voice, nearly three million retired government employees and defence personnel have…
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme Court heard the Patna Urban Cooperative Bank case. Then, last fortnight, Mishra’s fortunes took a sudden upward swing. On December 16, the Supreme Court held, by a two-one majority, that…
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of being walked to the gallows on the morning of Sunday. November 8. 1981, in retribution for the brutal murder of Gita and Sanjay Chopra on August 26, 1978, the two…
Political cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the public eye is built around a social theme that fits in with the Government’s meandering philosophy. A ‘successful’ political film also usually turns out to be feature-length, in colour, and…
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by lightning that ripped through its top; in 1803, an earthquake shook down a harp-shaped cupola that adorned its fifth storey. The latest shock, which came last fortnight, damaged none of…
I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is. — John Lennon. 1968 Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be happy on December 30 The prime minister herself had come down to Lucknow to pat him on his back and give his ministry a clean chit.…
“My resignation over the Dehuli issue is not important, law and order is,” was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s answer when asked why, after owning moral responsibility for the massacre, he had not quit. “Either we protect the survivors, and liquidate the killers, or we might as well find somebody else to run…
On January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills have been on strike since October 1981. In every way, the lengthening strike has become a grim milestone in India’s industrial history, with the opposing sides only gaining in belligerence…
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity in the loftiest institution of the land, the Supreme Court. Exactly four weeks after he delivered a judgment that granted Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra a reprieve from trial for…
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it is like to take on this public sector leviathan. Rao is, after all, only one of BHEL’S 70,000 employees. Yet, on February 23 this year, Rao filed a writ petition…
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock waves emanated from an indecisive Supreme Court. In November 1981, the court had stayed executions all over the country after it was contended in the case of Kuljit Singh (alias…
That trite phrase ‘as old as the hills’ has suddenly taken on startling significance in relation to a thread that runs through Hindu beliefs: the cult of mother-worship. a veneration of the shakti form that harks back to primeval times. Recently, an lndo-US team of archaeologists working in the Son valley in Madhya Pradesh Sidhi…
I am your valuable,/The Pure gold baby,/That melts to a shriek,/I turn and burn,/Do not think I underestimate your/great concern./Ash, ash/You poke and stir,/Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/A gold filling. …
The sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught. As the expected moment of conflict neared, Chandigarh’s streets were gradually cordoned off with bamboo and steel barricades; a vast area taking in the Punjab, Haryana and Union territory secretariats,…
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o–Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle chains, knives and iron rods, a group of 100 pro-Khomeini Iranian students attacked 25 anti-Khomeini counterparts under cover of darkness in Aligarh on June 9. The bloody battle left 14 of…
Last week-end the seesaw battle being waged by Swraj Paul to take over Escorts and DCM slowed to a less suspenseful motion when the London-based industrialist suffered a series of setbacks. The first and predictable one came when Escorts’ Board of Directors refused on June 9 to register 4,62,377 shares lodged by Paul’s brokers Harish…
Rope-Making On Summer nights all over north India. people put out hundreds of thousands of cots in the open air to sleep on Most of the cots are made of rope strung on a wooden frame, and almost all of the rope comes from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Rope-making in Saharanpur is a traditional skill…
There are times when India looks invincible, bursting with food stocks and blessed with a government that is gungho about its workability. But the rain gods do not work to a 20-point programme, and last fortnight weathermen the country over were developing cricks in their necks as they stared hopefully into the pale blue and…
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s health more than anything else has been responsible for the sudden thaw in Delhi-Srinagar relations For a while last month Kashmir teetered on the brink of an insoluble crisis while the prickly Resettlement Bill hung fire, the Sheikh grew more belligerent and the Centre seemed trapped in a peculiar inertia. Then, on…
Within a few years from now, the westernmost and thirstiest fringe of Rajasthan, along the Indo-Pakistani border, is going to be brought to life by the digging of what will be the longest irrigation canal in the world up to date. Though the climate is torrid, the soil, here too, is good. When the water…
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp and panoply. The theatre of this absurd epic, Raj Darbhanga in Bihar, has been reduced today to a threadbare relic of the fiefdom’s old glory. Darbhanga was once India’s largest…
Indian foreign policy has always suffered from contradictory tugs and pulls, and last month the Government exposed its tendency to over-react to global developments. Israeli Consul Yousuf Hasseen earned his expulsion with an outspoken interview with Bombay’s Sunday Observer (INDIA TODAY. July 31). But the subsequent announcement by Foreign Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao that…
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have clashed repeatedly over the last two years and a half-only to be dragged back into uneasy reconciliation every time by mediators. Incredibly, Charan Singh moved to hammer the last nail…
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by the cloud raised by stays granted on more than 20 executions of condemned murderers throughout the country. The flurry of stay orders stemmed from a May 6 ruling by a…
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special rights on an individual. Untouchability has long ago been ‘abolished’, but caste prejudice is one of the most insidious cankers eating into the country’s vitals. At 4 p.m. on August…
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already been emasculated by Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra. Using the twin methods of patronage and advertisement support, Mishra’s Government has directly subsidised an explosion of small papers across the state-the very…
Chaitanya Kalbag In the coolness of the early morning there is little traffic on National Highway 3. Outward bound from Nasik, the tar stretches infinitely in mottled grey, punctuated by the whoosh and blare of passing trucks. Through the sounds of the stirring countryside come the choral slaps of the marchers’ feet. It is a…
Without second-generation reforms and a drastic overhaul of its institutions, India is condemned to mediocre income and growth. As befits an ancient land, India is not bereft of clairvoyants. Three times over the past decade, some of our best economists, managers, bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and private citizens put their brains together and came up with…
‘This Year We Will Fall Short of the Target’ After a lifetime spent powering TCS to its current position as the country’s pre-eminent technology company, S. Ramadorai took over as Advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Council for Skill Development in February 2011. He spoke to Chaitanya Kalbag and Shamni Pande on the…
A disgraced Ranbaxy has a long and expensive journey ahead before it regains the trust of global and Indian customers. By E. Kumar Sharma and Chaitanya Kalbag Two inspectors working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on a trip to a Ranbaxy Laboratories factory late in January 2008, were stunned by what they…
Two days after he and a brother judge handed down a blistering verdict in the Centre for Public Interest Litigation & Others vs Union of India & Others case, cancelling 122 telecom licences and severely indicting a former minister, now a jailbird, Justice ASOK KUMAR GANGULY was at peace in his study at home, behind…
In a candid conversation with Chaitanya Kalbag, Kishore Biyani reveals why he sold a controlling stake in his flagship Pantaloons stores to the Aditya Birla Group Kishore Biyani is waiting, relaxed, in a darkened hotel suite. He’s just flown in from cool London to broiling Gurgaon. He talks softly and very fast, jumping in before…
V. Vaidyanathan takes wing with a $17 million stake in a star NBFC By Chaitanya Kalbag The next time you are flying somewhere, do not bury your nose in a book or plug in your earphones. Take a good look around. And if you happen to be sitting next to Vembu Vaidyanathan, a wiry, fast-talking…
Quit moaning and hear the good news, folks! India is going to be the world’s largest beef exporter in 2012, beating out Australia and Brazil with 1.4 million tonnes of buffalo meat hoofing it to distant shores. You may think the domestic economy is all blood and gore, but it is not. Last weekend, it…
Maruti will not end Contract-Worker System Simmering unrest among contract workers at the Manesar (Haryana) plant of Maruti Suzuki exploded in violence and arson on July 18; one HR executive died, and 96 employees were injured. Suzuki Motor Corp Chairman Osamu Suzuki made a point of visiting Manesar and meeting every injured worker during a…
There are companies which are defying the law…. We have taken a series of measures, says SEBI chief In the 20 months he has been Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Upendra Kumar Sinha has taken several initiatives, but has also been involved in controversies. The Supreme Court order upholding SEBI’s decision…
Until July 1991, directors at Indian companies could not be paid more than ₹15,000 a month. Commissions as a percentage of net profits were permitted but capped at half the annual salary. Today, the top-paid director in India, steel tycoon Naveen Jindal, takes home more than ₹6 crore a month, and scores of Indian CEOs…
Development is not a Linear Process, says World Bank’s Country Director Roberto Zagha has been the World Bank’s Country Director in India since January 2009, when the economy was reeling from the global financial crisis and just before the national elections that brought the UPA back to power. Zagha, a Brazilian national, has been closely…
Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last, says Vedanta’s chairman He started out as a scrap trader in Patna. Today, with a personal fortune of $3.5 billion, Anil Agarwal is one of the richest men in the world. Over the last three decades, he has transformed the Vedanta Group into…
The Method Man – Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under…
‘Washington is Starting to Look Like Delhi’ Says British historian and Harvard University professor Niall Ferguson An erudite scholar, acclaimed author, and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, British historian Niall Ferguson wears several hats. At the India Today Conclave, Ferguson spoke on “American decline: Myth and Reality”. On…
The Jan Lokpal Bill may need to move from idealism to realism; the solution may also lie in granting independence and teeth to existing agencies created to fight corruption. The three men stood up, glowered at me, and began shouting in chorus. They ignored the business card I had introduced myself with. How dare I…
We Were Leaders, but We Were Not Leading, says Paranjpe Since June 2005, when he took up the mantle of Non-executive Chairman of Hindustan Unilever (then Hindustan Lever), Harish Manwani has seen three executive leadership changes at the consumer goods major. First, there were two managing directors, Arun Adhikari and S. Ravindranath, under him. Expat…
‘My Objective and My Company’s Objective is to be Future Ready’ YOGESH CHANDER DEVESHWAR has been with ITC for nearly 43 years. The past 15 years as chairman and chief executive. Having turned ITC into a multi-product company no longer synonymous with cigarettes, he is seeking a five-year extension during which a successor will be…
The US is on life support, and Asian creditors led by China, which holds $1.16 trillion of US treasuries, control the intravenous drip. Asian central banks will not be dumping their dollar assets, but there is no doubt that US power is waning. For a while there, it looked like we would all, lemming-like, race…
Edited excerpts of a conversation BT’s Chaitanya Kalbag and Josey Puliyenthuruthel had with GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt On the US economy Things are getting better in the United States. It’s a slow recovery, and some of that is based on how steep the crisis was, on consumer deleveraging, and the savings rate going…
Chaitanya Kalbag Barack Obama had barely walked out of Parliament’s Central Hall when the debate began on whether his India visit was “transactional” or “strategic”. It was neither. Obama, accompanied by an unusually large contingent of CEOs, many of them small and medium businessmen, was in search of jobs. Yes, the $10 billion of purchasing…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral trade? It is very important to get things on the table to understand…
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and hard. Schoolgirls on bicycles. Schools that actually function. Half of all panchayat posts are reserved for women. Close to 40,000 criminals were put behind bars. Roads that can be driven…
Can we even dream of saying bye-bye to China’s economy? Sushma swaraj said it simply in parliament in early August when she ruled out war with China over the Doklam plateau: “China has contributed to our growing economic strength. For them, there’s a lot at stake… here. They have been awarded many contracts.” That’s putting…
Importune your Maker, but not with impunity My family cracks up every time we watch Noises off, the rambunctious 1992 comedy. Maybe we find it funnier because we live in such a noisy nation. As India enters its 72nd year of freedom, we should declare independence from noise, and vow to liberate ourselves from religious…
Palliatives, pain-killers or band-aids: take your pick We are so frozen in the headlights of the onrushing slowdown that even a flicker leads us to believe that we have seen friendly djinns in the darkness. It is clear that Narendra Modi’s sixth year in power will be his worst in economic terms. The GDP is…
India’s ex-prime minister says the nation needs a unified approach to fuel growth Chaitanya Kalbag The man who launched India’s economic revolution 25 years ago, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, believes the country needs a stronger political consensus on reform to fuel double-digit growth and lasting prosperity. India’s economy expanded 7.6% in the fiscal year…
India has crossed just one battle line, but many more lie ahead Political power grows out of the barrel of gun. More precisely, it grows from the air-to-air missiles mounted on an upgraded, but aging, MiG-21 Bison interceptor flown by the intrepid Wing Commander Abhimandan Vardhaman, who took on US-made Pakistani F16s on February 27.…
Politics was reduced to raucous pandering: if Modi’s speech was short of a clearer vision of New India, Rahul did not lay out a blueprint for a transfer of power either It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign…
The PM has adopted legacy programmes and run them better They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing.…
“Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”-Voltaire Absurdity was piled atop absurdity as seven weeks of vitriol ended in a splash on Tuesday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a seaplane ride. When this prime minister, arguably the most powerful mass leader we have had in a generation, breaks security rules,…
While waiting for the 10,400 policemen who were deployed this week to guard Ivanka Trump in Hyderabad to go back to their regular duties of guarding lesser VIPs, I pondered over the eternal “Where are we in history?” question. Ms. Trump’s speechwriters were savvy enough to avoid comment on the hordes of beggars who had…
There are some remarkable similarities—and dissimilarities—between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Both men ran insurgent presidential campaigns that upended conventional political structures (I use ‘presidential’ advisedly for Modi; does the Bharatiya Janata Party matter any longer to our prime minister, when all around us people refer to his government as ‘Modi sarkar’?). Both men were…
To be truly remembered in history books, Narendra Modi will have to parlay his interpersonal skill to work his way through his bucket list I don’t know how many people noticed this tweet from the Prime Minister’s Office on November 19: “External Affairs Minister@ Sushma Swaraj ji is present at Delhi airport to receive PM…
I am nagged by a disturbing question: how will historians compile the “collected works of Narendra Modi” when so many of his thoughts are so, well, instant? What better setting to join Instagram than Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s new capital, back-dropped by visuals of spectacular pagodas, with thousands of swooning followers now able to follow…
I should have titled this column “The Audacity of Hype”. Reading some of the speeches made at and around the Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, it almost sounded like a lovefest around joint action and joint reaction with the exception of Vladimir Putin, who was clearly the black sheep because of Russia’s incursions into…
The two men were born fourteen years and fourteen days apart. They died fourteen years apart, one just three years after independence. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were both London-educated lawyers. They both worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the long fight for independence. Both went to prison several times. Both were involved in…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is at his best when he is talking. He has been in office for 555 days and I wager that he has made at least three times that number of speeches, give or take the time that he spends travelling on Air India One. Modi’s personal website and that of the…
When our prime minister rode on horseback to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu last week, one swooning supporter could not contain himself and tweeted: “When I saw Modi on a white horse on way Maa Vaishno Devi the avatara of Kaliki (sic) flashed my mind. What a leadership”. Devout Hindus believe that we are…
Eight hundred and forty-five years ago, Henry II of England, chafing under a long and abrading rivalry with Thomas Becket, his former friend and the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally burst out in anger: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of Henry’s courtiers rushed out, accosted the archbishop in his cathedral, and…
I was chatting with my barber in Gurgaon when I realised that Narendra Modi and the hundreds of other politicians campaigning in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections were not uttering the P word. Salman, the young hair-cutter, said he was the second of nine children of a sepoy in the Indian Army — the…
Chaitanya Kalbag Thousands of grumpy bureaucrats are being forced to sacrifice a long weekend — there are too many of them anyway this year in India — and clean toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Movement) by wielding a broom himself in a Delhi…
Twice in the past four months, Narendra Modi has spoken with unalloyed pride and excitement as he stood among our super-achieving space scientists — at Sriharikota on June 30, and on Wednesday when the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrated the success of our Mars orbiter Mangalyaan. “History has been created today You have dared to…
Sometimes, when the late monsoon clouds hover low, India can be spied through the gloom, as if by happen-stance. So many geographies, languages, foods, cultures — and religions — thrown together higgledy-piggledy and powered by a sputtering nationalism that makes us want to be counted among the great powers of the world, rich, strong, and…
Over the past week, I have been struck by the helplessness of the men leading the world’s two biggest democracies. There is a major difference, though: President Barack Obama has tried, and failed, to change America’s gun control laws as one mass shooting is followed closely by another. After last week’s massacre at an Oregon…
Narendra Modi is a follower of Yogi Adityanath. On Twitter, that is. But the Mahant from Gorakhpur has no qualms about setting a tone that neither Modi nor his senior colleagues can publicly take. Why, while Modi basks in the afterglow of a series of foreign-policy successes, the yogi has seen fit to broadcast his…
I marked one hundred days of the Narendra Modi government by meeting four women called Usha Chaumar, Guddi Athwal, Annu Tamole and Sunita Chawaria who have travelled in just over a decade from the lowest rung of India’s caste ladder to a future that holds hope and optimism. Their lives and their stories were more…
In a striking exposition of what could be termed the Modi Doctrine, NSA Doval said if you are not able to exercise the power you possess because you don’t have the will, that is as good as not having it It is difficult to discern if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is beginning to lose his…
It is amusing, and not entirely surprising, that anybody sounding less than flattering of the Narendra Modi government is instantly suspected to be a member of a left-liberal pseudo-secular club of automated naysayers. There is, too, a newer class of dissidents, consisting either of frustrated right-wingers dismayed at either not partaking of the loaves and…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
This weekend Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Nepal on his third foreign trip in ten weeks. By the end of September he will also have taken in Japan and the United States. Looming large on his itinerary will be China, which he visited four times as Gujarat’s chief minister in his quest for…
Round about this time, we ought to have been chilling our champagne and getting ready to exult in, and celebrate, a year of dramatic and positive change under the inspiring leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vision, vim, vigour, and vitality should have been the keywords for Year One of the Modi Era. Yet the…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
One year ago, as voting got underway in our national elections, I titled my first column in this newspaper A Witch’s Brew’. That referred to the choices India’s voters had. Now we know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had to quaff quite a potent concoction since he rode to power. In equal parts, he…
The Narendra Modi government has been taking a few hard knocks. It learned that sweet talk in Maharashtra’s sugar belt, or at a gaudy wedding celebration in a dusty town in the Uttar Pradesh bad lands, is just that: in politics, your friends always have one eye cocked at a higher seat of power. Your…
There is a new sense of purposefulness in government. Many of the early steps Modi has taken reflect his Chief Executive Officer style in Gujarat. He does not believe in endless meetings and buck-passing. It seemed like the rhyming slogans, the election jingles, and the grandiloquence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto were all that…
Damyata, datta, dayadhvam. “This very thing the heavenly voice of thunder repeats da, da, da, that is, control yourselves, give, be compassionate.” In the ancient Hindu text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Prajapati or the creator is asked by his three-fold progeny — gods, men and demons —for advice, and he utters the syllable da three times. Self-control,…
The PMO website is taking on the busyness of Modi’s own website. Within hours of Munde’s death, the list of cabinet ministers was updated with a blank space next to the ministries of rural development… If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of…
Arvind Kejriwal is the India Rubber Man. A Leo in politics if there is one, charismatic, mercurial, impetuous and likeable despite his foibles, he has re-invented himself time and again and rebounded into a new avatar. IIT trained engineer, IRS tax officer, Right to Information activist, anti-corruption crusader, and sidekick to Anna Hazare, Kejriwal couldn’t…
Long, long ago, before they invented news in 140 characters and we could remember our lives only through social media timelines, some of us believed it was possible to have our leaders display lofty politics and selfless diplomacy That is not true, of course. Politics and diplomacy both involve winning people over; in the end,…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
This column will be published exactly ten months after Narendra Modi took office in the South Block. It is as good a time as any to think of Lee Kuan Yew, whose funeral Modi will attend next Sunday, and of Singapore and India and their fates and futures. Lee was a strongman in every sense…
First election since 1984 where a national party is looking like sure-fire winner Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the…
More than once in the past couple of weeks, before he climbed into his plane to fly off to more island nations, Narendra Modi was at his histrionic, chest-thumping best in Parliament. His voice rose and fell as he spoke, now in a shouted challenge and then dropping to a whisper. MPs, and a larger…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign ministry announced his visit to Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa. He will be away during the first full week of the monsoon session, which could be the last of the 16th…
I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
One of the smartest things Prime Minister Narendra Modi did after coming to power four years ago was to appoint diehard loyalists as state governors. They were either beholden to him or to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When the Congress was on top of the heap, it routinely…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
High stakes gamble to change behavior Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing Writer NEW DELHI — Of all Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaigns, none, perhaps, is more consequential than the renewed push for his Swachh Bharat — or Clean India — Mission launched in October 2014. At first glance SBM was a mere rehash of…
The past few weeks in India have been like drinking from a fire hose. Full-page newspaper advertisements, huge rallies and hosannas from giddy supporters have poured forth as the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party celebrates two years in power. There has also been a deluge of interviews You might also like with senior government ministers, a…
Modi has one job: Get India’s lazy tiger of an economy to roar Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley will have two tough acts to follow when he stands in a few hours to present India’s budget for 2015-16. The first: On Feb. 26, railway minister Suresh Prabhu did a rousing, clackety-clack rendition of the railway…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team have had a lot of time to polish the report card on their year in power. I woke up on Anniversary Day determined, like Norman Vincent Peale, to feel The Power of Positive Thinking. Whatever the opinion polls or the trolls on Twitter said, we had to be…
Several moons ago, a car driver in Chennai told me the fascinating story of a young man whom he drove around in Coimbatore during the 2009 general elections. At every stop, the driver said, the young man would return with a bulging sack that he would stuff into the boot. The young man was collecting…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
The end of campaigning in Amethi in a cacophony of anger, derogation, and obloquy was briefly leavened by “Twitter joining Rajinikanth.” The Superstar’s followers piled up at the rate of 20,000 an hour. Not even Narendra Modi, one of the Thalaivar’s first followers, could have matched that. Fantasy had trumped politics. As if in affirmation,…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning, most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
The Rajyabhishek in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt was a sight for sore eyes, and understandably some of us went ape even if we were not among the 4,000 people attending Narendra Modi’s oathtaking. It was still a modest event compared with the 1.8 million people who attended Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration. Talking about…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India of traffic chaos, noise and tumult. Gujarat’s administrative capital reminded me more of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s high-tech capital complex outside Kuala Lumpur, than of the headquarters of Modi Unlimited. The Gujarat…
The Method Man – Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under…
As we prepare to vote, lots of loose talk lies ahead If you believe in the theory of evolution, as I do, then you will agree that one of the very few things that separates us from our earliest ancestors is the faculty of speech. Scientists speculate that we were communicating through speech as far…
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a nail-biter. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just before the general election. On January 17, the Supreme Court instructed the committee to come up…
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon. I dare you to find me a single expert who can measure the financial cost of the…
Governments cynically scoop out value from their own companies. Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned company’s capital to the public and relinquishes management control. This has not happened. Successive governments have mostly destroyed value by divesting only thin slivers of public sector undertakings (PSUs) and…
The government must take courage and embrace privatisation Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11 trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced on October 24 to recapitalise public-sector banks (PSBs); and Rs 2.67 trillion ($41 billion), the total earned by the government in 26 years from the divestment of its stakes, in…
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much of a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he has set an October 2, 2019 deadline for Swachh Bharat, and August 15, 2022 for a New India. Mohan…
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that hit us in November 2016 and July 2017 with demonetisation and the introduction of the GST. “Those two shocks seem…
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercising your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey says 86.5 per cent of users access the Internet via mobiles and smartphones. That works out to over 430 million…
Many anniversaries this year, but few happy ones This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s crushing victory in the world’s biggest election – in many ways a more portentous event than Narendra Modi’s 2014 ascent to prime…
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd at one of the prime minister’s rallies, then go to his website, which has a link to ‘NaMo Merchandise’.…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…
The Indian ryot, or peasant cultivator, has always been a political football. When we think of a farmer most of us think, this man is getting subsidised water, electricity, seeds, fertilizer. The government buys his harvest. The government is keen to gift him a bank account under the Jan Dhan Yojana, even if he has…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…
When Anand Mohan and Chaitanya Kalbag called on Mrs. Ambika Soni in Delhi on August 17, they expected her to come forth with the defensiveness and the self-righteousness most of her colleagues in the Congress Party display. Mrs. Soni, after all, had occupied a powerful and coveted position during the Emergency—as President of the Youth…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
India, a land where personality cults spring up overnight, is struggling to find a pedestal on which to put its assassinated leader Indira Gandhi. In the year since her murder last Oct. 31, the woman once portrayed by a leading painter as a Goddess has become mainly a face looking out from old election posters. …
New Delhi— Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has vowed to take tough action to conquer what he sees as India’a political and social ills after basking in a year-long glow of triumph for hauling the country back from the brink of widespread unrest. Cracks have started appearing in the national euphoria swirling around the former airline…
The 48-year-old challenger is flat on his back on the canvas. The crowd is cheering on the champion, who is 20 years older but lighter on his feet. Is the challenger out for the count, or will he go another round? Can Rahul Gandhi breathe life back into his shattered organization? Three weeks after the…
One week before Phase 1, the votes still hold the cards Loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it. -Mark Twain After five years of ‘achhe din’, you would think we’d be gazing with happy expectation at the bright lights of even better days, looking forward to a…
A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of…
Five years ago the Centennial Group and the Asian Development Bank issued an interesting report titled “India 2039: An Affluent Society”. There is a lot to read there; the Congress party had just been re-elected, and it seemed to have been handed a decisive second chance that would enable it to get out of the…
I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
By CHAITANYA KALBAG New Delhi, Dec 11. India’s ruling Congress (I) Party, which celebrates its centenary next year, is fighting for political survival as much as a parliamentary majority in national elections in two weeks’ time. After years of unchallenged supremacy as India’s dominant political force, the party is being rocked by an internal debate…
Bitter squabbles divide party By CHAITANYA KALBAG New Delhi, Nov 4—India’s new Prime Minister, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, yet to win his spurs in Government, has to quickly take a series of tough political decisions to consolidate his power. He must end squabbles inside his ruling Congress (I) Party, decide by the end of this…
Not because it wants to solve the foreigners issue In Assam, a Chief Minister who is unpopular in her own party is being kept on, a minority government is being propped up, and the powers that be seem uninterested in solving the foreigners issue. In Manipur, the Assembly has been suspended while the Congress(I) works…
The kisans got a free ride, and helped give the Congress(l) a lift Never had so many people gained so little from so heralded an event as the Kisan Rally in Delhi on 16 February. Estimates of the crowd gathered on the Rajpath lawns ranged from 2.5 million by Delhi Police Commissioner PS Bhinder to…
What is the current state of youth politics? Every youth organisation is dominated by the parent party and suffers from the prejudices of old politicians. Every youth organisation is dormant most of the time but takes to street warfare when roused. Youth politics are only a youthful version of the rot that has eaten into…
Has anything changed in the two Bihar villages that hit the headlınes? Six kilometres from Harnaut, the jeep broke down in the mud. The slipper-shod lady decided to continue her journey on elephant-back. Perched dangerously behind her and the mahout was another lady, a member of Parliament. It took the elephant three hours to reach…
Oh, what a glorious thing democracy is! If you add the number of festivals, weekends, hours spent in bad traffic, and election days in a typical working-age Indian’s life, chances are that she or he is beavering away for less than half the year. If we just had elections to all our state assemblies and…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), it is a make-or-break election in Assam. Of the four states and one union territory going to the polls in April and May, Assam is the only one where the BJP–having suffered defeats in Delhi and Bihar–stands a decent chance of snatching power. Except in…
Which party will you vote for? It is a bit like England’s witch trials in the middle ages. You were dunked in water as a test; if you did not drown you were pronounced a sorceress and burnt at the stake. Whichever government you elect, the choice is not clear, clean, and comforting. By now…
Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the choices facing the nation. They were exercised by the epic corruption and mis-governance,…
I was hard put on Wednesday to find an advertisement remembering Rajiv Gandhi on the anniversary of his assassination. It was a telling contrast with a few months ago when the newspapers were flooded, just before the elections were announced, with ads extolling UPA II’s achievements. Political parties do suffer huge losses, but nothing has…
INFORMATION & BROADCASTING MINISTER L.K. ADVANI
‘I Am Not Happy with The Pattern of Newspaper Ownership’
Transindia: Mr. Advani, many people feel today that the Janata Government’s image is quite clean, and that it is innately decent, but that its performance has been quite poor. Would you comment on that?
L.K. Advani: This impression is erroneous, though if people hold that impression, I wouldn’t blame them because we came into office in a situation in which the people expect- ed wonders from us.
Transindia: Mr. Chandra Shekhar, do you think you have one of the most thankless jobs in the country today, what with having to build up a party composed of such varied components as the Janata is?
Chandra Shekhar: I agree that we have had to create a party from scratch. But I would not say that my job is thankless. There are certain advantages which one cannot ignore and there are many difficulties, too.
Is Drinking A Ritual? Then I Think It Is Better to Close Our Diplomatic Missions! The appointment is at 1 pm at the Prime Minister’s Office in South Block. These imposing stone buildings, a few hundred yards away from Rashtrapati Bhavan, contain the offices of most of India’s government leaders. A surprisingly courteous Reception Officer enters…
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that have passed since Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister…
Chaitanya Kalbag Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The…
Eighteen hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in the Chandigarh Raj Bhavan’s large reception hall. “This is Haryana!” yelled apoplectic Lok Dal MLAs, eyes blood-shot, neck veins bulging, pressing around the diminutive Tapase in a knee-touching, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.…
CONGRESS PARTY PRESIDENT- BRAHMANANDA REDDY “We Will Return to Power Soon” Transindia: Mr. Reddy, many people feel that the Congress Party has had a great past, but does not have a great future. Would you like to comment on that? Brahmananda Reddy: That the Congress Party had a great and glorious past is accepted by…
13 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 13 (Reuters) – The resemblance to Indira Gandhi is eerie—the sari draped over the head, the dark glasses, the high-pitched oratory, the imperious wave of the hand. Even her signature “Jai Hind!” (Victory to India) at the end of every campaign…
16 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Indian voters queued up early on Monday to cast their votes as the world’s largest democracy launched the first phase of a mid-term election that is widely predicted to return another hung parliament. At least 250 million adults are…
22 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 22 (Reuters) – “Watch this space.” The website of India’s 112-year-old Congress party promises to introduce the “most popular, most charismatic and most dynamic political figures” in India—but there are no names. “This section will be up soon,” the page says limply.…
1 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 1 (Reuters) – Indians waited uneasily on Sunday for official results from a drawn-out election that looks set to confirm their worst fears of more political instability in a hung parliament. State television Doordarshan forecast large gains for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya…
3 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 3 (Reuters) – India’s Bharatiya Janata Party appeared tantalisingly close on Tuesday to realising its dream of ruling this vast nation, but its leaders were not rapturous. With results in for 504 of the 545 seats in parliament’s lower house, the…
10 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 10 (Reuters) – India was set on Tuesday for a new coalition government led by Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee. Vajpayee, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was invited by President K.R. Narayanan to form a new federal government, ending…
15 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 15 (Reuters) – Atal Behari Vajpayee received the green light on Sunday to form India’s next government, but his coalition is likely to be even more shaky than the one it replaced. Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will take power…
16 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 16 (Reuters) – The leader of India’s Hindu-dominated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) embarks on Monday on the difficult task of cobbling together a cabinet coalition to head a shaky minority government. BJP supporters celebrated late into the night with sweets and fireworks…
19 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 19 (Reuters) – Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee took office on Thursday as India’s new prime minister at the head of a minority coalition government. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and over a dozen regional allies will have to face a…
29 November 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party swept to electoral victory in three key states on Sunday, raising the prospect of a power struggle with the Hindu nationalist-led central government. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi said she was in no hurry to oust the…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s wounded Bharatiya Janata Party should ram through an agenda of bold economic reform in the aftermath of its humbling in three key provincial elections, a senior official of the rival Congress party said on Sunday. Voters spoke with their wallets and delivered a stinging rebuff to…
18 May 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 17 (Reuters) – Sonia Gandhi spent 16 years observing India’s most consummate political chess player – her mother-in-law – and on Monday showed she knew a gambit or two. Faced with a revolt by three veteran colleagues, the Italian-born Sonia handed…
Chaitanya Kalbag CHAMKAUR SAHIB, India, Nov 23, Reuter – Long before Bimal Kaur Khalsa’s motorcade churns into dusty view across the Punjab countryside, the waiting crowds are chanting militant Sikh slogans. Khalsa, widow of one of prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassins, has come to symbolise the anger and alienation that have plunged the north Indian…
Chaitanya Kalbag LUDHIANA, India, Nov 24, Reuters – Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi wound up an exhausting election campaign on Friday, addressing a sparse crowd standing up to its ankles in mud. Chief rival Vishwanath Pratap Singh ended his campaign jubilant. “Congress will be routed,” Singh told an impromptu roadside news conference in Uttar Pradesh…
Chaitanya Kalbag CHANDIGARH, India, Nov 26, Reuters – India’s bloody general election entered its final stage on Sunday with an exit poll from earlier voting predicting that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi faces major losses. The survey, conducted by the independent India Today magazine, forecast neither Gandhi nor the opposition National Front alliance would get a…
27 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 27, Reuter – A giant petrochemical project could hold a clue to whether India’s main communist party will throw its weight behind Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as he heads towards an election defeat. Gandhi’s Congress party appeared on Monday to be…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, NOV 28, Reuters – Political instability in India may be in prospect after inconclusive national elections, but industrialists and economists said they expected business to carry on as usual. They said industry’s energetic growth over the past five years had generated its own momentum. “This country, fortunately, is not run by…
5 September 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Little more than half of 166 million eligible voters took part in the first round of India’s general election on Sunday in a poll widely predicted to deliver the first majority government in 15 years. Five people died in…
20 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 20 (Reuters) – India faced the prospect of fresh elections on Thursday as the country was convulsed by a frenzy of political gamesmanship. The only real question appeared to be when, not whether, the new polls would be held. “It may happen…
In a spirited panel discussion moderated by Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag, Yashwant Sinha, MP and former finance minister, M. Damodaran, former SEBI chairman, Satya Poddar, Partner, Ernst & Young, Samiran Chakraborty, Regional Head of Research, Standard Chartered Bank and Nilesh Shah, President, Corporate Finance, Axis Bank, shared their views. Edited excerpts Chaitanya Kalbag: All…
29 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India woke up on Saturday to a lame-duck government and a political crisis that only deepened after Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s resignation. Newspapers were cynical about what lay ahead and ran banner headlines like “Experiment Coalition: Abort, Fail,…
The Janata Party will soon split. The Janata Party has always been a loose coalition. The Janata Party’s constituents have view-points and ambitions that differ too widely. The Janata Party was a short-lived experiment in democracy. Opinions like these began to rotate slowly in the air when hardly a few months had passed after the…
28 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party switched off the life support system of the minority government on Friday, but in the process may have hastened its own death throes. Twice in the past 13 years Congress has ridden to power on a…
7 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The word “pundit” is Sanskrit for “learned man,” and in India they were busy at the weekend trying to divine what lay ahead for the world’s most populous democracy. This much was clear — no single party was likely…
8 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s main opposition group will block the full convertibility of the rupee, favour foreign investment only if it goes into infrastructure and shake out state firms if it wins power, its chief planner said on Monday. Jay Dubashi, chief…
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will be held in March, has created ripples of amazement the world over. All detained Opposition leaders have been released, and press censorship has been lifted. What do these developments portend?…
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too, it is she who is the real issue. Her challengers’ election manifestos say hardly anything new, except that they vow to ‘wipe out’ the ‘scourges’ of the Emergency. 320 million…
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political forecaster. In a hurricane sweep, it snuffed out thirty years of uninterrupted Congress rule in independent India, and sent Premier Indira Gandhi, and her feared lieutenants, into sudden oblivion. The…
If politics is the art of deception, the Congress(I) symbolises its highly developed state. After crying itself hoarse about its inability to conduct the Garhwal Lok Sabha by-election, the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh seems on the surface surprisingly resigned to the victory of its bête noire, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, 63, president of the Democratic…
It began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of Gwalior, and her only son, ex-Maharaja Madhavrao. Over the years, this essentially political fight spilt out of the Gwalior palace into national attention. Today, it includes all the ingredients of…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Nearly two months after a shocked Parliament was rocked by the Nellie and Gohpur massacres and the bloodbath that had drenched Assam during February’s’ election week, the issue had all but been forgotten by both government and opposition. Suddenly last fortnight it was revived by journalist Arun Shourie’s scathing expose in the last issue of…
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s health more than anything else has been responsible for the sudden thaw in Delhi-Srinagar relations For a while last month Kashmir teetered on the brink of an insoluble crisis while the prickly Resettlement Bill hung fire, the Sheikh grew more belligerent and the Centre seemed trapped in a peculiar inertia. Then, on…
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have clashed repeatedly over the last two years and a half-only to be dragged back into uneasy reconciliation every time by mediators. Incredibly, Charan Singh moved to hammer the last nail…
Quit moaning and hear the good news, folks! India is going to be the world’s largest beef exporter in 2012, beating out Australia and Brazil with 1.4 million tonnes of buffalo meat hoofing it to distant shores. You may think the domestic economy is all blood and gore, but it is not. Last weekend, it…
Where responsibility for troubled histories can be clearly defined, other countries have tried to make amends. Germany has apologised for the horrors of the Holocaust… How far can you reach back in time if you want to right wrongs, real or perceived? Look back through history and nearly every nation can point to traumatic events…
How to create a state of suspended animation On August 5, the Indian government declared that Jammu and Kashmir is no longer an exception. On August 5, the Indian government decided to make Kashmir an exception. Why am I saying contradictory things about the same event? Because they are both facts. Bear with me. Removing…
One week before Phase 1, the votes still hold the cards Loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it. -Mark Twain After five years of ‘achhe din’, you would think we’d be gazing with happy expectation at the bright lights of even better days, looking forward to a…
In his book ‘How the BJP Wins’, Prashant Jha describes how Narendra Modi has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to near-invincibility by transmogrifying himself again and again over the past decade and a half. “If he was a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) from 2002, Modi carefully transitioned into a vikas purush, the…
“Tis the season for chest-thumping. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unquestionably on top of the heap. But what a heap it is. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of nasty triumphalism has been on display. Such eruptions need a trigger, and a handy one was provided by the departing remarks of…
I woke up before dawn today to an email from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. It listed his major activities over the previous week. He had been typically busy: just before he left for Hangzhou, where he chaired a special BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi granted a soft-focus television interview…
There is nobody left in the Valley with the moral authority, the stature and the courage to stand and speak to the angry mobs. The last man who could have, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, died nearly 34 years ago. All of us view the past through a very limiting lens. We move the glass over people…
A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of…
Why the regional thoroughbreds are the real winners in the assembly election sweepstakes The scene for India’s regional politics was scripted by Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai in 1967. The screenwriter and playwright led his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to victory in Tamil Nadu (then Madras state), riding to power on resurgent Tamil nationalism and an anti-Hindi agitation. …
Round about this time, we ought to have been chilling our champagne and getting ready to exult in, and celebrate, a year of dramatic and positive change under the inspiring leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vision, vim, vigour, and vitality should have been the keywords for Year One of the Modi Era. Yet the…
Arvind Kejriwal is the India Rubber Man. A Leo in politics if there is one, charismatic, mercurial, impetuous and likeable despite his foibles, he has re-invented himself time and again and rebounded into a new avatar. IIT trained engineer, IRS tax officer, Right to Information activist, anti-corruption crusader, and sidekick to Anna Hazare, Kejriwal couldn’t…
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.- Julius Caesar, Act 1 By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who…
In the late 15th century, an anonymous playwright wrote Everyman, widely billed as the world’s greatest morality play of all time, in which the gentle aam admi, visited by sinister Death, is saved only by his Good Deeds after his Pride, Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five Wits have all deserted him. What Good Deeds…
I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
Not since Brutus has there been such a stab in such a back. No wonder Indira Gandhi was so “absolutely livid” and her daughter-in-law Maneka so studiously low-key. The culprit: Maneka’s mother Amiteshwar Anand, who fetched Mrs Gandhi a resounding snub by selling her chintzy. down-at-heel magazine Surya India and its Hindi counterpart to two…
ALL GOOD Hindus hope to reincarnate as better Hindus, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be celebrating its second birthday on April 5 with the conviction that it is well on the way to establishing itself as a “nation alternative”. More than anything else, a strident section in the party is anxious to shed…
One of the smartest things Prime Minister Narendra Modi did after coming to power four years ago was to appoint diehard loyalists as state governors. They were either beholden to him or to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When the Congress was on top of the heap, it routinely…
Oh, what a glorious thing democracy is! If you add the number of festivals, weekends, hours spent in bad traffic, and election days in a typical working-age Indian’s life, chances are that she or he is beavering away for less than half the year. If we just had elections to all our state assemblies and…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
Will Modi carry out fundamental reforms or continue to tinker? Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement Monday of a $2.5 billion program to take electricity to 40 million of India’s poorest households bore all the hallmarks of his recent economic policies. Two-thirds of the way into his five-year term,…
The past few weeks in India have been like drinking from a fire hose. Full-page newspaper advertisements, huge rallies and hosannas from giddy supporters have poured forth as the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party celebrates two years in power. There has also been a deluge of interviews You might also like with senior government ministers, a…
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), it is a make-or-break election in Assam. Of the four states and one union territory going to the polls in April and May, Assam is the only one where the BJP–having suffered defeats in Delhi and Bihar–stands a decent chance of snatching power. Except in…
Which party will you vote for? It is a bit like England’s witch trials in the middle ages. You were dunked in water as a test; if you did not drown you were pronounced a sorceress and burnt at the stake. Whichever government you elect, the choice is not clear, clean, and comforting. By now…
Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the choices facing the nation. They were exercised by the epic corruption and mis-governance,…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning, most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
I was hard put on Wednesday to find an advertisement remembering Rajiv Gandhi on the anniversary of his assassination. It was a telling contrast with a few months ago when the newspapers were flooded, just before the elections were announced, with ads extolling UPA II’s achievements. Political parties do suffer huge losses, but nothing has…
The Rajyabhishek in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt was a sight for sore eyes, and understandably some of us went ape even if we were not among the 4,000 people attending Narendra Modi’s oathtaking. It was still a modest event compared with the 1.8 million people who attended Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration. Talking about…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
New Delhi, May 13 (Reuters) – Pakistan’s test launch of its longest-range missile last month triggered this week’s series of underground nuclear tests by India, a senior Indian official said on Wednesday.
In a briefing for Western news agencies hours after India stunned the world with two more underground nuclear blasts, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, set forth the rationale for the tests in unambiguous terms.
“No more tests are planned,” he said.
Chaitanya Kalbag Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The…
13 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 13 (Reuters) – The resemblance to Indira Gandhi is eerie—the sari draped over the head, the dark glasses, the high-pitched oratory, the imperious wave of the hand. Even her signature “Jai Hind!” (Victory to India) at the end of every campaign…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Feb 14 (Reuters) – The leader of India’s main opposition party said on Saturday he was the target of a series of car bomb blasts that killed at least 31 people, wounded up to 100, and triggered rioting and arson in the city of Coimbatore. The violence was the worst…
15 February 1998 The Washington Post A30 Copyright 1998, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved The leader of India’s main opposition party said today he was the target of a series of car-bomb blasts that killed 32 people, wounded as many as 100 and triggered rioting and arson in the city of Coimbatore. The…
16 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Indian voters queued up early on Monday to cast their votes as the world’s largest democracy launched the first phase of a mid-term election that is widely predicted to return another hung parliament. At least 250 million adults are…
22 February 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Feb 22 (Reuters) – “Watch this space.” The website of India’s 112-year-old Congress party promises to introduce the “most popular, most charismatic and most dynamic political figures” in India—but there are no names. “This section will be up soon,” the page says limply.…
1 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 1 (Reuters) – Indians waited uneasily on Sunday for official results from a drawn-out election that looks set to confirm their worst fears of more political instability in a hung parliament. State television Doordarshan forecast large gains for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya…
3 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 3 (Reuters) – India’s Bharatiya Janata Party appeared tantalisingly close on Tuesday to realising its dream of ruling this vast nation, but its leaders were not rapturous. With results in for 504 of the 545 seats in parliament’s lower house, the…
10 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 10 (Reuters) – India was set on Tuesday for a new coalition government led by Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee. Vajpayee, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was invited by President K.R. Narayanan to form a new federal government, ending…
15 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 15 (Reuters) – Atal Behari Vajpayee received the green light on Sunday to form India’s next government, but his coalition is likely to be even more shaky than the one it replaced. Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will take power…
16 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 16 (Reuters) – The leader of India’s Hindu-dominated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) embarks on Monday on the difficult task of cobbling together a cabinet coalition to head a shaky minority government. BJP supporters celebrated late into the night with sweets and fireworks…
19 March 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 19 (Reuters) – Hindu nationalist leader Atal Behari Vajpayee took office on Thursday as India’s new prime minister at the head of a minority coalition government. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and over a dozen regional allies will have to face a…
11 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 11 (Reuters) – India’s three underground nuclear tests on Monday were heralded by plentiful portents and a steady rise in the political temperature on the subcontinent. One day before he took power in March, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee served notice…
11 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 12 (Reuters) – India prepared on Tuesday to face the world’s shock and dismay over its three underground nuclear tests, and its faltering government appeared to have won sweeping domestic backing for its bold and defiant step. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya…
12 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 12 (Reuters) – India was engulfed by waves of international anger and revulsion on Tuesday, but its leaders dug in their heels and appeared ready to pay the price for audaciously stepping over the nuclear threshold. Monday’s stunning trio of underground nuclear…
14 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 14 (Reuters) – India woke up on Thursday to the first full day of biting sanctions ordered by a furious United States after a series of underground nuclear tests provoked outrage from around the world. Global condemnation continued to rain down on…
17 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 17 (Reuters) – “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One…I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” These words from the Hindu…
27 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – India’s nuclear tests alone will not make the country a major power unless twinned with rapid economic development, Defence Minister George Fernandes said on Wednesday. “I believe that India has remained a very soft state, soft in every sense…
27 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) – In June 1976, after a year in hiding, George Fernandes was arrested on Charges of waging war against the state and paraded in manacles before the cameras. The firebrand chairman of India’s Socialist Party was accused of being a…
29 May 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – India’s defence minister said on Thursday he did not think nuclear deterrence would help resolve the dispute over Kashmir and dismissed Pakistan’s nuclear tests as “ping-pong balls”. Asked if “equal deterrence” would pave the way for India and Pakistan…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, June 2 (Reuters) – India’s Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha put up a spirited defence of his “investor-friendly” budget on Tuesday and said he was not unduly worried about inflation so long as the economy grew strongly. In an interview with Reuters Television a day after he unveiled the federal budget for…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, June 3 (Reuters) – India’s fiscal targets for the current year are not just a “hope and a prayer” even if there is a trade-off between growth and Inflation, the government’s chief economic adviser said on Wednesday. Shankar Acharya told Reuters he did not agree with critics who had labelled Finance…
29 November 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party swept to electoral victory in three key states on Sunday, raising the prospect of a power struggle with the Hindu nationalist-led central government. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi said she was in no hurry to oust the…
Chaitanya Kalbag NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s wounded Bharatiya Janata Party should ram through an agenda of bold economic reform in the aftermath of its humbling in three key provincial elections, a senior official of the rival Congress party said on Sunday. Voters spoke with their wallets and delivered a stinging rebuff to…
25 April 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, April 25 (Reuters) – What do a former housewife who speaks Italian-accented Hindi, a former movie glamour girl now dubbed a “Revolutionary Leader”, and the world’s longest serving elected communist leader have in common? All three unlikely partners have struggled over the…
21 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 21, Reuters – The leader of an increasingly powerful rightwing Hindu party said on Tuesday that India faces instability if the opposition alliance he backs wins this week’s elections. Lal Krishna Advani of the revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was harsh in…
5 September 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Little more than half of 166 million eligible voters took part in the first round of India’s general election on Sunday in a poll widely predicted to deliver the first majority government in 15 years. Five people died in…
20 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 20 (Reuters) – India faced the prospect of fresh elections on Thursday as the country was convulsed by a frenzy of political gamesmanship. The only real question appeared to be when, not whether, the new polls would be held. “It may happen…
In a spirited panel discussion moderated by Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag, Yashwant Sinha, MP and former finance minister, M. Damodaran, former SEBI chairman, Satya Poddar, Partner, Ernst & Young, Samiran Chakraborty, Regional Head of Research, Standard Chartered Bank and Nilesh Shah, President, Corporate Finance, Axis Bank, shared their views. Edited excerpts Chaitanya Kalbag: All…
29 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India woke up on Saturday to a lame-duck government and a political crisis that only deepened after Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s resignation. Newspapers were cynical about what lay ahead and ran banner headlines like “Experiment Coalition: Abort, Fail,…
28 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – India’s Congress party switched off the life support system of the minority government on Friday, but in the process may have hastened its own death throes. Twice in the past 13 years Congress has ridden to power on a…
7 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The word “pundit” is Sanskrit for “learned man,” and in India they were busy at the weekend trying to divine what lay ahead for the world’s most populous democracy. This much was clear — no single party was likely…
8 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s main opposition group will block the full convertibility of the rupee, favour foreign investment only if it goes into infrastructure and shake out state firms if it wins power, its chief planner said on Monday. Jay Dubashi, chief…
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the struggle within “We are all like a family and there is bound to be dissent in a democratic party.” The trouble with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 55, is he is too transparent. A rotund, dhoti-cad orator given to over- heated rhetoric, his misfortune is that he heads a party consisting in…
It began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of Gwalior, and her only son, ex-Maharaja Madhavrao. Over the years, this essentially political fight spilt out of the Gwalior palace into national attention. Today, it includes all the ingredients of…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Can the new Railway minister outrun the challenges? Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant, lawyer, former investment banker, former Bharatiya Janata Party treasurer, and a go-getter. Goyal, who likes taking leadership courses (currently Harvard; and Yale and Oxford and Princeton earlier) likes stretch targets, just as his boss Narendra Modi favours BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious…
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd at one of the prime minister’s rallies, then go to his website, which has a link to ‘NaMo Merchandise’.…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…
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