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…
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.
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…
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…
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…