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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…