Innholdsfortegnelse for December 13, 2021 i India Today

Babul Supriyo, the BJP member of Parliament who crossed over to the Trinamool Congress in September, was being tipped for high office in Didi’s party. Like being the mayoral candidate in the upcoming Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) election, replacing incumbent Firhad Hakim. Supriyo’s periodic tweets professing love for the city provided more grist to this rumour mill. To no avail, though, for he didn’t make it to the list of KMC candidates, whereas Hakim did. Babul isn’t giving up. He was spotted dribbling a football at a local ground while campaigning for a local TMC candidate. Benched, but still in the game.…

The Madras High Court has nixed the AIADMK (All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) plan to convert former chief minister J. Jayalalithaa’s sprawling home into a second public memorial. In a November 24 verdict, Justice N. Seshasayee ruled against the decision of the former AIADMK government to acquire the property and directed the Chennai district collector to hand over the keys of the house to its legal heirs, J. Deepak and J. Deepa, nephew and niece of the former chief minister, within three weeks. For four decades, Jayalalithaa had lived in the bungalow ‘Veda Nilayam’ (named after her mother Vedavalli), on a property they had bought in 1967 in her superstar years in the upscale Poes Garden area of Chennai. After she died on December 5, 2016, and the other principal…

↘ The party’s database of 180 million volunteers has been classified by profession, area and interests using digital software. They were then activated for party work at the grassroots level. WhatsApp groups were created at the booth level to impart information in the form of videos, documents, voice-modulated messages etc. ↘ Regular training camps are organised at the mandal level about how to propagate the news of PM Modi’s programmes and policies to the specific groups they belong to ↘ All officebearers of the party, including state unit chiefs, have key result areas (KRAs) expected of them and their performance is monitored ↘ A battalion of 8,000 full-time party workers have been deputed as poornkalik vistaraks (full-time expansionists) across all the Vidhan Sabha constituencies in the country to ensure implementation…

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Pictures of corpses bracket photographer Prashant Panjiar’s recently released book, That Which is Unseen. In 1981, he writes, “Dacoits were big news in Uttar Pradesh.” Besieged and beleaguered, the state police had started staging encounters, killing innocents they would brand bandits. We see in Panjiar’s stark photograph, a police constable stepping on a dead body. In his outstretched hand, there is triumph and a warning. Almost 30 years later, in 2010, Panjiar shoots another body, this time in drought-prone Vidarbha: “I photographed Vijay Thamke’s body in the mortuary the morning after he binged on alcohol laced with pesticide, watched his family grieve, and participated in his funeral.” Between banditry and farmer suicides, Panjiar tells us many stories—his own, of print journalism in post-Emergency India, but the most crucial story he…

1232 Kms Journalist-turned-filmmaker Vinod Kapri followed a group of migrant workers from Delhi to their hometown in Saharsa in Bihar, documenting the harsh treatment meted out to them by authorities who should have ideally helped them. BACKSTAGE Lipika Singh Darai looks at the dying art form of puppetry in Odisha. Her film tells the story of four sets of puppeteers, asking them essential questions: How is folklore preserved? What happens to the ‘purity’ of an art form when it gets co-opted? THE BORDERLANDS Samarth Mahajan’s film premiered at the Munich International Documentary Festival, 2020. It follows the lives of six individuals and shows the violence civilians living in border areas are forced to endure.…

Barely a fortnight after news broke of a new Covid-19 ‘variant of concern’—codenamed ‘Omicron’ and first reported to the WHO (World Health Organization) by South Africa on November 24—and even before a single case has been reported in the country, India is scrambling to implement measures to contain what some say is the most contagious variant yet. At the national level, these include travel advisories and stricter testing and quarantine guidelines for travellers, while several states have imposed additional restrictions of their own. At the time of writing, there were few certainties about the Omicron variant. Virologists say they hope to have a better understanding of the danger posed by this strain by mid-December, including how quickly it spreads, the expected severity of symptoms and how effective existing vaccines are…

When Param Bir Singh, director general (DG) of the Maharashtra Home Guard, flew down to Mumbai from Chandigarh on November 25—after going missing for 231 days—he had probably made up his mind to face investigation in the extortion cases against him. Singh reached his home in South Mumbai’s Malabar Hill, changed to formals and headed for the Kandivali unit of the Mumbai Police crime branch. There he underwent six hours of interrogation by deputy commissioner of police Nilotpal Mishra and a police inspector—junior officers who had reported to Singh till he was unceremoniously removed as Mumbai police chief on March 20. Singh’s return was not voluntary though. The Supreme Court, on November 18, had asked the 1988 batch IPS officer to disclose his whereabouts if he wanted his plea seeking…

With millions of Indians already invested in cryptocurrencies and possibly as many trying to assess its scope and risks before taking the plunge, there is a lot of interest in the upcoming Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, slated for discussion in the ongoing winter session of Parliament. The Bill is expected to include accountability and transparency standards for crypto-trading exchanges, with many hoping the digital tokens will be treated as assets like equities or real estate. It’s near-certain that private cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, will not be recognised as legal tender in India. On November 29, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Lok Sabha that the Centre had no plans to recognise Bitcoin—the largest cryptocurrency by value—as a currency. Government sources say there are…

Trust Amit Shah to know just how important the states going to the assembly elections, particularly Uttar Pradesh, in February 2022, will be for the national fortunes of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Last month, while addressing a gathering of over 700 party workers in Varanasi, the Union home minister and former party president told them: “The foundation of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, which will be held under the leadership of Narendra Modiji, will be laid in the 2022 assembly election in UP.” For the BJP, the seven assembly elections scheduled in 2022—UP, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur, Goa (which go to the polls in February), and Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh (in late 2022)—will indeed be a significant battle in the run-up to the 2024 general election, determining whether the…

The annual India Today State of the States ranking is the most credible and comprehensive study on the performance of states in India. Examining the states’ progress over a dozen categories—economy, agriculture, education, healthcare, infrastructure, inclusive development, governance, law and order, entrepreneurship, tourism, environment and cleanliness—the rankings not only reflect the graph of socio-economic development across India but have emerged as the final word on the health of Indian states. As the objective of this survey has always been to find new ways to measure the states’ overall health, a new category was introduced this year—the happiness index. To calculate the score in happiness index, objective data on prosperity (per capita income, outstanding liabilities to population, CPI, unemployment rate) of a state, along with scores from its rankings in education,…

If what use are edifices when empty? Or buildings when free of human presence? A new online photo exhibition bears witness to the voiding of life during our two national lockdowns which silenced the streets of India since the Covid-19 pandemic began last year. Curated by Georgina Maddox and titled Poetry of Lived Spaces: A Brush with the Lens, the exhibition, featuring 11 artists, is a response to lonely and deserted spaces and our place in them. Sometimes lone human figures occupy this emptiness; sometimes they don’t appear in this landscape at all. Take an image by Aditya Arya, for instance. A lone man stands in the foreground, masked, uniformed, with mop in hand. Around him are giant markers of a once-bustling Delhi mall. The photograph is an eerie reminder…

After ‘considering it’ for years, the Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, on November 21, announced that his government will introduce the police commissioner system in the state. The system essentially involves transfer of magisterial functions from the district magistrate and the executive magistracy under him/her to police officers. The IAS (Indian Administrative Service) lobby, which had successfully thwarted two previous attempts at this change—in 2012 and 2018—has finally relented, it appears. Chouhan says initially state capital Bhopal and commercial capital Indore will get police commissioners. So why did the chief minister decide to bring in the police commissioner system even when there was no clamour for it nor a pressing law and order problem that merited such a response? Sources says the nudge came from Prime Minister Narendra…

UTTAR PRADESH Key BJP strategies • Stitched alliances with caste-based groups • Micro-managing state by dividing into six zones • Leveraging Modi’s soft Hindutva and hard Hindutva of Yogi Adityanath • Poll planks: better law & order, development, relatively corruption-free regime, pro-poor policies • Free vaccination and new vaccine campaign ‘Har Ghar Dastak’ (party is trying to make vaccination a poll issue) • Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, abrogation of Art. 370, return of Ma Annapurna’s stolen idol, redevelopment of Kashi planks to pep up Hindu sentiment Team BJP Organisation: State in-charge: Radha Mohan Singh Organisational affairs in-charge: Sanjay Bhatia (western UP), Sanjeev Chaurasia (Braj), Y. Satya Kumar (Awadh), Sudhir Gupta (Kanpur), Arvind Menon (Gorakhpur), Sunil Oza (Kashi) Election management: In-charge: Dharmendra Pradhan. Co-in-charge: Capt. Abhimanyu (western UP), Arjun Ram Meghwal,…

Q. Five states go to the polls in early 2022, and two more towards the end of the year. What are the challenges the BJP faces in these elections, especially with regard to anti-incumbency, since your party is in power in six of these states? In any election, there are many factors to consider, and all of them are important. Our style is to understand each state’s issues—its leadership, governance, our cadre’s momentum, the behaviour of opposition parties and where our party organisation in that state stands at that moment of time. The BJP tries to address every issue—we are never complacent and we are always ready to reorient our strategy. Like, in Uttar Pradesh, this is probably the first time that there is pro-incumbency in the election. Yogi Adityanath…

Tamil Nadu Best Performing Big State M.K. STALIN Chief Minister “With Tamil Nadu being called No. 1, my resolve is to work harder to hold on to this position. With the right goals coupled with determination and hard work, Tamil Nadu can reclaim its lost glory. We will soon be at the forefront in the industrial sector, education, employment and the economic and social indices. This award is a boost for the upward trajectory Tamil Nadu has undertaken” Puducherry Best Performing Small State: Overall, Health Most Improved Small State: Cleanliness M. RANGASAMY Chief Minister “We are working for the overall development of Puducherry. Promoting tourism and industries is priority for the growth of our economy. We have set aside 16.5 per cent of the total funds for the under-privileged and…

Q. Does this feel like a seminal moment in your career? I feel this time is very symbolic because I am back as a lead. It was something I was really looking forward to. It has been a journey, quite a ride. I have been working on my craft, trying to pick the right projects and work with the right people. Q. There were a lot of expectations from you after Dhobi Ghat. How did you keep the actor in you satisfied? There was a slump. Before Baaghi 2, I was contemplating if I should still continue being an actor. I am so thankful that I craved to get back out there and prove myself to the audience, my family, my friends, and to the people who wrote me off. There were…

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker and teacher at the Centre of Modern Indian Studies, Lalit Vachani admits it’s hard to find a silver lining in this pandemic, given the death and destruction it has caused. However, he also says that adversity was turned into opportunity by some. Vachani started an online documentary film festival called ‘Crossings’ himself. It’s not something that would have happened if not for this new normal. “My colleague Karin Klenke asked me if I would be interested in a film festival, because even the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) mentioned they would like to be innovative in their programming. That’s how we got started. Another Indo-German consortium, the ICAS:MP, came on board for funding purposes,” says Vachani on a video call. Having begun in October, Vachani and his…