Innholdsfortegnelse for April 22, 2024 i India Today

Disillusioned by the “false promises” of the Union and state governments to grant them Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, the Kurmi community has decided to field its own candidates in West Bengal for the impending Lok Sabha election. Their dominant presence in the four districts of Paschim Medinipur, Purulia, Jhargram and Bankura—collectively known as Jangalmahal—make them a deciding or important factor in polls. If they constitute 65 per cent of the population in Purulia, they are 42 per cent, 17 per cent and 18 per cent in Jhargram, Paschim Medinipur and Bankura, respectively. The decision is significant because members of the community voted en masse for the BJP in the 2019 general election, helping it sweep the Bankura, Bishnupur, Jhargram, Medinipur and Purulia seats for the first time, contributing significantly to…

Rivers flowing down from the Himalayan massifs are known to have fickle habits—they curl about, meander and, if they stray far enough, get captured by bigger river systems. It’s natural that politics in Punjab, a province named for five rivers, is influenced by that naughty ecological habit. Its glib practitioners breach party embankments at the speed of thought. The state is headed for its first-ever four-cornered electoral contest, and a wise punter will hold his hand. The only thing you want to bet on is that every party is made up of other parties. The BJP has fielded six candidates for the state’s 13 seats so far—four are ‘dunkis’. AAP has announced nine candidates—again, four dunkis. The chief prey base for both is the hapless Congress. The BJP is generous…

It’s harvest season for India’s charter flight operators, as eager candidates hop on to rented choppers and small aircraft with sky-high ambitions. Soaring along with them is the revenue graph of these private ‘non-schedule operators’ (NSOps)—India has around 110 of them, half with just one aircraft, but all booked out for the next two months. “The demand is huge. Bookings happen well in advance,” says Capt. R.K. Bali, MD, Business Aircraft Operators Association. Choppers are more popular due to how they allow netas to raise dust in the interiors. Fixed-wing aircraft are for the big fish state-hopping on a single day. Those who fly business class go for the Falcon 2000, whose 9- and 12-seater versions go for Rs 5.25 lakh per hour. The smaller Cessna Citations and Super King…

Till now, let’s say, he has been more renowned for not letting go. His total immersion in Rajasthan’s power stakes makes the absence of Ashok Gehlot from the LS poll fray even more conspicuous—some attribute the avoidance to fear of losing. Except for trying to see his son Vaibhav through in Jalore-Sirohi, the ex-CM has been mostly abdicating. The other half of the binary for the Congress in Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot, too has dodged the draft. He was active in candidate selection and is out campaigning enthusiastically, at least for his chosen people. But with his personal popularity, especially in the eastern belt, direct presence in the battlefield could have altered outcomes beyond one seat. Of the three, Vasundhara Raje’s recusal from Lok Sabha candidacy is the most understandable—she clearly…

THE ELECTORAL LANDSCAPE IN KARNATAKA has been marked by a curious paradox since the turn of the century. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been the biggest beneficiary of seats in parliamentary polls in the state since 2004, but has yet to win a state assembly election outright. At the same time, the Congress has come to power twice in Karnataka with a clear majority over these two decades, but has never gone beyond a single-digit seat tally in the four Lok Sabha polls held during these two long decades. No doubt, then, that the BJP has the upper hand in Karnataka when it comes to parliamentary elections. But that, ironically, also puts a lot of pressure on the saffron formation in 2024 when it’s crucial for it to maximise…

Slices of forgotten Calcutta, deep meditative paintings of nature, politically strident art as protest, and a wonderfully intriguing Avatar series with “pattachitra idioms” are seen in this uncommon exhibition featuring over 100 works by the late, and often overlooked, artist Gobardhan Ash. Curated by Brijeshwari Kumari Gohil and Harsharan Bakshi, The Prinseps Exhibition: Gobardhan Ash Retrospective, is on till April 21 at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity. Born in 1907 to a family of humble means in Begumpur in Bengal’s Hooghly district, Ash’s “knack for art” was discovered early on during his days in high school. The exhibition traces the journey of his life through his art—right from when he ran away to the Benares Art School and his coerced return to Calcutta where he eventually enrolled in the Government…

A careless comment from the Union minister of fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying, Parshottam Rupala, is threatening to put the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a spot in a state that it has held for nearly three decades—Gujarat. Rupala’s transgression came at an event of the Valmiki Samaj last month, where he said that while the British oppressed and tortured all Indians, members of the princely states bowed to them, fraternised with them and even married their daughters to the imperialists. He went on to glorify the Dalit community—of which the Valmikis are a part—for not giving in to them. “Dalits were tortured the most, but they did not yield,” Rupala, who is the BJP candidate from Rajkot, said. While Rupala’s depiction of history may (or may not) have endeared…

The farmers’ agitation had a strong Punjabi accent and its seeds of dissent have flown far in India’s political winds. The five-year-old Bahujan Dravida Party (BDA) has fielded seven candidates who could be emblems of national cross-cultivation—they are all Tamils who embraced Sikhism after taking part in the 2021 protests. “Our aim is to bring social change at the grassroots by establishing a cultural identity through Sikhism,” claims BDA founder Jeevan Singh, a Tamil from Thoothukudi. A Buddhist with the BSP earlier, his goals haven’t changed. “Our party works to empower the SCs, STs, OBCs and religious minorities who form 95 per cent of Indians,” he says. The BDA is in the fray in southern Tamil Nadu, and Jeevan hopes the neo-Sikhs will add a vibrant new colour to the…

You’d think its history of language politics would have nixed such a possibility. But politics never ceases to surprise. There’s a hot new item in Maharashtra’s campaign polemics: English proficiency, as a marker of education. With a deficiency in the former allegedly implying the lack of the other! Dr Sujay Vikhe Patil, BJP MP from Ahmednagar, took Maratha politics to these unfamiliar waters when he took a swipe at his rival Nilesh Lanke’s lack of command over English and Hindi. “I will not file my nomination if, over the next month, my opponent can repeat my speeches verbatim even after learning them by rote,” he said, throwing a dare to the Sharad Pawar NCP candidate. Vikhe Patil, a neurosurgeon, speaks with all the nerve of the well-heeled—his dad, state revenue…

PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI HAS THE RARE ABILITY to visualise the big picture and then, like an artist, proceed to execute it stroke by stroke. As he told INDIA TODAY in an interview last December, “When I start something, I know the endpoint. But I never announce the final destination or blueprint in the beginning. There is a progressive unfolding of my vision and plans.” On April 9, 10 days before the voting date in Tamil Nadu, the prime minister held a massive road show in Chennai that wended its way through T. Nagar in the heart of the city and, just as it was about to end, declared: “Chennai has won me over.” The symbolism of the route the prime minister took for his rally wasn’t lost on Chief…

FORMER INDIAN POLICE SERVICE officer Kuppuswamy Annamalai is just four years into his avatar as a politician but is already looking like a pro. At Palladam, on the outskirts of Coimbatore, the Lok Sabha constituency he is contesting from, bursting crackers and the beating of drums greet the arrival of his saffron mini-bus. Dressed in a white dhoti-kurta and sporting a craggy beard and hair, Annamalai steps on the hydraulic lift pedestal that enables him to pop up from the roof of the bus. Outside, party workers wave Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) flags furiously while cutouts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi beam down from the poles that line the road. Everything is carefully choreographed. Songs praising Modi’s achievements and his vision for India blare out in Tamil as an ecstatic…

FOR ONCE, SHASHI THAROOR IS AT A LOSS FOR WORDS. ASKED WHAT HE CALLS the burgundy red election vahanam (vehicle) he is perched precariously atop during a drive-through campaign rally in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram, he pauses and then laughs. “It’s a pick-up truck that gives me a chair and enough space for a couple of colleagues so that we can wave to the public as we drive by.” It’s hot and humid in Kerala’s capital city and all that protects Tharoor from the sun and rain is a makeshift tarpaulin over his head and a compact air-conditioner next to his perch. Having won three consecutive Lok Sabha elections for the Thiruvananthapuram constituency on a Congress ticket, Tharoor, 68, is a veteran at campaigning. He waves furiously to pedestrians, passing…

FOR A STATE THAT HAS BEEN IN EXISTENCE only for 10 years and is therefore the country’s youngest, Telangana is fast becoming the new battleground for hard-fought electoral contests. Just five months ago, it saw the end of the decade-long rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), led by the man who had spearheaded the movement for the state itself, K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), in a bruising assembly election. The summer may be crueller than November, with political temperatures rising in tandem with the mercury. On May 13, three advancing armies—of the ruling Congress, BRS and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—will battle for the state’s 17 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress—buoyed by its win in the 2023 year-end assembly election, coming in from a decade’s exile—is determined to replicate its…

In the assembly election held in March 2022, Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami defied psephologists, anti-incumbency and a history of no incumbent party being re-elected. Winning 47 seats and 44.3 per cent of the votes, his return to power was emphatic. Two years later, Dhami is back on the campaign trail, hoping to retain all the state’s five seats that the BJP won in the 2019 polls. The state goes to the polls on April 19, when 8.4 million voters would exercise their franchise. Sixty per cent of voters are younger than 48-year-old Dhami, who is wooing them with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of a Viksit Bharat, while showcasing his own government’s work. “Infrastructure projects like construction of highways, bridges, roads, upgradation of airports and rail links are…

At a time when Opposition unity and amicable seat-sharing should come as welcome news, any heartburn it causes has to remain suppressed in pursuit of the greater common good. So it is with the Maharashtra Congress, where several have been left unhappy with the party’s decision to concede the Sangli and Mumbai South Central seats to the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) partner Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) and Bhiwandi to the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar). The MVA sealed its seat-sharing deal for the Lok Sabha election on April 9, with the Sena (UBT) bagging 21 seats, the Congress 17 and the NCP (SP) 10. Sena (UBT), in fact, had already announced the candidature of wrestler Chandrahar Patil from Sangli and former Rajya Sabha MP Anil Desai from Mumbai South…

Jitin Prasada was a second-generation loyal campwallah to Congress bigwigs, but fortune started smiling on him only after he decided to venerate other gods. Presently ensconced in the Yogi cabinet, he now looks set to pole-vault back to the national stage as the BJP candidate from Pilibhit. That’s a step up for the former Rahul Gandhi acolyte, given that he replaces another high-profile Gandhi scion, Varun. The first prasada he got after jumping ship to the BJP was the plum PWD department. With the saffron momentum carrying him, his flight to the Lok Sabha may not see too much turbulence. Word on the street is that he may now get a call-up to the Union cabinet if the BJP forms government again.…

WILL THE DRAVIDA MUNNETRA KAZHAGAM (DMK) again be the third largest party, behind the BJP and the Congress, in the 18th Lok Sabha? It’s a question that’s being bandied about in Tamil Nadu a lot these days as the state braces to vote in the first phase of the general election on April 19. The ruling DMK faces a different challenge this time, considering that rivals All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the BJP have forged separate alliances, unlike in 2019, to make it a triangular contest. The Tamil nationalist Naam Thamizhar Katchi (NTK) makes the contest, at least on paper, a quadrangular one. NTK had almost 7 per cent vote share in the 2021 assembly polls, finding favour among the younger voters. The party didn’t win any seats,…

POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE Shashi Tharoor: ‘Performance’ has two meanings. One is what I have done for my constituency in the past 15 years—a 60-page report in Malayalam and English gives details of what I have done. The other meaning is ‘acting’ or ‘theatre performance’. That’s what the BJP is all about—performing for the media’s cameras, performing before the general public. The BJP-ruled Centre had made three specific promises for Kerala; none has been fulfilled, including the setting up of an AIIMS. Rajeev Chandrasekhar: Very little has happened in the constituency. Despite people being given repeated mandates to Parliament and the state assembly, there’s very little to show for it in Thiruvananthapuram. It is widely acknowledged that in the last 15 years, Tharoor has not performed much. He made promises, including…

On MARCH 16, ANDHRA PRADESH CHIEF MINISTER Y.S. JAGAN MOHAN REDDY PAID HOMAGE at the memorial of his father and former CM Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, on the family estate at Idupulupaya in Kadapa district before going on to announce the names of party contestants for the 175 assembly and 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Just hours later, though, his Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) came in for a rude shock as the Election Commission (EC) announced that the state would go to the polls only in the fourth phase, and not the first, as had been the case in the past four elections. Any hope of running a short, sustained campaign leading to a triumphant election in April was shattered. That the voting will now be on…