India Insight

‘Powerful’ Mamata has much to lose

Ankush Arora

Apr 21, 2012 14:14 EDT

Time Magazine’s decision to name Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee one of the world’s 100 most powerful people couldn’t have been more ironic.

It comes at a time when the “populist woman of action” is drawing criticism from many quarters after some of her fledgling government’s recent decisions sparked public outrage and a media furore.

No doubt Banerjee is still powerful. She’s been instrumental in stalling some of India’s biggest economic reforms and key policy decisions. But the state of West Bengal is now facing the heat of her maverick actions.

As the state chief minister goes from strength to strength in charting her own course, critics wonder what lies ahead for the 57-year-old firebrand leader?

Banerjee’s ouster of the world’s longest-running elected communist government was hailed as a watershed event last year. The Trinamool leader came to power on the promise of bringing ‘poribartan’ (change) to West Bengal. But her obstructionist attitude at the centre and the functioning of her own state government could derail her political career.

Perhaps the people of West Bengal didn’t know ‘poribartan’ could translate into — jailing a university professor for posting a cartoon on Banerjee, dubbing rape cases a conspiracy against the government, rewriting history textbooks in schools, banning English-language newspapers from state-run libraries. The list goes on and the opposition Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M) says Banerjee’s rule could be described as “semi-fascist”.

India’s grand old party in need of young blood

Reuters Staff

Jun 27, 2011 05:52 EDT

By Annie Banerji

With a cabinet reshuffle seemingly around the corner and the Congress party general secretary saying that Rahul Gandhi, the 41-year-old son of party chief Sonia Gandhi, had the potential to be a good prime minister, India’s home minister has now entered the fray to call for fresher faces at the highest level of politics.

In a recent interview with an Indian news channel, P. Chidambaram said that he does not consider the sixties to be the age of political prime in Indian politics; rather he feels sexagenarians in politics should step back from their positions, and leave cabinet posts for the young.

“I think we should have younger politicians. I firmly believe that we should have younger leaders. I think we should have ministers, including cabinet ministers, in their late forties and early fifties. I think those over 60, including myself, should step back,” he was quoted as saying.

If the home minister’s stance be taken into consideration with the impending ministerial reshuffle at the Centre, one could possibly witness the demission of 27 of the 34 cabinet ministers from their respective positions as most exceed the 60-plus age limit.

Leaving a handful of ministers behind, one of whom is expected to be dropped in the July cabinet restructure, the cabinet would then have a strength of seven members.

Dayanidhi Maran, India’s 44-year-old textile minister, is under investigation for alleged misdeeds in the purview of the 2G spectrum allocation scam and may be shown the door this time around.

The dog days of India’s bizarre summer of politics

Perhaps the government’s decision to push back the opening of the upcoming monsoon session of parliament was not the best idea. For as the dog days of the sub-continent’s sweltering summer drag on, the parliament-less politicians sweat from the sublime to the ridiculous in the baking heat.

From the haphazard ensemble of senior ministers that flocked to New Delhi’s airport to greet yoga guru turned social activist Swami Ramdev with more fanfare than is reserved for visiting heads of state, to the current conspiracy swirling New Delhi surrounding espionage chewing gum found in the finance minister’s private chambers, it has been a bizarre summer for politics fuelled by the hungry media in the world’s largest democracy.

Kapil Sibal, as Human Resource and Development minister, could have spent his summer break drawing up plans to overhaul an education sector that looks dangerously inadequate to deal with the demographic dividend of millions of young Indians that New Delhi likes to trumpet. Instead, he spent his days holed up in five-star hotels begging Ramdev not to stop eating, and playing it coy in press conferences after quietly ignoring veteran activist Anna Hazare’s demands for a stronger anti-graft bill.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who has seen a series of economic data releases over the past month pour cold water on optimistic growth prospects, spent the majority of his summer trying to chair what appeared to be most unruly meetings on the anti-graft legislation, but has stolen the headlines recently with a mind-boggling story involving government secrets, ministerial rivalries and old-school espionage — all bonded together with chewing gum.

With TV channels and opposition politicians dubbing it “India’s Watergate”, and political figures from across the spectrum weighing in on the sticky mess, there appears little evidence to go on than a few errant pieces of gum stuck under various desks in Mukherjee’s chambers. With the minister himself telling the media to take their conspiracy theories elsewhere, it appears more a case of unhygienic office visitors than dastardly undercover spies.

Outside of the cabinet, the summer bug spread as the mercury rose.

DMK, Congress to untie the knot?

Reuters Staff

Jun 9, 2011 06:33 EDT

By Annie Banerji

Cast as the villain in high profile graft cases and reeling from its huge loss in the Tamil Nadu state elections in May, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) appears to be in freefall.

The party has declared an emergency meeting in the state capital to discuss potential strategies regarding the recently incarcerated daughter of the DMK chief, Kanimozhi and the party’s strained ties with the ruling Congress party, itself struggling to shake off its scam-ridden identity  and public resentment for its lack of initiative and inability to tackle corruption.

Controversy has been hovering over the DMK since last year when A. Raja, a key member of the party and then Telecoms Minister, was accused of spectrum allocation at discounted prices causing a loss of $39 billion to the national exchequer.

A. Raja’s case has caused a domino effect within the Karunanidhi family, with the former Tamil Nadu chief minister’s grandnephew, Dayanidhi Maran, also under investigation for alleged misdeeds in the purview of the 2G spectrum allocation scam, regarded as the largest graft case in India.

In May, the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court ordered the arrest of Kanimozhi for handling a 2 billion rupee bribe.

Maran, who served as the telecom minister from 2004-2007, is now under the scanner for his alleged role in the two-year delay in issuing Aircel company’s applications for a mobile permit. “I vouch that during my tenure as minister of communications and IT (information technology), I was totally impartial in taking decisions,” he said, but the national auditor seems to be indicating the contrary, claiming that the minister revised the terms of reference minus the pricing.

M.F. Husain, Swami Ramdev and the world’s largest democracy

M.F. Husain, India’s most famous modern artist, died at the age of 95 this morning, not in Maharashtra, his home state, nor New Delhi, where many of his ground-breaking works were exhibited, but in London, where he lived in exile with Qatari citizenship. The ‘Picasso of India’ has for five years felt unable to live and work in his country of birth.

Husain fled India in 2006, leaving behind court cases and death threats against him, and continued vandalism of his works from right-wing Hindu groups that accused him of insulting their religion by painting deities in the nude.

Husain, a Muslim, felt unsafe and unable to practice his particular art form in the world’s largest democracy. And he’s not the only one. Salman Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but lives in the UK, saw New Delhi ban his Satanic Verses for its perceived depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

And Husain’s death presents a timely reminder to India of the multi-faceted obligations of an open, secular democracy, as anti-graft movements swell against the government.

On Thursday morning, India’s news channels cut to the breaking news of Husain’s death from pictures of Swami Ramdev, the yoga guru turned social activist being treated by doctors monitoring his health during a hunger fast that entered its sixth day on Thursday.

The country’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram, in an effort to undermine Ramdev’s stand against corruption, sought on Wednesday to paint the guru as an agent of the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organisation, and raise his worries of an upsurge in far-right extremism against the government – currently headed by his secular Congress party – to discredit the wider anti-graft movement.

Women power triumphs in state polls. What next?

The people’s verdict in the state elections of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu has put Mamata Banerjee and J. Jayalalithaa in the chief minister’s chair. With Sheila Dikshit in Delhi and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, India will now have four women chief ministers — no mean feat for a country that usually associates politics with the male gender.

Still, the poll triumphs can’t hide that the road to women’s empowerment in India has plenty of bottlenecks. For one, critics of the Women’s Reservation Bill (which if passed will reserve one-third of parliament and assembly seats for women) have ensured the bill has remained on the table in the lower house of parliament.

And despite the examples of Indian President Pratibha Patil and Congress party head Sonia Gandhi, few can deny that the number of women in Indian politics is not commensurate with the corporate world where several Indian women hold sway over multinational companies.

Women’s liberation groups say that discrimination in politics is derived from the deep-seated hypocrisy of Indian culture, one where female deities are worshipped but women still have little say over their lives.

And that even in cases where suitable female candidates are available for national and state elections, the choice has gone in favour of a male candidate.

While the Congress party headed by Gandhi has only one woman chief minister in Dikshit, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party doesn’t have any, despite its vocal support for the Women’s Reservation Bill.

Have things changed since the state polls? Are the election wins for Banerjee and Jayalalithaa a milestone for women’s empowerment in India? Share your views.

Disruptive opposition blames government for parliament woes

A lack of accountability from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a failure of consultation by his ruling Congress-led coalition and too few days of legislative business, rather than opposition protests that smothered months of legislative debate, are to blame for the paralysis of India’s parliamentary democracy, the leader of India’s opposition party wrote on Monday.

Making no reference to the weeks of protest by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that saw opposition members shouting, chanting and waving placards in the well of both houses to force the cancellation of an entire legislative session and threaten the passage of the 2011-12 budget, Arun Jaitley called for more “proper conduct” from Indian MPs in an opinion piece in The Indian Express that appeared to lay the blame of parliamentary disruption at the government’s door.

“In the last few decades the participation of prime ministers in parliamentary debates has declined. Their effective intervention is confined to reading written texts prepared by their offices. This is unacceptable… The PM has to be the most accountable in a democracy. His depleting presence in Parliament compels one to suggest (the British system of Prime Minister’s Questions) be successfully replicated in India,” Jaitley wrote.

Reticent Singh is typically media-shy, but a slew of corruption charges against his party compelled him to hold a rare press conference live on national television in February, where he vowed he would not step down despite increasing pressure from Jaitley’s party.

“To meet for less than 70 days in a year is inadequate. Short durations lead to paucity of time available for debates, issues of public importance and legislation. When members, particularly from the opposition, want to raise several issues, the privilege is denied for paucity of time. The gagging of debate leads to obstructionism. Parliamentary obstructionism then becomes an acceptable mode to highlight an issue of public importance,” Jaitley wrote, without making reference to the BJP protest of parliament.

“The government and the opposition both have a key role to play in Parliament. Conflicting opinions and at times even tensions between the two bring out the best in Indian democracy. However, there must be healthy communication between the political leadership in government and the opposition,” Jaitley continued.

Manmohan Singh: middle-class darling no more?

For nearly two decades, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the darling of the Indian middle classes, who saw the Oxford- and Cambridge-trained economist as a rare alternative to the stereotype of the uneducated, corrupt and criminal politician.

That love affair had begun to fray at the edges of late, after Singh’s perceived inaction over several corruption scandals that had emerged in his second term as premier, but now, it may finally be over.

As thousands of mostly middle-class Indians across the country demonstrated in support of veteran social activist Anna Hazare’s hunger strike against corruption, the anti-government and anti-Singh mood was very much palpable.

The middle classes have a poor voting record, but their influence on public discourse is highly out of proportion to their electoral strength and a shift in their allegiance should be worrisome for both Singh and his Congress party.

Singh has lost the only popular election he has contested and arguably, his only constituency is the middle class. His greatest advantage vis-a-vis potential rivals within and outside his party is the impression there is no alternative to this honest and upright leader.

That image has largely been sustained because of its currency amongst the middle classes who have been the biggest beneficiaries of Singh’s policies to open up the economy.

His presence had helped bring to Congress several middle-class voters who had previously supported the market-friendly policies of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The bitter truth behind BJP’s deafening budget silence

To some, the parliamentary walkout by India’s opposition prior to the vote on the country’s annual budget motion marked the failure of India’s ruling Congress party to engage with its primary adversary, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), over its claims that the Prime Minister had lied to parliament to protect his own reputation.

To others, the sight of BJP leader Sushma Swaraj leading her MPs out of the chamber as Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee prepared to deliver the most important parliamentary bill of the year encapsulated the sorry state of India’s increasingly bitter partisan politics that show no signs of repair since trumpeting corruption became the opposition’s raison d’etre. Swaraj would later tell The Hindu that her walkout was to avoid disrupting the passage of the bill, but the damning point rang out loud and clear: the opposition had decided the corruption drumbeat was more important than the budget.

Mukherjee had earlier pleaded with senior BJP leaders to allow the budget to be debated prior to any discussion on a parliamentary privilege motion submitted against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by Swaraj, promising a two-and-a-half hour debate on the issue after the budget had passed.

But as the budget was given precedent over the privilege motion, out trooped the opposition in protest, leaving a half-empty chamber to pass the bill that will keep the country financed on April 1.

India’s parliament was paralysed in November by opposition protests demanding an inquiry into allegations a minister had lost the exchequer up to $39 billion in a telecom spectrum scam, which eventually resulted in the entire winter session being abandoned. Since it reopened in February, after extensive negotiations between Congress and the BJP, various protests from the opposition over other corruption charges have resulted in adjournments and cancellation of parliamentary business.

With a slew of economic reforms seen crucial to India’s continued growth momentum gathering dust as MPs exchange insults and chants across the floor of both houses of parliament, the partisan politics that have turned India’s much-vaunted parliamentary democracy into a slanging match between government and opposition risk ruining far more than just the reputation of the primary belligerents.

Out of the DMK frying pan and into Mamata’s fire for Congress

Fresh from negotiating the continued support of one key coalition ally, Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and the Congress party heavyweights must now tackle the demands of the more politically canny and locally powerful Mamata Banerjee.

As the bleary eyes of Congress negotiators turned over the morning papers on Wednesday after almost two days of political horse-trading with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the relief of front page headlines declaring the Tamil Nadu party’s climbdown will have been cut short by the ominous presence of Banerjee and her own seat-sharing demands in the political minefield of West Bengal.

Banerjee, Railways Minister and leader of the opposition in West Bengal, is commonly referred to as “Didi” – Hindi for elder sister – and can often appear to be spearheading a one-woman party.

Negotiations with the Trinamool Congress, with the savvy Banerjee courting a burning desire to end 34 years of Left Front rule in the state, and sensing a weakened Congress party that needs to balance a continued parliamentary majority with a strong performance in the state elections, may make the talks with the DMK look like a cakewalk.

As with the Tamil Nadu party, the simmering feud with Trinamool, which contributes 19 seats to the Congress-led coalition, comes down to seat-sharing in April’s state election. Banerjee has reportedly rejected demands from Congress to allow it to contest more seats than she is currently offering.

Banerjee’s current position- described as a “take-it-or-leave-it” offer – of 58 seats for Congress to contest, is short of the 98 demanded by Congress officials in the state. 294 seats will be up for election next month.