Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

BY R.K.MISRA
India’s ruling party has perfected a formula to win elections and master the mandate.
Every politically important poll you have variations of this theme dished out in myriad forms and features. The formula is simple. Use symbolisms. Flail at Pakistan, muddy the minority and harvest the hindu. Cite muslim mobilization to seek hindu voter consolidation. Many times it works as in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and the north-eastern states and sometimes it does not as in Bihar.The by-election results declared  May 3I are further cause for saffron concern. The cleaver failed to cut in Kairana, UP lok sabha seat as the jats, muslims and dalits forged a front to frustrate the BJP.
The controversy stirred up around the portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah at the Aligarh Muslim University falls in this category. It was part of the saffron poll programme, aimed at the hindu voter in Karnataka.
The BJP, MP from Aligarh, Satish Gautam who raised the issue in a letter to the AMU vice-chairman on may…

BY R.K.MISRA
Simple assumptions seduce while complex questions confound.
And so you have all manner of media pundits, simply writing off saffronista surgeon, Dr Pravin Togadia, until recently the international president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who quit the organization after his nominee was trounced. Only the star-struck believer, the self-blinded media and the politically challenged  lacking knowledge of RSS functioning, would do so.
Togadia who had been the informal chief of the VHP since 2003, announced he was quitting the outfit after the VHP elected former Himachal Pradesh Governor, Sadashiv Kokje as it’s working president on April I4 in the first ever election of the VHP in 52 years.
One time close friends, it is no secret that Togadia’s relations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi had soured during his chief ministerial days and the vitriolic hindutva/ram mandir crusader was in his cross-hairs marked out for ‘political’ extermination’. With Modi acquiring lord and master domi…

BY R.K.MISRA
Nearly 70 years after his death, Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s portraits continue to adorn places like Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Bombay High Court and Sabarmati Ashram in India. On the other hand, the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry building’s foundation stone states that it was laid by Mahatma Gandhi in 1934.
Recently, BJP MP Satish Gautam sought to remove a Jinnah portrait from AMU. It was ironic because, instead of vilifying Jinnah, the Modi Government should have actually decorated the Qaid-e-Azam, posthumously, with a Bharat Ratna because, it was Jinnah who created a Hindu-majority Bharat from the rarefied, nebulous India, while pushing the Islamists to a corner of the subcontinent and that was why the Deoband School opposed Jinnah!
Had India remained undivided, its Muslim population would now have been around 600 million, vis-à-vis the Hindus’ 1,000 million. Would the Hindus have lived peacefully with this large ‘minority’? Or, had India been balkanized, as Wi…

BY R.K.MISRA There is turmoil in the saffron brotherhood as the old order clashes with an emerging one led by personality dominant Prime Minister Narendra Modi who brooks no opposition and covets complete control. It is this tectonic shift  that is causing friction between the ‘plates’ within the larger saffron-fold.Thus you see the TDP-BJP pact under strain in Andhra Pradesh, the BJP-PDP governance unease in J&K, the Shiv Sena straining at the leash in Maharashtra and the poll imbroglio in Nagaland. As the man in total command of the Government and the party, both national governance as well as the ruling party’s politics rotates on a single axis, Narendra Modi. It is he who exercises a cast iron control over the administration through a network of civil servants-both serving and retired-personally loyal to him. By last count there must be seventy such officers-serving and retired- from Gujarat alone sprinkled all over key governance positions, outside his parent state. The latest i…

BY R.K.MISRA
Why is  Vishwa Hindu Parishad, International president Pravin Togadia fearful for his life in  BJP ruled Gujarat ?.
This million rupee puzzle is defying an answer as unfolding events indicate something amiss in the saffron brotherhood.
VHP leader Dr Pravin Togadia who mysteriously disappeared on January 15 from the VHP office in Ahmedabad causing consterned cadres to take to the streets leading to stray incidents of violence, re-appeared in a city hospital in an unconscious condition the same evening.
The next day,Togadia went public charging that there was an attempt to muzzle his voice for raising issues like the construction of the Ram temple, resettlement of Kashmiri pundits, curbing cow slaughter and ensuring right price to farmers for their produce. Known for his fiery temperament and acidic tongue, Togadia was tearful in his interaction with mediapersons. He said that he had gone into hiding fearing an ‘encounter’ by the police.
News of the VHP leader’s sudden disappear…

BY R.K.MISRA
Outcome influences attitude.
And the outcome of the just concluded elections is that the improved fortunes of the Congress  is having a profound influence on the attitude of the BJP in Gujarat.
Gujarat BJP leaders who had lost their larynx during the decade and a quarter long Narendra Modi rule in Gujarat have found their voice after the polls. The first ‘presentation’ came when deputy chief minister Nitin Patel demonstrated the strength of his vocals after BJP chief Amit Shah sought to hollow out his power entrails while leaving the deputy chief ministerial hardcover intact.
BJP leaders fondly relate how Congress in Gujarat is remote controlled from Delhi. That the BJP is walking the same beaten track became evident from the  pitiable  plight of chief minister Vijay Rupani and his entire cabinet sworn December 26 and made to wait for the next two days for the allocation of portfolios, a process which normally takes just a few hours after swearing-in.
Why? The Prime Minister …