Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

BY R.K.MISRA Caught between a rock and a hard place, t he Vijay Rupani led BJP government in Gujarat has ended up tying itself in knots over the just concluded   indefinite fast of   patidar quota stir leader Hardik Patel.   The protest fast which began on August 25,saw the youth leader enlarge his demands to include farmer’s debt waiver and   emerge as a bridgehead for the national opposition, BJP rebels ,even garnering support from NDA ally,Shiv Sena. He   gave up his indefinite fast on the 19 th day on September 12,2018 but not before he brought divergent sects of his community on a common platform in a show of unheralded unity. Present   on the occasion of his fast breaking were key leaders of   the major sub-castes of patidars, not very often seen on a common community platform. As the reverberations from his stir spread out in concentric circles countrywide, the BJP was at it’s wits end dealing with the political fall-out of a 25 year old’s intransigence which

BY  R.K.MISRA After a life embedded in flowing prose and lyrical poetry, embellishing harsh politics with soft imagery, Atal Bihari Vajpayee has entered the domain of the dead. A sombre nation spared time from lynchings and launchings to lament. He passed away on August 16,2018. The dust has settled.The man is no more but images linger. Of ironies and contrasts, of the first saffron prime minister viewed from the home state of the next one. Of the time when there was melody in politics and the heart stirred to a captivating tune. Now feet stomp  stadiums to shrill-shriek speeches  and snuff lives on the street. As in his last days so  in 1980, Vajpayee stood straddling the divide between irrelevance and irreverence. The 1977 post-Emergency Janata Party experiment, which had brought the first non-Congress government to power headed by gujarati Morarji Desai , had come unstuck. The contentious issue was the dual membership of the erstwhile Jan Sangh members. The Jan Sangh was re