Misadventures of the Modi government


"Back in the summer of 2014, almost anything was possible for the BJP government. The once-in-a-generation mandate had endowed the government with enormous political capital that could be used to implement any reform, including some long-pending and difficult reforms. Alas, two years after May 2014, the government has become a punchline for jokes." - writes P. Chidambaram
He writes, on Pseudo-nationalism: "Starting with the bogus sedition case against a bunch of JNU students based on a doctored video, the government launched a nationwide campaign to create the perception of an “enemy within”. The only thing this strategy seems to have achieved is to turn college campuses from Hyderabad to Pune to Aligarh to Jadavpur into war zones. Add to that the stoking of divisive fires like ‘ban beef’, ‘say Bharat Mata ki Jai’, ‘kill rationalists’ etc, and the stage is set for deeper polarisation and the ghettoisation of towns and cities. Equating nationalism with Hindutva and a right-wing, atavistic agenda is the final blow to ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’."
You can read his article by clicking here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Defining the Biden Doctrine

  In his first major foreign-policy speech as U.S. president, Joe Biden declared to the world that America was back. The international sigh of relief was almost audible amid hopes that former President Donald Trump’s disruptive style was a relic. Biden has pursued an ambitious agenda to repair alliances and forge new ones, curb corruption, arrest democratic backsliding, and tackle climate change, all while managing the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian threats to Ukraine, and escalating tensions with China.  It hasn’t all been plain sailing. The decision to withdraw remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of the country’s government and chaos in Kabul as hundreds of thousands of people fled the Taliban. Plans to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia, at the expense of Canberra’s submarine deal with Paris, soured trans-Atlantic relations.  Ahead of the anniversary of Biden’s inauguration,  Foreign Policy ’s Amy Mackinnon spoke with one of t
Read more

George Soros at the Davos Forum

Dear Friends and Colleagues,   I thought you would be interested in reading George's remarks he delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this evening.   Best regards, Michael Vachon   George Soros Remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland January 25, 2018 The current moment in history Good evening. It has become something of an annual Davos tradition for me to give an overview of the current state of the world. I was planning half an hour for my remarks and half an hour for questions, but my speech has turned out to be closer to an hour. I attribute this to the severity of the problems confronting us. After I’ve finished, I’ll open it up for your comments and questions. So prepare yourselves. *** I find the current moment in history rather painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Trump would
Read more