L K Advani's Fav Poem - The Footprints

Translation of L K Advani's favorite poem

By Narayan-Chandra Rauf

Bichad kar badalon se giraa khawab koyi 

dekh raha thaa usme naaye baab koyi

Chale jaa raha thaa khudaa thaa sang sang

chalte they paa mere usi ke sang sang

Bichad ke khizaa se giraa phir khwaab koyi

kar raha thaa hisaab is baar kharaab koyi

Chaar ke badle kyon hai do bus paa ke nisha 

Ched rahe they khatte saare mujhe ye guma

Ye kyon hua kaise hua pooch raha thaa khuda se 

haasil hua jawab phir usi khuda se

Ye do hai, na balki chaar

Gaur se sunn yaar

Mushkilo mein jo tu ghiraa thaa

kaandho pe le tujhe phira thaa

BJP Needn't Slump Into Depression, They Are Poised to Win Coming Assembly Polls

While the loss of a couple of seats here and there in a by-election by a political party is understandable, the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in eight of the 11 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh should deeply concern the ruling party at the Centre.

After all, only a little over three months ago, it had swept the State in the Lok Sabha election, winning 71 of the 80 seats on offer.

What should be further worrisome for the BJP is that it has lost a majority of  the Assembly seats it had held, including that of Rohania which is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency.

For the party, this is not a good harbinger, given that it has set its sights on claiming the State in the Assembly election due in a couple of years' time.

Clearly, something is amiss in the party's organisation in the State which failed to capitalise on the wave of goodwill that Mr Modi has generated and the tremendous groundwork which BJP president Amit Shah did during the general election.

State party president Laxmikant Bajpai has taken the blame for the loss, but that is not enough. It is time for a complete overhaul of the set-up to restore confidence and enthusiasm in the cadre.

The BJP should be thankful that the jolt has come early enough for it to do a course correction and be fighting fit when the Assembly poll dawns.

While the party bigwigs will be deliberating on the reasons for the defeat, several explanations are already being touted by analysts, primary among them being that the people have punished the BJP for the ‘communal campaign' which some its senior leaders allegedly unleashed. This is the easiest available stick with which rivals of the party get to beat the BJP.

However, such a simplistic conclusion fails to take into account the various other local factors that could have determined the outcome. One such cause is the selection of candidates.

There is already rumbling that the BJP lost a few seats due to a wrong choice of candidates. Also, at least one defeated candidate has alleged that the local Member of Parliament did not whole-heartedly campaign in his favour, and was even antagonistic.

For now these are accusations and the party will be able to more accurately pinpoint the reasons once it thoroughly studies the result.

Meanwhile, it need not slump into depression, because all is not lost, though some political experts would like to believe otherwise by linking this defeat to the BJP's average performance in the recent by-election in Bihar and Karnataka and seeing an ominous pattern.

The party along with its ally, the Shiv Sena, is poised to dislodge the Congress-led regime in the coming Assembly election in Maharashtra, while it is on strong turf in Haryana, which along with Maharashtra votes on October 15.

The Samajwadi Party need not consider its victory in the by-election (it won eight of the 11 Assembly seats) as an endorsement of its governance in the State — which has been and remains pathetic.

Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav can smile for now, but the mood of the people of the State in general remains grim. The fear that, emboldened by the win, the ruling Samajwadi Party may turn even more indifferent to administration and stoop further in the politics of appeasement, is very real.

The Pioneer

The rise and fall Cong role models including Nehru

Ravi Shankar writes: 

If the expedience of history perverts values, perversions of perception create history. The campaign against Narendra Modi as the ‘maut ka saudagar’ who seeks to turn India into a totalitarian Hindu state where Muslims live in fear started sometime in 1936. It marked the emergence of the Congress party’s schizophrenic politics—one aspect inspired by tragic emotion, the other by a cynical electoral calculus. It also indicated the rise and fall of India’s role models.

From the 1930s to 50s, the Congress was a work in progress, and the dramatic personae were Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Jinnah and the Indian Muslim. As Congress role models disappeared or were dwarfed through the years, and the party clung to a fading dynastic iconography, the seraphims of the Hindu gestalt continued to prosper. Sardar Patel believed India belonged to all religions, but could not be held hostage to minority policies. As the decades passed, the BJP pantheon only grew—Golwalkar, Nanaji Deshmukh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani and now Narendra Modi—as the Gandhis syntactically emasculated Congress stalwarts. This election is not a conflict of ideology but of isology; between a party that scatters its original inclusive values and one that consolidates the legacy of its role models.

Before Independence, Congress role models included Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Jinnah and Abdul Gaffar Khan. In the provincial legislative council elections held in 1936, the Muslim League (ML) fared badly, and Jinnah saw the chance to become an Islamic role model. In 1929, ML issued a charter of demands to Nehru that included reservation for Muslims, allowing of cow slaughter, abolition of Vande Mataram, Urdu as the national language, changing the Tricolour and more. Nehru refused. But in 1947, when the Partition riots erupted, he personally intervened to protect Muslims, becoming India’s first unifying role model. Across the border, however, Jinnah refused to intervene as Muslims mobs murdered and raped Hindus and Sikhs, and Pakistan’s first role model was born.
After the 1937 elections in UP, the Congress formed the government on its own, abandoning its poll partner, the ML. As a result, the Congress lost all Muslim seats in 1946. It desperately needed an enemy to regain minority support. The Hindu Mahasabha was the obvious choice and thus, the seed of communal politics was sown.

It is the caste factor that keeps the Indian Muslim backward. Lower-caste Muslims form the majority, and are the biggest minority vote bank. A uniform civil code does not exist because of the fear of losing this vote bank. Article 370 stays, also because of the same reason. This is the segment that populist politicans like Mulayam, Lalu, Nitish, Mamata and Kejriwal woo with reservations, job quotas and special privileges. Now Congress is promising a sub-quota.

There is little empirical evidence that Modi is a role model of hate. Ironically, the largest number of riots in which thousands of Muslims perished happened under the Congress rule—Bhagalpur in 1989, Ahmedabad in 1969, Moradabad in 1980 and Nellie in 1983, to name a few. Except that 2002 riots happened under Modi’s watch, there has been not a single communal incident in Gujarat. A National Sample Survey of the last seven years shows that in rural Gujarat, the number of BPL Muslims fell from 31 per cent to 7 per cent. In the cities, it declined from 42 per cent to 14.6 per cent. The maximum per capita expenditure of Muslims in rural Gujarat increased from Rs 209 to Rs 291, and in urban Gujarat from Rs 259 to Rs 328 in the last seven years. Seventy-four per cent of Muslims in Gujarat are literate. In UP and Bihar, however—where communal politics is the norm—one-third of the Muslim population lives below the poverty line. Refusing to wear a skull cap hardly negates development. Sonia doesn’t wear a bindi nor Rahul the sacred thread.

A true role model represents a universal truth whose roots are based in an enduring culture. Others merely occupy pedestals that topple in the storms of change.