-The Indian Express BJP candidate Neelam Karwariya, whose husband, former BJP MLA Uday Bhan Karwariya, is lodged in Mirzapur district jail, won from Meja seat in Allahabad. Lucknow: Murder accused Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya and Amanmani Tripathi, jailed don Mukhtar Ansari and gangsters Vijay Mishra and Sushil Singh are among over a dozen candidates with criminal backgrounds who won this election. While Singh contested on a BJP ticket from Saiyadraza seat...
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Freedom with defects -Ramachandra Guha
-The Telegraph After the third general elections held in 1962, the scholar-statesman, C. Rajagopalachari, wrote a fascinating, if now forgotten, essay on the imperfections of our young democracy. "The Indian electorate", remarked Rajaji, "suffers from well-known defects from which Western democracies are relatively free. The Indian voters are in great measure poor and vulnerable to bribery: even a day's expense for food serves to buy a large number of the poor...
More »Why HP farmers are better off than tillers in Uttarakhand -Subodh Varma
-The Times of India A striking feature of the poll campaign in Uttarakhand is that neither of the two major political parties have any concrete strategy for a crisis that's haunting nearly half the state's population. Since 2000, when the state was created, foodgrain production has gone down by 6% and land under cultivation by 11%. In neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, with similar mountainous terrain, foodgrain output increased by 29% while the country...
More »No one loves the farmer -Ashok Gulati & Siraj Hussain
-The Indian Express They are the largest constituency in UP. Yet, all parties have overlooked their issues Next month, Uttar Pradesh (UP) will have a new popular government, hopefully with a clear mandate. If UP was a country, with a population reportedly of more than 214 million in 2015 (as per UN population projections), it would have been the fifth most populous country in the world after China, India, US and Indonesia....
More »Battleground Punjab: The story of the missing farmers -Subodh Varma
-The Economic Times A small village called Khanauri in Punjab's Sangrur district has become a macabre hotspot. People come here to peer down at the Bhakra Main Line canal hoping to catch sight of dead bodies that get held up on the sluice gates. They are not ghouls they are looking for kin or friends who have disappeared. The canal runs unhindered like an arrow for 159 km through Punjab's eastern...
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