-Business Standard/ India Spend The BJP-led government spent Rs 4,880 crore ($753.99 million) on advertising its flagship schemes in the 52 months between April 2014 and July 2018 Mumbai: Midday meals for 45.7 million children for a year. One day’s wages for 200 million workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). About 6 million new latrines. And at least 10 more Mars missions. These were some of the things...
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Nitin Gadkari's googly on jobs may be ominous for Narendra Modi govt; state of drift may be a political hot potato -Madhavan Narayanan
-Firstpost.com Was that a bouncer to the political opposition or was that a googly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi from an esteemed colleague in the cabinet? Trying to decipher Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari's latest jibe at caste-based quota seekers in government jobs amid protests by Marathas in his home state of Maharashtra is as tricky as discussing the current valuations of Sensex stocks or whether Cheteshwar Pujara would have helped India...
More »Citizenship and compassion -Shiv Visvanathan
-The Hindu Can India manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution...
More »Assembly elections: Farm distress, jobs could unseat the BJP in Rajasthan -Rakesh Goswami and Urvashi Dev Rawal
-Hindustan Times Unfulfilled promise of generating 1.5 million jobs, anger among castes that formed the traditional BJP vote base and rural distress will be major issues when Rajasthan goes to polls. When chief minister Vasundhara Raje undertook her jan samwad (public dialogues) initiative across Rajasthan in January 2018, the idea was for her to step out of Jaipur to meet and talk to people across the state and dispel the impression...
More »The dwindling minority -Christophe Jaffrelot & Gilles Verniers
-The Indian Express Drop in Muslim representation in legislatures is related to the rise of the BJP. Muslim MPs currently occupy 19 seats of the Lok Sabha (or 3.5 per cent of its members), the lowest figure since 1952. Between 1980 and 2014, the representation of Muslim MPs in the lower house of India’s Parliament has diminished by nearly two-third even as the share of Muslims in the population rose during the...
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